BIASED REPRESENTATION OF HILLARY CLINTON’S ...er/...2016/06/01 · Magazine (nymag.com) was...

BIASED REPRESENTATION OF

HILLARY CLINTON’S EMAIL SCANDAL

IN THE MEDIA

EVALUATIVE LANGUAGE ON

FOX NEWS AND NEW YORK MAGAZINE

Written by: Ákos Csernák

Supervisor: Dr. Nicole Baumgarten

Date of submission: 1 June 2016

Total number of typed characters: 157,346

SYDDANSK UNIVERSITET – UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN DENMARK

i

Table of Contents

Table of Contents .................................................................................................................... i

List of Figures ........................................................................................................................ iv

Plagiarism Statement ............................................................................................................. vi

Summary ............................................................................................................................... vii

1. Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 1

2. Hillary Clinton’s Email Controversy .................................................................................. 3

3. Literature and Theoretical Framework ............................................................................... 6

3.1. Measuring Media Bias ................................................................................................. 7

3.2. The Appraisal Framework: Evaluation in Verbal Language ....................................... 8

3.2.1. The Appraisal Framework in Linguistics .............................................................. 8

3.2.2. The Appraisal Framework: Attitude Overview ................................................... 10

3.2.3. The Appraisal Framework: Engagement Overview ............................................ 12

3.2.4. The Appraisal Framework: Graduation Overview .............................................. 14

3.3. Analytical Approach .................................................................................................. 16

4. Data ................................................................................................................................... 17

4.1. Fox News and New York Magazine: Overview ........................................................ 17

4.1.1. foxnews.com and nymag.com: Overview ........................................................... 18

4.1.2. Situational Characteristics of Fox News and New York Magazine News Articles . 19

4.2. Data Collection .......................................................................................................... 21

4.2.1. Timeframe ........................................................................................................... 21

4.2.2. Defining Written News Articles .......................................................................... 22

4.2.3. Selecting News Articles Using Predefined Criteria ............................................ 23

4.2.4. Selecting News Articles Using Extended Criteria .............................................. 24

4.3. Data Overview ........................................................................................................... 26

4.3.1. Further Commentary on Data: Article #02 ......................................................... 27

4.3.2. Further Commentary on Data: Article #12 ......................................................... 28

4.3.3. Data Measurements ............................................................................................. 30

5. Design of the Analytical Framework................................................................................ 32

5.1. Design of the Appraisal Framework: Attitude ........................................................... 34

5.1.1. Attitude → Affect................................................................................................ 34

5.1.2. Attitude → Judgement ........................................................................................ 36

ii

5.1.3. Attitude → Appreciation ..................................................................................... 38

5.2. Design of the Appraisal Framework: Engagement .................................................... 40

5.2.1. Engagement → Heteroglossia → Expand ........................................................... 41

5.2.2. Engagement → Heteroglossia → Contract ......................................................... 44

5.2.3. Engagement → Heteroglossia → Borderline ...................................................... 47

5.3. Design of the Appraisal Framework: Graduation ...................................................... 52

5.3.1. Graduation → Reckoning.................................................................................... 54

5.3.2. Graduation → Scaling ......................................................................................... 57

5.3.3. Graduation → Isolation ....................................................................................... 59

5.4. Design of the Appraisal Framework: Summary And Out-of-Scope Lexical Items ... 61

6. Results .............................................................................................................................. 63

6.1. Frequencies of Attitude, Engagement, and Graduation ............................................. 63

6.1.1. Normed Rates of Occurrence .............................................................................. 63

6.1.2. Occurrences in Total ........................................................................................... 64

6.2. Frequencies of Attitude Categories ............................................................................ 65

6.3. Frequencies of Engagement Categories ..................................................................... 66

6.4. Frequencies of Graduation Categories ....................................................................... 69

6.5. Attitude: A Closer Look ............................................................................................ 69

6.5.1. Attitude → Affect................................................................................................ 69

6.5.2. Attitude → Judgement ........................................................................................ 71

6.5.3. Attitude → Appreciation ..................................................................................... 72

6.6. Engagement: A Closer Look ...................................................................................... 73

6.6.1. Engagement → Attribute .................................................................................... 74

6.6.2. Engagement → Entertain .................................................................................... 74

6.6.3. Engagement → Proclaim .................................................................................... 76

6.6.4. Engagement → Disclaim .................................................................................... 78

6.7. Graduation: A Closer Look ........................................................................................ 79

6.7.1. Graduation → Reckoning.................................................................................... 79

6.7.2. Graduation → Scaling ......................................................................................... 81

6.7.3. Graduation → Isolation ....................................................................................... 83

6.8. Implicit Meaning Making .......................................................................................... 84

6.8.1. Implicit Meaning Making on Fox News ............................................................. 84

iii

6.8.2. Implicit Meaning Making on New York Magazine ............................................ 86

7. Discussion ......................................................................................................................... 89

8. Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 94

References ........................................................................................................................... xiii

Primary Sources ............................................................................................................... xiii

Secondary Sources .......................................................................................................... xvii

Appendices ........................................................................................................................ xxiv

Appendix 1. Part of the New York Magazine News Archive........................................ xxiv

Appendix 2. Part of the Fox News News Archive .......................................................... xxv

Appendix 3. Attitude → Affect in Emailgate News Articles ....................................... xxvii

Appendix 4. Attitude → Judgement in Emailgate News Articles ............................... xxviii

Appendix 5. Attitude → Appreciation in Emailgate News Articles .............................. xxix

Appendix 6. Engagement → Attribute in Emailgate News Articles .............................. xxx

Appendix 7. Engagement → Entertain in Emailgate News Articles ............................. xxxi

Appendix 8. Engagement → Proclaim in Emailgate News Articles ............................ xxxii

Appendix 9. Engagement → Disclaim in Emailgate News Articles ........................... xxxiii

Appendix 10. Graduation in Emailgate News Articles: Fox News ............................. xxxiv

Appendix 11. Graduation in Emailgate News Articles: New York Magazine ............. xxxv

iv

List of Figures

Chart 1. Instances of Attitude, Engagement, and Graduation per dataset ........................... 64

Chart 2. Frequencies of Attitude Categories ....................................................................... 65

Chart 3. Monoglossic vs. Heteroglossic Utterances ............................................................ 67

Chart 4. Frequencies of Engagement Categories ................................................................ 68

Chart 5. Frequencies of Graduation Categories .................................................................. 69

Figure 1. The Appraisal Framework in Systemic Functional Linguistics,

Its Three Domains and Their Categories ............................................................................. 9

Figure 2. Analytical Approach: Repeated Cycles of Data Analysis

and Framework Consultation .............................................................................................. 17

Figure 3. Attitude Categories in Fox News and

New York Magazine Emailgate News Articles ................................................................... 34

Figure 4. Affect Subcategories in Fox News and


Figure 5. Judgement Subcategories in Fox News and


Figure 6. Appreciation Subcategories in Fox News and


Figure 7. Engagement Categories in Fox News and


Figure 8. Heteroglossia → Expand Subcategories in Fox News and


Figure 9. Heteroglossia → Contract Subcategories in Fox News and


Figure 10. Heteroglossia → Borderline Subcategories in Fox News and


Figure 11. Graduation Categories in Fox News and


Figure 12. Graduation → Reckoning Subcategories in Fox News and


Figure 13. Graduation → Scaling Subcategories in Fox News and

v


Figure 14. Graduation → Isolation Subcategories in Fox News and


Figure 15. The Full Layout of the Appraisal Framework.................................................... 62

Figure 16. Voices and Issues at Stake in Clinton's Email Controversy ............................... 91

Table 1. Key Developments in Clinton's Email Controversy .............................................. 5

Table 2. Examples of Attitude → Affect ............................................................................. 11

Table 3. Examples of Attitude → Judgement...................................................................... 11

Table 4. Examples of Attitude → Appreciation .................................................................. 12

Table 5. Examples of Engagement → Monoglossia ........................................................... 13

Table 6. Examples of Engagement → Heteroglossia .......................................................... 14

Table 7. Examples of Graduation → Force ......................................................................... 15

Table 8. Alexa Internet Metrics for foxnews.com and nymag.com .................................... 19

Table 9. Situational Characteristics of Fox News and New York Magazine Articles ........ 20

Table 10. The Dates of Publication and Titles of the 2x14 Emailgate News Articles ........ 26

Table 11. Word Count of Articles on Emailgate ................................................................. 31

Table 12. Mentions of Hillary Clinton in Emailgate Articles ............................................. 31

Table 13. Out-of-Scope Lexical Items in Articles on Emailgate ........................................ 61

Table 14. The Calculation of Normed Rates of Occurrence ............................................... 63

Table 15. Ten Fox News Sentences with Implicitly Evaluative Language ......................... 85

Table 16. 10 New York Magazine Sentences with Implicitly Evaluative Language .......... 87

vi

Plagiarism Statement

“I hereby solemnly declare that I have personally and independently prepared this paper. All

quotations in the text have been marked as such, and the paper or considerable parts of it

have not previously been subject to any examination or assessment.”

______________________

Ákos Csernák

vii

Summary

The aim of this thesis is to investigate and identify evaluative language in news articles that

discuss Hillary Clinton’s email controversy.

Hillary Clinton’s email scandal, often labeled as emailgate, arose in March 2015, one

month before she announced her run for President of the United States of America. Since

announcing her presidential bid, Clinton and the development of her campaign have been

under close scrutiny in the press. Reports on her controversial email practices, however, have

received frequent and heavy media coverage since March 2015, shifting the focus of the

media from her campaign efforts.

The online edition of Fox News (foxnews.com) was identified as explicitly opposing

the Democratic aspirant Clinton’s presidential bid, whereas the online edition of New York

Magazine (nymag.com) was identified as explicitly supporting it. The question arose as to

whether Fox News and New York Magazine present emailgate news articles in a language

that reflects partisan bias, as well. Thus, this thesis aims to answer the following research

question. Is there evaluative language in Fox News and New York Magazine news articles

discussing Hillary Clinton’s email controversy? If so, how is evaluative language expressed

and how does it build media bias?

In answering the research question, the thesis first offers an overview of how the key

events in Hillary Clinton’s email controversy have unfolded and what repercussions they

have had in the media. Clinton’s email practices gained media attention as The New York

Times revealed in March 2015 that the former secretary of state of the United States

exclusively used a personal email account on her private home server to conduct official

business. As secretary of state and head of the State Department, Clinton was responsible for

the foreign policy of the U.S. between 2009 and 2013. A 2012 terrorist attack on U.S.

diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya, had resulted in the death of four American officials

and had prompted an official investigation into the accountability of U.S. officials in the

events. As part of the investigation, requests were filed for the email correspondences of U.S.

officials including those of Hillary Clinton. The fact that only eight Benghazi-related Clinton

emails were submitted in response to the record requests prompted a Vice News investigative

reporter to file a Freedom of Information Act in search of other Clinton correspondences.

viii

Upon The New York Times breaking the news in March 2015 that Clinton’s official

correspondences passed through her private email address on a private server, Clinton

claimed to have deemed 30,000 emails work-related, which she delivered to the authorities,

and she claimed to have deemed 30,000 pages of emails private, which were deleted without

turning them over. Clinton also said that her emails contained no classified information.

In response to the news, a federal judge ordered the 30,000 work-related emails to be

released to the public on a monthly basis. As two inspectors general found that potentially

hundreds of Clinton’s emails could have classified information, the Federal Bureau of

Investigation launched its own investigation into the Clinton emails. The FBI soon managed

to recover the 30,000 pages of deleted private emails from Clinton’s server.

In the media, Clinton’s email practices generated debate about information security

issues and Clinton’s responsibilities to defend the nation’s security as secretary of state.

Emailgate became a frequently discussed topic in the presidential candidates’ political

debates, as well. The issue will likely remain a revisited topic for the rest of 2016 if Clinton

wins the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party, especially because the FBI’s probe

into Clinton’s email practices has not yet concluded.

The thesis next reviews literature on the measuring of media bias. A common means

of assessing partisan bias in the media is to investigate language with regard to

evaluative/opinionated language use. Martin and White’s Appraisal framework is one way

to identify evaluation in verbal language. The Appraisal framework relies on Systemic

Functional Linguistics, a paradigm of Michael Halliday that approaches language from a

social semiotics perspective. The Appraisal framework comprises three domains: Attitude,

Engagement, and Graduation.

The Appraisal framework is introduced in chapter 3 and its domains exemplified via

sentences from written news articles on Fox News and New York Magazine that discuss

Hillary Clinton’s email controversy. Researchers who apply the Appraisal framework to

field-specific texts often make adjustments to the framework. In this thesis, some

modifications were made to the framework. As a result, the full layout of the system follows

in a later chapter. Chapter 3 also introduces the analytical approach used in this thesis. To

identify evaluative language on Fox News and New York Magazine, induction was used.

ix

Following the inductive approach, the data, written news articles published on the two media

outlets, were taken as the starting point. First, the data were observed for recurring linguistic

elements that construe potentially evaluative meanings. Next, the Appraisal framework was

consulted to systematically interpret the found linguistic elements. Afterwards, the data were

observed again for a deeper scrutiny, after which the Appraisal framework was consulted

again to interpret the new findings. This two-step analytical approach developed into a

repeated cycle of analysis and framework consultation until the data were fully exposed for

evaluative language and the found linguistic patterns systematically interpreted in the

Appraisal framework.

The thesis next introduces the data in greater detail, including an overview of Fox

News and New York Magazine. Fox News is the only outlet on a national scale to propagate

Republican views. New York Magazine is a lesser-known media outlet commonly not

included in media bias studies. It is unofficially viewed as having liberal bias. The online

edition of Fox News has a bigger reader base than New York Magazine. Foxnews.com is

among the 50 most visited American websites, while nymag.com ranks in the top 500. The

situational characteristics of Fox News and New York Magazine articles are detailed next. A

marked difference between the two media outlets is that the author of many Fox News news

articles remain unnamed, decreasing the interactiveness between writers and readers.

Next, data collection is detailed. The data investigated in this thesis are 14 emailgate

news articles published on Fox News and 14 news articles published on New York Magazine

between 12 April 2015 and 1 February 2016. The start date marks Clinton’s official

announcement of her presidential bid. The end date marks the first Democratic electoral

contest in 2016, the first in a series of contests that ends in June 2016, and is designed to help

the Democratic Party select its presidential nominee. The 2x14 news articles were then

filtered for sentences that reference Hillary Clinton. 410 such sentences were found, which

were selected as the core of the data analysis. Narrowing the data was important in order for

the focus of the research to shift to how Clinton as a public figure and Democratic presidential

candidate is depicted on Fox News and New York Magazine against the backdrop of her

email controversy.

x

The thesis then returns to the Appraisal framework and lays out the system in its

entirety based on the data. The Appraisal framework needed modifications in all of its three

domains (Attitude, Engagement, and Graduation) in order for it to better accommodate the

field-specific language that is used to describe Hillary Clinton and emailgate.

First, the Attitude domain is opened up, with its categories and their subcategories

explained in detail and exemplified through language taken from the data. Attitudinal

meanings are words that signal emotional responses (e.g. love, excited, fear, anxiety,

sympathy), evaluate people’s behaviour (e.g. controversial, unusual, shady, sorry), and

assess things, objects, and performances (e.g. unsecured server, boring emails).

Second, Engagement, the second domain of the Appraisal framework, is explained in

detail with examples taken from the data. Engagement deals with whether writers and

speakers express only their own take on an issue, or their language represents other voices,

other opinions, and other takes on an issue, as well. The former is called Monoglossia, where

writers present their own ideas, feelings, and thoughts only. The latter is called Heteroglossia.

Heteroglossia takes place when writers express that the idea presented in their utterances is

only one position out of a range of other positions. The existence of other voices with

different ideas, feelings, and thoughts, is recognised. For instance, when a journalist quotes

a spokesman or Clinton, he or she introduces a new voice into the text and expresses that the

quoted material does not necessarily represent his or her take on the issue. Another example

of Heteroglossia is to use negation. When a journalist writes that Clinton never sent classified

information, he or she introduces another voice into the text, according to which Clinton sent

classified information, a position that is shown not to hold via negation.

Third, Graduation, the third domain of the Appraisal framework, is explained in

detail. Martin and White, the linguists who created the Appraisal framework, suggest that

Graduation is not a separate third domain, but instead it overarches both Attitude and

Engagement. Graduation is language that down-scales or up-scales meanings. For instance,

highly unusual carries an attitudinal meaning (unusual) up-scaled by the word highly. Some

instances of Graduation are less clear-cut. To refer to Clinton’s email scandal as email saga,

stories, and an Internet meme is to down-scale emailgate.

xi

The thesis then presents the research results. New York Magazine news articles are

found to contain more evaluative language than those on Fox News. Evaluations are used

differently by the two outlets, and they build different dispositions toward Clinton and

emailgate.

As for Attitude, Fox News removes the emotional aspect of emailgate, negatively

assesses Clinton’s truthfulness and the appropriateness of her email usage, and often

questions the confidentiality of the Clinton emails. New York Magazine describes Clinton in

a human context surrounded by friends and everyday matters and hobbies, evaluates the

media’s attack on emailgate negatively, and describes the Clinton emails as containing

uninteresting details on Clinton’s everyday life.

As for Engagement, Fox News journalists often distance themselves from what

Clinton has said in relation to emailgate, introduce denial into Clinton’s statements, and

hypothesise that top-secret information leaked from Clinton’s use of emails, thus

jeopardizing the country. New York Magazine journalists often refer to groups of people who

intend to find incriminating evidence against Clinton, introduce commentary to dismiss these

groups of people, stress that Clinton did not break any laws by using a personal email server,

and negate statements that otherwise use incriminating language about Clinton.

As for Graduation, Fox News up-scales the seriousness of emailgate, describes it as

a long-lasting scandal, blows up the amount of emails involved, uses adjectives and adverbs

that increase the severity of emailgate, and lays emphasis on select emails that imply that

top-secret information passed through Clinton’s private server. New York Magazine lays

emphasis on select emails that contain insignificant details of Clinton’s life at the office,

describes the media’s attention as overblown, and expresses that certain groups of people

have failed to use the scandal to hinder Clinton’s presidential run.

The thesis then interprets the findings. Fox News journalists overplay emailgate and

express disbelief of Clinton’s claims in the issue. New York Magazine journalists underplay

emailgate, explicitly dismiss Republicans as the people who wish to find incriminating

evidence against Clinton, and present Clinton in a relatable way. These over- and

underplaying tones remained unchanged on the two media outlets between 12 April 2015 and

1 February 2016. This is interesting because Clinton’s email usage evolved from a political

xii

scandal into a morally questioned practice followed by legal consequences. In total, both

outlets were found to exhibit bias in their presentation of emailgate news. Fox News exhibits

negative bias toward Clinton. New York Magazine uses evaluative language more often than

Fox News, exhibits a positive bias toward Clinton, and makes its Democratic partisan bias

explicit.

The thesis concludes by stating the interesting aspects of the research. The research

sheds light on the responsibility of political journalists in presenting news stories using

evaluative language and, thus, shaping how these stories reach the public. This is relevant

because emailgate has been a highly divisive political issue since 2015, possibly contributing

to Clinton’s lessened chances of winning the presidential nomination. The research also

identifies what linguistic resources can be used to defend public figures and their deeds in

front of a wide audience. Using these linguistic resources can help protect people and other

entities when facing controversies and negative publicity. From the perspective of crisis

communication, the research shows language that has been adjusted to aggravate or mitigate

issues such as scandals. This type of language can be used to over- and underplay key actors’

and entities’ responsibilities in controversies. Lastly, the thesis identifies formatting

conventions (parentheses, scare quotes, dashes) used in journalistic discourse as bearing

evaluative potential. As these formatting options can be used to infuse written texts with

authorial opinions and ambiguity, their further research and possible addition to the Appraisal

framework are recommended.

1

1. Introduction

As President Barack Obama concludes his second term as President of the United States,

America prepares to elect its 45th president in November 2016. 2015 saw a number of

Democratic and Republican politicians announce their run for the 2016 presidential

nomination, launch campaigns and fundraisers, and make clear their political stance on issues

such as immigration, taxes, health care, and other social matters. Among the Democratic

candidates is Hillary Rodham Clinton, secretary of state of the United States from 2009 to

2013, who is currently considered to be the Democratic front-runner for president.

Since Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy for president in April 2015, the

national media have covered her political stance on economic and social issues and her

campaign-related news extensively. However, a matter of a different kind has been catching

the headlines, often overshadowing the politician’s campaign. Clinton's email controversy,

labeled as emailgate, emerged in March 2015. Emailgate soon evolved into a scandal and

became one of the most heavily publicised controversies that an American politician was

involved in in 2015.

The email controversy arose as it was revealed that Clinton used a personal email

account, hosted on a privately run server in her New York home, to conduct official

correspondence during her tenure as secretary of state. Shortly after the news broke in March

2015, Clinton announced that she had turned over around 30,000 pages of work-related email

exchanges for the authorities to investigate whether the emails contained classified

information that could jeopardize the nation’s security. Clinton had considered personal

another set of approximately 30,000 pages’ worth of email, which her campaign team

consequently deleted from the private server without turning them over.

Clinton’s campaign news, including her email controversy, has received wide media

coverage in the past year. I found two media outlets to either oppose her presidential bid or

support it. Fox News, a prominent conservative media outlet leaning toward Republican

values, has commented negatively on Clinton’s run for presidency, saying, “nothing better

defines the hypocrisy of the left than Hillary Clinton’s likely coronation as the 2016

Democratic presidential candidate” (Peek, 2015, para. 1). New York Magazine, a New York-

based online magazine covering politics and culture, has shown a more positive disposition

2

toward Clinton’s candidacy, saying, “the argument for Clinton in 2016 is that she is the

candidate of the only major American political party not run by lunatics. There is only one

choice for voters who want a president who accepts climate science and rejects voodoo

economics, and whose domestic platform would not engineer the largest upward

redistribution of resources in American history” (Chait, 2015, para. 25).

Based on this explicit side-taking by Fox News and New York Magazine, I decided

to research whether these two media outlets display media bias in their propagation of

emailgate news. In general, news articles are expected to preserve neutrality and factuality,

and minimise commentary. The question arises as to whether the news pertaining to Clinton’s

email controversy contains evaluative language owing to the media outlets’ negative or

positive disposition toward Clinton’s presidential bid, i.e. whether journalists exploit

emailgate in their political side-taking.

Thus, my research question can be formulated in the following way. Is there

evaluative language in Fox News and New York Magazine news articles discussing Hillary

Clinton’s email controversy? If so, how is evaluative language expressed and how does it

build media bias?

This thesis is structured as follows. I first give a detailed account of Hillary Clinton’s

email controversy in chapter 2. In chapter 3, I first review literature pertaining to the

measuring of media bias. Next, I present the Appraisal framework, a system that aims to

reveal evaluative language in discourse. Further, I introduce the analytical approach used to

conduct the research. In chapter 4, I introduce the contextual properties and production

circumstances of foxnews.com and nymag.com, the two sources of my investigation. Then I

discuss my data collection process, i.e. the criteria used to select Fox News and New York

Magazine emailgate news articles. In chapter 5, I lay out the Appraisal framework along with

the adjustments made to it for the investigation of emailgate news articles. In chapter 6, I

present my findings by showing explicit evaluative language use in my data. In addition, I

show examples of the interaction of evaluative meanings that result in implicit evaluation. In

chapter 7, I discuss my findings, including how evaluative language contributes to media bias

in the two media outlets, and present limitations to my research. In chapter 8, I summarise

my thesis.

3

2. Hillary Clinton’s Email Controversy

In this chapter, I offer an overview of the main events of Hillary Clinton’s email controversy

including their repercussions in the media.

In January 2009, Hillary Rodham Clinton became secretary of state of the United

States and head of the State Department, primarily responsible for the country’s foreign

policy. On 11 September 2012, a half a year before the end of Clinton’s tenure, Islamic

militants attacked two U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya, killing four American

officials. Clinton took responsibility for the Benghazi attack (New York Daily News, 2015).

A House Select Committee was appointed in May 2014 to investigate what led to the

Benghazi attack and how it could have been prevented, and to assess the accountability of

U.S. officials in the attack (About the Select Committee, n.d.). The Committee sent record

requests to the State Department to obtain Benghazi-related documents including email

correspondences. In response, the State Department delivered 15,000 documents to the

Committee. The batch included only eight Hillary Clinton emails, harvested from state.gov

email accounts (Kiely, 2015). This raised questions given that Clinton was the President’s

principal foreign policy adviser at the time of the Benghazi attack and leader of the State

Department. In search of other Clinton emails about Benghazi, Jason Leopold, a Vice News

investigative reporter, filed a Freedom of Information Act in “November 2014, when it

became clear that [Hillary Clinton] would announce her candidacy for US president”

(Leopold, 2016, para. 11). In response, Clinton’s office delivered 55,000 pages of work-

related emails to the State Department the following month. The email threads were

harvested from her private email server.

