BUSINESS COMMUNICATION AND POLITICS - APPEARING IN THE MEDIA

Abstract

The aim of this papar is to show how Serbian politicians behave in the media. Eight editions of the Pravi ugao interview broadcast on Channel 1 of Radio-Television of Vojvodina make the corpus for this material. The author had nine guests, one guest in seven interviews, and two guests in one interview. The parameters considered for evaluating public appearances are respect for business etiquette (clear and unambiguous speech, persecution) and aspects of non-verbal communication that are used to evaluate public appearances of politicians such as: body language (in general), eye contact, facial expressions, the position of the interlocutor in space, gestures and their clothes. The analysis shows that politicians control their appearance in the media to a certain extent, but that there are specific situations in which they unwittingly respond by sending an unplanned or honest message to an audience that they might otherwise hide. Unlike verbal communication in which we can use words to hide what we really mean, body language is considered to be spontaneous and genuine.