Transcript Portrait of a Press Secretary A CADS investigation in the

Portrait of a Press Secretary
A CADS investigation in the role of the podium
in George W. Bush Administration’s press briefings
Giulia Riccio
Dottorato di Ricerca in Lingua Inglese per Scopi Speciali (ESP)
Università degli Studi di Napoli “Federico II”
[email protected]
International Conference: Issues of Identity in and across Cultures and Professional Worlds
Rome, 26th October 2007
The present talk
Investigating professional identity through the
Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS)
approach:
methodological issues
and possible applications
Professional identity:
the role of the White House Press Secretary
during the first term of
the George W. Bush Presidency (2001-2005)
The present talk
A brief outline of:
• The White House Press Secretary as a role as
opposed to the institutional spokesperson as a role
• Methodological issues: CADS, markup and identity
• The White House Press Briefings XML corpus
• Speech representation
in the White House Press Briefings XML corpus
• Preliminary results
George W. Bush’s Press
Secretaries during his first term
• Ari Fleischer
January 2001 - July 2003
George W. Bush’s Press
Secretaries during his first term
• Scott McClellan
July 2003 - April 2006
The communications triumvirate
at the White House
White House offices focusing on different
aspects of Presidential communications:
• the Press Office  information
•
the Office of Communications  persuasion
• the Office of the Chief of Staff  strategy
(Kumar 2000)
The White House Press Office
• Cooperation among reporters and White House
officials
• Stability of the position of Press Secretary
• Outside constituents housed in the building
• President’s public visibility vs. vulnerability
• Three constituents but just one boss
(Kumar 2000)
The White House Press Secretary
…has three constituents:
• The President
• White House staff
• News organizations
…but has just one boss:
• The President
(Kumar 2000)
The White House Press Secretary
…has four principal roles:
• information conduit
• constituent representation
• administration
• communications planning
In practical terms:
he or she must work together with a variety of White
House officials in creating the portrait of the
President and his policies they want to publicly
deliver.
(Kumar 2000)
The White House Press
Secretary’s golden rules
“…tell the truth, don’t lie, don’t cover up,
put out the bad news yourself,
put it out as soon as possible,
put your own explanation on it.”
(former Press Secretary Ron Nessen quoted in Kumar
2000)
The White House Press Secretary
Partington 2003:
White House Press Briefings in the Clinton years
Commentators’ metaphors for the Press Secretary:
• soldier
• sailor
• street thug
• pugilist
• ambassador
• smear artist
• spinmeister
The White House Press Secretary
Partington’s characterization of the White House Press
Secretary in Levinson (1988)’s terms:
White House Press Secretary ≠spokesperson*
*production role: spokesperson =
‘speaking for a distant principal or motivator, but in his/her own
words. Responsible for the form but not the message’
(Partington 2003: 54)
Levinson: potential vagueness of the participant role of spokesperson
associated with the institutional role of spokesperson
(Levinson 1988)
The White House Press Secretary
According to Partington (2003),
the White House Press Secretary acts as:
• Relayer when reading announcements
• Spokesperson when he uses his own words to respond
to questions in the interests of one of more principals
• Principal
when he adds tactical touches of principalship
to messages from a distant source, and when he personalizes his
relationship with the audience
The White House Press Secretary
Partington calls
the White House Press Secretary
‘the podium’
Theoretical framework
Corpus Linguistics:
• Partington 1998
• Tognini-Bonelli 2001
• Baker 2006
Studies in political discourse:
• Partington 2003
• Chilton 2004
Theoretical framework
CADS:
• Partington 2004
• Partington forthcoming
…but also:
• Levinson 1988
• Bergler 1991
• Cameron 2001
• Semino and Short 2004
Theoretical framework: CADS
CADS (Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies)
• Investigate discourse types in order to uncover
meanings non-obvious to the naked eye
• Quantitative + qualitative
• Compile your own corpus and ‘make friends’ with it
• Detailed knowledge of discourse type
• Context not limited to concordance line
• Value of reinforcing introspection with observation
(Partington 2004)
(Partington forthcoming)
Corpus and software
• 698 press briefings and ‘gaggles’
• Dating back to George W. Bush’s first term as
President (Jan. 2001 - Jan. 2005)
• More than 3 million running words
• Divided into 4 subsections on a chronological basis
• XML marked-up (TEI-conformant)
• Corpus processing tool: Xaira
(XML Aware Indexing and Retrieval Application)
XML mark-up
Mainly based on the schema developed
for the CorDis project
(Cirillo, Marchi and Venuti forthcoming)
TEI-conformant: complies with the guidelines
of the Text Encoding Initiative
XML mark-up
Information included in mark-up:
• Title of the briefing
• Date it took place
• Location where it was held
• Type: briefing / gaggle / briefing with guest
• Structure of the briefing: opening statement and other
announcements, Q&A, addendum
• Speaker role: podium, press, Cabinet members, Press Office
staff, Presidential staff, Department staff, Federal agency
heads, other guests
• Individual speaker
Mark-up and identity
Mark-up as added value (Leech 2005)
Mark-up for speaker and speaker role in studies of identity:
allows the researcher to compare discourse strategies for
different sets of speakers.
