The discussions that I have been analysing in Chapters 5–8 took place upstairs in a pub, in a hotel conference centre, or in a rented living room. However powerful the utterance of a participant in a focus group, it stays in that room. Opinions that reach out beyond the immediate setting have to be mediated in some way. And the media are full of opinions. Niklas Luhmann notes, in his lectures on media,

Of course most of these opinions are from public figures, as in the interviews I referred to in Chapter 2. But there are also events in which individual members of the public call or are called on to give their opinions – polls, talk shows, formal debates, letters to the editor, Internet discussion lists. In this chapter I focus on sociable argument in phone-ins; in the next I look at vox pops in terms of categorization and constitution of a category of ‘public opinion.’