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Laila Hualpa
The American Chief Executive does not submit to questions from other
branches of government. The encounters with the press are the only forum
where the president submits to questions on what he does and why (Joynt
Kumar, 2005), and where he can be observed thinking on the spot. Because of
this, the White House staff devotes a considerable amount of time to
preparing for such sessions and continually strives to find venues—such as
joint news conferences with another head of state—which are not as
threatening as the solo press encounter(Joynt_Kumar,
2005). Previous studies on solo presidential press conferences over a span
of 50 years (Clayman et al, 2002, 2006, 2007) have 1) demonstrated that
journalists have become more aggressive over time and 2) isolated the
conditions under which the questioning becomes more aggressive. This paper
extends previous research by studying journalistic questioning in all the
joint and solo press conferences (39 conferences) held in the United States
and around the world during the first two years of the George W. Bush
administration. It was hypothesized that questioning in joint press
conferences would be less aggressive than in solo press encounters. In
addition, questioning in conferences held abroad was hypothesized to be less
aggressive than in conferences in the United States. Given the time span of
the conferences (2001-2002), the study explored two other issues:
questioning in both types of conferences (joint and solo) during the first
100 days of the Bush presidency to see if the president enjoyed a honeymoon
period, and questioning before and after 911 to test the hypothesis that
after the 911 attacks, the press became less aggressive.
In order to measure aggressiveness, I used a modified version of
the coding system created by Clayman and Heritage (2002) for their study of
solo press conferences which measures aggressiveness through the following
five dimensions:
Initiative:
how enterprising the journalist is. The indicators in this dimension are
question complexity, follow-up questions, and question prefaces.
Directness: how blunt or cautious a question is when raising
an issue. Here the indicators examined are the use of self- and
other-referencing frames.
Assertiveness: here we examine whether the question presses
for a particular answer and is thus more opinionated than neutral.
Adversarialness: the focus here is on whether a question sets
an agenda in opposition to the president or his administration, and whether
this is done in the preface or in the design of the question as a whole.
Accountability: a question is examined to see whether it is
asking the president to justify his policies or actions.
After estimating logistic regression models, the results show that in
general, and contrary to what was expected, journalists are not considerably
less aggressive in joint press conferences as opposed to solo encounters,
showing that the presence of another head of state does not necessarily
deter them from asking difficult questions. With respect to the country
where the conference was held, the results reveal that journalists tend to
be less direct and less adversarial abroad than in the United States. The
results also show that, contrary to what is a widely held belief, the
president did not enjoy a honeymoon period with the press. This is in
keeping with a study by Clayman et al (2006). As for the 911 effect, the
hypothesis that journalists would be less adversarial after 911 proved to be
true. However, the other outcomes did not show any considerable variation
after the attacks. This paper presentation will explain the factors
responsible for the trends described above.
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