The White House Press Briefing Corpus 1993-2010

The daily press briefings that take place at the White House are one of the most important arenas of political communication today. During the briefings, the press secretary to the president meets reporters with the twofold goal of responding to reporters’ demands for presidential news and, more importantly from the White House point of view, of setting the agenda for the day by making certain issues more salient than others, according to the priorities established by the administration. In particular, we have chosen to focus on the White House press briefings held during the two terms of the Clinton and of the George W. Bush administration: a wide time span that ranges from January 1993 to the same month in 2009. As reported by a number of presidency scholars (Perloff 1998; Han 2001; Kumar 2007), the importance of communications and media relations at the White House has been steadily growing throughout the 20th century, and nowadays “the president and the news media jointly occupy center stage” (Perloff 1998: 58). The advent of the new millennium has then brought with it the rise of the Internet as a primary source of information, especially for the young people, and the multiplication of cable television networks – both factors that have led to an unprecedented transformation in the news cycle, which is now active 24 hours a day and in which pieces of news tend to have a very short life (Kumar 2007: xxx-xxxi), with the risk of generating a situation where there is “an abundance of information but a lack of understanding of what it means” (Kumar 2007: 2-3). Furthermore, since Clinton’s presidency, press briefings are not only transcribed and made available on the White House website, but also filmed and broadcast live both on television and on the Internet. Partington (2003: 29) suggests that this decision was made in an attempt to circumvent the filter represented by the press and show the public the briefings for themselves. Some commentators point out that this recent evolution has transformed the briefings into “a political stage” where “a unique form of reality TV” takes place (Cooper and McKinnon 2005). Kumar (2007: 243) also observes that “televising the briefing influences not only the language people use but also the way they deport themselves and the messages they send”. The televised briefing, according to Jim Kennedy, communications director for the White House Counsel’s Office during the Clinton administration, resembles a duel, where the way questions are formulated is influenced by the need to get answers that, informative or not, sound interesting or even sensational on TV (quoted in Kumar 2007: 56). The press briefings that took place at the White House during the Clinton and Bush eras are therefore likely to represent an interesting starting point for the exploration of the way discourse strategies evolved in such a transformed context.