Reading Lab · Dossier 12

The briefing room

348 press briefings and 2,897 questions between summer 2003 and June 2004. Reporters asked about Fallujah and Sadr when both flared in April 2004, and rarely about prisons. Two men stood at the podium most: military spokesman Mark Kimmitt and CPA spokesman Dan Senor.

348briefings
2,897questions
1,838answers by Kimmitt and Senor
14prison questions in May 2004

Who stood at the podium

Band thickness = the speaker’s words that month · terracotta: Kimmitt and Senor.

What reporters asked about

Questions per month per topic on one scale · terracotta: the peak month.

1

Established

A two-man podium: Kimmitt answered 1,069 questions and Senor 769, 68% of all answers with a known speaker.

2

Established

April 2004 changed the questions: 141 on Fallujah and 126 on Sadr and Najaf in a single month, after few before.

3

Open question

After the Abu Ghraib photos were published (28 April 2004), questions on prisons and detainees in these briefings reached only 14 in May. Did the subject move to Pentagon briefings? The archive does not say.

4

Likely

Explicit deflection was rare: highest for Martin Dempsey (15% of answers), lowest for Mowaffak al-Rubaie (3%). The count is automatic on set phrases, so it misses evasion without them.

TR-0d52d210

5

Doubtful

Who asked? Only 205 questions (7%) began with the reporter naming their outlet; most were American or global wires, with 0 Arab or Iraqi. Arab reporters’ questions may have come through interpretation without introduction, so nothing can be concluded from absence.

How often a speaker explicitly deflected

Share of answers containing an explicit deflection phrase · speakers with 30+ answers.

Outlets reporters named

Only from the 205 questions with an outlet named · terracotta: Arab and Iraqi outlets.

Method, confidence and limits

Source: briefing transcripts in section 06 of the archive. The speaker is identified from speaker names in the text (“MR. SENOR:”, “GEN. KIMMITT:”), and a question from “Q” at the start of a line. An answer is the first official’s turn after a question.

Topics: a question counts for a topic if it contains one of its word patterns: security (attack, bomb, IED, killed, insurgent, security); Fallujah; Sadr & Najaf (Sadr, Najaf, Mahdi); handover & elections; reconstruction & services (electric, reconstruction, contract, jobs, fuel, oil); prisons (Abu Ghraib, prison, detainee). A question may carry more than one topic.

Deflection: an answer containing one of: “I’m not going to get into/speculate/comment”, “can’t comment/confirm”, “I don’t have any information/details/numbers”, “get back to you”, “I’d refer you”, “I don’t know”. Rates are shown for speakers with 30+ answers.

Privacy and limits: we do not show reporters’ names, only their outlets when they gave them. Texts are machine-extracted, and some briefings are missing from the archive.

Briefing transcripts in the archive Language and discourse → ← Reading Lab