On March 2 2015, The New York Times revealed that Clinton “exclusively used a

personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state,” which is a

possible breach to the Federal Records Act (Schmidt, 2015, para. 3). The New York Times

broke the news the following day that several record requests sent from the House Select

Committee to the State Department “came up empty” in the past because the State

Department had no access to Clinton’s privately stored emails (Schmidt & Chozick, 2015,

para. 8).

4

Clinton herself addressed the reports for the first time the following week and claimed

to have already delivered her work-related emails (referring to the 55,000 pages/30,000

emails turned over in November 2014) to the State Department and to not have kept emails

“within the scope of my personal privacy” (amounting to 30,000 pages of emails). Clinton

also pointed out that she “did not email any classified material to anyone” from her private

email server (The New York Times, 2015).

At the end of May 2015, the State Department released a batch of Clinton emails in

relation to the Benghazi attack (Virtual Reading Room Documents Search Results, 2015). A

week later, a federal judge ordered the State Department to release “some of the 55,000

Clinton emails on a monthly basis starting June 30 and ending Jan. 29, 2016” (Ferrechio,

2015).

After the monthly releases began, The New York Times revealed that two inspectors

general requested the Federal Bureau of Investigation to conduct a criminal investigation into

Clinton’s email usage after announcing in a joint memo that Clinton’s private email account

contained “hundreds of potentially classified emails” (Schmidt & Apuzzo, 2015). In August,

the FBI claimed Clinton’s private server and began investigating its contents. Later that

month, the question arose as to whether Clinton had deleted her private email chains or wiped

her server. When a reporter asked her about wiping her server, she responded, “What, like

with a cloth or something?,” furthering the controversy around her use of emails (The Wall

Street Journal, 2015).

In September 2015, IT specialist Bryan Pagliano, who had helped set up Clinton’s

private email server in her New York home, was announced to invoke his Fifth Amendment

right, meaning that he would not have to testify in front of the House Select Committee and

answer questions about Clinton’s email server. Later that month, Clinton was interviewed by

MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell and said that she was “sorry that [her email usage] has been

confusing to people” (MSNBC, 2015). Some media outlets interpreted this as an act of

apologizing for the confusion but not for her email usage. According to Maureen Dowd of

The New York Times, “[Clinton] leaves the impression that she is merely sorry to be facing

criticism, not that she miscalculated in the first place” (Dowd, 2016, para. 17).

5

At the end of September, the FBI recovered the 30,000 Clinton emails from her

private server that had been deemed private and deleted/wiped from the email server

previously. The State Department also received work-related Clinton emails that had not been

turned over by Clinton despite her claims that she and her team had “provided all of them”

(CBS News, 2015). Later, the FBI requested Datto, Inc., a tech company that had been

unknowingly backing up Clinton’s private email server, to hand over all the data that the

company had on the Clinton emails. A month later, the intelligence community announced

that two Clinton emails previously thought to contain top-secret information were no longer

believed to have classified content (Gerstein, 2015).

In the meantime, the State Department continued with its monthly release of Clinton

emails. The Department published over 3,000 emails on the last day of 2015, but failed to

meet its target of releasing at least 82% of all Clinton emails by the end of 2015. To meet the

goal, it released the remaining 1262 emails a week later.

In January 2016, the intelligence community announced that “several dozen emails”

found on Clinton’s server contained intelligence known as Special Access Programs. SAP

information exceeds regular top-secret classifications (Dilanian, 2016). At the end of the

month, the State Department confirmed that 22 Clinton emails found on her private email

server contained top-secret information and withheld their release.

For later reference, Table 1 gives a summary of the key events in Clinton’s email

controversy.

KEY DEVELOPMENTS IN CLINTON’S EMAIL CONTROVERSY

Date Development

January 2009 –

February 2013 Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state

September 2012 Benghazi attack on the American consulate

May 2014 U.S. House Select Committee established

August 2014 Official email server data sent to House Select Committee

November 2014 Request for Benghazi-related Clinton emails

December 2014 Private email server data sent to State Department

February 2015 Private email server data sent to House Select Committee

2 March 2015 The New York Times breaks the news about Clinton’s use of a private email server

6

3 March 2015 The New York Times breaks the news about failed Clinton email requests

March 2015 Clinton holds press conference, speaks up in the issue

22 May 2015 Benghazi-related Clinton emails released to the public

27 May 2015 Court order issued requiring regulated release of Clinton emails

30 June 2015 2nd batch of Clinton emails released

24 July 2015 FBI requests to conduct investigation into Clinton emails

12 August 2015 FBI begins investigation into Clinton emails

18 August 2015 Clinton gives controversial reply about email deletion

3 September 2015 IT specialist working on Clinton’s private email server said to take the 5th Amendment

4 September 2015 Clinton interviewed by Andrea Mitchell, says sorry for email confusion

23 September 2015 FBI recovers erased emails from Clinton’s private email server

25 September 2015 Clinton emails previously not turned over received by State Department

7 October 2015 FBI requests backed up data on Clinton’s private email server

6 November 2015 Two, previously classified Clinton emails no longer thought classified

31 December 2015 –

8 January 2016 End-of-the-year batch of Clinton emails released late

20 January 2016 Several dozen Clinton emails found to have intelligence beyond top secret

29 January 2016 22 Clinton emails contain top secret information, release withheld

Table 1. Key Developments in Clinton's Email Controversy

Although the State Department’s email release process concluded at the end of

February, the FBI’s own investigation into Clinton’s email usage has continued to generate

publicity in the media throughout the spring of 2016. Emailgate has also been frequently

covered in the candidates’ political debates. Additionally, because “The State Department

has not ruled out conducting its own review after the FBI investigation is complete,”

Clinton’s email controversy is bound to receive media coverage for the rest of her campaign

work (Fishel, 2016, para. 12).

3. Literature and Theoretical Framework

In this chapter, I first review literature on how media bias has been measured in the past.

Afterwards, I introduce the Appraisal framework, an analytical model for the investigation

of evaluative language in discourse. Lastly, I introduce the data-driven analytical approach

that I used to investigate evaluative language in emailgate news articles on Fox News and

New York Magazine.

7

3.1. Measuring Media Bias

The American journalistic discourse is often perceived as exhibiting partisan bias, i.e. a

conservative or liberal political bias (Covert & Wasburn, 2009). This is held to commonly

manifest in a slanted coverage of either conservative or liberal perspectives in the discussion

of core social issues. A common approach to measure media bias is to investigate how much

coverage these issues receive in a media outlet. For example, Covert and Wasburn (2009)

looked at the extent to which four social issues (crime, the environment, gender, and poverty)

were covered in two national news magazines and journals. According to the researchers, an

imbalanced coverage of these topics leads to the preferential propagation of partisan issue

positions. Journalists can attain these slanted representations by way of advancing the

political perspectives that they align with and omitting or dismissing positions that belong to

the opposite political side.

Covert and Wasburn (2007) also remark that investigating language use is another

widely used means of detecting bias, because, as communication theorists have argued, bias

in news reporting is unavoidable due to the inherently evaluative character of language (Geis,

1987).

Bednarek (2006) looked at “the expression of opinion through language” in her

investigation of evaluation in media discourse (Bednarek, 2006, p. 3). Bednarek investigated

how tabloid and broadsheet journalists evaluate the world along the clines of, for instance,

what is good/bad, important/unimportant, expected/unexpected, as well as the reliability of

propositions and other parameters. Bednarek also reviews the Appraisal framework, which

this thesis builds on, and identifies issues within it. (Bednarek, 2006, p. 27-35). For instance,

she points out that categorising words and propositions within the framework system is

sometimes problematic. On the other hand, she also states that the Appraisal framework is

“an ongoing research project” and the result of an over 20-year-long research (Bednarek,

2006, p. 34).

Given the progressive nature of the Appraisal framework, the system allows for

extensions and amendments when field-specific texts are under investigation. For example,

Hommerberg and Don (2015) used and amended the Appraisal framework to analyse

winespeak (Hommerberg & Don, 2015). Furthermore, Economou (2009) adapted the

8

Appraisal framework from the verbal to the visual mode and analysed evaluation in news

photos (Economou, 2009).

3.2. The Appraisal Framework: Evaluation in Verbal Language

In this section, I lay out an initial overview of the Appraisal framework as developed by

Martin and White (Martin & White, 2005). The data that I applied the Appraisal framework

to are two text sets: written news articles on Hillary Clinton’s emailgate scandal published

by Fox News and New York Magazine. In order to investigate evaluative language in these

text sets, some adjustments to the Appraisal framework were necessary. Therefore, I describe

the full Appraisal framework specific to my text sets in chapter 5. Here, I briefly describe the

framework as established by Martin and White and exemplify the Appraisal domains with

instances from the Fox News and New York Magazine text sets.

3.2.1. The Appraisal Framework in Linguistics

The Appraisal framework was developed by Martin and White with the aim of identifying

linguistic resources in texts that authors rely on both to formulate stances and to position their

audiences “to supply their own assessments” (Martin & White, 2005, p. 2). As the definition

indicates, the Appraisal framework looks at language from an interpersonal point of view,

i.e. the way people interact and attempt to share feelings and thoughts with each other.

Interpersonal meaning comprises one of the three modes of meaning within Systemic

Functional Linguistics, a paradigm of Michael Halliday and an approach to language from a

social semiotics perspective (Martin & White, 2005, p. 8). The Appraisal framework

comprises three domains that work together in the creation of evaluation: Attitude,

Engagement, and Graduation. Figure 11 shows the modes of SFL, the Appraisal framework,

and the three framework domains along with their categories.

1 The layout of the Appraisal framework as proposed by Martin and White (2005) is not reproducible. Therefore,

I altered the visual layout of the system and use this color-coded version throughout this thesis paper.

9

Before introducing each domain, it is important to note that evaluative meaning

making can be explicit and implicit. Positive and negative evaluations, i.e. stances, are

sometimes explicitly realized by a single lexical item that falls under Attitude, Engagement,

or Graduation. Often, however, meanings are not isolated in such clear-cut ways. Instead, the

Appraisal domains and their categories co-occur and blend to facilitate more subtle, i.e. non-

explicit meaning making. These types of meanings are constructed in a way that they, when

dissected into separate lexical items, lose their evaluative values. As a result, instead of

limiting my research to only one domain within the Appraisal framework, I analyzed

occurrences across all of the three domains in my data.

ATTITUDE

AFFECT | JUDGEMENT | APPRECIATION

ENGAGEMENT

MONOGLOSSIA | HETEROGLOSSIA

GRADUATION

FORCE | FOCUS

A

E

G

Textual mode

Ideational mode

Interpersonal mode

Systemic

Functional

Linguistics

(SFL)

APPRAISAL

FRAMEWORK

Figure 1. The Appraisal Framework in Systemic Functional Linguistics, Its Three Domains and Their Categories

10

According to Martin and White (2005), evaluative linguistic resources can be explicit,

implicit, or provoked. In explicit instances, a single lexical unit carries the meaning. Implicit

statements look factual on the surface, apparently stripped of any evaluation, but they have

the potential to evoke evaluation in the reader depending on whether the reader shares the

emotional, cultural, and/or aesthetic values presented by the writer. Attitudinal positioning

can also be provoked. Lying between explicit and implicit evaluations, provocations contain

detectable, vaguely evaluative language, where a single lexical unit cannot be pinpointed as

the carrier of stance. As a main focus of my research is to show how explicit evaluations co-

occur and interact to express subtle authorial stances, this thesis maintains the difference

between explicit and non-explicit categories. However, due to the sometimes fuzzy

boundaries between provoked and implicit evaluations, I do not make further distinctions

within non-explicit meaning making. Instead, I discuss both implicit and provoked categories

under implicit evaluative meaning making.

3.2.2. The Appraisal Framework: Attitude Overview

Attitude, the first domain within the Appraisal framework, is the sum of linguistic resources

used for the signalling of emotional responses (Affect), the evaluation of people’s behaviour

(Judgement), and the assessment of things, objects, natural phenomena, and performances

(Appreciation).

The category Affect attends to registering positive and negative feelings. Table 2

offers exemplary instances of Attitude → Affect taken from my data. In the Fox News

utterance, Hillary Clinton is quoted by the journalist as she shares her feelings about being

called a “liar”2 and “dishonest” (Malloy, Associates, & Relations, 2016, p. 9). Her use of

good together with the negative clearly indicates her emotional response to a certain event or

occurrence. In the New York Magazine proposition, the journalist assigns an emotional

response to Clinton, “a strong feeling of sadness and regret” (Remorse, n.d.).

2 Examples taken from Fox News and New York Magazine emailgate news articles are italicised throughout

this thesis paper. This is to avoid interference with double quotes, which have evaluative potential. Section

5.2.3. details how double quotes can carry evaluation.

11

Attitude → Affect (emotional responses)

Fox News example New York Magazine example

“Well it certainly doesn’t make me feel good,” Clinton said.

Clinton's remorse was mostly directed at the hell the email hath wrought instead of the fact it existed.

Table 2. Examples of Attitude → Affect

Affect positions the author who selects these words to describe a feeling, but also the

reader: the audience may show solidarity and align with the statements, or reject them and

distance themselves from the emotional perspective of the statement.

The category Judgement, the evaluation of behaviour, is concerned with a person’s

conduct in terms of social esteem, morality, and legality. Table 3 offers exemplary instances

of Attitude → Judgement taken from my data. In the Fox News assertion, improperly points

to the appropriateness of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server to accommodate

classified communication, with legal issues being at stake due to the Justice Department’s

possible involvement in the issue. The journalist proposes a possibility for unethical conduct

by using the adjective in its negative form. The writer of the New York Magazine sentence

states that Clinton has been described as “liar” and “dishonest,” two adjectives of negative

judgement, showing that Clinton’s truthfulness has been called into question.

Attitude → Judgement (evaluating people’s behaviour)


…key inspectors general asked the Justice Department to open an investigation into whether classified material was improperly shared on the former secretary of state's account.

…the top two words that come to voters’ minds when they hear the words “Hillary Clinton” are “liar” and “dishonest.”

Table 3. Examples of Attitude → Judgement

The category Appreciation deals with the valuation of things and objects surrounding

people, natural phenomena, and performances. Table 4 offers exemplary instances of

Attitude → Appreciation taken from my data. Appreciation occurs explicitly three times in

the Fox News sentence. These instances describe the emails contained on Hillary Clinton’s

private server and their release. The speaker of the utterance, directly quoted by the journalist,

assigns a level of appropriateness to the Clinton emails (while assuming that a percentage of

12

them may be deemed inappropriate), and describes their release as timely and transparent.

These adjectives evaluate the level of suitability (appropriate) of the emails, as well as the

level of punctuality (timely) and the level of veracity/truthfulness (transparent) of the release

process. The second sentence, written by a New York Magazine journalist, assesses the

worthiness of recent email releases, speculating that some upcoming releases will also

contain boring bureaucratic data.

Attitude → Appreciation

(assessing things, objects, natural phenomena, performances)


“As [Clinton] has said, it is her hope that State and the other agencies involved in the review process will sort out as quickly as possible which emails are appropriate to release to the public, and that the release will be as timely and transparent as possible,” Merrill said Tuesday.

Based on the last few releases, [the releases] will mostly entail bureaucratic boringness…

Table 4. Examples of Attitude → Appreciation

3.2.3. The Appraisal Framework: Engagement Overview

Engagement, the second domain of the Appraisal framework, defines attitudinal positioning

along the dimension of dialogism, opening up two subcategories: Monoglossia and

Heteroglossia. An utterance is monoglossic when there is only one overt voice behind the

assertion: the author. If a proposition references other voices apart from that of the author’s

or opens up alternative positions to the statement, the utterance is heteroglossic.

By invoking other voices or positions, the writer of an utterance reduces the

absoluteness of the statement, relocates some of the responsibility taken for the statement to

an external voice, or expresses that the utterance is not taken for granted but is still up for

discussion. The writer also takes stand with respect to what has been said by others: the author

stands with or against the statement, can remain undecided, or expresses neutrality. A

common way to recognise alternative voices or positions is to quote what another person

stated previously, to use negation, or to open up alternative interpretations by marking the

statement as hypothetical.

From this perspective, heteroglossic utterances can be contractive or expansive.

Contraction happens when alternative voices are invoked to then challenge, shut down, or

13

refute them, thus closing down the space of dialogism. Alternatively, a voice is singled out

as highly warrantable, shutting out any other, possible voices. Expansion, on the other hand,

brings in external voices and accepts their existence, and thus opens up the space of

dialogism.

Table 5 offers exemplary instances of Engagement → Monoglossia taken from my

data. In all of the three sentences, the writers do not invoke any additional voices that the

statement or a part of the statement could be allocated to. The authors, thus, take full

responsibility for their statements and assign a sense of absoluteness to them. Potentially

evaluative language (growing questions, unusual usage, notion inspiring bad headlines) is

formulated by the journalists and remains to be associated with them. As for absoluteness,

the sentences introduce ideas that are shown to be not up for discussion. Instead, they seem

taken-for-granted assertions.

Engagement → Monoglossia (single-voiced utterances)


The revelation adds to the growing questions related to the Democratic presidential front-runner's unusual usage of a private email account and server while in government.

The notion that Clinton had willfully jeopardized national security for the sake of convenience inspired months of bad headlines for the Democratic front-runner. The interview took place a day before the 20th anniversary of Hillary Clinton's U.N. speech in Beijing, where she famously said, "It is time for us to say here in Beijing, and the world to hear, that it is no longer acceptable to discuss women's rights as separate from human rights.

Table 5. Examples of Engagement → Monoglossia

A further consideration arises when apparently externally sourced, heteroglossic

utterances are overridden by the author, who introduces some attitudinal meaning to express

their own alignment/disalignment with the externally sourced proposition. In the last

sentence in Table 5, the journalist expresses evaluation of Clinton’s speech by assessing it as

famous. Thus, the utterance is considered monoglossic despite Clinton’s external voice

invoked in it, which would otherwise render the assertion heteroglossic.

Heteroglossic utterances have external voices and/or positions that are assigned to

somebody other than the writer. Table 6 offers exemplary instances of Engagement →

14

Heteroglossia taken from my data. Said, comment on, and the quote marks explicitly add

other speakers to the discussion. The writers acknowledge the assertions of the external voice.

These instances expand dialogism.

Another type of Heteroglossia is expressed with negation. It’s not clear, no emails,

and would not comment carry with themselves the positive counterparts, i.e. open up new

dialogic alternatives (e.g. it’s clear, some emails), then reject them. These instances contract

dialogism. Any and but represent a different type of disalignment: they express counter-

expectations, signalling that a different proposition was expected in place of the current one.

These instances also contract dialogism.

If and whether are used to open up the dialogic space: the writer acknowledges the

proposition and announces it as but one of the possible positions in the issue, expanding

dialogism. Lastly, presumably renders the utterance hypothetical and helps the writer

explicitly present the proposition as grounded in its own subjectivity, and invokes dialogic

alternatives, expanding dialogism again.

Engagement → Heteroglossia (utterances sourced out to other voices/positions)


It's not clear if the device will yield any information — Clinton's attorney said in March that no emails from the main personal address she used while secretary of state still "reside on the server or on back-up systems associated with the server."

A Justice Department spokesman would not comment on whether the feds are looking for another device, but presumably the hunt for Clinton's yoga schedules continues.

Table 6. Examples of Engagement → Heteroglossia

In sum, journalists can use monoglossic and heteroglossic sentences when

propagating news contents. Monoglossic utterances represent the voice of the journalist only.

Heteroglossic utterances introduce other voices to the statements by means of quotation

marks, negation, words that render the statement hypothetical, etc.

3.2.4. The Appraisal Framework: Graduation Overview

The third domain of the Appraisal framework, Graduation, attends to the scalability of both

Attitude and Engagement values. Attitudinal meanings as well as Engagement values can be

mitigated or aggravated in order to convey lesser or greater degrees of positive or negative

15

stances. Graduation involves the down-scaling and up-scaling of e.g. amount (a few, many),

mass (small, heavy), and proximity (recently, in times gone by).

Martin and White (2005) also propose that Graduation overarches both Attitude and

Engagement (Martin & White, 2005, p. 136) by decreasing or increasing the intensity of

attitudinal meanings (a bit sad, somewhat staggering, utterly unacceptable, a most memorable

performance) and scaling Engagement values (she hesitantly suggested, she stated, she firmly

insisted). Further, a single lexical item can carry lower or higher grades of attitudinal

meanings (contented – happy – ecstatic) and Engagement values (suspect – believe – be

convinced).

Martin and White (2005) discuss Graduation in terms of its two categories Force and

Focus. Table 7 offers exemplary instances of Graduation → Force taken from my data. In

the Fox News utterance, Graduation attends to the intensity of the statement. The writer up-

scales Clinton’s denial as he or she intensifies the vigour of the denial via the word

repeatedly. In the New York Magazine statement, the writer discusses a number of emails in

question and chooses not to provide the precise amount of it. Instead, the journalist down-

scales the gravity of the proposition by providing imprecise reckonings of underestimation.

Other common examples that create a similar effect in my data include a handful of emails,

more than 3,600 pages of documents, etc.

Graduation → Force


Clinton has repeatedly denied sending or receiving any then-classified information on her personal account.

The emails in question, fewer than ten of them, were sent between Clinton — both before and shortly after she became secretary of State — and now-retired general David Petraeus, who was at that point in charge of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Table 7. Examples of Graduation → Force

As for Graduation → Focus, the second Graduation category as proposed by Martin

and White (2005), the data under my investigation contained no linguistic resources that fall

under Focus. Martin and White (2005) discuss here resources that sharpen or soften meanings

that are otherwise not scalable. These involve hedges and vague language, which are

unexpected in written journalistic discourse. The following mock examples, not part of my

16

data, feature Focus: Clinton’s decision to use a private server borders on the unreasonable

and Clinton used kind of/sort of a homebrew server, where borders on, kind of, and sort of

exemplify Focus.

3.3. Analytical Approach

In order to identify evaluative language in Fox News and New York Magazine news articles,

I relied on the inductive analytical approach. “In inductive reasoning, we begin with specific

observations and measures, begin to detect patterns and regularities, formulate some tentative

hypotheses that we can explore, and finally end up developing some general conclusions or

theories” (Trochim, 2006). Induction takes data as its starting point and the data’s

organization into an analytical model as its goal. Therefore, I started with an initial

investigation of my data for recurring linguistic patterns that construe potentially evaluative

meanings. Second, I consulted Martin and White’s Appraisal framework (2005) to interpret

the linguistic patterns that I had found to be notable with respect to evaluation. Next, I

returned to the data for a deeper scrutiny and then to the Appraisal framework again to

interpret the found linguistic patterns. This two-step analytical work developed into cycles

of data analysis and framework consultation until the news articles under investigation were

fully exposed for evaluative language and the linguistic evidence of evaluation

accommodated to the Appraisal framework. Figure 2 shows the analytical approach used in

my research.

17

A similar approach was used by Economou (2009), whose research, the extension of

the Appraisal framework to visual language, also “involved applying general appraisal

options to a corpus of news photos and proceeding to further delicacy in a repeated cycle of

analysis and system-building” (Economou, 2009, [Abstract]).

4. Data

In this chapter, I introduce the two text sets that comprise my data: written news articles on

Hillary Clinton’s emailgate scandal published by Fox News and New York Magazine. First,

I offer an overview of the two media outlets Fox News and New York Magazine in 4.1.,

including their websites where the data were pulled from and the situational characteristics

of their news articles. In 4.2., I describe the data collection process. In 4.3., I give an overview

of the data.

4.1. Fox News and New York Magazine: Overview

Foxnews.com is an online news website that belongs to Fox News Channel, one of most

widely available cable news channels in the United States. While Fox News self-declares to

be “Fair & Balanced” (Fox News, 2016), it is commonly held to be the only media outlet on

a national level that propagates conservative bias (Goldberg, 2007). The other two highest-

1.

DATA

ANALYSIS

2.

FRAMEWORK

CONSULTATION

Figure 2. Analytical Approach: Repeated Cycles of Data Analysis and Framework Consultation

18

rated cable news channels are CNN and MSNBC, which are viewed as belonging more to

the liberal media (n.a., 2014). Fox News is seen as more aligning with values that closely

represent Republican voices. In this respect, Fox News is in a unique position on a national

scale: not only is it believed to hold Republican views, it is also the sole major, national

media outlet to do so. This requires Fox News to assume a number of roles and represent a

group of ideological positions that are perhaps more evenly distributed among Democratic

media outlets: it needs to express its distance from Democratic values, further a Republican

political standpoint, but remain informative and preferably unbiased in news reporting at the

same time. Media outlets held to advance Democratic values, on the other hand, have more

options in positioning themselves along the clines of factual news propagation and

opinionated commentary publishing, because there are more liberal media outlets available

to assume these roles.

