Portrait of a Press Secretary A CADS investigation in the role of the podium in George W' Bush Admin

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Portrait of a Press SecretaryA CADS
investigation in the role of the podium in
George W. Bush Administrations press briefings

• Giulia Riccio
• Dottorato di Ricerca in Lingua Inglese per Scopi
  Speciali (ESP)
• Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II
• giuliariccio_at_gmail.com

International Conference Issues of Identity in
and across Cultures and Professional Worlds
Rome, 26th October 2007
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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)

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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

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George W. Bushs Press Secretaries during his
first term

• Ari Fleischer
• January 2001 - July 2003

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George W. Bushs Press Secretaries during his
first term

• Scott McClellan
• July 2003 - April 2006

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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)

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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
• Presidents public visibility vs. vulnerability
• Three constituents but just one boss
• (Kumar 2000)

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The White House Press Secretary

• has three constituents
• The President
• White House staff
• News organizations
• but has just one boss
• The President
• (Kumar 2000)

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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)

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The White House Press Secretarys golden rules

• tell the truth, dont lie, dont 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)

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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

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The White House Press Secretary

• Partingtons 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)

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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

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The White House Press Secretary

• Partington calls the White House Press Secretary
  the podium

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Theoretical framework

• Corpus Linguistics
• Partington 1998
• Tognini-Bonelli 2001
• Baker 2006
• Studies in political discourse
• Partington 2003
• Chilton 2004

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Theoretical framework

• CADS
• Partington 2004
• Partington forthcoming
• but also
• Levinson 1988
• Bergler 1991
• Cameron 2001
• Semino and Short 2004

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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)

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Corpus and software

• 698 press briefings and gaggles
• Dating back to George W. Bushs 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)

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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

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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, QA, addendum
• Speaker role podium, press, Cabinet members,
  Press Office staff, Presidential staff,
  Department staff, Federal agency heads, other
  guests
• Individual speaker

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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.

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Some raw data from the corpus

• Who is the podium speaking for?
• Occurrences of the President in the podiums
  discourse remarkably decrease in time

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Some raw data from the corpus

• Who is the podium speaking for?
• Occurrences of administration in the podiums
  discourse also decrease in time and they are more
  rare than in the discourse of the press

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Some raw data from the corpus

• Who is the podium speaking for?
• Occurrences of we in the podiums discourse, in
  contrast, remarkably increase in time and they
  are much more frequent than in the discourse of
  the press

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Some raw data from the corpus

• Who is the podium speaking for?
• Occurrences of I in the podiums discourse
  increase in time, while the use of the pronoun
  you in the press discourse does not
  correspondingly increase

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Mark-up and identity reported discourse

• Comparison patterns in the podiums and press
  usage of reporting verbs
• The briefings as an instance of strategic
  discourse (oriented to success) --gt competing
  strategies in reporting the speech (and thought)
  of others

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Speech presentation in the briefings

• What can reporting verbs be used for in the
  briefings?
• To report the podiums previous statements
• To report the Presidents previous statements
• To report other peoples (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)

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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)

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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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(No Transcript)
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(No Transcript)
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A subset of the hierarchy of genus terms in the
OED (Bergler 1991)
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Reporting verbs frequencies

• Occurrences, in the briefings corpus, of verbs
  contained in Berglers 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)

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Reporting verbs stated

• In the podiums discourse
• 288 occurrences in the podiums 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)

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Reporting verbs stated

• In the podiums 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)

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Reporting verbs stated

• In the podiums discourse
• Adverbs that collocate with stated in the
  podiums 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)

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Reporting verbs stated

• In the podiums 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

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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 Presidents position, it is exactly
  as I stated
• subject we 1
• in official statement

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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)

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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

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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)

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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

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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
  administrations policies

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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 --gt Presidents loss of
  credibility or new podiums stronger personality?

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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 Berglers schema
  

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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)