This paper analyzes the footing shift by focusing on an interviewer’s questioning from the conversation of a Korean TV news interview. By dividing the interviewer’s questions into adversarial questions and non-adversarial questions, this study investigates what footing shift functions and what the interviewer wants to achieve through it. The analysis of the news interview reveals that footing shift in adversarial questions performs a function of defense. The interviewer attributes the responsibility of remarks that criticize and refute interviewees to a third party so that they can defend themselves against the criticism of attacking interviewees. On the other hand, the footing shift in non-adversarial questions is used to introduce a new topic to the conversation. The interviewer speaks on behalf of a third party when the new topic indicates one’s position on a contentious topic. It enables the interviewer to entirely conceal his personal opinion and lead the discussion in depth. In conclusion, footing shift in questions allows an interviewer to satisfy institutional demands of the news interview. Furthermore, it is found that interviewees collaborate to preserve the interviewer’s stance of footing shift in their responses.