As compared to Fox News, there is less data available on New York Magazine.

Nymag.com self-declares to “cover the new, the undiscovered, the next in politics, culture,

food, fashion, and behavior nationally, through a New York lens” (n.a., 2016). Nymag.com

is the online version of the bi-weekly published print magazine. In 2013, the online media

outlets that belong under the magazine were reported to have increased their number of online

visitors considerably (Pompeo, 2013). While the magazine is usually not measured for bias

in researches, media critic Eric Alterman, the author of What Liberal Media?, described the

outlet as being “in the heart of liberal country” (Alterman, 2003, para. 11).

4.1.1. foxnews.com and nymag.com: Overview

Emailgate news articles were collected on the websites www.foxnews.com and

www.nymag.com. Alexa Internet, a major data analytics company situated in the United

States, offers web traffic details and insights into the visitor metrics of websites (Alexa.com,

2016a, 2016b). Table 8 shows the web traffic data of foxnews.com and nymag.com, as

downloaded in March 2016.

19

ALEXA INTERNET METRICS FOR

WWW.FOXNEWS.COM AND WWW.NYMAG.COM

Alexa Internet Metric foxnews.com nymag.com

Global rank (volume of visitors and page views combined)

209 1687

Rank in the United States 44 482

Percent of visitors in the United States

85.9% 77.4%

Top search word to send visitors to this website

fox news fox news

Physical base New York, NY, US New York, NY, US

Visitorship: Gender

male

female

male

female

Visitorship: Education

no college

some college

grad. school

college

no college

some college

grad. school

college

Table 8. Alexa Internet Metrics for foxnews.com and nymag.com

The data show that foxnews.com has a considerably bigger reader base than

nymag.com, as it is the 44th most visited website in the United States. Its audience is more

U.S.-based than that of nymag.com, and, interestingly, people frequently find their way to

both websites by searching for the keywords fox + news. The diagrams provided by Alexa

Internet show that the readership of foxnews.com is demographically more balanced along

gender and education levels than that of nymag.com. This could reflect the more specific role

of nymag.com and its catering for a narrower audience as compared to foxnews.com, which

captures a wider audience.

4.1.2. Situational Characteristics of Fox News and New York Magazine News Articles

In explaining the context of Fox News and New York Magazine articles, another necessary

step is to introduce their written news articles on Hillary Clinton’s emailgate scandal along

the contextual properties, the production circumstances, and the purpose these articles serve

- in other words, their situational characteristics. Table 9 summarises the situational

characteristics of the Fox News and the New York Magazine text sets. These properties were

20

identified following Biber and Conrad’s (2009) framework for analyzing situational

characteristics of registers and genres (Biber & Conrad, 2009, p. 40).

SITUATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS OF FOX NEWS/

NEW YORK MAGAZINE ARTICLES

Situational characteristics Fox News articles New York Magazine articles

Participants

Addressor One or more journalists, often

unidentified One or more journalists

Addressee

A wide range of readers possibly

scattered across different places

and times;

85.9% of all visitors come from

the United States.

A wide range of readers possibly

scattered across different places

and times;

77.4% of all visitors come from

the United States.

Relations among participants

Interactiveness Limited

Social roles Status/power differences possible

Personal relationship

Strangers

Shared knowledge

Low degree

Channel Mode Writing

Medium Published online

Production circumstances

News articles are revised and edited before publication, sometimes

corrected and updated after the first publication.

Setting Shared time

Time is usually shared between the writer and the reader as news

articles are expected to be read on the day of publication or soon

afterwards; otherwise, date markers and timestamps indicate the

release of the article.

Shared place Online space shared; no physical place shared

Communicative purposes

General Propagating news; explaining news information

Specific Reporting on the developments of Hillary Clinton’s email controversy

Factuality The factual representation of information is assumed.

Topic General Politics

Specific Hillary Clinton, data security, privacy issues, email controversy

Table 9. Situational Characteristics of Fox News and New York Magazine Articles

While researching the situational characteristics of Fox News and New York

Magazine articles, an important difference arose between the two media outlets: the writers

on Fox News often remain unnamed. This decreases the interactiveness between journalists

and their audiences as the readers cannot address the writer of the given news article. From

an evaluative standpoint, the lack of a named author is crucial because it leads the readers to

either align or not with the collective philosophy represented by the media outlet. When the

author is named, on the other hand, the audience has a choice to align or not with the

21

journalist’s position, a stand that might not necessarily reflect the mentality of the whole

media outlet.

As for interactiveness, the readership has the ability to react to the published articles

by way of posting comments under the articles and emailing journalists (except for when the

journalists remain unnamed, which often occurs in Fox News articles). Nevertheless, the

written mode does not allow for direct interaction between the participants, resulting in

limited interactiveness between writers and readers.

Also of note is the low degree of shared knowledge between writers and readers.

While some shared contextual knowledge is assumed to exist between the participants, the

purpose of news propagation indicates more knowledge on the journalist’s part, which is then

passed onto the reader. As a result, the journalist is generally assumed to have information

that has been unknown to the general readership, while the audience is assumed to have at

least some knowledge and interest in the given topic.

4.2. Data Collection

In this section, I present the method that I used to select data, written news articles on Hillary

Clinton’s emailgate scandal published by Fox News and New York Magazine, on

foxnews.com and nymag.com.

4.2.1. Timeframe

Primary data collection began by determining a timeframe within which news articles

discussing Hillary Clinton would be collected on the two media outlets.

The timeframe of my choice runs from 12 April 2015 to 1 February 2016. The start

date marks Clinton’s public and official announcement of running for president in 2016 on

her YouTube channel (Clinton, 2015). 1 February 2016 is the date of the first Democratic

caucus, held in Iowa (Putnam, 2015). Caucuses (and primaries) are part of the presidential

nomination process, which lead the Democratic and the Republican political parties to the

nomination of their presidential candidate based on a voting system. Although caucuses and

primaries last until June 2016, The Washington Post predicted that “the earlier contests will

winnow the field of candidates enough that a candidate is very likely to claim enough

delegates to clinch the nomination prior to the final contest. […] The presidential nomination

22

process has tended to produce essentially two leading candidates, a frontrunner and an

alternative to the frontrunner. These candidates will emerge in the invisible primary or

certainly after the first few contests” (Putnam, 2015, para. 44-45).

As of the middle of May 2016, around the time that this thesis is finalised, Donald

Trump has emerged as the most likely Republican presidential nominee, while no winner has

emerged from the Democratic party. As of 18 May 2016, Clinton has won 1,767 delegate

votes as opposed to her Democratic opponent Bernie Sanders’ 1,488 delegate votes. In order

for a candidate to be nominated by the Democratic Party, one must win 2,383 delegate votes

(Andrews, Bennett, & Parlapiano, 2016). Bernie Sanders announced that he would stay in

the race for the nomination until the Democratic Convention in July 2016, where party

delegates decide whether to nominate Clinton or Sanders for President of the United States

(Alcindor, 2016). Thus, whether Hillary Clinton becomes the Democratic presidential

nominee remains undecided until July 2016.

4.2.2. Defining Written News Articles

Data collection proceeded by distinguishing news articles from other types of posts published

online on Fox News and New York Magazine. Written news articles are understood in this

thesis as written texts whose main purpose is to propagate the news. Additionally, these texts

need to be the first textual references in the news archives of Fox News and New York

Magazine to discuss a given emailgate news event. Furthermore, they must be published on

a separate subpage on either website, i.e. one news article equals one subpage on

foxnews.com or nymag.com. As a final criterion, it is important for any two news articles

discussing the same news event to have been published relatively close to each other in time

on the two media outlets.

These delimiting criteria helped identify and exclude from the data a) video news

published under news headlines on Fox News, and b) commentary articles published under

news headlines on either Fox News or New York Magazine.

Category a) video news were in many cases the first mentions of a given news event

on Fox News. This is owing to the fact that Fox News is primarily an American television

channel, and, consequently, multimodal news reporting is one of its inherent features. In

cases where the news were first propagated exclusively in video format, I continued

23

searching for the first written article that discusses the given news event. Eventually, these

articles were selected to be part of my data even if some audiovisual material was embedded

in them.

Category b) commentaries were distinguished from news articles proper under the

following criteria. Commentaries were assumed to be dated later than when the given news

information broke and to be not the first in a row of articles to discuss the news event. Both

media outlets were expected to first propagate a news event and then provide more subjective

commentary on them. This assumption is not to exclude the possibility that subjective

commentary may be included in the selected news articles themselves.

Furthermore, to ensure that the selected news articles indeed have the property of

news propagation, each selected article was identified either as being the source that broke

the news or as directly referencing a news source that broke the given news event.

These predetermined criteria served their delimiting purpose effectively in most

cases. 4.2.3. exemplifies this. However, there were instances where further research was

necessary to identify a text string as a news article without a doubt. 4.2.4. details this.

4.2.3. Selecting News Articles Using Predefined Criteria

The following is an example of the selection procedure where the predefined criteria

successfully filtered non-relevant articles.

On 4 September 2015, Clinton was interviewed by MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell,

where Clinton’s email controversy arose as one of the main topics under discussion

(MSNBC, 2015). Both Fox News and New York Magazine reported on the event. Appendix

1 shows New York Magazine’s news archive sorted after the date of publication and filtered

for news about Hillary Clinton (Hillary Clinton. Most recent articles, 2016).

To find the news article reporting on the interview, first every post published before

4 September, in this case The Relatable Hillary, was determined as not carrying the potential

to propagate this news event. Next, articles not pertaining to the topic in question, in this case

The Sanders Surge whose main topic of discussion is not Clinton or her email scandal, were

disqualified from being the news article of my interest.

24

The initial exclusions reduced the list of articles to the ones that indeed attend to the

Mitchell-Clinton interview. There was one article published on the day of the interview

(Clinton on Emails), but that does not automatically grant it the news propagation properties

as the news may be distributed later than the day of the event. On 8 and 17 September, two

more articles related to the email scandal were published, To Clarify, and Hillary Clinton is

Hurt, respectively. The question remains as to which of the three articles is the one first

distributing the news on Clinton’s interview with Andrea Mitchell.

The predetermined criteria verified that Clinton on Emails is the article propagating

the interview: the text includes a direct link to MSNBC’s source video, whereas To Clarify,

posted four days later, references Clinton on Emails. Furthermore, while Hillary Clinton is

Hurt, posted on 17 September, seems to discuss the email scandal on the face of it, it in fact

details a televised Clinton interview with Jimmy Kimmel. As a result, Clinton on Emails was

selected and added to the list of news articles as primary data.

4.2.4. Selecting News Articles Using Extended Criteria

In some cases, following the predefined criteria to select content that carries the news did not

suffice. As a result, details beyond what had been preset by the criteria had to be scrutinized.

This applies in particular to Fox News content for two major reasons. First, Fox News articles

are assigned timestamps that reveal the day of publication but not the exact hour, as opposed

to content on New York Magazine. This prevents delicate filtering for the first textual

reference that holds relevant content. Second, posts are not tagged for topic, resulting in all

articles containing the search words Hillary + Clinton to show up in the search results, a

quantity that amounts to thousands of posts in the selected timeframe. Again, the tagging

feature is implemented in the New York Magazine archive, rendering search for Clinton-

related content much faster and efficient than in the rather cumbersome Fox News archive

(Results found for Hillary Clinton, 2016).

For these reasons, it became standard procedure that I would first identify news

content on New York Magazine, and then match it to a corresponding news article published

on Fox News. If no match was found, the New York Magazine news article was discarded,

as well. If a match was found, extended criteria were used to identify one Fox News article

as the propagator of the news event in the written mode.

25

One instance where the predefined criteria proved insufficient to select news content

was when on 22 May 2015 the State Department released Clinton emails about the 2012

Benghazi terror attacks. Both Fox News and New York Magazine reported on the event. New

York Magazine reported on it on 22 May under the headline State Department Releases

Hillary’s Benghazi Emails in Textbook Case of ‘Holiday News Dump.’ To find the Fox News

counterpart, I started by listing articles containing the search words Hillary + Clinton

published on 22 May and later. Appendix 2 shows Fox News’s news archive sorted after the

date of publication and filtered for news about Hillary Clinton (Results found for Hillary

Clinton, 2016).

Headlines not containing Hillary or Clinton were ruled out first, followed by the

exclusion of those articles whose image thumbnails featured a play button, which indicates

exclusively audiovisual content. It is important to mention that posts without a play button

in their image thumbnails may include video content, as well. However, the lack of the icon

indicates content primarily in the written mode on Fox News, making the selection of written

articles easier.

Having discarded 8 of the 10 articles shown in Appendix 2 following this method

nominated Another day of damaging disclosures, and Internal emails show Clinton got

detailed intel, as the potential bearers of the news. Because the news articles are not sorted

alphabetically, one might assume that the exact time of publication is reflected in the order

of the posts, with posts toward the bottom indicating earlier publication times. This

assumption, together with a Fox News First tag on Another day of damaging disclosures

point to this article as the first report on the release of the Benghazi emails.

In the end, Another day of damaging disclosures turned out to be a newsletter-like

aggregation of headlines outlining interesting developments in politics in the recent past and

the foreseeable future. While the article refers to the release of the Benghazi emails, it does

so in the future tense, saying, “later today we will get the first wave of her emails from a

secret server” (Stirewalt, 2015). As a result, Internal emails show Clinton got detailed intel

was selected as the news article propagating the news and corresponding to the one published

by New York Magazine.

26

4.3. Data Overview

In this section, I give an overview of the data and provide calculations of word count.

43 news articles on New York Magazine were selected with a matching 43 news

articles on Fox News that, when paired up from the opposite news website, propagate

Clinton-related news in the period 12 April 2015 to 1 February 2016. Out of the 43 pairs, 20

pertain primarily to the Clinton campaign, including reports about her White House bid,

campaign details, public speeches, debates, and poll results. 14 pairs attend to Clinton’s email

controversy. 9 pairs are concerned with other Clinton-related matters that have been

examined in the campaign context, but nevertheless mainly attend to topics such as Clinton’s

wealth, the Clinton Foundation, a book called Time Bomb that looks to reveal exclusive

information on the Foundation, and a congressional hearing with Clinton testifying in relation

to the 2012 Benghazi attacks.

Table 10 shows the 2x14 news articles that comprise my primary data. Where the

publication dates of the given pair differed, the first date shows that of Fox News, while the

second one shows that of New York Magazine.

FOX NEWS AND NEW YORK MAGAZINE ARTICLES ON EMAILGATE

# Date Fox News article headlines New York Magazine headlines

01 22 May Internal emails show Clinton got detailed intel on 'planned' Benghazi hit

State Department Releases Hillary’s Benghazi Emails in Textbook Case of ‘Holiday News Dump’

02 01 July Blumenthal gave diplomatic advice to Hillary Clinton as early as 2009, emails show

15 Fun Tidbits From Hillary Clinton’s Emails

03 24 July Clinton facing new calls to turn over server after IGs request probe

Justice Department Asked to Investigate Hillary’s Emails

04 12 August FBI investigating security of Hillary Clinton's private email server

Clinton Gives In, Turns Over Email Server to Justice Department

05 13 August State Dept. accused of stiff-arming intel watchdog over Hillary emails

If Clinton Has a Backup of Her Emails, the FBI Would Like to See It

06 03 September Former Clinton aide who helped set up server to plead Fifth Amendment to avoid subpoena

Aide Who Set Up Clinton’s Email Server Will Plead the Fifth

07 04 September Clinton ‘sorry’ for email confusion, stops short of apology for actions

Clinton on Emails: ‘I Am Sorry That This Has Been Confusing to People’

08 23 September FBI reportedly recovers deleted emails from Clinton server

The FBI Managed to Recover Hillary Clinton’s Personal Emails

09 26 September/

25 September

State Dept. receives Clinton email chain apparently not included in pages turned over

Defense Department Finds More Clinton Emails

27

10 07 October FBI probe of Hillary Clinton emails expands to second tech company

Hillary Is Done Playing Defense, But Emailgate Won’t Go Away

11 06 November Intelligence officials reportedly walk back Clinton 'top secret' email claims

Report: Clinton Never Sent Classified Information From Her Private Email Account

12 01 January/

08 January State Department releases over 3,000 Clinton emails on New Year's Eve

Hillary Clinton Reacts to Benghazi in Newest Batch of Emails

13 19 January/

20 January

Inspector General: Clinton emails had intel from most secretive, classified programs

New Report Says Some Emails Sent on Clinton’s Server Were Super Top Secret

14 29 January Official: Some Clinton emails 'too damaging' to release

The State Department Confirms Clinton’s Email Server Hosted ‘Top Secret’ Information

Table 10. The Dates of Publication and Titles of the 2x14 Emailgate News Articles

The overview reveals two peculiarities that require closer inspection: one concerning

the contents of article pair #02, and one pertaining to the production circumstances of article

pair #12.

While most headline pairs show a clear connection regarding their contents, the

headlines of article pair #02 show considerable discrepancy regarding the story that they

cover, the Fox News headline signalling news propagation, while the New York Magazine

one apparently displaying commentary. I address the issue in section 4.3.1.

Further, Table 10 shows that most article pairs were published on the same day by

the two media outlets, satisfying the definition of news articles and other criteria as presented

in section 4.2. In two cases, one media outlet published the news the day after the other

(articles #09 and #13). Of more interest is article #12, which shows a week-long gap in

publication date. The news discussing the State Department’s end-of-the-year release of

Clinton emails sees a discrepancy of 7 days between its release date on Fox News and New

York Magazine. While the delayed propagation of the news is not the main focus of my thesis

paper, the marked time difference emerged as a potential contributor to the biased

representation of emailgate, and, as such, it necessitates further investigation. I address this

in section 4.3.2.

4.3.1. Further Commentary on Data: Article #02

The content mismatch in article pair #02 could result from wrongly selecting 15 Fun Tidbits

From Hillary Clinton’s Emails as the news article on New York Magazine discussing the

28

State Department’s release of a second batch of Clinton’s emails, and that an earlier article

that carried those news had been overlooked.

A re-check of the New York Magazine news archive confirmed, however, that the

article, posted at 4.53 a.m. on 1 July, was the first one on New York Magazine to discuss the

email release that was published online on 30 June (Virtual Reading Room Documents

Search Results, 2015). In addition, the article provides a direct link to the State Department’s

database: by referencing the news source, the article meets the data selection criteria detailed

in section 4.2.

The data analysis later revealed that the language in the article indeed takes up

evaluative resources in a degree different to those represented in the rest of the articles.

Despite this, I decided to keep the article pair in my data for two reasons. First, the article

pair satisfies the preset criteria. Second, it reports on a significant event in the development

of Clinton’s email controversy, namely the State Department’s release of the first extensive,

large-scale batch of emails containing over 1,900 correspondences. (The release prior to that

was specific to the Benghazi attacks and included 296 pages of email.) (Virtual Reading

Room Documents Search Results, 2015).

To conclude, I considered the article 15 Fun Tidbits From Hillary Clinton’s Emails a

news article, albeit with commentary voice infused in it more than in the rest of the articles.

4.3.2. Further Commentary on Data: Article #12

On the face of it, the publishing irregularity that surrounds article #12 seems to be the result

of either one of two scenarios. First, a failure to identify a New York Magazine article is

possible - one that corresponds to the State Department’s end-of-the-year release of Clinton

emails and was published around 1 January 2016. Alternatively, New York Magazine

possibly waited a week (to review the emails first) before construing a conclusion and

propagating the news accordingly.

A re-check of the news archive of Fox News and New York Magazine, however,

suggests a third possibility. According to The Washington Post, the State Department was

obliged under court order to release 82% of all Clinton emails by the end of 2015 (Helderman,

2015). However, the approaching holidays and being understaffed prevented the Department

29

from achieving the court-ordered goal and instead released 3,079 correspondences on 31

December 2015 (Virtual Reading Room Documents Search Results, 2015). As well, they

announced a second batch to be released the following week in order “to make up for the

shortfall” (Helderman, 2015, para. 5). The release of the remaining 1,262 emails eventually

took place at around 2 a.m. on 8 January 2016 (Virtual Reading Room Documents Search

Results, 2016).

New York Magazine did not report on the larger batch of emails released on 31

December 2015. Instead, article #12 Hillary Clinton Reacts to Benghazi in Newest Batch of

Emails was published 9 hours after the State Department released the rest of the document

collection on 8 January 2016. Claire Landsbaum of New York Magazine offered in article

#12 a reflection over these correspondences, suggesting that “they’re mostly boring

administrative emails” (Landsbaum, 2016, para. 2). The journalist further claimed that “the

newest batch of Hillary Clinton emails arrived a little late (they were supposed to be out

December 31), but the State Department worked into the night and finally released 3,000

pages of ‘fit n sparkly’ new content around 2 a.m.” (Landsbaum, 2016, para. 2). The quoted

text contains an external link that points to the State Department’s document collection of

the 1,262 emails published on 8 January 2016.

Fox News, on the other hand, used a different strategy to cover the irregular, two-step

release of the email batch. The unnamed journalist on 1 January 2016 published article #12

State Department releases over 3,000 Clinton emails on New Year's Eve, reporting on the

release of the 3,079 correspondences. Following the State Department’s release of the second

batch of emails on 8 January 2016, Fox News published two more articles detailing the

contents of the document collection of the 1,262 remaining emails. The release and the emails

were referenced in the first of these articles as “the exchange was one of more than 1,200

messages released overnight, under a court order dating back to last year” (Tomlinson, 2016).

In the second article, the release is referenced as “a recently released email” (FoxNews.com,

2016).

The unusual practices in covering the end-of-the-year release of Clinton emails points

to the potential where New York Magazine underreported the release process of the Clinton

emails and misinformed the public about data volume. Conversely, Fox News can be assessed

30

as overreporting emailgate, producing articles with disproportionately great frequency and

on incomplete batches of email releases.

The above detour was necessary in order for me to support my decision in selecting

a pair of news articles with a week-long time difference in their publication date.

Furthermore, the above examples show Hillary Clinton’s email controversy can be mitigated

or aggravated beyond the level of language in order to spread or cover up the scandal. Last,

it justifies once again and prompts a linguistic investigation into emailgate articles to see

whether partisan bias is reflected in how the journalists report on the controversy.

4.3.3. Data Measurements

I performed calculations on the 2x14 emailgate articles to see to what extent the two media

outlets deal with the email controversy. Word count measurements revealed that the 28

articles contain 16,608 words in total, 65.2% of which was produced by Fox News.

It is important to note here that one necessary adjustment to the scope of my

investigation was to sort the 2x14 articles on the sentence level and differentiate between

those sentences that directly reference Hillary Clinton and those that do not. I eventually

narrowed my data to include only those sentences where Hillary Clinton is explicitly

mentioned. This step was crucial to reduce my data scope and to shift the focus of the research

to how the email controversy is described against the backdrop of Clinton’s political persona

and her run for presidency.

The 28 news articles published on Fox News and New York Magazine consist of 653

sentences. After selecting the ones that directly reference Clinton, 410 sentences remained.

These 410 sentences comprise my data.

The 410 sentences, the core of my data analysis, consist of 11,278 words, 61% of

which were published by Fox News. Table 11 below presents this information. A keyword

density analysis performed on the 410 sentences revealed that the most frequently mentioned

words in both text sets are Clinton, emails, and Clinton’s, with State Department, server, and

information present in the top ten keywords list of both groups of sentences. A marked

difference is that classified and secretary are the eighth and tenth most frequently used

keywords in the Fox News sentences, respectively, while neither of the two are in the top ten

31

list of New York Magazine keywords. The opposite applies to the keyword Hillary, which

ranks nine of the top ten keywords list of New York Magazine sentences but is not present

in the same list for Fox News.

WORD COUNT OF ARTICLES ON EMAILGATE

Words in Fox News articles Words in New York Magazine articles

Clinton Clinton Total Clinton Clinton Total

Σ 3943 6898 10841 1387 4390 5777

% 36.4% 63.6% 100% 24% 76% 100%

Table 11. Word Count of Articles on Emailgate

As far as direct references to Hillary Clinton are concerned, 57% of all Fox News

sentences reference Clinton directly; this number rises to 72% in the case of New York

Magazine sentences. The sentences that directly reference Hillary Clinton and are thus added

to my analysis amount to 239 and 171 for Fox News and New York Magazine, respectively.

In search of direct references to Hillary Clinton, three distinct categories were

identified as carriers of such references: name references, including Clinton or Hillary’s,

political positions, such as The 2016 Democratic frontrunner, secretary of state, or former

Secretary Clinton’s, and function words, such as she, her, herself, and in some direct quotes

I and you. In order for a sentence to be included in my data, it had to contain at least one

direct reference of these kinds. Table 12 is an overview of the top ten occurrences throughout

the 410 sentences.