Features of podium discourse can be highlighted in this
corpus thanks to the XML mark-up.
Some raw data from the corpus
Who is the podium speaking for?
Occurrences of the President in the podium’s discourse remarkably
decrease in time
occurrences
pre-9/11 pre-Iraq war initial invasion of
per 100 words
Iraq
post-invasion
of Iraq
podium
0.78
0.76
0.62
0.48
press
0.27
0.25
0.22
0.24
Some raw data from the corpus
Who is the podium speaking for?
Occurrences of administration in the podium’s discourse also decrease
in time and they are more rare than in the discourse of the press
occurrences
pre-9/11 pre-Iraq war initial invasion of
per 100 words
Iraq
post-invasion
of Iraq
podium
0.06
0.04
0.02
0.03
press
0.07
0.06
0.06
0.05
Some raw data from the corpus
Who is the podium speaking for?
Occurrences of we in the podium’s discourse, in contrast, remarkably increase
in time and they are much more frequent than in the discourse of the press
occurrences
pre-9/11 pre-Iraq war initial invasion of
per 100 words
Iraq
post-invasion
of Iraq
podium
0.24
0.25
0.46
0.85
press
0.09
0.10
0.13
0.09
Some raw data from the corpus
Who is the podium speaking for?
Occurrences of I in the podium’s discourse increase in time, while the use of the
pronoun you in the press’ discourse does not correspondingly increase
occurrences of pre-9/11 pre-Iraq war initial invasion of
I per 100
Iraq
words
post-invasion
of Iraq
podium
0.79
0.61
0.70
0.75
occurrences of pre-9/11 pre-Iraq war initial invasion of
you per 100
Iraq
words
post-invasion
of Iraq
press
0.43
0.50
0.45
0.46
Mark-up and identity: reported
discourse
Comparison: patterns in the podium’s and
press’ usage of reporting verbs
The briefings as an instance of strategic
discourse (oriented to success) -->
competing strategies in reporting the
speech (and thought) of others
Speech presentation in the
briefings
What can reporting verbs be used for in the briefings?
• To report the podium’s previous statements
• To report the President’s previous statements
• To report other people’s (members of the Administration or
anyone else) statements
• To report what the media have in turn reported
mainly Indirect Speech Presentation and Narrative Report of
Speech Acts (lower degree of faithfulness)
(model based on Semino & Short 2004)
Thought presentation in the
briefings
What can reporting verbs be used for in the briefings?
To present the opinions, views, beliefs of:
• the podium
• the President
• the public
etc.
