I was able to see the whole book page in Amazon using "Look Inside the Book." Reading most of page 14 I now understand what was a completely puzzling phrase to me. He makes it clear later on the page. He is an academic, writing about research in his field, and researchers in a field often create specialized terminology. Ordinary words acquire special meanings. "Overhearing" means "to accidentally hear someone saying something to something else." For example, some months ago I was in a train and I overheard people in the seat in front of me say "I wonder if we can get to the X Museum by public transportation." I leaned over and said "Please forgive me, I overheard your question. Yes, you can get to the X Museum easily--just get off at Y and take the Green Line to Z street." To listen INTENTIONALLY to a conversation not meant for you is called "eavesdropping." A perfectly common, idiomatic phrase is "the listening audience." It refers to the people who are listening to a radio broadcast and can only hear the speaker, as distinct from "the studio audience" who are there in the studio and can both see and hear the speaker. On this textbook page, he explains that "overhearing audience" was apparently coined in 1985 by someone named Heritage. HE says that it is an INACCURATE term. He would prefer the phrase "distributed audience." He calls the broadcast listener a "ratified (though non-co-present) hearer rather than an eavesdropper." But he says he is going to use the term "overhearing listener" anyway because it is "so common in the existing literature." In other words, sociologists to study media use the word "overhearing listener" to mean a group of people who hear a broadcast, but can't see the speaker, and can't see or relate to each other the way people in an auditorium do.

Misused, certainly. The meaning of the writer might be "hearing what was not intended."

Yes sir the book is about journalism. Media Talk by Ian Hutchby.

To hear (speech or someone speaking) without the speaker's awareness or intent. This is the dictionary definition of overhear. If the book you are reading is about journalism, which it sounds like, then overheard is being used in the wrong context.

I found that phrase in a book I read. Here's the context 'Another technique for producing talk that is critical and challenging towards interviewees, and which is also bound up with the production talk for an overhearing audience, is that of 'formulating' the gist or upshot of the interviewee's remarks, usually in pursuit of some controversial or newsworthy aspect. Heritage (1985:100)'