MENTIONS OF HILLARY CLINTON IN ARTICLES ON EMAILGATE

Fox News mentions New York Magazine mentions

Top 10 references Occurrences Top 10 references Occurrences

Clinton 116 Clinton 71

her (possessive determiner) 96 Clinton’s 54

she (personal pronoun) 65 her (possessive determiner) 53

Clinton’s 54 she (personal pronoun) 48

I (personal pronoun) 13 secretary of State 14

Hillary Clinton 12 Hillary Clinton’s 12

Hillary Clinton’s 12 Hillary Clinton 11

secretary of state 12 I (personal pronoun) 11

32

her (personal pronoun) 6 her (personal pronoun) 7

herself 5 Hillary 5

Number of all mentions 452 Number of all mentions 309

Table 12. Mentions of Hillary Clinton in Emailgate Articles

In total, 452 direct references were identified in Fox News articles and 309 in New

York Magazine ones. Fox News used twice as many different expressions to reference

Clinton (56) than New York Magazine (28). This is owing to the fact that Fox News news

articles use a range of expressions that reference Clinton’s past and prospective affiliations

and positions. Examples include presidential candidate, top diplomat, First Lady, former

Secretary Clinton, the secretary’s, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, etc.

During the analysis, the three categories of references were expanded to include

expressions that do not fit in any of the three categories. Examples include the two

(referencing Hillary Clinton and her daughter), their end user (a reference to Hillary Clinton

to whom services were done by the tech company Datto), one of the “three amigos” (a

nickname for Clinton during the 1980’s according to Fox News), and “liar” (used by some

respondents to a Quinnipiac questionnaire that looked into what words come to people’s mind

when they hear the words Hillary Clinton). In addition, those sentences were also added to

my data where there is a lack of direct references to Clinton, but she is the speaker of the

given utterance, and thus her presence is certain.

To sum up, my primary data consist of 239 Fox News and and 171 New York

Magazine sentences that directly reference Clinton and were published as part of emailgate

news articles.

5. Design of the Analytical Framework

As emphasised in section 3.2. The Appraisal Framework: Evaluation in Verbal Language,

certain linguistic patterns found across the emailgate news articles grouped along organizing

principles different to the subcategories proposed by Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal

framework. For instance, feelings (Attitude → Affect) were found to be sourced to the writer,

to Clinton, or a third party. In some cases, they were sourced through more than one actor,

33

as in Top aide Huma Abedin didn't think Clinton would be excited…, where excitement is

assigned to Clinton through a third party. While Martin and White make a distinction between

authorial and non-authorial Affect, multiple sources are not examined. In addition,

distinguishing third party-sourced Affect from Clinton-sourced Affect is specifically

important with regard to the email controversy news, where Clinton plays a central role. As

for Engagement, certain linguistic elements such as scare quotes do not belong to one clear-

cut category but rather border on two or three categories. Scare quotes and other formatting

conventions are not discussed in Martin and White’s Appraisal framework. Thirdly,

registering Graduation yielded the emergence of subcategories that are prevalent throughout

my data but do not necessarily correspond to the Graduation system established by Martin

and White. As mentioned in 3.2.4. The Appraisal Framework: Graduation Overview,

Graduation → Focus had zero occurrences in my data. Further, Martin and White’s

Graduation → Force attends to imprecise reckonings (a handful of emails) among others,

whereas my data showed that overly precise reckonings (31,105 emails) also have evaluative

potential.

Thus, in order to accommodate standout linguistic phenomena across my data,

adjustments were made to the Appraisal framework. This was necessary in order to provide

a full account of evaluative language on Fox News and New York Magazine specific to

Clinton and her email controversy. Therefore, the expanded layout of the Appraisal

framework is one specific to my data and does not completely reflect Martin and White’s

system (Martin & White, 2005).

From sections 5.1. to 5.3., I move from domain to domain in the Appraisal framework

and open up all categories and subcategories to provide a full account of the framework. In

section 5.4., I show the complete map of the Appraisal framework modified for the text sets

written news articles on Hillary Clinton’s emailgate scandal published by Fox News and New

York Magazine. Further, I present lexical items that I deemed non-evaluative and thus did

not assign them to any of the Appraisal framework domains.

34

5.1. Design of the Appraisal Framework: Attitude

Attitudinal meanings needed adjustment in the Affect category. Judgement values and

assessments of Appreciation, on the other hand, were registered according their layout

proposed by Martin and White (Martin & White, 2005). Figure 3 shows Attitude (A) and its

categories.

5.1.1. Attitude → Affect

Affect, the signalling of emotional responses is subcategorised by White according to

whether the source of Affect is authorial or non-authorial (White, 2015). Authorial Affect

means that the writer presents his or her own emotional responses to a given utterance. In

Non-authorial Affect, the writer remains the voice behind the feeling, i.e. they take some

responsibility for the affect value presented in the text, but it is not the author’s emotions that

are described. Rather, they are associated with other individuals or groups of people.

With regard to my data, three additional subcategories were opened under Non-

authorial Affect: feelings sourced to Clinton, feelings sourced to a third party i.e. neither the

author nor Clinton, and multiple non-authorial sources, i.e. when the described feeling is

filtered through one actor and then at least another one. Figure 4 shows the fully expanded

subcategories under Affect with examples taken from my data.

AFFECT

JUDGEMENT

APPRECIATION

AUTHORIAL | NON-AUTHORIAL

SOCIAL ESTEEM | SOCIAL SANCTION

REACTION | COMPOSITION| VALUATION

A

Figure 3. Attitude Categories in Fox News and New York Magazine Emailgate News Articles

35

AFFECT

A

Clin

ton's

FO

MO

is

more

understa

ndable

w

hen

you le

arn

that…

(N

ew

York

Magazin

e)

Clin

ton has

said

sh

e w

ants

the

departm

ent

to

rele

ase

th

e

em

ails

(Fox N

ew

s); Then [C

linto

n]

got sto

od u

p b

y

the entire

ca

bin

et,

confirm

ing

her w

orst fe

ars

(New

York

Magazin

e)

[officia

ls at D

atto

] did

not w

ant

to ru

n in

to a

legal p

roble

m(F

ox

New

s); N

atu

rally

, Republica

ns

were

gid

dy a

bout C

linto

n's co

nce

ssion.

(New

York

Magazin

e)

In th

e in

terv

iew

, M

itchell

also

ask

ed C

linto

n h

ow

she fe

els th

at

a Q

uin

nip

iac

poll

found…

(F

ox

New

s); Top

aid

e

Hum

a

Abedin

did

n't

thin

k C

linto

n w

ould

be e

xcite

d…

(N

ew

York

Magazin

e)

NO

N-A

UT

HO

RIA

L

AU

TH

OR

IAL

Sourc

e: C

linto

n

Sourc

e: 3

rd Party

M

ultip

le S

ourc

es

Fig

ure 4

. Affect S

ub

categ

ories in

Fo

x New

s and

New

Yo

rk Ma

ga

zine E

ma

ilga

te New

s Articles

36

5.1.2. Attitude → Judgement

Judgement, the evaluation of behaviour, falls into two distinct subcategories: Social Esteem

and Social Sanction. Social Esteem covers those positive or negative evaluations that could

boost or diminish the esteem that one is given in society. These judgements mostly answer

to behaviours and deeds that do not have a lawful/unlawful quality to them, but can easily

result in the actor being raised or lowered in the esteem of their community (White, 2015).

Social Sanction, on the other hand, attends to morality or legality and comes into play when

rules have been broken and misconduct is under discussion. People evaluated along Social

Sanction are potentially caught up in some degrees of (im)moral/(un)lawful conduct.

Social Esteem can be further broken down into three subcategories: evaluations

targeted at how unusual someone is (normality), how able they are (capacity), and how

resolute they are (tenacity). Also on the level of subcategories, Social Sanction differentiates

between evaluations of someone’s truthfulness (veracity) and their ethical behaviour

(propriety). Figure 5 shows the fully expanded subcategories under Judgement with examples

taken from my data (examples of tenacity are taken from Martin & White for a lack of

tenacity evaluations in my data) (Martin & White, 2005, p. 53).

37

JU

DG

EM

EN

T

A

Norm

ality

co

ntro

versia

l, unusu

al

(Fox N

ew

s); co

ntro

versia

l, fam

ously

(New

York

Magazin

e)

Capacity

w

ell-tra

ined, stru

ggle

, jum

p o

n

(Fox N

ew

s); te

ch-sa

vvy,

quick

ly

challe

nged,

quick

ly

resp

onded

(New

York

Magazin

e)

Tenacity

[b

rave], [re

ckle

ss]

Vera

city

Clin

ton h

edged, “

liar,”

secre

tive

(Fox N

ew

s); sh

ady, “

liar,”

“dish

onest”

(New

York

Magazin

e)

Pro

prie

ty

inappro

pria

tely

, sh

ould

have

know

n,

avoid

public scru

tiny

(Fox N

ew

s); holid

ay n

ew

s dum

p, sh

ould

, sorry

(New

York

Magazin

e)

SO

CIA

L E

ST

EEM

SO

CIA

L S

AN

CT

ION

Fig

ure 5

. Jud

gem

ent S

ub

categ

ories in

Fo

x New

s and

New

Yo

rk Mag

azin

e Em

ailg

ate N

ews A

rticles

38

5.1.3. Attitude → Appreciation

Appreciation, the assessment of objects, things, natural phenomena, and performances, is

established by Martin and White along “our ‘reactions’ to things (do they catch our attention;

do they please us?), their ‘composition’ (balance and complexity), and their ‘value’ (how

innovative, authentic, timely, etc.)” (Martin & White, 2005, p. 56). Figure 6 shows the fully

expanded subcategories under Appreciation with examples taken from my data.

39

APPRECIA

TIO

N

A

a fla

tterin

g fe

atu

re

(New

York

Magazin

e)

classifie

d p

rogra

ms

(Fox N

ew

s); se

cure

netw

ork

(N

ew

York

Magazin

e)

insu

fficient e

vid

ence

(F

ox N

ew

s); th

e m

ost sig

nifica

nt fin

din

gs

(New

York

Magazin

e)

REA

CT

ION

C

OM

PO

SIT

ION

VA

LU

AT

ION

Fig

ure 6

. Ap

precia

tion S

ub

categ

ories in

Fo

x New

s an

d N

ew Y

ork M

ag

azin

e Em

ailg

ate N

ews A

rticles

40

5.2. Design of the Appraisal Framework: Engagement

The Engagement domain, which attends to whether assertions are sourced internally or

externally, sees a distinction between Monoglossia and Heteroglossia as introduced in 3.2.3.

The Appraisal Framework: Engagement Overview. Categories under Heteroglossia,

utterances where alternative voices or positions are invoked, are detailed in this section.

Figure 7 lists Engagement (E) and its categories.

Heteroglossic utterances influence the dialogic space in either of two ways. The first

possibility is Heteroglossia → Expand, where heteroglossic assertions are used to open up

dialogic space and signal that the position they represent is only one out of a range of possible

positions. In this way, the dialogic space becomes expanded (Martin & White, 2005, p. 103).

Section 5.2.1. details expansion.

The second possibility for heteroglossic assertions to impact the dialogic space is to

restrict the scope of alternative voices or positions (Heteroglossia → Contract). In this way,

the dialogic space is closed down, i.e. contracted. Section 5.2.2. details contraction.

During data analysis, I found language that can be interpreted as both expanding and

contracting the dialogic space. These ambiguous linguistic features are discussed in section

5.2.3.

MONOGLOSSIA

HETEROGLOSSIA → CONTRACT

HETEROGLOSSIA → EXPAND

DISCLAIM | PROCLAIM

ATTRIBUTE | ENTERTAIN

E

Figure 7. Engagement Categories in Fox News and New York Magazine Emailgate News Articles

41

5.2.1. Engagement → Heteroglossia → Expand

There are two ways to show that an assertion expands dialogism, i.e. that it is only one of

many possibilities. First, the authorial voice can disassociate itself from the utterance by way

of sourcing, i.e. attributing it to an external voice (Expand → Attribute). Attribution is often

realised grammatically through reported speech. Attributions can go two different ways: the

authorial voice can acknowledge or distance itself from the attributed statement. When the

authorial voice does not explicitly state where it stands with respect to the displayed

proposition, the voice acknowledges the utterance (Attribute → Acknowledge). When the

author attributes a proposition to an external voice and in doing so refuses to take

responsibility for the attributed utterance, he or she distances him- or herself from the

proposition (Attribute → Distance).

Attribute → Acknowledge is commonly realised by instances such as he said, he

believes, he noted, according to her, in her view, etc. Attribute → Distance is carried through

wordings that stress that the assertion has not been generally accepted. While some may agree

with it, other voices do not accept it. Instances such as he claimed, it’s rumored that, she

maintained, and sometimes he insisted, carry the idea that at least some people do not align

with or believe the statement.

The second way to construe an utterance as but one of a range of alternatives is by

way of entertaining them (Expand → Entertain). By using wordings of probability (might,

probably, possibly, I believe that, it’s possible that… - expressing that there are alternatives,

as well), evidentiality (it seems, the evidence suggests, apparently), and

permission/obligation (must, have to), the authorial voice displays the proposition as one

possibility only but explicitly boosts or decreases the validity of it via wordings of

entertainment. As such, while the authorial voice opens up the possibility that the reader

might think differently about the matter, they entertain, i.e. explicitly and subjectively align

with the presented proposition.

In sum, reported speech and wordings of different levels of probability announce a

proposition to be but one of a number of propositions to align with. When the authorial voice

selects this assertion, they do not overtly indicate their stance with respect to it

(Acknowledge), step back from it (Distance), or advance their own assessment of it

42

(Entertain). When attributing, the authorial voice grounds the utterance in the subjectivity of

an external voice. When entertaining, the authorial voice grounds the proposition in his or

her own subjectivity. Figure 8 shows the fully expanded subcategories under Heteroglossia

→ Expand with examples taken from my data.

43

EN

TERTA

IN

Pro

bability

perh

aps

(Fox N

ew

s); pre

sum

ably

(New

York

Magazin

e)

HETERO

GLO

SSIA

→ E

XPA

ND

E

AT

TRIB

UT

E

Acknow

ledge

acco

rdin

g to

, said

, told

(F

ox N

ew

s); re

port, sa

id

(New

York

Magazin

e)

Dista

nce

m

ain

tain

, claim

(F

ox N

ew

s); cla

im

(New

York

Magazin

e)

Evid

entia

lity

suggest

(Fox N

ew

s); oste

nsib

ly (N

ew

York

Magazin

e)

Oblig

atio

n

must, h

as to

(N

ew

York

Magazin

e)

Fig

ure 8

. Hetero

glo

ssia →

Exp

and

Su

bca

tego

ries in F

ox N

ews a

nd N

ew Y

ork M

aga

zine E

ma

ilga

te New

s Articles

44

5.2.2. Engagement → Heteroglossia → Contract

Similarly to Expand, Heteroglossia → Contract offers two main routes to affect the range of

possible dialogic alternatives. First, the authorial voice can announce one claim to hold fully

and thus excludes other positions or voices from offering an alternative (Contract →

Proclaim). Second, the authorial voice can reject a certain claim or show it as replacing one

that was expected in its place (Contract → Disclaim).

In Proclaim → Concur, the authorial voice explicitly agrees with the single external

voice or position that has been presented. This can take place by using wordings such as of

course, naturally, not surprisingly, certainly, etc. These wordings position the proposition as

the generally agreed and accepted viewpoint.

When the authorial voice introduces an external position and announces them as

valid, correct, or undeniable, they use wordings such as show, demonstrate, prove, reveal,

confirm, corroborate, disclose, confide, etc. These fall under the subcategory Proclaim →

Endorse. An important distinction to make here is the one between endorsing and

acknowledging an utterance. In Contract → Proclaim → Endorse, the authorial voice

explicitly aligns with a statement and takes responsibility for them, thereby rejecting

alternative voices as holding true. In contrast, in Expand → Attribute → Acknowledge, the

authorial voice disassociates from the proposition and takes no responsibility for what has

been said. To say Internal emails show Clinton got detailed intel on 'planned' Benghazi hit

is to nominate the statement as undeniably valid and taken for granted. To say Clinton said

she loves swimming, chocolate, House of Cards, sleep, and ... email, the author reports on

what has been said and expresses that the proposition is valid in the subjectivity of the

external voice – from Clinton’s viewpoint in this case.

A third way to proclaim that a proposition is warrantable is for the authorial voice to

intervene in the utterance and place authorial emphasis on the proposition (Proclaim →

Pronounce). In speech, primary stress is one way to introduce these interpolations. In writing,

formatting including emboldening or italicising text parts can contribute to this effect. Also,

wordings such as indeed, really, as well as the helping verbs does, did, was, were, etc. in

positive sentences to express emphatic assertion (e.g. The judge has yet to rule on that matter,

but he did set hearings for February…) can be used to pronounce a proposition. Proclaim →

45

Pronounce puts solidarity with the audience at risk by confronting and defeating alternative

voices or positions. Unless the reader subscribes to the one pronounced statement and agrees

with alternatives being shut down, the writer risks solidarity with his or her audience.

The second scenario in dialogic contraction concerns the authorial voice dismissing

alternative voices or positions (Contract → Disclaim).

When the authorial voice disclaims alternatives, they show either denial or counter-

expectation. In the first case (Disclaim → Denial), the author uses negation to introduce the

alternative positive position into the dialogue and then reject it. This effect is unavoidable

when negating a statement because the negative invariably carries with it the positive (Martin

& White, 2005, p. 118). Consequently, when the authorial voice says Clinton never sent

classified information, an alternative voice is invoked (stating that Clinton sent classified

information) and shown to not hold, i.e. excluded from the scope of alternative voices. This

does not work reciprocally, i.e. the positive does not necessarily carry with it the negative.

The second way to disclaim alternatives is to introduce a proposition and present it

as replacing another proposition that was expected in its place (Disclaim → Counter). This

is grammatically delivered via conjunctions and connectives (even though, although,

however, yet, but), as well as comment adjuncts and adverbials (surprisingly, even, only,

still). The contrary position invoked by the authorial voice is shown to not hold and shut out

of the alternative propositions. Disclaim → Counter puts solidarity between the writer and

the reader at risk because the author takes the replacing proposition for granted and not up

for discussion. As a result, if the reader does not subscribe to the notion advanced by the

author, the solidarity between them is subject to damage. In this respect, Counter is similar

to Proclaim → Pronounce.

To sum up, dialogic contraction singles out one assertion as legitimate and

warrantable (Contract → Proclaim) or announces a range of propositions as invalid (Contract

→ Disclaim), thereby closing down the dialogic space for alternative voices or positions.

Figure 9 shows the fully expanded subcategories under Heteroglossia → Contract with

examples taken from my data.

46

HETERO

GLO

SSIA

→ C

ON

TRACT

E

DIS

CLA

IM

PR

OC

LA

IM

Denia

l not crim

inal, n

ever se

nt, d

idn’t

(Fox N

ew

s); never, n

ot ta

rgetin

g, n

o e

mails

(New

York

Magazin

e)

Concur

undoubte

dly

, cle

arly

, su

rely

, obvio

usly

(N

ew

York

Magazin

e)

Counte

r all b

ut, h

ow

ever, y

et

(Fox N

ew

s); yet, b

ut, still, a

ny

(New

York

Magazin

e)

Endorse

sh

ow

, reveal, co

nfirm

(F

ox N

ew

s); re

alize

, reveal, sh

ow

(N

ew

York

Magazin

e)

Pro

nounce

re

ally

(Fox N

ew

s); esp

ecia

lly, a

lso o

f note

, (N

ew

York

Magazin

e)

Fig

ure 9

. Hetero

glo

ssia →

Con

tract S

ub

categ

ories in

Fo

x New

s and

New

Yo

rk Mag

azin

e Em

ailg

ate N

ews A

rticles

47

5.2.3. Engagement → Heteroglossia → Borderline

There arose one standout linguistic feature across the data under my investigation that seems

to override the construction of the Appraisal framework system along the duality of

expansion and contraction: formatting conventions, used by the journalists in the data to

infuse voices into their propositions, often represent features of both Expand and Contract.

The salient formatting choices that potentially carry evaluative meanings in the two

text sets under my scrutiny include a) the punctuation marks parentheses, the em dash, the

colon, and b) quote marks.

I traced category a) punctuation marks for heteroglossic features and eventually

categorised them under Proclaim → Pronounce for the following reasons. Parentheses and

the em dash are used throughout Fox News and New York Magazine articles to introduce a

shift in voice toward commentary and separate that content from the rest of the proposition.

Regardless of how subjective the isolated content is, these markers introduce a pause to the

text, a separation that can be assumed to be authorial interventions. The author in these

instances foregrounds the information separated by punctuation marks and nominates it as

more important than the rest of the assertion or at least requiring special attention. In this

respect, the same applies to capitalized wordings followed by a colon: they might not infuse

commentary voice into the text, but they act as significance nominators of text parts. These

punctuation marks achieve an effect very similar to what has been discussed under Proclaim

→ Pronounce: they mark overt authorial intervention in which the writer makes their

subjective role stand out and takes responsibility for marking up assertions as more

significant than other propositions.

Category b) quote marks proved more difficult to categorise along Martin and

White’s description of heteroglossic subcategories (Martin & White, 2005, p. 92). As both

single and double quotes occur frequently in the texts under investigation, a reasonable

starting point to explore the functions fulfilled by quotes is to look into the difference between

these two types of quote marks.

Throughout my data, double quotes are used in body text, while single quotes are

used either inside double quotes to mark a quote inside a quote, or in article headlines. As for

headline punctuation practices, Malcolm Gibson of the University of Kansas points to the

48

following rule: “Headline punctuation is normal with two significant exceptions: Use periods

for abbreviations only, and use single quotes where you would use double quotes in a story”

(Gibson, n.d., para. 16). Further, according to Beth Hill of The Editor’s Blog, “single

quotation marks are used in newspaper headlines when quotation marks are required. (Space

is limited for newspapers; they cut punctuation wherever they can.)” (Hill, 2014, para. 17).

This explains the presence of both types of quote marks in my data and removes this

distinction from the scope of my discussion with regard to evaluative language.

However, a visually less pronounced difference within double quote marks requires

further investigation. Throughout my data, I encountered a small set of quote marks that are

put to use to mark something different from the verbatim account of some external voice.

These quote marks isolate very few words only and seem to encompass hints toward

criticism, irony, vague accusations, disbelief, or pronunciation with regard to the quoted

material. These effects are all the more identifiable against the backdrop of proper quotes in

these texts, which usually cover rather long strings of words or even multiple sentences.

Double quotes of this special usage have been labeled as scare quotes. As The News

Manual points out on the issue,

“Scare quotes are words or short phrases which are placed between quotation marks

when they really do not belong. Usually, the writer is trying to add stress to the

words or to suggest something other than their obvious meaning.

The simplest reason for scare quotes is to add emphasis; A more common use of the

scare quote is to suggest that the word or phrase should not be taken at face value.

It is often used to suggest disbelief or actual disagreement with the words as they

are being used” (Henshall & Ingram, 2008, para. 92).

A further comment comes from Mark Davidson, the author of Right, Wrong, and

Risky: A Dictionary of Today's American English Usage, who advises to “not use quotation

marks for a word or phrase that the speaker happened to use unless the word or phrase is

particularly dramatic or otherwise unusual” (Davidson, 2005, p. 446).

To sum up the above, when the author relies on scare quotes, they might do so to add

stress, suggest disbelief/disagreement, or add a dramatic tone to the dialogue. Based on my

49

data, a number of effects can come into play ranging from actually neutral quotes to the

advancing of factuality, the pronunciation of alignment, disalignment, or the distancing from

what has been externally sourced. An important consideration here is that scare quotes infuse

the text with ambiguity as to where the author stands with regard to the proposition. From

this standpoint, scare quotes have strong evaluative potential because they pass the

responsibility of registering alignment or disalignment entirely to the audience. The

proposition remains ambiguous and subjective in a way that the exact nature of authorial

stance remains unknown, thereby risking solidarity between writer and reader in case the

reader interprets the writing as a proposition that he or she does not subscribe to.

As such, scare quotes are problematic to assign to heteroglossic subcategories and

require the contextual background to pinpoint their assumed evaluative effect.

On the face of it, scare quotes can be categorised under Contract → Proclaim →

Endorse or Pronounce as they mark explicit authorial interventions in support of the

externally sourced material, making them similar in function to other punctuation marks.

However, in New York Magazine’s scare quoted reference to Clinton’s email controversy in

the sentence

Four months after we first learned about “emailgate,” on Tuesday night the State

Department finally released the first batch of Hillary Clinton's emails,

it is safe to assume that the authorial voice does not make an attempt at endorsing the label

emailgate or pronouncing it as highly warrantable. Rather, there seems to be a sense of

disalignment with (Expand → Attribute → Distance), or even disapproval of the use of the

term emailgate. It can also be seen as a means of questioning the existence of the scandal

(Contract → Disclaim → Denial).

