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Abstract The present study examines English political talk show interviews (2011-2014) within the Critical Discourse Analytic approach of Political Discourse Analysis (PDA). The thematic domain of the interviews is the Arab upheavals that prevailed during this period and the different attitudes adopted by the Interviewers (IR) and the Interviewees (IE). A news interview involves an argument, where the IR handles an often-controversial topic; addresses challenging questions; highlights certain evidence; and hides others. While doing this, the interviewer often aims at gaining a conspicuous reputation by posing threatening questions to the IE. On the other hand, the IE, a politician in the current dissertation, often wishes to provide adequate responses without losing her/his credibility before the public. The study analyzes qualitatively and quantitatively the interactional process in a political talk show interview. The study covers the interactional communication in selected interviews through examining some of their syntactic, semantic and pragmatic aspects. The analysis is based on Bull and Mayer (1993), Bull (2003), Clayman and Heritage (2002) and the act of positioning as presented by Du Bois (2007). The political talk show interviews analyized in the study are selected from the British Program HARDTalk broadcast on the BBC (the British Broadcast Corporation) and the Russian Program Worlds Apart broadcast on RT (Russia Today). Qualitatively, the study detects the most salient strategies employed by the IR to pose threatening questions, and the recurrent ones used by the IE to provide evasive responses. Quantitatively, the study reveals some preferred strategies employed by both the IR and the IE. The study contributes to PDA, as it sheds light on the interactional process in the political talk show interview. This affects the objectivity of the IR, and the credibility of the IE. Additionally, the study presents a plethora of attitudes to ”The Arab Spring” recurrent in Western media to the present time. Keywords: Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), Political Discourse Analysis (PDA), Talk Show Interviews, Threatening Questions, Evasive Responses. |