Portrait of a Press Secretary A CADS investigation in the role of the podium in George W. Bush Administration’s press b

1. Portrait of a Press SecretaryA 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” giuliariccio@gmail.com International Conference: Issues of Identity in and across Cultures and Professional Worlds Rome, 26th October 2007

2. 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)

3. 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 representationin the White House Press Briefings XML corpus • Preliminary results

4. George W. Bush’s Press Secretaries during his first term • Ari Fleischer January 2001 - July 2003

5. George W. Bush’s Press Secretaries during his first term • Scott McClellan July 2003 - April 2006

6. 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)

7. 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)

8. The White House Press Secretary …has three constituents: • The President • White House staff • News organizations …but has just one boss: • The President (Kumar 2000)

9. 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)

10. 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)

11. 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

12. 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)

13. 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

14. The White House Press Secretary Partington calls the White House Press Secretary‘the podium’

15. Theoretical framework Corpus Linguistics: • Partington 1998 • Tognini-Bonelli 2001 • Baker 2006 Studies in political discourse: • Partington 2003 • Chilton 2004

16. Theoretical framework CADS: • Partington 2004 • Partington forthcoming …but also: • Levinson 1988 • Bergler 1991 • Cameron 2001 • Semino and Short 2004

17. 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)

18. 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)

19. 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

20. 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

21. 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.

22. Some raw data from the corpus Who is the podium speaking for? Occurrences of the Presidentin the podium’s discourse remarkably decrease in time

23. Some raw data from the corpus Who is the podium speaking for? Occurrences of administrationin the podium’s discourse also decrease in time and they are more rare than in the discourse of the press

24. Some raw data from the corpus Who is the podium speaking for? Occurrences of wein the podium’s discourse, in contrast, remarkably increase in time and they are much more frequent than in the discourse of the press

25. Some raw data from the corpus Who is the podium speaking for? Occurrences of Iin the podium’s discourse increase in time, while the use of the pronoun you in the press’ discourse does not correspondingly increase

26. 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

27. 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)

28. 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)

29. A framework for the analysis of reported discourse Bergler 1991: semantic dimensionsin the semantic field of reporting verbs, extracted from dictionary entries

32. A subset of the hierarchy of genus terms in the OED (Bergler 1991)

33. 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)

34. 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%)

35. 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)

36. 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)

37. 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

38. 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

39. 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)

40. 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

41. 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)

42. 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

43. 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

44. 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) statedis more frequent --> President’s loss of credibility or new podium’s stronger personality?

45. …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

46. 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)