Scare quotes are up for discussion in journalistic discourse in particular, where

register conventions foreshadow factual information sharing, and while scare quotes seem to

foreground facts on the surface, they in fact bring evaluative meanings into the assertion. Fox

News’s scare quoted reference in the below sentence exemplifies this.

50

In the [MSNBC] interview, Mitchell also asked Clinton how she feels that a

Quinnipiac poll found that the first words that came to mind among voters when

asked about her were “liar,” “untrustworthy” and “crooked…”

Here, the authorial voice can be surmised at the minimum to have used quote marks

to introduce external voices and reference them properly without explicitly stating his or her

own stance on the quoted material (Expand → Attribute → Acknowledge). However, a

second check of the Quinnipiac poll results – otherwise unreferenced by the Fox News article

– reveals the Fox News statement to be false. In fact, “untrustworthy” was the third word

and “crooked” the nineteenth to have come to voters’ mind when asked about Clinton

(Malloy et al., 2016). The writer of the quoted sentence used quote marks to infuse the

assertion with factuality on the face of it, whereas he or she in fact subjectively selected an

arbitrary group of words and claimed them to be the first in the list. Consequently, the quoted

material is in fact more a statement that the authorial voice aligns with and thus promotes it

(Contract → Proclaim → Pronounce) but without explicitly admitting it.

To sum up, most formatting choices made by the authors were assigned to the

Proclaim → Pronounce category, but a set of scare quotes were retained as having both

expansive and contractive potential and thus relocating the responsibility of interpretation to

the audience. These cases were assigned under Heteroglossia during a calculation of

frequencies of the Appraisal domains in the two text sets, but were left out of calculations

targeting Contract and Expand and their subcategories. Figure 10 shows borderline examples

taken from my data.

51

HETERO

GLO

SSIA

→ B

ORD

ERLIN

E

E

FO

RM

AT

TIN

G: P

UN

CT

UAT

ION

FO

RM

AT

TIN

G: S

CA

RE Q

UO

TES

Pro

cla

im →

Pro

nounce

…

"severa

l" of

Clin

ton's

em

ails

conta

ined cla

ssified in

tellig

ence

in

form

atio

n -- a

nd a

t least o

ne

of th

em

was m

ade p

ublic,

EXCLU

SIV

E: …

(F

ox N

ew

s); But h

er e

mail sca

ndal w

orse

ned

again

on

Tuesd

ay

(with

so

me

help

from

Republica

ns),

Officia

l: …

(New

York

Magazin

e)

Contra

ct →

Pro

cla

im →

Endorse

/Pro

nounce

O

R

Expand →

Attrib

ute

→ A

cknow

ledge/D

istance

so

-calle

d “hom

ebre

w” se

rver,

the “extre

mely

se

rious”

in

vestig

atio

n

(Fox N

ew

s); afte

r we first le

arn

ed a

bout “

em

ailg

ate

”, “

fit n sp

ark

ly”

conte

nt

(New

York

Magazin

e)

Fig

ure 1

0. H

eterog

lossia

→ B

ord

erline S

ub

categ

ories in

Fo

x New

s and

New

Yo

rk Ma

ga

zine E

mailg

ate N

ews A

rticles

52

5.3. Design of the Appraisal Framework: Graduation

Graduation, which is suggested by Martin and White to overarch Attitude and Engagement

rather than being a separate third domain (Martin & White, 2005, p. 136), required several

adjustments with regard to my data.

As stated in section 3.2.4. The Appraisal Framework: Graduation Overview,

instances of Focus, one of the two major fields of Graduation, did not occur in my data. While

Force, the second Graduation category, occurred frequently, I decided to recategorise the

domain according to what gradable linguistic features were salient in my data.

The reason behind this recategorisation is the nature of Graduation. Gradability is

intrinsic in language, and, as such, categories within it blend, and fuzzy boundaries occur

around what can be regarded as a graded utterance and what not. Taking the main distinctive

feature of Graduation into consideration (down-scaling/mitigating and up-

scaling/intensifying the force of a proposition), graded language can be traced in any

proposition and removed until we arrive at a decomposed assertion built from irreducible

meanings. This is the natural semantic metalanguage, a very small set of words such as

good/bad, yes/no, big/small, etc. (Goddard, 2008, p. 33). However, the goal of journalistic

discourse is not to present stories by way of these semantic primitives.

As a result, while acknowledging that strictly speaking words such as never and stated

are up-scaled meanings when compared to their semantic primitive counterparts not and said,

I decided to assess as graded those assertions only which show striking differences in graded

meanings when Fox News wordings and New York Magazine wordings are compared. For

example, word choice in the below two sentences clearly point at graded meanings that

contribute to the seriousness versus the triviality of the email controversy.

Clinton has been under fire through much of 2015 about her use of a private,

unsecured email server as secretary of state, specifically over the security of her

server, and her incomplete retention of her emails. (Fox News)

The questions surrounding Clinton’s private server haven’t taken up much oxygen in

the Democratic primary race save for inspiring a popular meme. (New York

Magazine)

53

Fox News presents an up-scaled substitute for criticism (under fire), imprecise

reckoning of time to elongate the presence of emailgate in time (through much of 2015), up-

scales security issues (private, unsecured email server) and goes on to isolate some content

as being significant (specifically).

The adjective order in private, unsecured email server requires further explanation

here. As Enrica Rosato (2013) points out in her thesis Adjective order in English: A semantic

account with cross-linguistic applications, relative descriptions of a noun concerning quality

are syntactically placed farther from the base noun than intrinsic features such as color,

origin, or material (Rosato, 2013, p. 26). The default word order in the Fox News utterance

would thus be unsecured private email server, a pattern that is followed in general by both

media outlets in their description of Clinton’s email server. Via the irregular adjective order

in private, unsecured email server, the concept of the insecurity of the server is up-scaled by

assessing the server as objectively, irrefutably unsecured.

As for the New York Magazine sentence, it down-scales the scandalous nature of the

controversy (haven’t taken up much oxygen) and trivialises it by down-scaling the scandal to

have inspired a popular (Internet) meme.

Applying this comparative approach of graded wordings on Fox News and New York

Magazine gave rise to three distinct Graduation tendencies in my data that contribute to

intensifying meanings and, as a result, overplay the gravity of the propositions, and to

softening meanings and thus underplaying the gravity of the news content. The three

subcategories are Reckoning, Scaling, and Isolation. While registering these instances in my

data, only those utterances were marked as graduated where the authors selected

configurations from the language that overtly alter meanings along grades. Figure 11 lists

these Graduation (G) categories.

54

From 5.3.1 to 5.3.3., I present the Graduation categories Reckoning, Scaling, and

Isolation.

5.3.1. Graduation → Reckoning

Reckoning deals with how accurately or precisely factual data are described across the text

sets under investigation. Along the cline of preciseness, two main subcategories arose.

Reckoning → Mass comes into play when the journalists describe volumes of emails,

documents, and the level of preciseness in doing so. Rather than marking up all reckonings

as graduated meanings, I focussed on those instances where amounts are made unnecessarily

precise (31,105 emails) or are clearly understated (a handful of emails) in a way that they

imply evaluative meanings that contribute to the aggravation or mitigation of a proposition.

The second subcategory within Reckoning was named Proximity. Proximity attends

to imprecise and precise descriptions of time and space. Again, I selected instances where

reckonings of this type, especially times and dates, are blurred or sharpened to the level that

they carry meanings beyond face value. Instances of proximity were registered when dates

were replaced by imprecise counterparts or were extended with further description to link

events in time that could boost an incriminating tone (Blumenthal gave diplomatic advice to

Hillary Clinton as early as 2009). The same applies to overly precise descriptions of time

where the hour and the minute are disclosed for an email exchange or an email release date.

These are apparently no constructive additions to the text but can be used to evaluate, for

example, the administrative burden imposed by the email server investigation (…the State

RECKONING

SCALING

ISOLATION

MASS | PROXIMITY

SCANDAL | REPETITION G

Figure 11. Graduation Categories in Fox News and New York Magazine Emailgate News Articles

55

Department worked into the night and finally released 3,000 pages of “fit n sparkly” new

content around 2 a.m.). Figure 12 shows the fully expanded subcategories under Graduation

→ Reckoning with examples taken from my data.

56

RECKO

NIN

G

G

MA

SS

som

e, se

vera

l, thousa

nds o

f (F

ox N

ew

s); m

any, a

handfu

l of e

mails

(New

York

Magazin

e)

PR

OXIM

ITY

rece

ntly

(Fox N

ew

s); a little

late

(New

York

Magazin

e)

pre

cisio

n

3,1

05 e

mails

(Fox N

ew

s); 31,8

30 e

mails

(New

York

Magazin

e)

pre

cisio

n

Septe

mber 1

1, 2

012, a

t 11 p

.m.

(New

York

Magazin

e)

Fig

ure 1

2. G

radu

atio

n →

Recko

nin

g S

ub

categ

ories in

Fo

x New

s an

d N

ew Y

ork M

aga

zine E

ma

ilga

te New

s Articles

57

5.3.2. Graduation → Scaling

Scaling was registered when the authorial voice scaled up or down their general descriptors

usually via adjectives or adverbs (e.g. highly unusual). When referring to the emailgate

controversy, the authors sometimes replaced these references with words that explicitly

aggravate (e.g. even more sensitive intelligence) or mitigate (e.g. email saga, stories) what

is at stake in the context of the scandal. Therefore, I opened up the subcategory Scaling →

Context, which attends to graded descriptions surrounding the email controversy proper.

Another type of scaling was identified when individual words expressed that an action

was done over and over or when two synonymous words stood next to each other to intensify

the gravity of the proposition (Scaling → Repetition). Figure 13 shows the fully expanded

subcategories under Graduation → Scaling with examples taken from my data.

58

SCALIN

G

G

hig

hly

unusu

al, g

row

ing q

uestio

ns

(Fox N

ew

s); a cle

are

r pictu

re

(New

York

Magazin

e)

Scandal

crimin

al in

vestig

atio

n, m

ajo

r issues

(Fox N

ew

s); em

ail sa

ga, sto

ries, a

distra

ction

(New

York

Magazin

e)

Repetitio

n

repeate

d

questio

ns,

repeate

dly

denie

d

(Fox N

ew

s)

Fig

ure 1

3. G

radu

atio

n →

Sca

ling S

ub

categ

ories in

Fo

x New

s an

d N

ew Y

ork M

ag

azin

e Em

ailg

ate N

ews A

rticles

59

5.3.3. Graduation → Isolation

Finally, a major theme that runs through my data is related to when the authorial voice singles

out some information and provides extra description about it (Isolation). This was recognised

as a frequently used technique to separate content (usually email contents or emailgate

developments) and nominate them as more significant than other information. When the

author makes prominent email content related to the Benghazi attacks, the wealth of Clinton

aides as against Clinton’s yoga schedule and her daughter’s wedding plans, the authorial

voice fronts content in a way that contributes to the seriousness or triviality of the email

controversy. Two sentences to describe this are taken from Fox News and New York

Magazine, respectively.

In another exchange, Billionaire George Soros, a major donor to liberal causes,

confided to a former Clinton aide that he made the wrong choice in supporting Barack

Obama in the 2008 primaries over Clinton. (Fox News)

When Clinton fractured her elbow, Senator Barbara Mikulski expressed sympathy for

her inability to do lady things. (New York Magazine)

From this standpoint, Isolation is related in functionality to formatting choices

discussed under Engagement. As opposed to text formatting choices, however, the authorial

voice here promotes or relegates content in a way that is interwoven in the narrative of the

news article. Because of this, the presence of the subjective author is not as overtly stated in

Graduation → Isolation as it is in Engagement → Contract → Proclaim → Pronounce. Yet,

singling out content can contribute to an overall impression of all the Clinton emails as

containing texts that can potentially implicate Clinton morally or legally versus comprising

private content irrelevant to the public. Figure 14 shows the fully expanded subcategories

under Graduation → Isolation with examples taken from my data.

60

ISO

LATIO

N

G

anoth

er re

aso

n, a

t least o

ne C

linto

n

em

ail

(Fox N

ew

s); yet a

noth

er E

mailg

ate

update

(N

ew

York

Magazin

e)

Fig

ure 1

4. G

radu

atio

n →

Isola

tion

Sub

categ

ories in

Fo

x New

s and

New

Yo

rk Mag

azin

e Em

ailg

ate N

ews A

rticles

61

5.4. Design of the Appraisal Framework: Summary And Out-of-Scope Lexical Items

Figure 15 on the next page shows the full layout of the Appraisal framework adjusted to the

text sets written news articles on Hillary Clinton’s emailgate scandal published by Fox News

and New York Magazine.

Having opened up all subcategories under the Appraisal framework, one

consideration remains to be discussed before I turn to the research results. A small set of

lexical items were taken out of the scope of my research as not qualifying for evaluative

language. Table 13 presents this set.

OUT-OF-SCOPE LEXICAL ITEMS IN ARTICLES ON EMAILGATE

Nouns Verbs Adjectives

batch (of emails) release, receive, send (emails)

private, personal, work-related,

top-secret (emails)

Table 13. Out-of-Scope Lexical Items in Articles on Emailgate

These lexical items were deemed neutral and not carrying evaluation. These items

occur with high frequency not only across my data, but also in other media outlets discussing

emailgate that I relied on as secondary literature. As pervasive items in the narrative of

Clinton’s email controversy, I considered these words commonly used descriptors and

activity verbs used to report on emailgate news.

62

FO

RM

AT

TIN

G

Inte

rperso

nal m

ode

Syste

mic

Functio

nal

Lin

guistic

s

(SFL)

APPRAIS

AL

FRAM

EW

ORK

AU

TH

OR

IAL

NO

N-A

UT

HO

RIA

L REA

CT

ION

CO

MPO

SIT

ION

VA

LU

AT

ION

AT

TR

IBU

TE

EN

TERTA

IN

MA

SS

PR

OXIM

ITY

CLIN

TO

N |

3R

D P

AR

TY

| M

ULT

IPLE

SO

UR

CES

SO

CIA

L E

ST

EEM

SO

CIA

L S

AN

CT

ION

V

ERA

CIT

Y |

PR

OPR

IET

Y

NO

RM

ALIT

Y |

CA

PA

CIT

Y |

TEN

AC

ITY

DIS

CLA

IM

PR

OC

LA

IM

DEN

Y |

CO

UN

TER

CO

NC

UR

| E

ND

OR

SE

| P

RO

NO

UN

CE

AC

KN

OW

LED

GE

| D

IST

AN

CE

E

A

G

PR

OBA

BIL

ITY

| E

VID

EN

TIA

LIT

Y|

OBLIG

AT

ION

Fig

ure 1

5. T

he F

ull L

ayo

ut o

f the A

pp

raisa

l Fra

mew

ork

SC

AN

DA

L

REPET

ITIO

N

63

6. Results

In this chapter, I first present the frequencies of occurrences of the three Appraisal framework

domains Attitude, Engagement, and Graduation, and their categories across the Fox News

and New York Magazine data in sections 6.1. to 6.4. Sections 6.5 to 6.7. present and discuss

selected examples of all categories and their subcategories in detail. In 6.8., I present the

Appraisal framework analysis on 10 + 10 exemplary sentences from Fox News and New

York Magazine, paying special attention to sentence parts that carry implicit evaluations.

6.1. Frequencies of Attitude, Engagement, and Graduation

This section presents frequencies of the three Appraisal framework domains across the two

text sets written news articles on Hillary Clinton’s emailgate scandal published by Fox News

and New York Magazine.

6.1.1. Normed Rates of Occurrence

To arrive at comparable frequencies across the datasets, I calculated normalised occurrences.

This was necessary because the Fox News data consist of 6898 words, while the New York

Magazine one of 4390. Without normalised computation, the number of occurrences would

not reflect the discrepancy in data volume. For instance, meanings of Attitude were registered

66 times in the Fox News data and 68 times in the New York Magazine one. The two numbers

imply nearly equal use of attitudinal meanings in the two sets of texts. However, when the

difference in data volume is considered, i.e. normalised occurrences are calculated, the New

York Magazine data display a 62% more use of attitudinal meanings than the Fox News one.

Normed rates of occurrence are “the rate at which a feature occurs in a fixed amount

of text” (Biber & Conrad, 2009, p. 62). In my calculations, I chose 1000 words as the fixed

amount of text. Table 14 exemplifies this method.

NORMED RATES OF OCCURRENCE

occurrences of Attitude (Fox News) occurrences of Attitude (New York Magazine)

(66 ÷ 6898) × 1000 (68 ÷ 4390) × 1000

9.57 15.49

Table 14. The Calculation of Normed Rates of Occurrence

64

Table 14 shows that there are 9.57 words expressing attitudinal meanings per 1000

words in the Fox News data. In contrast, there are 15.49 words expressing attitudinal

meanings per 1000 words in the New York Magazine data.

6.1.2. Occurrences in Total

When the two datasets are viewed together, attitudinal meanings were the least employed

evaluative resources to present Hillary Clinton’s email scandal, and Engagement the most

frequently featured domain. When the two text sets are looked at separately, The New York

Magazine data are shown to use each of the three domains more than the Fox News texts.

Chart 1 presents these results.

In sum, Attitude categories are the least frequently used across my data (13%).

Engagement was registered the most (47%), with Graduation categories constituting 40% of

all evaluative meanings in Fox News and New York Magazine news articles. When looking

at the two text sets separately, New York Magazine makes more frequent use of all of the

three Appraisal framework domains than Fox News.

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

Fox News New York Magazine

Instances of Attitude, Engagement, and Graduation per dataset

Attitude Engagement Graduation

Chart 1. Instances of Attitude, Engagement, and Graduation per dataset

65

6.2. Frequencies of Attitude Categories

The Attitude categories were found to distribute differently in the two text sets. Chart 2 below

presents these results. New York Magazine features meanings of Affect over 7 times more

often than Fox News. The Fox News data rely most on Judgement values, while New York

Magazine texts use Appreciation the most often, twice as much as Fox News. This difference

in category distribution shows that the moral and legal implications of emailgate are much

more accentuated on Fox News than on New York Magazine. In turn, the latter lays emphasis

on the emotional aspect of the scandal and attends more to the things, objects, and

performances around Clinton rather than the moral issues surrounding the email controversy.

Chart 2 also shows the distribution of negative versus positive attitudinal meanings

in the two text sets. 90% of Judgement values, the most common Attitude category used by

Fox News authors, are negative on Fox News. 63% of all Appreciation values, the most

frequently used Attitude category by New York Magazine journalists, are positive in New

York Magazine articles. In sum, the Fox News data contain more negative evaluations in

each Attitude category than the New York Magazine data.

Fox News

New York Magazine

Frequencies of Attitude categories

Affect Judgement Appreciation

90% - | 10% +

70% - | 30% +

37% - | 63% +

32% - | 68% +

50% - | 50% +

70% - | 30% +

Chart 2. Frequencies of Attitude Categories

66

6.3. Frequencies of Engagement Categories

As for Engagement, the dialogism of the data, the majority of sentences in both text sets are

heteroglossic and a smaller amount monoglossic. The Fox News data have twice as many

monoglossic sentences than New York Magazine ones, indicating that Fox News journalists

advanced their own interpretation of the email controversy as opposed to New York

Magazine journalists, who referenced more external sources.

Monoglossia was found to override heteroglossia once: one New York Magazine

sentence expressed explicit evaluation when presenting a Hillary Clinton quote as an

assertion which the presidential front-runner famously said. The full sentence goes, The

[Clinton-Mitchell] interview took place a day before the 20th anniversary of Hillary

Clinton's U.N. speech in Beijing, where she famously said, “It is time for us to say here in

Beijing, and the world to hear, that it is no longer acceptable to discuss women's rights as

separate from human rights.” The New York Magazine journalist inserts this information in

article #07 Clinton on Emails: ‘I Am Sorry That This Has Been Confusing to People’ in

relation to a Clinton interview with Andrea Mitchell targeting Clinton’s email usage. While

there is a four-minute-long discussion of Clinton’s U.N. speech in the interview (MSNBC,

2015) lasting from 23:00 to 26:50, the New York Magazine article details the speech on

women’s right in four paragraphs and two embedded videos, making up for 40% of the article

in terms of word count. Against this backdrop, the unusual emphasis placed by the journalist

on Clinton’s fight for women’s rights can be viewed as removing the focus from the main

topic of the interview, emailgate. Furthermore, introducing a detailed description of Clinton’s

humanitarian deeds as famous is a way to praise her work and express sympathy or even

admiration. As a result, while the quoted material points at the sentence being heteroglossic,

I categorised the assertion as monoglossic, in which the writer positively evaluates a quoted

material and thus positions the audience to take up similar standpoints.

Chart 3 presents the ratio of monoglossic versus heteroglossic assertions.

Heteroglossic utterances were further investigated to identify heteroglossic subcategories

across the text sets.

67

To further break down Heteroglossia, an overwhelming majority of heteroglossic

utterances feature Attribute where the authorial voice remains neutral or expresses distance

from the evoked external voice. Most attributions were carried by said, reported, and

claimed.

Entertain was registered the least, with New York Magazine relying on it over four

times more than Fox News, lending certain utterances a hypothetical, uncertain value via the

words perhaps, probably, raises the possibility, and likely.

Proclaim was used twice as much by New York Magazine than by Fox News.

Examples include obviously, really, surely, naturally, and also of note. The calculations

include the formatting choices previously discussed in section 4.2.3. Engagement →

Heteroglossia → Borderline. Scare quotes were not added to the calculations as they

potentially belong to more than one subcategory. In total, scare quotes were registered 13

times across the Fox News data and 5 times in the New York Magazine data.

Fox News

New York Magazine

Monoglossic vs. Heteroglossic utterances

Monoglossia Heteroglossia

Chart 3. Monoglossic vs. Heteroglossic Utterances

68

Disclaim shows the most balanced usage of engagement resources between the two

text sets. Disclaim is also the second most frequently used category, mainly because most

details around emailgate were still up for discussion at the time when the articles were

published, resulting in the authorial voices frequently refuting the claims coming from

external voices. Chart 4 shows the frequencies of Engagement categories.

Fox News

New York Magazine

Frequencies of Engagement categories

Disclaim Proclaim Entertain Attribute

Chart 4. Frequencies of Engagement Categories

69

6.4. Frequencies of Graduation Categories

All Graduation categories are more prevalent in New York Magazine news articles than in

Fox News ones. The Reckoning category appears the most often in both sets of texts, while

Scaling and Isolation are both less frequently used. The two media outlets make near equal

use of Scaling and Isolation. Chart 5 presents these results.

6.5. Attitude: A Closer Look

Sections 6.5. to 6.7. present the way the categories of the Appraisal domains are used across

my data. To illustrate my points, I use examples from each text set. An extended list of

examples is in Appendix 3-11.

6.5.1. Attitude → Affect

Attitude → Affect was not only found to be used in the two text sets to a different extent, but

it is also used to create different feelings and dispositions toward Clinton and the email

controversy. The Fox News data made scarce use of Affect, with none of the affect values

being authorial-sourced. In most cases, they express desire as in what Clinton, a third party,

or a multiple sourced actor wants to do about the rising email controversy, e.g. Clinton has

Fox News

New York Magazine

Frequencies of Graduation categories

Reckoning Scaling Isolation

Chart 5. Frequencies of Graduation Categories

70

said she wants the department to release the emails. In one instance, the authorial voice

describes how employees at Datto, Inc., a data security company, were surprised that

Clinton’s email server was backing up to two backup servers, and how they did not want to

run into a legal problem. Affect values were found most frequently in multiple sourced

assertions.

The New York Magazine dataset shows a different distribution of affect values across

their subcategories. The authorial voice steps up as the source of a given feeling more often

(understandable, surprised), and third parties as well as multiple sourced actors show a

greater occurrence than in the Fox News data.

Apart from the authorial voice introducing their own feelings into the assertions more

often, a marked difference is in the amount of Clinton-sourced feelings that New York

Magazine presents the reader with. One part of assigning emotions to Clinton appears where

the author singles out, dissects, and presents some of the released emails (Graduation →

Isolation). The journalists interpret the content of the emails in a way that Clinton’s feelings

are foregrounded. Examples include Clinton […] got worried that everyone was hanging out

with her, Clinton liked Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, Clinton said she loves swimming,

and Clinton receives a cheerful note from her BFF Senator Mikulski. In other cases, the

author ventures to guess and describe how Clinton might be feeling in the course of the email

scandal developments. Examples include Clinton […] was being a tad too optimistic,

Clinton’s remorse, Hillary Clinton will surely be relieved to learn, and the use of the informal

internet slang FOMO (fear of missing out) in Clinton's FOMO is more understandable when

you learn that… (FOMO, 2011).

In sum, the affect values presented on New York Magazine describe Clinton in a

human context as surrounded by friends and having feelings in everyday life, and they thus

make Clinton relatable as a human being. Some of the negative affect values also attain to

this goal, as in [Clinton] got stood up and confirming [Clinton’s] worst fears. As opposed to

this presentation, Fox News removes the emotional aspect of the email controversy and does

not aim to describe Clinton from this perspective. Appendix 3 shows more examples of

Affect.

