The article discusses the democratizing potential of the talk show genre by exploring the discursive positioning of anonymous lay participants in the Israeli prime-time talk show Live. Quantitative analyses of three measures of participation reveal that anonymous guests take fewer turns, intervene less and self-select less than famous and semi-famous guests on the show. Qualitative analyses reveal a dialectical response by the host to anonymous guests’ initiative behavior. Such behavior is encouraged and supported when it conforms to a prototypical view of the anonymous guest as communicatively inferior, but is perceived as challenging and sanctioned when guests go beyond this prototypical view and exhibit high degrees of communicative competence. This dialectic is discussed as evidence of the embeddedness of conversational patterns of self-selection within an institutional framework of asymmetric control, meriting a multi-layered approach to semi-institutional discourse. The article concludes with a cultural and institutional contextualization of the findings.
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