As we are witnessing the current NSA Prism scandal, I thought it would be interesting to have a look at a White House press briefing (transcripts can be found at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings).
I used the transcription for the briefing held on June 11th, 2013. I cleaned the text very slightly by removing the words Mr. and Carney, as the press secretary’s name appears regularly on the transcript to indicate the speaker, and as this alters the data readings, I decided to remove them. The text in question contains 7,294 words; I was interested in looking at the keywords of the text, and in order to obtain a keywords list, I used Wordsmith. As a reference corpus, I used a section of the Westbury Lab Usernet Corpus, a 30 billion word corpus of news texts. (This corpus is available for download, but a BitTorrent and patience is required!:http://www.psych.ualberta.ca/~westburylab/downloads/usenetcorpus.download.html).
When I looked at the keywords, I found the following:
As can be seen, the keyword list is able to demonstrate the principle themes of the text, which include not only the NSA controversy, but also topics such as Syria and Nelson Mandela.
The word with the fourth highest level of keyness is debate, and I would like to focus some time on this.
And just to remind ourselves before continuing, the Oxford dictionary defines debate as follows:
A search of the concordance lines of this word gives the following:
I find it quite fascinating that the NSA Prism project, which until very recently remained secret, is now being constructed by the White House as something which:
he is interested and believes in a debate
spirited and animated debate
healthy debate
honest debate
important debate
merits debate
welcomes the debate
If this debate is so healthy, honest, important, merited and welcomed, why has it taken the actions of a whistleblower to make it happen?
