Thoughts on Questioning Presidents

[Linnea Micciulla]

This paper provides a number of contributions that are useful for CDA.  The
framework for characterizing journalists' questions in a quantitative
fashion is a big step forward, and I have been able to adapt it for my own
research on press conferences.

I would be interested to hear what people think about the idea that the
measures outlined by Clayman and Heritage are easily codified, and not as
subject to interpretation as the measures used in other studies.  The
criteria seem to me to vary quite a bit in that regard; hostility seem more
interpretive and less codifiable than cascades, for example, but even the
cascade category could cause disagreement among coders; what seems like a
version of the same question to one person might seem like a different
question to another person.

In my own investigation of daily White House press conferences, the
turn-taking is much less clean than it appears to be in the Eisenhower and
Reagan examples.  Both the interviewer and interviewee are very likely to
interrupt each other, to repeat the question or to protest the question.  I
was thinking that it might be interesting to apply Clayman & Heritage's
system to a few examples from a White House press briefing corpus.  I have
pasted the first 10 questions (and partial answers) from Monday's briefing
below; if you have a chance, let's try coding some of the questions
according to the 10 categories, and see how much we agree.

The four categories / ten sub-categories are:

Initiative: complexity, cascades, follow-up
Directness: other-referencing, self-referencing
Assertiveness: preface tilt, negative questions
Hostility: preface hostility, global hostility, accountability

**********
White House Daily Press Briefing: November 8, 2004

  1) QUESTION: I realize what's going on in Iraq is essentially military
operation, but I thought I'd try to see the political side of this, what we
could get from this. Is there a feeling here that there is some risks, there
is some necessary, I suppose, risk with losing already not so strong Sunni
support by going into Fallujah full blast? Has the Secretary done anything
that you want to tell us about on the diplomatic front to try to explain to
other governments what we're doing?
  MR. BOUCHER: The Secretary has been active with other foreign ministers,
as have others in the Department, in terms of messages about the operations
that are commencing in Fallujah...

  2) QUESTION: Touching on the civilian situation, although most of the
people have left, people or civilians often --
  MR. BOUCHER: I think there is -- yes. The simple answer is yes. There is
obvious concern about the civilians in Fallujah. For that reason, the
government has, first of all, for days now, encouraged people to leave and
many of them have taken the opportunity to get out of town, get away from
the fighting...

  3) QUESTION: Does the U.S. share the view of Mr. Solana, that the security
situation in Iraq is so bad that the elections cannot be held in January?
  MR. BOUCHER: Our view remains the view of the Iraqi Government, that the
determination is very strong to bring the elections about on time -- I think
  you've seen that in Prime Minister Allawi's statements -- that bringing
cities back under the control of the central government is, indeed, a step
forward in providing every Iraqi with the opportunity to participate in the
political process and to participate in the election in January...

  4) QUESTION: Can I just follow up? You mentioned that the Secretary spoke
with Prince Saud of Saudi Arabia. Do you have any more details on that phone
conversation?
  MR. BOUCHER: Just the phone calls. I don't have individual details on
individual calls...

  5) QUESTION: Right, friends and partners, indeed. These foreign ministers,
can they all be listed in the "yes" column, that they support what is --
  MR. BOUCHER: You'll have to ask the individuals what they -- what their
view is  of the operation.

  6) QUESTION: Well, then I'm going to ask the question this way. There's a
question of -- I'm going to go off on another track. But there was kind of
an ambiguous statement put out by the Saudi ambassador here -- not on the
main thing, but on the side issue. Is the Secretary calling friends and
allies alone, or is he -- is it more of a broad-beamed consultation?
  MR. BOUCHER: Well, he's calling countries that are obviously concerned
about this situation...

  7) QUESTION: Allegedly, Prime Minister Allawi made some disparaging
remarks against Kofi Annan and the UN. Do you find that might compromise the
elections, considering that everybody's looking for a role for the UN?
  MR. BOUCHER: I don't know what you're referring to. Certainly, we and the
Iraqi Government have differed with the Secretary General over his views of
possibility of fighting in Fallujah, and I think I made that clear last
week, and I think our views are similar to those of the Iraqi Government in
that regard...

  8) QUESTION: It's been reported that a hospital out to the west has been
captured by coalition troops, but a second hospital has been totally
demolished, whether  it be by shelling and/or by the insurgents themselves.
If this affects the full downtown center of Fallujah, are there any plans to
maybe rebuild it or to have the --
  MR. BOUCHER: I'm not going to try to do a battle assessment on an hourly
basis. I don't think anybody in the U.S. Government is going to do that. But
if it is done, the Pentagon will try to explain particular details of the
fighting that's going on around that area, various places...

  9) QUESTION: On the issue of the civilians -- I'm sorry, just to follow up --
  MR. BOUCHER: Yeah.

  10) QUESTION: The people that have left in the city, are they being camped
or housed, or who's taking care of them? Do you have anything -- I mean, is
there is anything?
  MR. BOUCHER: I don't know. I think you'd have to look for reports on the
ground, whether they've gone to -- many of these cases, people go to stay
with relatives in other places but I don't know specifically where they've gone.

*****
Were Clayman & Heritage's categories useful for analyzing these questions?
What other measures would be useful to provide a critical discourse analysis
of information provided by government sources?