UCLA

The purpose of this study is to investigate, through analyses of videotaped records, how presidents of the United States interact with members of the White House press corps during presidential news conferences. The study is divided into two main parts. The first part examines practices of interaction in this institutional setting. One main objective is to determine when and how the president of the United States starts reacting to the propositions and presuppositions contained in the journalists questioning turns, or put slightly differently, what features of a journalist's questioning turn trigger non-vocal responses from the president that show his stance on the question he is listening to. In addition, this part of the dissertation also analyses refusals to answer without an account. More specifically, it studies how a president manages a refusal to answer a question without an account by defusing the fact that he is not being accountable. The president uses various semiotic resources to accomplish this task and the chapter provides a detailed analysis of these practices. The second part of this dissertation builds on studies that have documented a rise in aggressiveness in presidential news conferences (Clayman and Heritage, 2002b; Clayman et al., 2006, 2007, 2010) and zeroes in on a particular strategy the White House employed starting in the George H.W. Bush presidency to counteract this trend: holding joint press conferences--where the president appears with another head of state and answers only two or three questions. These types of conferences have surpassed solo press conferences in frequency. Yet, a key question about the effectiveness of this strategy has yet to be answered: how has this change in participation framework affected micro-level journalistic practices? In other words, do journalists address less aggressive questions to the president in joint press conferences than in solo conferences? With these two major objectives, this study contributes to the growing literature on stance-taking in interaction and the research on president-press relations. Employing qualitative and quantitative methods, this dissertation seeks to study press-state relations to show how these two bodies relate to one another.