The veteran UPI correspondent Helen Thomas, recently dislodged from the front row of the remodeled press briefing room, has seen a lot in her forty-six years covering the White House. The octogenarian’s tenure has spanned nine presidents and two generations of journalists. But in some recent books, the famously combative Thomas claims that her colleagues’ willingness to ask tough questions has waned over this period, particularly during the Bush administration and the run-up to war.

She may be right, but only if a long-term trend suddenly reversed itself during the Bush administration. The questions from White House correspondents at presidential news conferences from Eisenhower through Clinton grew more assertive, more adversarial, and more demanding over time, according to new research led by the UCLA sociologist Steven Clayman and published in February’s American Sociological Review.

Clayman and his colleague John Heritage scored more than 4,500 questions on five measures of aggressiveness–”initiative,””directness,””assertiveness,””adversarialness,”and ”accountability.”Questions got higher marks for ”initiative”if they began with a preamble that defined a context for the question and if there was a follow-up. ”Directness”measured conversational bluntness in contrast to conversational caution, politeness, or self-effacement. ”Assertive”questions called for a ”yes/no”response or even for a particular ”yes”or ”no”(”Aren’t we in an economic downturn?”). ”Adversarial”questions had preambles that were critical of administration policies. ”Accountability”questions explicitly asked for an explanation or justification of presidential policy in a ”Why did you …?”or a ”How could you …?”form. Fourteen coders worked together in pairs to analyze the data. The raw data, gathered from a sample of 164 press conferences staggered quarterly between 1953 and 2000, were analyzed to answer a question that is often asked, but rarely tested systematically: ”When does the watchdog bark?”

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