mainly Indirect Thought Presentation
(model based on Semino & Short 2004)
A framework for the analysis of
reported discourse
Bergler 1991:
semantic dimensions
in the semantic field of reporting verbs,
extracted from dictionary entries
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A subset of the hierarchy of genus terms in the OED (Bergler 1991)
Reporting verbs: frequencies
Occurrences, in the briefings corpus, of verbs contained in Bergler’s
OED hierarchy of genus terms
Past tense and past participle forms counted for the sake of
convenience (in the absence of POS-tagging)
• Said: 10302 occurrences (of which 6151 podium, 3929 press)
• Announced: 701 occurrences (of which 503 podium, 175 press)
• Agreed: 493 occurrences (of which 377 podium, 90 press)
• Stated: 335 occurrences (of which 288 podium, 40 press)
• Confirmed: 188 occurrences (of which 117 podium, 53 press)
• Charged: 98 occurrences (of which 49 podium, 47 press)
• Accepted: 90 occurrences (of which 60 podium, 29 press)
• Declared: 90 occurrences
(of which 40 podium, 47 press)
Reporting verbs: stated
In the podium’s discourse
• 288 occurrences in the podium’s utterances out
of a total of 335 occurrences in the corpus (86%)
• 259 occurrences if uses other than as that of
reporting verb are left out
• most occurrences are found
in the post-Iraq invasion phase (71%)
Reporting verbs: stated
In the podium’s discourse
•
• most frequent subjects: the President / we / I
but also world leaders, UN resolutions, Cabinet members, other authoritative
sources
President (or he referred to the President)
in subject position: 59 occurrences;
frequent both in the pre-Iraq war and post-invasion phases
•
•
We in subject position: 22 occurrences,
21 of which in the post-invasion phase
• You (journalist) in subject position: 12 occurrences;
in early briefings, emphasis on the way something was stated (accurately,
correctly); later, on disagreement with it
•
I in subject position: 48 occurrences (46 in the post-Iraq invasion phase)
Reporting verbs: stated
In the podium’s discourse
Adverbs that collocate with stated in the podium’s discourse:
publicly/privately;
repeatedly/already/always/consistently;
clearly/firmly.
Publicly (21 occurrences): used in response to references to
“contradictory statements”, “a wink and a nod from the White House”, “some
resistance”, “the White House blocked or muscled Congress out of…” (subject:
mainly President or we)
Repeatedly (14 occurrences): mainly used with a direct complement (support/
concern/views/position) (subject: mainly President or the US or we)
Reporting verbs: stated
In the podium’s discourse
Passive agentless: very rare
(12 occurrences) and in 10 of these cases
the agent can be inferred from the co-text
The podium is not interested to adopting vagueness strategies
when referring to the source of some previous statement
Reporting verbs: stated
Different podiums, different identities?
Ari Fleischer:
subject: President 20 + he 4
(support/determination/position/concern etc.)
subject: I 3
“You know the President’s position, it is exactly as I stated…”
subject: we 1
in official statement
Reporting verbs: stated
Different podiums, different identities?
Scott McClellan:
subject: President 14 + he 17
(views/position/opposition/policies/remarks)
subject: we 20
(opposition/belief/preference/seriousness/views)
subject: I 47
“for the reason(s) I (just) stated”
speaking on behalf of unspecified principals (we)
Reporting verbs: stated
In the journalists’ discourse:
• 40 occurrences in the journalists’ moves
• occurrences are evenly
distributed throughout the corpus
• most frequent subjects: the President / you
Reporting verbs: stated
In the journalists’ discourse:
• President in subject position: 8 occurrences;
used to ask for confirmation of previous statements
• You (podium) in subject position: 11 occurrences;
references to the past,
including the specification “from this podium”;
used to ask for confirmation of previous statements
or clarifications regarding them (courtroom-style)
Reporting verbs: stated
In the journalists’ discourse:
• Occurrences of state (verb) in journalists’ moves
(looking for occurrences of did you state etc.):
only eight occurrences
•
Could/would/will you (just) state for the records that
• Will you again state for us
• Would you state what it is that
• Are you not willing to state from the podium that
[…]?
[…]?
[…]?
[…]?
• + something unpleasant or something the podium is
unwilling to admit
Reporting verbs: stated Preliminary conclusions…
Extensively used by the podium in order to present
statements characterized by a high truth-value,
in response to challenges to the truthfulness of
statements
Reference to past statements
(both official and less formal ones)
as a proof of coherence in the administration’s policies
Reporting verbs: stated Preliminary conclusions…
The podium and the press compete in
constructing their own identity (position of authority)
by making reference to authoritative sources
During the first years of the Bush Presidency, the President
was presented as the most authoritative source.
Later on, reference to what we or I (podium) stated
is more frequent -->
President’s loss of credibility or new podium’s stronger
personality?
…and beyond
• Speech presentation: said (unmarked reporting verb?)
• Thought presentation: believe, think
• Variation in time and in the discourse of different podiums
(disappearance of the President)
• We and I as subjects of reporting verbs
• A complete picture of the usage of reporting verbs in the
briefings, based on Bergler’s schema
Wishlist
In order to be able to extract more detailed information from
the White House Press Briefings XML corpus, I would
need:
• POS (part-of-speech)-tagging
• Mark-up for topic of utterances
• Mark-up for speech and thought presentation
(Semino and Short 2004)