71

6.5.2. Attitude → Judgement

Attitude → Judgement is the only category in any domain that is more frequently used by

Fox News than by New York Magazine. It is notable that only 10% of all judgement values

are positive evaluations in the Fox News data. These are usually assigned to third parties such

as the Republicans (e.g. Congressional Republicans seized on Clinton’s reversal and the

Republican National Committee quickly jumped on Clinton’s remarks, where seized on and

quickly jumped on are evaluations of Social Esteem → Capacity). The majority of negative

evaluations, making up for 90% of all instances of judgement, are descriptive of Clinton and

her use of a private email server. For instance, Social Esteem → Normality describes the out-

of-the-ordinary nature of Clinton’s email usage (e.g. Clinton controversially conducted

official State Department business and Clinton’s unusual usage of a private email account),

while some are targeted at people with strong ties to Clinton (e.g. the controversial confidant

Blumenthal).

As for Judgement subcategories in the Fox News texts, instances of Social Sanction

far outnumber those of Social Esteem, which indicates that Fox News journalists often form

opinions on moral and legal implications. In Social Sanction → Veracity, Clinton is evaluated

as hedging questions and stating that she couldn’t be taken at her word, assigning to her an

untruthful quality. Social Sanction → Propriety is the most frequently used subcategory

across the Fox News data. Evaluations here often target the email release process (e.g.

document dumps, which stands for “releasing bad news or documents on a Friday afternoon

in an attempt to avoid media scrutiny” (Friday News Dump, n.d.). In other cases, Clinton is

the subject of Social Propriety evaluations (e.g. [Clinton’s use of a private email account] to

avoid public scrutiny, Clinton repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, and Clinton had handled

classified materials inappropriately). Thirdly, Social Propriety describes Clinton’s email

usage in the passive mode (e.g. whether classified information was improperly shared,

mishandled).

An interesting pattern that runs through the Fox News data is the morphological

negation of positive judgement values to construe negative judgements. Words such as

improperly, inappropriately, and unusual, are constructions where “a lexical item is used to

deny the truth of an expression” (Hamawand, 2009, p. 1). In this way, these words create

72

effects similar to Engagement → Disclaim in that they introduce an alternative, expected

course of events (proper, appropriate, usual), which are then proven to not hold.

Judgement values were less frequently used by New York Magazine. In that set of

texts, positive judgement values were registered 30% of the time, evaluating Clinton’s

campaign team which quickly challenged the story that a criminal investigation against

Clinton was under preparation (Social Esteem → Capacity), and Republicans who quickly

responded to the news that at least four Clinton emails contained classified information

(Social Esteem → Capacity).

The 70% negative judgement values evaluate people around Clinton (e.g.

controversial aide Sidney Blumenthal, Social Esteem → Normality), the representation of

the scandal in the media (e.g. In yet another Emailgate update that sounds shady but proves

nothing, Social Sanction → Veracity), and the release process of the emails (e.g. Textbook

Case of ‘Holiday News Dump’, Social Sanction → Propriety).

Judgement evaluations of Clinton include her Beijing speech (Clinton famously said,

positive evaluation, Social Esteem → Normality), and the Quinnipiac poll results that are

words coming from external voices (“liar” and “dishonest,” negative evaluation, Social

Sanction → Veracity).

In sum, Fox News texts rely on more Judgement than New York Magazine ones. Fox

News assigns negative evaluations of Veracity and Propriety to Clinton the most, while New

York Magazine evaluates negatively the representation of the scandal in the media more

often. Appendix 4 shows more examples of Judgement.

6.5.3. Attitude → Appreciation

Attitude → Appreciation is also used in a different manner by Fox News and New York

Magazine. In the Fox News data, 70% of all instances of Appreciation are negative. There

are zero occurrences of Reaction, the emotional response to things or performances.

Composition, the balance and complexity of things, is the most frequently occurring

Appreciation subcategory in the Fox News data. It mostly evaluates the contents of Clinton’s

email server via words such as detailed, sensitive, classified, and upgraded. Few adjectives

73

show Valuation, where the authorial voice assesses the value of a thing (insufficient evidence,

an awkward time for Clinton, and Clinton’s ill-fated 2008 campaign).

Appreciation is not only used more frequently by New York Magazine, but the

distribution of its subcategories is also highly different from that of Fox News. In the New

York Magazine data, 37% of all Appreciation values are negative. The data show the most

reliance on Reaction. While some of these are descriptive of Clinton (e.g. a flattering feature

on Clinton and her fun side), the majority evaluate the email content (e.g. [stories that say]

nice things about [Clinton], fun tidbits, bureaucratic boringness, boring administrative

emails, a cheerful note, “fit n sparkly” new content, thrilling update, and less than

remarkable update). Some of these seem positive evaluations at face value (fun, thrilling),

but when placed in the context of the details that they are used to describe (e.g. Clinton’s

daily errands, her yoga schedule, and her daughter’s wedding plans), they create the

impression of sarcastic descriptions of an overblown investigation that sheds light on

Clinton’s personal matters - uninteresting to the public. Composition values (e.g. secure

network, sensitive emails, technical, and opaque) occur the least in the New York Magazine

texts. Assessments of Valuation occur the second most often, and they mostly describe

Clinton’s performance (e.g. a rare interview, [Clinton’s] last big television appearance,

Clinton’s pointed criticism of China’s policy toward women, and Clinton rounded off her

summer in the best way possible: by giving back).

To sum up, Appreciation in Fox News is represented by Composition the most,

evaluating Clinton’s email server by questioning the confidentiality level of the email

contents. New York Magazine, on the other hand, relies the most on Reaction, with the

authors evaluating Clinton’s media presence positively and describing the email contents as

carrying minute, personal, uninteresting details on Clinton’s everyday life. Appendix 5 shows

more examples of Appreciation.

6.6. Engagement: A Closer Look

In section 6.3., I provided an overview of how mono- and heteroglossic utterances are

distributed across the Fox News and the New York Magazine data. In this section, I detail

occurrences of heteroglossic assertions in its four categories Attribute, Entertain, Proclaim,

and Disclaim.

74

6.6.1. Engagement → Attribute

The majority of heteroglossic utterances in both text sets take place when an utterance is

attributed to an external voice. While the majority of attributions occur by way of

acknowledging other positions (Attribute → Acknowledge), of more interest is distancing,

where the journalist introduces an external voice to the text and disaligns with its proposition.

In the Fox News data, 91% of Attribute → Distance was registered as Clinton-

sourced, i.e. the journalist reports on what she has said and expresses disalignment with the

proposition. Examples include [Clinton] went on to reiterate her claim that her use of email

was “fully above board and allowed by the State Department…”, She also claims that she

never sent or received emails marked classified, Clinton insists the information was not

classified at the time…, and Clinton has maintained that she turned over all relevant federal

records before deleting her emails off her sever… (Maintain, n.d.).

Attribute → Distance is infrequent in the New York Magazine data. The authorial

voice distances itself from a Clinton statement on one occasion (Clinton has insisted that she

never sent or received classified information over her private email account). Distance in the

direction of third parties is more common (e.g. General I. Charles McCullough III had

claimed that two emails sent from Clinton’s private account contained top-secret

information…).

In summation, the writers of both datasets rely heavily on attributing propositions

through Acknowledge, which is a neutral, or at least not explicitly side-taking means of

introducing alternative positions to the texts. When the writers introduce other voices and

express disalignment with them, Fox News journalists more often distance themselves from

what Clinton has said, while New York Magazine journalists do so from what a third party

has stated. Appendix 6 shows more examples of Attribute.

6.6.2. Engagement → Entertain

Instances of Entertain, when the authorial voice selects one voice or position and attaches

high probability to it, are four times less prevalent in the Fox News data than in the New

York Magazine one. Fox News often uses probability markers (perhaps, assumption) to

describe data security concerns around emailgate (e.g. Only [Clinton] and perhaps a small

75

circle of advisers know the content of the discarded communications, and the intelligence

agencies are operating on the assumption there are more copies of the Clinton emails out

there). Evidentiality markers (apparently, suggests), which stress that Clinton failed to turn

over all of her work-related emails to the authorities, are also frequent (e.g. State Dept.

receives Clinton email chain apparently not included in pages turned over, and at least one

email suggests she directed a subordinate to work around the rules).

New York Magazine uses over three times as many probability markers as Fox News.

In these instances, the writer surmises that some groupings of people are interested in

Clinton’s everyday matters and wish criminal evidence against Clinton to emerge from the

email chains. Examples include probably, presumably, and possibility in the following

sentences. Clinton is scheduled to testify in front of the House Select Committee on Benghazi

on October 22 — a date conservatives are probably looking forward to. Those hoping to find

a smoking gun will probably have to wait for next month's dispatch. …presumably the hunt

for Clinton's yoga schedules continues. This raises the possibility that someday the public

will be able to learn all about her yoga schedules and Chelsea's wedding-planning process.

A lower number of words show evidentiality (e.g. ostensibly personal emails), and

even less express obligation (e.g. Independent experts have suggested that actual charges

against Clinton are highly unlikely, as publicly available evidence has to indicate that she

broke any laws).

When using Entertainment, New York Magazine frequently addresses its presumed

audience directly and in a colloquial way (e.g. despite what you’re likely to hear in the coming

year, and Cliffhanger: You’ll have to read the next batch of emails to find out whether Hillary

and Huma ever figured out how to use the fax machine.). This, along with previously

exemplified acronyms and Internet slang words (BFF, FOMO), add a casual, non-formal tone

to the New York Magazine articles.

In sum, the use of Entertain in the two text sets is directed at different themes that

comprise Clinton’s email scandal. Fox News journalists take guesses at how Clinton’s

unsecured email communications exposed confidential information and thus put the United

States in jeopardy. They also emphasise with markers of evidentiality that Clinton deleted

half of her communications without turning them over to the Sate Department. New York

76

Magazine writers, on the other hand, entertain other voices in the email controversy. They

bring in voices of people who aim to find incriminating evidence in the Clinton emails.

Entertaining these with probability markers is a way to mitigate the accusatory tone that the

writers use when describing these groups of people. Appendix 7 shows more examples of

Entertain.

6.6.3. Engagement → Proclaim

Proclaim, when the author presents one external voice as highly warrantable and dismisses

the rest, occurred 50% less in the Fox News data than in the New York Magazine texts. As

for the Proclaim subcategories, Proclaim → Concur, which expresses explicit standing with

that one external position, was registered zero times in the Fox News texts. Proclaim →

Endorse occurs frequently and describes what the Clinton emails showed or revealed about

the presidential candidate, her use of emails, and her personal matters. Proclaim →

Pronounce appeared once lexically in the Fox News texts, carried by really in the sentence

Republican critics have demanded to know if any of those emails were really work-related

emails that should have been turned over to the State Department…

Formatting conventions were also assigned to the Pronounce subcategory. In the Fox

News data, formatting choices are used to boost the credibility of a given utterance, as

exemplified by the dash in the following sentence. However, the inspectors general wrote in

a subsequent memo last week that “several” of Clinton’s emails contained classified

intelligence information -- and at least one of them was made public. Other formatting

choices that attain the same goal include words in all caps followed by a colon, as in

EXCLUSIVE: Hillary Clinton’s emails on her unsecured, homebrew server contained

intelligence from the U.S. government’s most secretive and highly classified programs, and

Official: Some Clinton emails ‘too damaging’ to release. These Fox News pronouncements

invariably reinforce the incriminating load of the journalists’ utterances.

In the New York Magazine texts, all of the three Proclaim subcategories occur with

a higher frequency than in the Fox News data. There, instances of Proclaim → Concur are

carried by undoubtedly, clearly, surely, and obviously. Some of these are directed at groups

of people who are presumably interested in finding incriminating evidence against Clinton

(e.g. While there are undoubtedly teams of people scouring the documents for information

77

that will torpedo Clinton's 2016 bid, and many — especially those critical of Hillary Clinton's

use of a personal email account during her tenure at the State Department — are sure to

interpret the discovery of these emails as a sign that there may be more work-related emails

Clinton failed to make available to the public). Often, words of Concur reinforce the casual,

non-serious tone in the description of the email releases and contents (e.g. Clearly, being

secretary of State has its perks, such as directing underlings to track down that rad rug you

saw during your trip to China, and Hillary Clinton will surely be relieved to learn that the

FBI has recovered the 60,000 emails she carelessly deleted.). On one occasion, the authorial

voice shows giddiness to be a natural part of Republican conduct by saying Naturally,

Republicans were giddy about Clinton's concession.

Similarly to its use on Fox News, Proclaim → Endorse occurs most often around

emails that show or reveal details about Clinton, her work as secretary of state, and personal

matters.

While Proclaim → Pronounce was registered on one word in the Fox News data, it

occurred lexically nine times in New York Magazine, making the authorial presence more

emphasised throughout the New York Magazine articles. Examples include especially, the

helping verb did, and also of note. For example, the authorial voice of New York Magazine

made a statement about Clinton’s October Benghazi hearing, adding that it is a date

conservatives are probably looking forward to given the slow and steady stream of Clinton

email news from the past few months, especially since none of the news has done anything to

sink her campaign yet. Also, when news broke that Clinton’s email server was backing up to

two backup servers, and, as a result, retrieving her previously deleted email chains became a

possibility, a New York Magazine journalist wrote It’s also worth noting that this

information comes to us via a GOP [=Republican] senator a day after Clinton released an

ad attacking congressional Republicans. In this instance, the authorial voice openly refutes

a claim which came from the Republicans and stresses its lack of credibility via It’s also

worth noting that.

The use of formatting conventions to advance the author’s own stand with an issue,

also assigned to Proclaim → Pronounce, was registered almost five times more across New

York Magazine texts than in Fox News ones. Standout examples include the use of

78

parentheses in But [Clinton’s] email scandal worsened again on Tuesday (with some help

from Republicans). Another example is the em dash in the last batch — which offered yet

another look at the less than exciting conversations inspired by bureaucracy — was

published Monday as well as in an FBI investigation into the server [was set off] — an

investigation that is not targeting Clinton. Nominating information as highly credible by

using the colon and adding Attitude → Appreciation also occurred frequently. Examples

include Report: Clinton Never Sent Classified Information From Her Private Email Account,

and Bonus content: She expresses sincere surprise that a State Department employee is using

his personal email account, where bonus expresses positive appreciation. These inserts of

commentary nature stress the insignificance of the Clinton email contents, the existence of

people hoping to see Clinton prosecuted, and that Clinton did not break the law by using a

personal email server. Appendix 8 shows more examples of Proclaim.

6.6.4. Engagement → Disclaim

Fox News and New York Magazine data show balance in the amount of Engagement →

Disclaim values that they present. Markers of disclaim, however, are targeted at different

voices in Fox News than in New York Magazine. Throughout the Fox News data, Disclaim

→ Denial and Counter are frequently used to illustrate what Clinton has claimed, thereby

signalling that an opposing statement was expected in place of what she has said. Examples

include Clinton has repeatedly denied sending or receiving any classified information on her

personal account and Clinton, the Democratic presidential frontrunner, has repeatedly

denied any wrongdoing related to her private server. These utterances express that some

might rightfully think that Clinton did send or receive classified information, and that Clinton

has committed wrongdoing. On other occasions, utterances where Clinton is said to not have

had top-secret information on her private email server are further infused with Attribute →

Distance in order for the journalist to advance his or her doubtful tone about the Clinton

statement, e.g. She also claims (Distance) that she never sent or received (Denial) emails

marked classified.

Disclaim → Denial and Counter are used differently in New York Magazine texts.

There is a marked acquitting tone in the following negated sentences. Some of the information

in Clinton's emails were classified after the fact, but it wouldn't have been a breach of

79

protocol to email them at the time. The U.S. intelligence community no longer believes that

Clinton sent messages containing top-secret information. In these cases, the authorial voice

itself argues that Clinton did not break any laws or introduces external positions via Attribute

→ Acknowledge that state that Clinton did not have classified information on her private

email server. The authorial voice also relies on Attribute → Acknowledge to introduce a

proposition that Clinton has denied, e.g. Clinton and her campaign team have argued that

the emails didn't contain classified information when sent…

In sum, Disclaim instances occur frequently across both text sets, but they are used

in different configurations to advance different perspectives on Clinton’s email scandal. Fox

News journalists mostly infuse Clinton statements with denial and often add to these

presentations their own disalignment via Attribute → Distance. New York Magazine authors

negate propositions that would otherwise incriminate Clinton if they were written in the

positive, and introduce statements which Clinton has denied via Attribute → Acknowledge.

Appendix 9 shows more examples of Disclaim.

6.7. Graduation: A Closer Look

As stated in section 6.4., Graduation categories occurred more frequently in the New York

Magazine data than in the Fox News texts. In this section, I detail how Reckoning, Scaling,

and Isolation are used by the two media outlets in their presentation of Clinton’s email

controversy. Appendix 10 shows examples of Graduation on Fox News. Appendix 11 shows

examples of Graduation on New York Magazine.

6.7.1. Graduation → Reckoning

Precise and imprecise reckonings of the email data volume, dates, space, and other

quantifiable data are used differently by the two media outlets. Fox News journalists often

up-scale the volume of email chains by imprecise reckonings, e.g. potentially hundreds of

classified emails, and public release of thousands of Clinton emails. Other wordings that

signal impreciseness include some, more, partial, enough, and just a fraction. For instance,

in the clauses there are more copies of the Clinton emails out there, and even releasing a

partial email would provide enough clues to trace back to the original, the journalist implies

that a big number of Clinton emails contain classified information, and the release of even

small parts of them could allow the identification of “special access programs” intelligence,

80

i.e. top-secret information. In the case of overly precise reckonings, e.g. The latest batch of

3,105 emails includes 275 documents upgraded to “classified”…, the precise presentation

of large numbers adds a shock value to the utterance to underscore claims that the Clinton

emails indeed have confidential information that could jeopardize the country’s security.

When reckonings are connected to time, the imprecise presentation of dates act to

elongate the email scandal, aggrandising its coverage in the media, as in Clinton has been

under fire through much of 2015 about her use of a private, unsecured email server…

As for Reckoning in the other set of texts, New York Magazine uses overly imprecise

reckonings when the journalist selects some exemplary email content and, via quantifying

these, he or she renders the examples representative of the entirety of the email chains. For

example, a release is described as containing mostly boring administrative emails — lots of

Clinton asking aides to print things for her… In another example, the author says Many of

Hillary Clinton's contributions to the email threads are limited to “Pls print” or “thx.” In

these utterances, mostly, lots of, and many highlight the representativeness of the examples

on the scale of all the emails.

Imprecise reckonings are also used to shift focus from an act to the quantities involved

in the act in, for instance, two consecutive sentences that discuss the fact that the State

Department found emails that Clinton had not turned over to the authorities. ...the Defense

Department just found a handful of emails that she didn’t turn over with the rest of her work-

related emails. The emails in question, fewer than ten of them, were sent between Clinton —

both before and shortly after she became secretary of State — and now-retired general David

Petraeus... Here, the imprecise reckonings a handful of emails and fewer than ten of them

play down the amount of emails not turned over, thereby acquitting the act of not turning

emails over by presenting them as only very few. A similar effect is advanced by the

imprecise reckoning of time shortly after she became secretary of State, a vaguely acquitting

assertion proposing that the act of not turning emails over is justifiable by how soon they

were sent or received after Clinton took position.

Time reckonings also stand out when they are unnecessarily precise, as in the

following sentence. The newest batch of Hillary Clinton emails arrived a little late (they were

supposed to be out December 31), but the State Department worked into the night and finally

81

released 3,000 pages of "fit n sparkly" new content around 2 a.m. Here, it is implied that the

email controversy – apparently aimless as it is sparkled by documents of bureaucratic

boringness, according to other New York Magazine articles – has placed undue burden on

the State Department. The journalist describes that officials had to make every endeavour on

New Year’s Eve and the week after to release 3,000 email threads, a goal that was met around

2 a.m.

Overall, reckonings are used throughout the text sets to blow up or reduce the amount

of potentially incriminating emails, to move the focus of an utterance from the described act

to quantities, and to present emailgate as long-lasting and demanding. In general, Fox News

uses reckonings to advance the seriousness of emailgate and its ramifications, whereas New

York Magazine describes the disproportionate public attention paid to emailgate as compared

to the insignificance of the contents of the emails.

6.7.2. Graduation → Scaling

Scaling marks a more explicitly evaluative description of Clinton’s email usage and the

public’s response to emailgate. Carried usually by adjectives and adverbs, Fox News

journalists tend to scale up the email controversy by way of discussing the highly unusual

private server, deep concerns about the contents, the revelation adds to the growing

questions, and an exchange in September 2010 […] showed considerable confusion over

[Clinton’s] email practices. In these instances, the authorial voice aggravates the described

objects and things by up-scaling them via highly, deep, growing, and considerable. To refer

to the scandal proper, Fox News uses up-scaled utterances including major issues and major

document dumps.

The above examples stand out especially when compared to Scaling used in the New

York Magazine data. Examples here include actual charges against Clinton are highly

unlikely, [the emails] which many hope will provide a clearer picture of Clinton's tenure,

and conservatives are probably looking forward to [the Benghazi hearings] given the slow

and steady stream of Clinton email news from the past few months. In these examples, actual,

highly, clearer, and slow and steady carry scaled meanings. In the first sentence, scaled

meanings imply a reduced likelihood of legal consequences for Clinton. The second sentence

is sourced out to conservatives, a frequently dismissed group of people throughout the New

82

York Magazine articles, as exemplified in 6.6.2. Engagement → Entertain and 6.6.3.

Engagement → Proclaim. Slow and steady scales down the effectiveness of emailgate, which

has done [nothing] to sink [Clinton’s] campaign yet.

In addition, to refer to the scandal proper, New York Magazine often relies on

wordings such as Clinton’s email saga, story, cliffhanger, inspiring a popular meme, and the

whole emailgate scandal was a distraction. The first four wordings are in play to reinforce

the scandal as belonging to the yellow press, taking away from the seriousness of the

controversy. The tabloid quality assigned to the scandal by New York Magazine writers is

reinforced by the sentence If you're hungry for more Clinton email news, get ready for next

Wednesday, when the new batch will be released to the public, where devouring emailgate

like a scandal story implicitly evaluates the controversy as overblown, exaggerated, and

sensationalised. The last example, the whole emailgate scandal was a distraction, discusses

the controversy in the past tense, implying that the talk about Clinton’s email usage

diminished and is no longer up for discussion. Because this sentence comes from 15 Fun

Tidbits From Hillary Clinton’s Emails, published 1 July 2015, this tense choice is

unmotivated in retrospect.

Repetition is a subcategory of Scaling which looks to up- or down-scale information

through the recycling of the same information. Repetition was found prevalent in Fox News

articles, especially with regard to statements about the job position and ranks of an external

actor. Presenting people’s official titles seems accusatory when used differently from the

norm (e.g. Clinton knowingly sent classified information during her tenure as America's top

diplomat on Fox News, where the usual reference to Clinton is secretary of state), or have an

undertone that justifies Clinton’s email usage (e.g. top White House staffers at the time,

including David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel, were aware that she was using a personal

email address on New York Magazine).

In one salient example, official titles are recycled in a Fox News article to up-scale

the seriousness of the assertion. The sentence is as follows. Clinton, the former first lady,

senator from New York and top diplomat now running for the Democratic presidential

nomination, announced Tuesday that she had told aides to turn over the actual server to the

Justice Department, giving in to months of demands that she relinquish the device she used

83

to store her correspondence while secretary of state. Here, the unnecessarily long listing of

Clinton’s past and present positions is used in a vaguely accusatory way to imply how much

is at stake in the email controversy.

In sum, Scaling is used by Fox News journalists to aggravate Clinton’s email

controversy and overplay the severity of her use of a private email server. New York

Magazine takes a different approach in that it expresses the ineffectiveness of the questions

around Clinton’s email usage for a lack of incriminating evidence.

6.7.3. Graduation → Isolation

Isolation is the least frequently used Graduation subcategory in both text sets. In the case of

Isolation, the authorial voice, while detailing Clinton’s emails, nominates one email as

exemplary and describes that one at length. Based on the offered description, the seriousness

of the scandal is aggravated or mitigated. Examples in the Fox News dataset include at least

one and another in the following sentences. Fox News reported Friday that at least one

Clinton email contained information identified as "HCS-O," which is the code for

intelligence from human spying. Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Reince

Priebus seized upon the news of the upgraded emails as another reason the 2016 presidential

candidate couldn't be taken at her word.” Here, the Fox News author selects one email

attribute as especially important and expresses that these features may also apply to other

emails.

