TALK: Question Design and President-Press Relations
Steven Clayman (Sociology, UCLA)
Friday, May 16 / 1:30 PM
Phelps 2536
Question design is a neglected resource for research into the evolution of president-press relations. Clayman applies a multidimensional system for analyzing the aggressiveness of journalists’ questions, grounded in prior conversation analytic research, to five decades of presidential news conferences (1953-2000). Presidential journalism is known to have grown substantially more aggressive over this time period, but a definitive explanation for this trend remains elusive. Some suggest that events surrounding Vietnam and Watergate transformed the professional norms of journalism. However, the trend could also be a more superficial and transitory response to other circumstantial factors that converged in the same time period, such as president-level characteristics (the prevalence of Republicans, Washington outsiders, and more vigorous news management efforts), the political environment (official discord as embodied the rise of divided government and Congressional polarization), and the economic environment (a downturn in the business cycle). This study disentangles these various factors and assesses their relative success in explaining the vagaries of journalistic conduct in the postwar era. The results strongly support the normative shift hypothesis, and suggest a punctuated equilibrium model of journalistic change in relations between the White House press corps and the presidency.
Sponsored by the IHC’s Language, Interaction, and Social Organization RFG, and the Departments of Education, Sociology and Linguistics.
