Article published In:
Journal of Argumentation in ContextVol. 13:1 (2024) ► pp.74–105
Journalists’ questions during crisis
Watchdogs or disseminators of information?
During the Covid-19 pandemic, various institutions held press conferences to inform the public about the situation. Journalists engaged in these events to obtain information and to scrutinize the appropriateness of authorities’ measures. Previous research has shown that journalists have become more adversarial towards politicians, but also that health crises make journalists more cooperative with authorities to help manage the situation. However, it remains unknown to what extent journalists retain their deliberative aim in press conferences where crises are addressed, and how their interventions as a whole shape discussions with authorities. A corpus of twenty-one press conferences held by seven institutions was annotated according to the argumentative moves of journalists. Results show that journalists displayed a wide array of argumentative moves, and the findings suggest that journalists incline towards retrieving information during crises, unless the situation gets intertwined with political turmoil.
Keywords: argumentative moves, corpus annotation, Covid-19, journalism, press conferences, questions
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Literature review
- 3.Theoretical basis of the annotation
- 4.Data
- 5.Methodology
- 6.Results of the annotation
- 7.Discussion
- 8.Conclusions
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
References (45)
Anderson, Charles
2020 Jacinda Ardern and her government soar in popularity during coronavirus crisis. Retrieved on April 2022 from [URL]
Anthony, Laurence
2005 AntConc: design and development of a freeware corpus analysis toolkit for the technical writing classroom. In IPCC 2005. Proceedings. International Professional Communication Conference, 729–737. IEEE. 
Ardern, Jacinda
2020, April 7. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern holds a press conference to give an update on the Covid-19 pandemic in New Zealand. Retrieved on December 1, 2022, from [URL]
2020, April 29. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern holds a press conference to give an update on the Covid-19 pandemic in New Zealand. Retrieved on December 1, 2022, from [URL]
Clayman, Steven
2001 Answers and evasions. Language in society, 30(3), 403–442.
Clayman, Steven. and John Heritage
2002a Questioning presidents: Journalistic deference and adversarialness in the press conferences of US Presidents Eisenhower and Reagan. Journal of communication, 52(4), 749–775.
2002b The news interview: Journalists and public figures on the air. Cambridge University Press.
Clayman, Steven. and Matthew Fox
2017 Hardballs and softballs: Modulating adversarialness in journalistic questioning. Journal of Language and Politics, 16(1), 20–40.
Clementson, David. and William Eveland
2016 When Politicians Dodge Questions: An Analysis of Presidential Press Conferences and Debates. Mass Communication and Society, 19(4), 411–429.
Coombs, Timothy
2010 Parameters for crisis communication. In The handbook of crisis communication, ed. Coombs, T and S. Holladay. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons.
Cuomo, Andrew
2020, April 3. Governor Andrew Cuomo holds a press conference to give an update on the Covid-19 pandemic in New York State. Retrieved on December 1, 2022, from [URL]
2020, April 16. Governor Andrew Cuomo holds a press conference to give an update on the Covid-19 pandemic in New York State. Retrieved on December 1, 2022, from [URL]
Eriksson, Göran
2011 Follow-up questions in political press conferences. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(14), 3331–3344.
Eriksson, Göran and Mats Eriksson
2012 Managing political crisis: an interactional approach to “image repair”. Journal of Communication Management, 16(3), 264–279.
Gallup
n.d. Presidential Approval Ratings – Donald Trump. Retrieved on April 2022 from: [URL]
Glik, Deborah
2007 Risk communication for public health emergencies. Annual Review of Public Health,
28
1, 33–54.
Hautli-Janisz, Annette, Katarzyna Budzynska, Conor McKillop, Brian Plüss, Valentine Gold, and Chris Reed
2022 Questions in argumentative dialogue. Journal of Pragmatics, 1881, 56–79.
Heritage, Jhon and Steven Clayman
2013 The changing tenor of questioning over time: Tracking a question form across US presidential news conferences, 1953–2000. Journalism Practice, 7(4), 481–501.
Hernández, A.
2021 Journalists’ moves in political press conferences and their implications for accountability. Journal of Argumentation in Context, 10(3), 281–314.