In a similar vein, New York Magazine in one example describes an emailgate content

as yet another update, implying that other updates carry the same quality. In In yet another

Emailgate update that sounds shady but proves nothing…, the writer up-scales the dubious

and ineffective character of the scandal. In another example, content is isolated via only:

They’re mostly boring administrative emails — lots of Clinton asking aides to print things

for her — but 66 were retroactively classified, and the only email marked “secret” features

Clinton saying, “Wow — not good.” The approach here is the opposite of how the Fox News

sentences use Isolation. The New York Magazine journalist selects the sole email that has

been marked classified during the review of the Clinton emails, and by way of a scare quote

and Clinton’s quoted words, the writer makes the statement that the email has been marked

up as secret unnecessarily and without good reason.

84

To sum up, Fox News propagates select email details to imply that top-secret

information potentially passed through Clinton’s private email server. On the contrary, New

York Magazine isolates and presents content that discusses Clinton’s everyday office work

(e.g. printing, quick letters of response), and shows one classified email as apparently

containing top-secret information.

6.8. Implicit Meaning Making

In this section, I show analysis of evaluative meanings on the sentence level. For this

demonstration, I selected 10 Fox News and 10 New York Magazine sentences from the data

that make outstanding use of evaluative resources. I highlight in blue wordings that explicitly

express Attitude, in red those that render the utterance heteroglossic, and in green Graduation

categories. Those sentence parts are underlined where the interplay of evaluative resources

construe implicitly opinionated assertions, but a single word cannot be pinpointed as

explicitly carrying the evaluative meaning. These are implicitly evaluative propositions. In

my explanations, I focus on how the underlined sentence parts contribute to the opinionated

discussion of Clinton and her email controversy.

6.8.1. Implicit Meaning Making on Fox News

Emailgate articles on Fox News tend to use a vaguely accusatory tone where nation-wide

security risks are implied resulting from Clinton’s email usage. Fox News journalists tend to

stress the significance and seriousness of the investigations into Clinton’s email threads and

frequently point out that they possibly contain classified information, such as the

government’s closely held secrets. The journalists often describe this sensitive information

as potentially exposed to the prying eyes of foreign intelligence, as they hypothesise that

Clinton failed to encrypt her homebrew email server.

The writers also often emphasise that the email controversy has left its damaging

mark on Clinton’s past year, and, as more and more revelations come to light, Clinton’s

presidential bid may be at risk.

Another salient aspect in the Fox News articles concerns the journalists’ treatment of

authority. The writers often present Clinton as having the power to direct subordinates to

work around the rules. When external voices are introduced to a proposition, the journalists

85

tend to make mentions of the voices’ ranks and titles to lend authenticity to the utterance.

Entities such as the FBI, lawmakers, and other officials are often described as A-team, senior,

and top. This is to underscore the authenticity and trustworthiness of their announcements

about the email chains.

Table 15 below shows 10 Fox News sentences marked up for explicitly and implicitly

evaluative language. The sentences are in chronological order of publication.

EVALUATIVE LANGUAGE ON FOX NEWS

Sentence Evaluative meanings

There is no evidence Clinton used encryption to shield the emails or her personal server from foreign intelligence services or other potentially prying eyes.

no, Disclaim → Denial

other, Isolation

potentially, Entertain → Probability

prying, Judgement → Propriety

The FBI is investigating whether classified information that passed through Clinton's so-called “homebrew” server during her time as secretary of state was mishandled.

whether, Attribute → Acknowledge

scare quotes

homebrew, Judgement → Veracity

mishandled, Judgement → Propriety

The source also told Fox News an FBI “A-team” is leading the “extremely serious” investigation into Clinton's server and the focus includes a provision of the law pertaining to “gathering, transmitting or losing defense information.”

also, Reckoning

told, Attribute → Acknowledge

scare quotes

scare quotes

extremely, Scaling

quote marks, Attribute → Acknowledge

The revelation adds to the growing questions related to the Democratic presidential front-runner's unusual usage of a private email account and server while in government.

growing, Scaling

unusual, Judgement → Normality

The source familiar with the investigation said that like all major tech companies on the front lines, Datto has faced cyberattacks, another subject of great interest to the FBI in its probe of Clinton’s server.

said, Attribute → Acknowledge

all, Reckoning

major, Appreciation → Composition

another, Isolation

great, Scaling

The U.S. intelligence community has reportedly stepped away from claims that two emails in Hillary Clinton’s private email server contained top secret information, according to POLITICO.

reportedly, Attribute → Acknowledge

two, Reckoning

according to, Attribute → Acknowledge

Clinton has been under fire through much of 2015 about her use of a private, unsecured email server as secretary of state, specifically over the security of her server, and her incomplete retention of her emails.

much, Reckoning

unsecured, Appreciation → Valuation

specifically, Isolation

incomplete, Appreciation →

Composition

EXCLUSIVE: Hillary Clinton’s emails on her unsecured, homebrew server contained intelligence from the U.S. government's most secretive and highly classified programs,

formatting, Proclaim → Pronounce

unsecured, Appreciation → Valuation

homebrew, Judgement → Veracity

most, Scaling

86

according to an unclassified letter from a top inspector general to senior lawmakers.

secretive, Judgement → Veracity

highly, Scaling

classified, Valuation → Composition

according to, Attribute → Acknowledge

unclassified, Valuation → Composition

That indicates a level of classification beyond even “top secret,” the label previously given to two emails found on her server, and brings even more scrutiny to the presidential candidate’s handling of the government’s closely held secrets.

even, Disclaim → Counter

quote marks

two, Reckoning

even, Disclaim → Counter

more, Scaling

closely, Reckoning

Despite Clinton’s recent public statements about not knowing how the technology works, at least one email suggests she directed a subordinate to work around the rules.

despite, Disclaim → Counter

recent, Reckoning

not, Disclaim → Denial

at least one, Isolation

suggests, Entertain → Evidentiality

Table 15. Ten Fox News Sentences with Implicitly Evaluative Language

6.8.2. Implicit Meaning Making on New York Magazine

New York Magazine articles tend to highlight the media’s unnecessary and undue scrutiny

on emailgate. In doing so, the authors often discuss personal information found in the email

chains in detail, attending to how Clinton received sympathy emails after she fractured her

elbow and became unable to do lady things. This and the repeated mentions of Clinton’s yoga

schedules and her private thoughts on home furnishings are made prominent when the

journalists bring in external voices who say that emailgate was a distraction from the real

issues facing our country. To further this perspective, the journalists sometimes introduce

popular culture references, e.g. describing the email contents as moments that could have

been stolen from an episode of Veep, an HBO comedy series (HBO, n.d.).

New York Magazine lays focus on Hillary Clinton’s character, often presenting her

feelings, private thoughts, and everyday matters. Throughout the articles, she is also

construed as a fighter who attacks Republicans, gears up for fights, and goes on the offensive.

Against this backdrop, emailgate is presented as a sensationalised burden that has no real

substance yet annoyingly prevents Clinton from focussing on her campaign efforts.

Table 16 shows the 10 selected New York Magazine sentences marked up for

explicitly and implicitly evaluative language. The sentences are in chronological order of

their publication date.

87

EVALUATIVE LANGUAGE ON NEW YORK MAGAZINE

Sentence Evaluative meanings

Some people said the whole emailgate scandal was a distraction from the real issues facing our country, but we think they'll change their tune once they read Clinton's nickname for Senator Dianne Feinstein, and more of her private thoughts on home furnishings.

some, Reckoning


whole, Scaling

but, Disclaim → Counter

think, Attribute → Acknowledge

will, Entertain → Probability

When Clinton fractured her elbow, Senator Barbara Mikulski expressed sympathy for her inability to do lady things.

expressed, Attribute → Acknowledge

sympathy, Attitude → Affect

inability, Judgement → Capacity

In yet another Emailgate update that sounds shady but proves nothing, a lawyer for Hillary Clinton's former aide Bryan Pagliano said Wednesday that his client intends to invoke his Fifth Amendment right in response to questions from the House committee investigating the 2012 Benghazi attack.

yet, Disclaim → Counter

another, Isolation

shady, Judgement → Veracity


nothing, Disclaim → Denial, Reckoning


The FBI is still investigating, and Clinton's personal emails may be protected by public-information laws, but this raises the possibility that someday the public will be able to learn all about her yoga schedules and Chelsea's wedding-planning process.

still, Disclaim → Counter

may, Entertain → Probability


possibility, Entertain → Probability

someday, Reckoning


able, Judgement → Capacity

all, Reckoning

If Hillary Clinton hoped that saying sorry would make all of her email problems go away, she was being a tad too optimistic — especially since the Defense Department just found a handful of emails that she didn't turn over with the rest of her work-related emails.

if, Attribute → Acknowledge

hoped, Attitude → Affect

saying, Attribute → Acknowledge

sorry, Judgement → Propriety

would, Entertain → Probability

all, Reckoning

email problems, Scaling

tad too, Scaling

optimistic, Attitude → Affect

dash, Proclaim → Pronounce

especially, Proclaim → Pronounce

just, Reckoning

a handful, Reckoning

didn’t, Disclaim → Denial

the rest, Isolation

However, many — especially those critical of Hillary Clinton's use of a personal email account during her tenure at the State Department — are sure to interpret the discovery of these emails as a sign that there may be more work-related emails Clinton failed to make available to the public.

however, Disclaim → Counter

many, Reckoning

dash, Proclaim → Pronounce

especially, Proclaim → Pronounce

those, Reckoning

critical, Judgement → Normality

sure, Proclaim → Concur

interpret, Attribute → Acknowledge

these, Isolation

may, Entertain → Probability

failed, Judgement → Capacity

88

Based on the last few releases, they will mostly entail bureaucratic boringness, sharing links to stories that say nice things about the secretary of State, and other moments that could have been stolen from an episode of Veep.

last few, Isolation


mostly, Reckoning

bureaucratic boringness, Appreciation

→ Reaction

say, Attribute → Acknowledge

nice things, Appreciation → Reaction

other, Isolation

could, Entertain → Probability

From showing off her fun side on Saturday Night Live, to attacking Republicans over their Benghazi obsession, to gearing up for a potential primary fight against Joe Biden, everything Hillary Clinton has done in recent days suggests that she's ready to go on the offensive and move past the issues that plagued the first six months of her campaign.

fun side, Appreciation → Reaction

everything, → Reckoning

suggests, Entertain → Evidentiality

ready, Judgement → Capacity

first six, Reckoning

The questions surrounding Clinton’s private server haven’t taken up much oxygen in the Democratic primary race, save for inspiring a popular meme.

much, Reckoning

save for, Disclaim → Counter

popular, Appreciation → Reaction

Possibly because the details are technical and opaque, Democratic voters have, to this point, been entirely uninterested in another alleged Clinton scandal.

possibly, Entertain → Probability

technical, Appreciation → Composition

opaque, Appreciation → Composition

entirely, Scaling

uninterested, Attitude → Affect

another, Isolation

alleged, Appreciation → Valuation

Table 16. 10 New York Magazine Sentences with Implicitly Evaluative Language

Sections 6.8.1. and 6.8.2. detailed the approaches used by Fox News and New York

Magazine in their presentation of Clinton’s public image and the email scandal. Explicit and

implicit meaning making shows that Fox News approaches Clinton’s email usage in a

dismissive voice, while New York Magazine in a defensive voice. Between 22 May 2015

and 29 January 2016, these voices remained largely unchanged. This lack of change is

notable because this period saw Clinton’s email usage grow from a political scandal into a

morally and legally questioned controversy, resulting in probes and investigations. I address

this lack of change of voices in more detail in chapter 7. Discussion.

89

7. Discussion

This thesis paper aimed to answer the following research question: Is there evaluative

language in Fox News and New York Magazine news articles discussing Hillary Clinton’s

email controversy? If so, how is evaluative language expressed and how does it build media

bias?

I found that Fox News uses negative evaluative language in its coverage of Clinton’s

email scandal. The authorial voice on Fox News overplays the importance of emailgate,

presenting it as a security risk to the United States, and expresses that this is the result of

Hillary Clinton’s unusual and improper use of a homebrew private server. This evaluation is

often expressed by wordings of negative Judgement, by way of bringing sources into the

narrative that make dismissive statements about Clinton’s email usage, showing disbelief of

Clinton’s own claims, up-scaling the amount of emails involved in the security breach, and

detailing email threads that contained potentially top-secret information.

I found that New York Magazine, on the other hand, uses negative evaluative

language to report on the dismissive opinions surrounding Clinton’s email scandal. The

authorial voice on New York Magazine underplays the relevance of the email controversy,

showing that it is a sensationalised and overblown matter in the media, and that it takes away

attention from the important issues that the United States face. New York Magazine uses

values of positive Affect and Appreciation to present Clinton as a relatable person dealing

with everyday matters and having everyday feelings, and details email correspondences that

underscore how her emails contain personal information irrelevant to the public. Moreover,

New York Magazine journalists often name the Republicans as a group of people who wish

to find incriminating evidence against Clinton in the email threads, and stress that emailgate

was a futile attempt to undermine Clinton’s presidential bid.

These types of evaluations lead to a biased representation of Clinton and her email

controversy both on Fox News and on New York Magazine. Fox News is biased against

Clinton as it overplays the importance and gravity of her email practices, often expressing

concerns over how Clinton put the nation at risk. The negative disposition of Fox News

journalists toward Clinton results also from the largely dismissive tone of their language.

New York Magazine is biased toward Clinton as it underplays emailgate, stressing that it is

90

largely overblown in other media only to hinder her run for presidency. New York Magazine

journalists discuss Clinton’s email usage in a defending and permissive way and dismiss the

media’s exaggerated focus on it.

These two divergent ways of presenting emailgate are notable especially because the

controversy did not only create a public divide, but it has also grown to operate on more

levels than a political scandal. First and foremost, Clinton as a public figure has been from

the beginning deeply embedded in the controversy. Thus, voices of approval and disapproval

may be grounded in whether the given journalist has an endorsing or opposing attitude toward

Clinton, including the sum of her public image and her political persona (ideology). Second,

opinions on emailgate have also been positioned along morality: questions have been raised

about how ethical it is from a United States official to store sensitive information on a private

email server instead of a governmental one. A third layer to the scandal pertains to legal

concerns: once the FBI’s involvement in emailgate was revealed in July 2015, the filing of

criminal charges against Clinton became a possibility.

Despite the perspectives of morality and legality gaining relevance later in the

scandal, the narratives on Fox News and New York Magazine have remained largely

unaffected between 22 May 2015 (the publication date of the first article under investigation)

and 29 January 2016 (the publication date of the last article under investigation). Fox News

advances a dismissing voice and New York Magazine a defending or permissive voice when

discussing Clinton’s email practices. The two media outlets show little resilience in

reassessing their narratives of emailgate throughout the development of the scandal. As

Figure 16 shows, the voices around emailgate in the two media outlets are grounded in

Clinton’s political stand and public image. The arising legal concerns from May 2015 to

January 2016 did little to affect how the journalists described the email scandal later.

91

The persistent use of the same narrative over time applies in particular to New York

Magazine. Following Clinton’s controversial remarks about wiping her server, the

intelligence community’s finding of several dozen emails containing intelligence beyond top-

secret, and the FBI’s launching of its own investigation into Clinton’s email usage, the last

article in the New York Magazine data still described emailgate as another alleged Clinton

scandal that Democratic voters have been entirely uninterested in.

To compare the two media outlets, I found New York Magazine to be more biased

than Fox News in its presentation of the email controversy. First, New York Magazine news

articles contain more evaluative language from a metric standpoint. New York Magazine

journalists tend to infuse their subjective viewpoints into their texts in a more salient way.

These viewpoints defend Clinton’s email usage, and, because of the growing moral and legal

implications around the issue, a gradually more defensive tone was necessary for the New

York Magazine narrative to remain unchanged.

Despite lesser amounts of evaluative language in its news articles, Fox News also

persistently uses one approach to interpret emailgate developments. For example, when the

intelligence community announced that two Clinton emails were found to not have contained

classified information after a flawed first review, Fox News reported Intelligence officials

DEFENSIVE VOICE

DISMISSIVE VOICE

personality (political ideology)

morality

legality

Figure 16. Voices and Issues at Stake in Clinton's Email Controversy

92

reportedly walk back Clinton ‘top secret’ email claims, implicitly suggesting that the emails

could in fact contain top-secret communication, and it might only be the latest assessment

that claims otherwise.

Another marked difference between the two media outlets is in their expression of

partisan bias. In the investigated data, Fox News seldom referred to Democrats or

Republicans. Instances where this happened include positive evaluations of the Republican

Party’s agile response to emailgate developments (Judgement → Capacity). While New York

Magazine sometimes evaluates the Republican Party similarly, it makes its political stand

very explicit throughout the news articles. New York Magazine refers to giddy Republicans

and blames them for aggrandising emailgate. The journalists also express their alignment

with the Democrats when they stress the Democrats’ lack of interest in the overblown scandal

made up of uninteresting details about Clinton’s yoga schedule that have surfaced. The media

outlet also tends to address its audience directly with the frequent use of you. The

combination of explicit partisan references and the directly addressed audience positions

New York Magazine readers and prompts them to take stands similar to those of the

journalists. When, for example, a New York Magazine journalist describes emailgate as a

shallow creation of the yellow press and goes on to say that If you're hungry for more Clinton

email news, get ready for next Wednesday…, the journalist positions his or her audience to

subscribe to the writer’s ideas and, ideally, dismiss the sensationalised scandal.

In sum, I found that Fox News exhibits negative bias toward Clinton. Also, New York

Magazine shows positive bias toward Clinton and makes its Democratic partisan bias

explicit, thereby positioning its readership to also stand with the Democrats in the email

controversy.

For future research, it is important to note that further refinements can be made to the

Appraisal framework analysis of emailgate news articles. Each Appraisal framework

category could be further broken down into finer subcategories in order to account

quantitatively for who or what exactly is targeted in each subcategory. Measuring who of

what political affiliation is evoked in heteroglossic utterances, and how those assertions are

presented by the authorial voice is one consideration. This could shed light on how frequently

Republican and Democratic voices are introduced to the texts and whether the journalists

93

align or disalign with these voices. As Tawnya Adkins-Covert (2007) points out, “one of the

most common methods for measuring bias emphasizes who is quoted/given voice in news

coverage of social and political issues” (Covert & Wasburn, 2007, p. 691). The question

arises as to what the ratio is among heteroglossic propositions uttered by Clinton, a

Democratic third party, or a Republican third party. To what extent do writers introduce these

voices with dismissal (Distance, Disclaim), permission, or endorsement (Acknowledge,

Endorse, Entertain)? To answer these questions, the dataset must be extended to include all

sentences of the 2x14 emailgate news articles rather than investigating the ones with

references to Clinton only. In addition, background checks of the political affiliations of these

people are also necessary to find out what their political stand is. In many cases, both Fox

News and New York Magazine report on what the Republican chairman has said in relation

to emailgate. However, the political affiliations of most of the other actors are not explicitly

stated in the articles.

Assessing the importance of background information also requires further

investigation. The Fox News data at one point remind the readers of Clinton’s partnership at

a law firm in the 1980s, and the journalist refers to her as one of “three amigos.” New York

Magazine, on the other hand, recalls how the Mitchell-Clinton interview took place a day

before the 20th anniversary of Hillary Clinton’s U.N. speech in Beijing and goes on to

elaborate on how she famously stepped up for women’s rights. These two instances introduce

background information directly irrelevant to emailgate. What other background information

of such nature is included in the two media outlets’ news articles? What purpose do they

serve, and how do they help the authorial voice shape Clinton’s image through evaluative

resources? This again requires world knowledge and the scrutiny of background information.

Lastly, scare quotes also require further analysis. A large-scale investigation of

journalistic corpora including scare quotes could help categorise this ambiguous formatting

choice in the Appraisal framework to see what effect(s) the authorial voice attempts to make,

and to what extent these equivocal scare quotes endanger solidarity between the writer and

the reader.

94

8. Conclusion

In sum, this thesis looked at how political journalists use language to advance their own

opinions in news stories, thereby creating bias.

I first introduced Hillary Clinton’s email controversy, then Martin and White’s (2005)

Appraisal framework, an analytical framework used to identify evaluative language. Second,

I introduced two media outlets, Fox News and New York Magazine, whose news articles on

emailgate I investigated. Next, I detailed the Appraisal framework adjusted for the data under

investigation. By analyzing news article texts in the framework, I found that Fox News uses

dismissive language in its description of Clinton’s email usage, showing its negative bias

toward Clinton. I also found that New York Magazine defends Clinton’s email usage in its

language and shows positive bias toward Clinton and negative bias toward Republicans.

These findings shed light on the responsibility of political journalists in presenting

news stories through evaluative language and, by those means, creating bias and shaping how

stories across the political landscape reach the public. As Leon V. Sigal (1973) remarks,

“news is not what happens but what someone says has happened or will happen” (Sigal, 1973,

p. 15). Through evaluative language, political journalists load into their news articles their

own evaluations of factual news information. This results in a slanted retelling of events.

This, in return, can help journalists win over large audiences to support their cases. Winning

or losing support of one’s audience is especially significant during political election periods,

when politicians are constantly tested in public. The fact that Hillary Clinton’s chances of

winning in the 2016 presidential elections of delegate counts have lessened in the spring of

2016 is a result of a number of factors. The presentation of her email controversy in the press

is one of these factors, especially because emailgate has continued to be highly publicised

and divisive throughout 2016 so far.

Another important finding of the research is the identification of linguistic resources

that are used to defend public figures and their deeds in front of a wide audience. This can be

relevant in the field of public reputation work. Using these linguistic resources can help

protect, for instance, a client who is caught up in controversies and negative publicity.

Because Clinton’s email controversy has political, moral and legal repercussions which,

throughout the Fox News and the New York Magazine articles, have been infused with

95

dismissing and defending tones, my research uncovers evaluative language that can be used

to protect and attack public figures from political, moral, and legal perspectives. In this way,

this thesis showed what types of evaluative language can be useful when a public figure faces

challenges in the press.

Furthermore, this thesis is interesting with respect to crisis communication work by

showing how language can be adjusted to aggravate or mitigate issues. Linguistic resources

of aggravation and mitigation can make or break scandals. The evaluative language identified

in this thesis also helps over- or underplay key actors’ and entities’ involvement and

responsibilities in these controversies.

Lastly, my research revealed that formatting conventions – previously outside the

scope of the Appraisal framework – carry evaluative potential beyond the word level. This

thesis showed instances where the use of quote marks, parentheses, and dashes can be used

to infuse written language with the writer’s opinions in a subtle and often ambiguous way.

xiii

References

Primary Sources

Ed Henry. (2015). FBI probe of Hillary Clinton emails expands to second tech

company. Retrieved January 21, 2016, from

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/10/07/fbi-probe-hillary-clinton-emails-expands-to-

second-tech-company.html

FoxNews.com. (2015). Blumenthal gave diplomatic advice to Hillary Clinton as early

as 2009, emails show. Retrieved January 21, 2016, from

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/07/01/state-department-releases-3000-pages-

clinton-emails.html

FoxNews.com. (2015). Clinton “sorry” for email confusion, stops short of apology

for actions. Retrieved January 21, 2016, from

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/09/04/clinton-says-sorry-for-confusion-over-

emails-but-wont-apologize-for-usage.html

FoxNews.com. (2015). Clinton facing new calls to turn over server after IGs request

probe. Retrieved January 21, 2016, from

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/07/24/state-department-intelligence-watchdogs-

call-for-criminal-probe-clinton-emails.html

FoxNews.com. (2015). FBI investigating security of Hillary Clinton’s private email

server. Retrieved January 21, 2016, from http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/08/05/fbi-

investigating-security-hillary-clinton-private-email-server.html

FoxNews.com. (2015). FBI reportedly recovers deleted emails from Clinton server.

Retrieved January 21, 2016, from http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/09/22/fbi-

reportedly-recovered-deleted-emails-from-clinton-server.html

FoxNews.com. (2015). Former Clinton aide who helped set up server to plead Fifth

Amendment to avoid subpoena. Retrieved January 21, 2016, from

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/09/03/former-clinton-aide-who-helped-set-up-

server-to-plead-fifth-amendment-to-avoid.html

xiv

FoxNews.com. (2015). Intelligence officials reportedly walk back Clinton “top

secret” email claims. Retrieved January 21, 2016, from

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/11/06/intelligence-officials-reportedly-walk-back-

clinton-top-secret-email-claims.html

FoxNews.com. (2015). Internal emails show Clinton got detailed intel on “planned”

Benghazi hit. Retrieved January 21, 2016, from

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/05/22/1st-batch-clinton-emails-to-be-released-

around-1230-pm.html

FoxNews.com. (2016). State Department releases over 3,000 Clinton emails on New

Year’s Eve. Retrieved January 21, 2016, from

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/01/01/state-department-releases-over-3000-clinton-

emails-on-new-years-eve.html

FoxNews.com. (2015). State Dept. accused of stiff-arming intel watchdog over

Hillary emails. Retrieved January 21, 2016, from

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/08/11/fbi-has-hillary-clinton-emails-from-home-

server-official-says.html

FoxNews.com. (2015). State Dept. receives Clinton email chain apparently not

included in pages turned over. Retrieved January 21, 2016, from

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/09/25/source-state-dept-finds-more-clinton-emails-

relating-to-libya-benghazi.html

Fuller, J. (2015). Clinton on Emails: “I Am Sorry That This Has Been Confusing to

People.” Retrieved January 21, 2016, from

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/09/clinton-sorry-email-debate-has-been-

confusing.html

Fuller, J. (2015). Defense Department Finds More Clinton Emails. Retrieved January

21, 2016, from http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/09/defense-department-finds-

more-clinton-emails.html

xv

Fuller, J. (2016). New Report Says Some Emails Sent on Clinton’s Server Were

Super Top Secret. Retrieved January 21, 2016, from

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/01/emails-sent-on-clintons-server-were-top-

secret.html

Fuller, J. (2015). State Department Releases Hillary’s Benghazi Emails in Textbook

Case of “Holiday News Dump.” Retrieved January 21, 2016, from

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/05/state-department-releases-benghazi-

emails.html

Hartmann, M. (2015). Aide Who Set Up Clinton’s Email Server Will Plead the Fifth.

