The Changing Tenor of Questioning Over Time

Journal of Communication, 2002

The results reveal substantial and significant differences for all indicators, all in the direction of increased adversarialness. This pattern suggests that journalists have become much less deferential and more aggressive in their treatment of the U.S. president. Possible factors contributing to this development, and its broader ramifications for the evolving relationship between journalism and government, are also discussed.

Presidential Studies Quarterly, 2006

This article develops a system for analyzing the aggressiveness of journalists' questions to public figures and applies that system to a sample of presidential news conferences from Eisenhower through Clinton. The primary objective is to use the phenomenon of aggressive questioning as a window into the White House press corps and its evolving relationship to the presidency. Ten features of question design are examined as indicators of four basic dimensions of aggressiveness: (1) initiative, (2) directness, (3) assertiveness, and (4) adversarialness. The results reveal significant trends for all dimensions, all indicating a long-term decline in deference to the president and the rise of a more vigorous and at times adversarial posture. While directness Steven E. Clayman is professor of sociology and communication studies at UCLA, and is coauthor (with John has increased gradually over time and is relatively insensitive to the immediate sociopolitical context, initiative, assertiveness, and adversarialness are more volatile and sensitive to local conditions. The volatile dimensions rose from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, declined from the mid-1980s through the early 1990s, and rose again at century's end. Possible factors contributing to these trends, and their broader ramifications for the evolving relationship between the news media and the presidency, are also discussed.

Processes of media answerability are important for the professional conduct of media organizations and their analysis allows a better understanding of the negotiation among public actors over journalistic practices perceived as deviant. By intersecting public criticism over perceived deviant political interviews with Israeli ombudsmen's responses to these complaints, our aims are to (1) characterize processes of media answerability within the institution of the ombudsman and in the open public arena; (2) identify diversions between the public and the ombudsmen perspectives regarding perceived deviating practices (overaggressive and over-deferent style of interviewing) and their causes (political bias and violations of interpersonal codes of behavior); (3) pin point the outcomes of media answerability processes. Our findings suggest that while a disrespectful attitude toward public figures bothers the public more than an overly deferential approach, the ombudsmen tend to reject both types of complaint. At the causal level, while citizens point to interviewers' ideological bias as the main explanation for all types of deviations, the ombudsmen tend to accept complaints regarding violations of interpersonal codes of behavior and reject claims of political bias. In conclusion, we point to the advantages and limitations of a media answerability process.

The International Journal of Press/Politics, 2012

Are members of the White House press corps unified in their treatment of the president at any given time, or does their behavior differ by demographic and professional attributes? This study addresses this issue through multidimensional measurement of the aggressiveness of questions put to nine presidents in news conferences. In addition to the familiar print/broadcast distinction, three largely unexamined attributes are explored: (1) organizational status (journalists affiliated with prominent vs. marginal news outlets), (2) interpersonal familiarity (frequent vs. infrequent news conference participants), and (3) gender (male vs. female journalists).

2018

This study evaluates the relationship between the press and political leaders during joint press conferences. Aggressive journalistic questioning in press conferences has increased over time (Clayman & Heritage, 2002; Clayman, Elliott, Heritage, & McDonald, 2004; Clayman, Elliott, Heritage, & McDonald, 2007), but recent scholarships shows that journalists present less aggressive questions when a foreign head of state is present (Banning & Billingsley, 2007). Joint press conferences hosted in the United States by President Donald Trump between Prime Minister Theresa May of the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, respectively, were analyzed via conversation analysis based on a question analysis framework by Clayman, Elliott, Heritage, and McDonald (2004) and equivocation typologies by Bull and Mayer (1993). First, journalists’ questions were evaluated on five different measures –...

Journalism Practice, 2023

This article aims to examine the rhetorical strategies employed by interviewers and interviewees to understand how adversarialism unfolds in television broadcasts. While most studies to date analyze a single interview or compare how the same interviewer confronts several interviewees, we capture how different panels of interviewers address adversarial questions in the same program format. We use mixed methods to assess nine interviews with Brazilian presidential candidates on the Roda Viva program aired during the 2018 elections. The results reveal that the structural characteristics of Roda Viva reduce the opportunities for equivocation gaps. In addition, while media professionals adopt a more assertive stance toward candidates (seeking to deauthenticate them), some interviewers from outside journalism offered the interviewees moral support. In turn, politicians avoided tricky questions and criticized the media coverage when placed in "embarrassing" situations. We also discuss how adversarial questions may help populist candidates since they use such opportunities to play the victim's role and attack the interviewers' credibility. Besides scrutinizing the media's performance in a non-Western setting, the paper contributes to the work of journalists, candidates, and political consultants by highlighting which rhetorical elements favor or harm the efficiency of those participating in such interviews.

2006

Political Communication, 2010

Presidential journalism is known to have grown substantially more aggressive through the 1970s and beyond, 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 (the rise of official discord), and the economic environment (a downturn in the business cycle). This study disentangles these various factors and assesses their relative success in explaining trends in journalistic conduct in the postwar era. Data are drawn from a large sample of presidential news conferences from 1953 through 2000, focusing on the aggressiveness of journalists' questions. The results strongly support the normative shift hypothesis, although economic factors have also been consequential. These results suggest a punctuated equilibrium model of journalistic change in relations between the White House press corps and the presidency.

This paper considers negative interrogatives—questions beginning with such frames as 'Isn't it', 'Don't you', 'Shouldn't you' etc. –– as limiting cases of 'questioning'. Using data from news interviews, where questioning is mandatory and the boundary between questions and assertions can be highly sensitive and contested, it suggests that this form of interrogative is recurrently produced as, and treated as, a vehicle for assertions. Further while negative interrogatives are contested as 'assertions', statements accompanied by negative tags are not. This suggests that Bolinger's (Bolinger, Dwight, 1957. Interrogative Structures of American English. University of Alabama Press, Alabama.) claim that the two formats are equivalent is incorrect. Some suggestions are offered as to why the two formats should be differentially treated in terms of their assertiveness. # 2002 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.