Hooker, Claire, Catherine King, and Julie Leask
2011 Journalists’ views about reporting avian influenza and a potential pandemic: a qualitative study. Influenza and other respiratory viruses, 6(3), 224–229.
Jacobs, S., Jackson, S., & Zhang, X.
2022) What Was the President’s Standpoint and When Did He Take It? A Normative Pragmatic Study of Standpoint Emergence in a Presidential Press Conference. Languages, 7(2), 153.
Johnson, Boris
2020, November 26. Prime Minister Boris Johnson holds a press conference to give an update on the Covid-19 pandemic in the U.K. Retrieved on December 1, 2022, from [URL]
Klemm, Celine, Enny Das, and Tilo Hartmann
2019 Changed priorities ahead: Journalists’ shifting role perceptions when covering public health crises. Journalism,
20
(9), 1223–1241.
Klie, Jan-Christoph., Michael Bugert, Beto Boullosa, Richard de Castilho, and Iryna Gurevych
2018 The inception platform: Machine-assisted and knowledge-oriented interactive annotation. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations (pp. 5–9).
Krause, Thomas and Amir Zeldes
2016 ANNIS3: A new architecture for generic corpus query and visualization. in: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 2016 (31). [URL].
Leal, Fernando
2020 On the Importance of Questioning Within the Ideal Model of Critical Discussion. Argumentation 341, 405–431.
Pazzanese, Christina
2020 Principled yet just, pragmatic yet idealistic –and nice. The Harvard Gazette. Retrieved on April 2022 from [URL]
Politico
n.d. United Kingdom – PM Boris Johnson’s approval rating. Retrieved on April 2022 from: [URL]
Rigotti, Edo and Andrea Rocci
2006 Towards a definition of communication context. Studies in communication sciences,
6
(2), 155–180.
Rocci, Aandrea and Margarita Luciani
2016 Economic-financial journalists as argumentative intermediaries. Journal of Argumentation in Context,
5
(1), 88–111.
Roy, Eleanor
2020 New Zealand health minister David Clark quits over handling of Covid-19 outbreak. Retrieved on April 2022 from [URL]
Sánchez, Julio, Ninon Guibarra, and Pamela Pereyra-Zamora
2021 Media Agenda and Press Conferences on Covid-19 in Mexico: An Analysis of Journalists’ Questions. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health,
18
(22), 12067.
Siena College Research Institute
n.d. 87% of NYers Approve of Cuomo’s Handling of the Coronavirus. Retrieved on April 2022 from: [URL]
Schueler, D., & Marx, M.
(2023) Speech acts in the Dutch COVID-19 press conferences. Language Resources and Evaluation, 57(2), 869–892.
Trudeau, Justin
2020, May 15. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau holds a press conference to give an update on the Covid-19 pandemic in Canada. Retrieved on December 1, 2022, from [URL]
Trump, Donald
2020, April 14. President Donald Trump holds a press conference to give an update on the Covid-19 pandemic in the U.S. Retrieved on December 1, 2022, from [URL]
2020, April 27. President Donald Trump holds a press conference to give an update on the Covid-19 pandemic in the U.S. Retrieved on December 1, 2022, from [URL]
Van Eemeren, Frans
2017 Argumentative patterns viewed from a pragma-dialectical perspective. In Prototypical Argumentative Patterns (ed. van Eemeren, F.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 7–30.
2018 Argumentation theory: A pragma-dialectical perspective. Cham: Springer.
Van Eemeren, Frans and Rob Grootendorst
1984 Speech acts in argumentative discussions. A theoretical model for the analysis of discussions directed towards solving conflicts of opinion. Dordretch: Foris Publications.
2004 A Systematic Theory of Argumentation. The pragma-dialectical approach. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Van Eemeren, Frans, Rob Grootendorst, and Francisca Snoeck Henkemans
2002 Argumentation: Analysis, evaluation, presentation. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Walton, Douglas, Reed, Chris, & Macagno, Fabrizio
2008 Argumentation schemes. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
Weaver, David and Lars Wilhoit
1996 The American journalist in the 1990s: US news people at the end of an era. Erlbaum: New Jersey.
Wodak, R., Culpeper, J., & Semino, E.
2021 Shameless normalisation of impoliteness: Berlusconi’s and Trump’s press conferences. Discourse & Society,
32
(3), 369–393.