Retrieved January 21, 2016, from http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/09/clinton-

aide-plead-fifth.html

Hartmann, M. (2015). Clinton Gives In, Turns Over Email Server to Justice

Department. Retrieved January 21, 2016, from

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/08/clinton-gives-email-server-to-justice-

department.html

Hartmann, M. (2015). If Clinton Has a Backup of Her Emails, the FBI Would Like to

See It. Retrieved January 21, 2016, from

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/08/clinton-has-email-backup-fbi-wants-to-see-

it.html

Hartmann, M. (2015). 15 Fun Tidbits From Hillary Clinton’s Emails. Retrieved

January 21, 2016, from http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/07/juiciest-revelations-

from-hillarys-emails.html

Hartmann, M. (2015). Hillary Is Done Playing Defense, But Emailgate Won’t Go

Away. Retrieved January 21, 2016, from

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/10/hillary-wants-to-move-on-but-emailgate-

remains.html

xvi

Hartmann, M. (2015). The FBI Managed to Recover Hillary Clinton’s Personal

Emails. Retrieved January 21, 2016, from

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/09/fbi-recovered-hillarys-personal-emails.html

Hartmann, M., & Fuller, J. (2015). Justice Department Asked to Investigate Hillary’s


http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/07/criminal-probe-into-hillarys-emails-

requested.html

Herridge, C., & Browne, P. K. (2016). Inspector General: Clinton emails had intel

from most secretive, classified programs. Retrieved January 21, 2016, from

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/01/19/inspector-general-clinton-emails-had-intel-

from-most-secretive-classified-programs.html

Herridge, C., & Browne, P. K. (2016). Official: Some Clinton emails “too damaging”

to release. Retrieved January 30, 2016, from

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/01/30/official-some-clinton-emails-too-damaging-

to-release.html

Landsbaum, C. (2016). Hillary Clinton Reacts to Benghazi in Newest Batch of


http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/01/hillary-clinton-reacts-to-benghazi-in-new-

emails.html

Levitz, E. (2015). Report: Clinton Never Sent Classified Information From Her

Private Email Account. Retrieved January 21, 2016, from

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/11/clintons-email-scandal-may-finally-be-

over.html

Levitz, E. (2016). The State Department Confirms Clinton’s Email Server Hosted

“Top Secret” Information. Retrieved January 30, 2016, from

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/01/22-clinton-emails-deemed-top-secret.html

xvii

Secondary Sources

About the Select Committee | Select Committee on Benghazi. (n.d.). Retrieved

January 10, 2016, from https://benghazi.house.gov/about

Alcindor, Y. (2016). Bernie Sanders to Reassess Candidacy After Tuesday’s Vote,

but He'll Stay in Race. Retrieved May 17, 2016, from

http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/04/26/bernie-sanders-to-reassess-

candidacy-after-tuesdays-vote-but-hell-stay-in-race/

Alexa.com. (2016a). How popular is foxnews.com? Alexa Traffic Ranks. Retrieved

March 20, 2016, from http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/foxnews.com

Alexa.com. (2016b). How popular is nymag.com? Alexa Traffic Ranks. Retrieved

March 20, 2016, from http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/nymag.com

Alterman, E. (2003). What Liberal Media? Retrieved January 10, 2016, from

http://www.thenation.com/article/what-liberal-media/

Andrews, W., Bennett, K., & Parlapiano, A. (2016). 2016 Delegate Count and

Primary Results. Retrieved May 18, 2016, from

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/us/elections/primary-calendar-and-

results.html?_r=0

Bednarek, M. (2006). Evaluation in media discourse: Analysis of a newspaper

corpus. London: Continuum.

Biber, D., & Conrad, S. (2009). Register, genre, and style. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

CBS News. (2015). Face the Nation Transcripts September 20: Clinton and Paul.

Retrieved January 10, 2016, from http://www.cbsnews.com/news/face-the-nation-

transcripts-september-20-clinton-and-paul/

Chait, J. (2015). Why Hillary Clinton Is Probably Going to Win the 2016 Election.

Retrieved November 6, 2015, from http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/04/why-

hillary-clinton-is-probably-going-to-win.html

xviii

Clinton, H. [Hillary Clinton]. (2015, April 12). Getting Started | Hillary Clinton

[Video file]. Retrieved April 1, 2016 from

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uY7gLZDmn4

Covert, T. A., & Wasburn, P. C. (2007). Measuring Media Bias: A Content Analysis

of Time and Newsweek Coverage of Domestic Social Issues, 1975-2000. Social Science Q

Social Science Quarterly, 88(3), 690-706. doi:10.1111/j.1540-6237.2007.00478.x

Covert, T. A., & Wasburn, P. C. (2009). Media bias?: A comparative study of Time,

Newsweek, the National review, and the progressive coverage of domestic social issues,

1975-2000. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books

Davidson, M. (2005). Right, wrong, and risky: A dictionary of today's American

English usage. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Dilanian, K. (2016). Hillary Clinton Emails Held Info Beyond Top Secret: IG.

Retrieved January 29, 2016, from http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/hillary-clinton-

emails-contained-info-above-top-secret-ig-n499886

Dowd, M. (2016). Hillary Is Not Sorry. Retrieved April 21, 2016, from

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/opinion/sunday/hillary-is-not-sorry.html

Economou, D. (2009). Photos in the news: Appraisal analysis of visual semiosis and

verbal-visual intersemiosis. Sydney: University of Sydney.

FAQs on AP's Vote-Counting Network. (2016). Retrieved April 1, 2016, from

http://ap.org/products-services/elections/FAQs

Ferrechio, S. (2015). Court orders Clinton email release every 30 days. Retrieved

January 10, 2016, from http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/court-orders-hillary-clinton-

email-release-every-30-days/article/2565103

Fishel, J. (2016). State Department Halts Its Clinton Email Investigation, Defers to

FBI. Retrieved April 21, 2016, from http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/state-department-halts-

clinton-email-investigation-defers-fbi/story?id=38083129

xix

FOMO. (2011). Macmillan Dictionary. In Macmillan Dictionary. Retrieved February

1, 2016, from http://www.macmillandictionary.com/buzzword/entries/fomo.html

Fox News. (2016). Retrieved January 10, 2016, from http://www.foxnews.com/

FoxNews.com. (2016). Clinton email about non-secure fax re-ignites concerns about

her sidestepping security measures. Retrieved January 21, 2016, from

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/01/09/clinton-email-about-non-secure-fax-re-

ignites-concerns-about-her-sidestepping-security-measures.html

Friday News Dump. (n.d.). Taegan Goddard's Political Dictionary. In Taegan

Goddard's Political Dictionary. Retrieved February 1, 2016, from

http://politicaldictionary.com/words/friday-news-dump/

Geis, M. L. (1987). The language of politics. New York: Springer-Verlag.

Gerstein, J. (2015). Source: Key Clinton emails did not contain highly classified

secrets. Retrieved January 10, 2016, from http://www.politico.com/story/2015/11/hillary-

clinton-email-no-highly-classified-215599

Gibson, M. (n.d.). Writing Effective Headlines. Retrieved March 20, 2016, from

http://web.ku.edu/~edit/heads.html

Goddard, C. (2008). Natural Semantic Metalanguage: The state of the art. In Cross-

Linguistic Semantics Studies. doi:10.1075/slcs.102.05god

Hamawand, Z. (2009). The semantics of English negative prefixes. London: Equinox

Publishing.

HBO. (n.d.). HBO: Veep: About. Retrieved January 21, 2016, from

http://www.hbo.com/veep/about/index.html

Helderman, S. R. (2015). State Department misses court-ordered goal on Clinton

email release. Retrieved January 21, 2016, from

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/12/31/state-department-

misses-court-ordered-goal-on-clinton-email-release/

xx

Henshall, P., & Ingram, D. (2008). Chapter 8: Quotes. Retrieved March 20, 2016,

from http://www.thenewsmanual.net/Manuals Volume 1/volume1_08.htm

Hill, B. (2014). Single Quotation Marks And Their Uses | The Editor’s Blog.

Retrieved March 20, 2016, from http://theeditorsblog.net/2011/05/07/single-quotation-

marks-a-readers-question/

Hillary Clinton. Most recent articles. (2016). Retrieved January 7, 2016, from

http://nymag.com/tags/hillary-clinton/12/

Hommerberg, C., & Don, A. C. (2015). Appraisal and the language of wine

appreciation : a critical discussion of the potential of the Appraisal framework as a tool to

analyse specialised genres. Functions of Language, 2(22), 1–41.

http://doi.org/10.1075/fol.22.2.01hom

Kiely, E. (2015). Clinton’s Email Brag. Retrieved January 10, 2016, from

http://www.factcheck.org/2015/08/clintons-email-brag/

Landsbaum, C. (2016). Hillary Clinton Reacts to Benghazi in Newest Batch of


http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/01/hillary-clinton-reacts-to-benghazi-in-new-

emails.html

Leopold, J. (2016). There Are 1,800 Reasons Why the Controversy Over Hillary

Clinton’s Emails Is Far From Over. Retrieved March 20, 2016, from

https://news.vice.com/article/why-the-controversy-over-hillary-clinton-emails-is-not-over

Maintain. (n.d.). Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary. In Oxford Advanced

Learner's Dictionary. Retrieved February 1, 2016, from

http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/maintain?q=maintain

Malloy, T., Associates, R., & Relations, P. (2016). BIDEN RUNS BETTER THAN

CLINTON AGAINST TOP REPUBLICANS , QUINNIPIAC UNIVERSITY NATIONAL

POLL FINDS; TRUMP GOP LEAD GROWS AS CLINTON DEM LEAD SHRINKS.

Martin, J., & White, P.R.R. (2005). The language of evaluation: Appraisal in

English. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

xxi

MSNBC. (2015, September 4). Hillary Clinton Interview: One-On-One | Andrea

Mitchell | MSNBC [Video file]. Retrieved January 10, 2016, from

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiJyWfX79Dk

N.A. (2014). More News Media Sources Trusted by Those on the Left. Retrieved

January 10, 2016, from http://www.journalism.org/2014/10/21/political-polarization-

media-habits/pj_14-10-21_mediapolarization-12/

N.A. (2016). NYMag. Retrieved January 10, 2016, from http://nymag.com/

New York Daily News. (2015). TRANSCRIPT: Hillary Clinton takes responsibility

for Benghazi attack, defends actions in emotional testimony before Congress. Retrieved

January 10, 2016, from http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/transcript-hillary-

clinton-takes-responsibility-benghazi-attack-article-1.1246025

Peek, L. (2015). Hillary Clinton and 2016: It’s about the money, stupid. Retrieved

November 6, 2015, from http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2015/04/13/hillary-clinton-and-

2016-it-about-money-stupid.html#

Pompeo, J. (2013). “New York” mag hires new online deputy, as traffic grows.

Retrieved January 10, 2016, from

http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2013/05/8530548/new-york-mag-hires-new-

online-deputy-traffic-grows

Putnam, J. (2015, April 28). South Carolina Republicans eyeing February 20

presidential primary date. Retrieved February 1, 2016, from

http://frontloading.blogspot.dk/2015/04/south-carolina-republicans-eyeing.html

Remorse. (n.d.). Collins Dictionary. In Collins Dictionary. Retrieved February 1,

2016, from http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/american-cobuild-learners/remorse

Results found for Hillary Clinton. (2016). Retrieved January 7, 2016, from

http://www.foxnews.com/search-

results/search?q=hillary%20clinton&ss=fn&sort=latest&min_date=2015-04-

12&max_date=2016-01-23&start=5020

xxii

Rosato, E. (2013). Adjective order in English: A semantic account with cross-

linguistic applications.

Schmidt, M. S. (2015). Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email Account at State Dept.,

Possibly Breaking Rules. Retrieved January 10, 2016, from

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/03/us/politics/hillary-clintons-use-of-private-email-at-

state-department-raises-flags.html

Schmidt, M. S., & Apuzzo, M. (2015). Inquiry Sought in Hillary Clinton’s Use of

Email. Retrieved January 10, 2016, from

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/24/us/politics/inquiry-is-sought-in-hillary-clinton-email-

account.html

Schmidt, M. S., & Chozick, A. (2015). Using Private Email, Hillary Clinton

Thwarted Record Requests. Retrieved January 10, 2016, from

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/04/us/politics/using-private-email-hillary-clinton-

thwarted-record-requests.html?_r=0

Sigal, L. V. (1973). Reporters and officials: The organization and politics of

newsmaking. Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath and Company.

Stirewalt, C. (2015). Another day of damaging disclosures for Hillary. Retrieved

January 21, 2016, from http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/05/22/another-day-

damaging-disclosures-for-hillary.html

The New York Times. (2015, March 10). Hillary Clinton Answers Questions on

Email Controversy [FULL] | The New York Times [Video file]. Retrieved January 10,

2016, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZbRU10JUqk

The Wall Street Journal. (2015). Updated Timeline: Hillary Clinton’s Email

Troubles. Retrieved January 10, 2016, from

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2015/09/30/updated-timeline-hillary-clintons-email-

troubles/

Trochim, W. M. K. (2006). Deduction & Induction. Retrieved January 10, 2016,

from http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/dedind.php

xxiii

Tomlinson, L. (2016). Clinton fumed at staff after addressing Tunisian official by

wrong name, emails show. Retrieved January 21, 2016, from

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/01/08/clinton-fumed-at-staff-after-addressing-

tunisian-official-by-wrong-name-emails-show.html

Virtual Reading Room Documents Search Results. (2015, May 22). Retrieved

February 1, 2016, from

https://foia.state.gov/Search/Results.aspx?collection=Clinton_Email_May_Release

Virtual Reading Room Documents Search Results. (2015, June 30). Retrieved


https://foia.state.gov/Search/Results.aspx?collection=Clinton_Email_June_Release

Virtual Reading Room Documents Search Results. (2015, December 31). Retrieved


https://foia.state.gov/Search/Results.aspx?collection=Clinton_Email_December_Release

Virtual Reading Room Documents Search Results. (2016, January 7). Retrieved


https://foia.state.gov/Search/Results.aspx?collection=Clinton_Email_January_7_Release

White, P. R. R. (2015). 1. Attitude/Affect 5. Retrieved January 26, 2016, from

http://www.grammatics.com/appraisal/appraisalguide/framed/stage1-attitude-affect-

04.htm#P57_12861

White, P. R. R. (2015). 2. Attitude/Judgement 1. Retrieved January 26, 2016, from

http://www.grammatics.com/appraisal/appraisalguide/framed/stage2-attitude-

judgement.htm#P6_797

Word Counter: The Word Count Calculator. (n.d.). Retrieved January 25, 2016, from

https://wordcounter.net/

xxiv

Appendices

Appendix 1. Part of the New York Magazine News Archive

xxv

Appendix 2. Part of the Fox News News Archive

xxvii

Appendix 3. Attitude → Affect in Emailgate News Articles

ATTITUDE → AFFECT IN EMAILGATE NEWS ARTICLES

Type Fox News

+AFF, Clinton Clinton has said she wants the department to release the emails…

−AFF, multiple Though the source noted that this summer Platte River employees were “surprised” to learn that the Clinton data was being backed up in an offsite cloud, which wasa [sic] more extensive backup than Platte River officials had anticipated…

Type New York Magazine

+AFF, author Clinton's FOMO is more understandable when you learn that…

+AFF, Clinton

In the softball section of the interview, Clinton said she loves swimming, chocolate,

House of Cards, sleep, and ... email…

She's super excited about Raj Shah's “dynamite talk” packed with “stunning

statistics” and ends the whole exchange on a high note…

That summer Clinton receives a cheerful note from her BFF Senator Mikulski…

−AFF, Clinton

Clinton's FOMO is more understandable when you learn that…

Clinton used a Richard Nixon burn to mask her anxiety over her comparative lack of

Oval Office time…

+AFF, 3rd party When Clinton fractured her elbow, Senator Barbara Mikulski expressed sympathy

for her inability to do lady things…

−AFF, 3rd party Naturally, Republicans were giddy about Clinton's concession…

xxviii

Appendix 4. Attitude → Judgement in Emailgate News Articles

ATTITUDE → JUDGEMENT IN EMAILGATE NEWS ARTICLES

Type Fox News

−JUDG, normality

The revelation adds to the growing questions related to the Democratic presidential

front-runner's unusual usage of a private email account and server while in

government…

…Clinton’s private email server from which she controversially conducted official State Department business…

−JUDG, veracity …Clinton hedged [when asked if she was sorry for her decision to use personal email]… …the 2016 presidential candidate couldn’t be taken at her word…

−JUDG, propriety

...the FBI will further determine whether Clinton should have known [...] that emails passing through her server contained classified information regardless of the markings... ...Republicans accuse her of using a private account rather than the standard government address to avoid public scrutiny of her correspondence... ...Nick Merrill issued a statement early Friday denying that Clinton had handled classified materials inappropriately...


+JUDG, normality The interview took place a day before the 20th anniversary of Hillary Clinton's U.N.

speech in Beijing, where she famously said…

+JUDG, capacity Clinton's campaign and several people in the federal government quickly challenged

that story

−JUDG, veracity In yet another Emailgate update that sounds shady but proves nothing…

−JUDG, propriety

State Department Releases Hillary’s Benghazi Emails in Textbook Case of ‘Holiday

News Dump’

…[at least four emails that] should have been sent through the federal government’s

secure network…

If Hillary Clinton hoped that saying sorry would make all of her email problems go

away…

xxix

Appendix 5. Attitude → Appreciation in Emailgate News Articles

ATTITUDE → APPRECIATION IN EMAILGATE NEWS ARTICLES

Type Fox News

+APP, composition Hillary Clinton's emails on her unsecured, homebrew server contained intelligence from the U.S. government's most secretive and highly classified programs…

-APP, valuation

The revelations come at an awkward time for Clinton…

Hillary Clinton's emails on her unsecured, homebrew server contained intelligence from the U.S. government's most secretive and highly classified programs…


+APP, reaction Parade Magazine promised to do a flattering feature on Clinton…

-APP, reaction They're mostly boring administrative emails...

…[the releases] will mostly entail bureaucratic boringness…

-APP, composition Possibly because the details are technical and opaque, Democratic voters have, to

this point, been entirely uninterested in another alleged Clinton scandal.

+APP, valuation

MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell […] sat down with the Democratic presidential candidate for

a rare interview…

…since [Clinton’s] last big television appearance…

-APP, valuation

Possibly because the details are technical and opaque, Democratic voters have, to

this point, been entirely uninterested in another alleged Clinton scandal.

[Clinton] showing off her fun side on Saturday Night Live…

…there are still plenty of fascinating Clinton tidbits in Tuesday's release…

xxx

Appendix 6. Engagement → Attribute in Emailgate News Articles

ENGAGEMENT → ATTRIBUTE IN EMAILGATE NEWS ARTICLES

Type Fox News

ATTR, acknowledge

EXCLUSIVE: Hillary Clinton's emails on her unsecured, homebrew server contained

intelligence from the U.S. government's most secretive and highly classified

programs, according to an unclassified letter from a top inspector general to senior

lawmakers.

FBI reportedly recovers deleted emails from Clinton server

Gowdy had also demanded that Pagliano provide documents related to all servers or

computer systems controlled or owned by Clinton between 2009 and 2013.

A source familiar with the probe told Fox News that the watchdogs recommended a

criminal investigation into the handling of her email

The probe, which was first reported by The Washington Post, comes days after

watchdogs from the State Department and the intelligence community asked the

Justice Department to explore whether classified material was improperly shared or

stored on the former secretary of state's private e-mail account.

ATTR, distance

Clinton has maintained that she turned over all relevant federal records before

deleting her emails off her sever

The 2016 Democratic frontrunner went on to reiterate her claim that…

She also claims that she never sent or received emails marked classified…

But [the emails’] existence challenges Clinton's claim that she has handed over the

entirety of her work emails from the account…


ATTR, acknowledge

Independent experts have suggested that actual charges against Clinton are highly

unlikely

Brian Fallon, the Clinton campaign's press secretary, called the State Department’s

decision to withhold the emails an "overclassification run amok," and then elaborated

on that comment in an official statement.

but 66 were retroactively classified, and the only email marked "secret" features

Clinton saying, "Wow — not good."

The U.S. intelligence community no longer believes that Clinton sent messages

containing top-secret information from her private email account during her time as

Secretary of State, Politico reports.

ATTR, distance

General I. Charles McCullough III had claimed that two emails sent from Clinton’s

private account contained top-secret information…

Platte River had directed Datto to keep Clinton's emails for 60 days, but Johnson

claims that in late 2014 and 2015 — around the time the State Department asked for

Clinton's work-related emails — one of her staffers asked the firm to have Datto save

only 30 days worth of emails.

xxxi

Appendix 7. Engagement → Entertain in Emailgate News Articles

ENGAGEMENT → ENTERTAIN IN EMAILGATE NEWS ARTICLES

Type Fox News

ENT, probability Only she and perhaps a small circle of advisers know the content of the discarded

communications…

ENT, evidentiality at least one email suggests she directed a subordinate to work around the rules…


ENT, probability

The State Department released 296 emails from Hillary Clinton's private email

account today, perhaps hoping that the holiday weekend would wipe them from

everyone's memory as quickly as the emails were wiped from her server.

A Justice Department spokesman would not comment on whether the feds are looking

for another device, but presumably the hunt for Clinton's yoga schedules continues.

Clinton is scheduled to testify in front of the House Select Committee on Benghazi on

October 22 — a date conservatives are probably looking forward to…

The American people may finally be done hearing about Hillary Clinton’s “damn

emails.”

ENT, evidentiality

…investigators will have another way to obtain the tens of thousands of ostensibly

personal emails that Clinton's team deleted…

…everything Hillary Clinton has done in recent days suggests that she's ready to go

on the offensive and move past the issues that plagued the first six months of her

campaign

ENT, obligation Independent experts have suggested that actual charges against Clinton are highly

unlikely, as publicly available evidence has to indicate that she broke any laws.

xxxii

Appendix 8. Engagement → Proclaim in Emailgate News Articles

ENGAGEMENT → PROCLAIM IN EMAILGATE NEWS ARTICLES

Type Fox News

PROC, endorse

…amid recent polls showing potential slack in her public support.

Patrick Kennedy said a review of Clinton's email archive showed "hundreds of

potentially classified emails."

The developments, taken together, show Clinton finding herself once again at the

epicenter of a controversy over incomplete records.

Subsequent reports revealed that the account was run through a personal so-called

"homebrew" server based at her New York home.

The FBI has begun investigating the security of Hillary Clinton's private e-mail server,

an attorney for the Democratic presidential front-runner confirmed to Fox News

late Tuesday.

The FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email has now expanded to include

obtaining data from a second tech company, which is fully cooperating with the FBI

probe that has threatened Clinton’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination,

Fox News has learned.

PROC, pronounce

Republican critics have demanded to know if any of those emails were really work-

related emails that should have been turned over to the State Department along

with…

EXCLUSIVE: The intelligence community has deemed some of Hillary Clinton’s emails

“too damaging"


PROC, concur

Naturally, Republicans were giddy about Clinton's concession

However, many — especially those critical of Hillary Clinton's use of a personal email

account during her tenure at the State Department — are sure to interpret the

discovery of these emails as a sign that there may be more work-related emails

Clinton failed to make available to the public.

Clearly, being secretary of State has its perks, such as directing underlings to track

down that rad rug you saw during your trip to China.

PROC, endorse

A new report from the intelligence inspector general shows that there may be a few

emails from Hillary Clinton's server that are even more classified than originally

believed.

Then she got stood up by the entire cabinet, confirming her worst fears…

But according to Politico, in August, Platte River employees realized that Clinton's

emails were syncing to Datto's cloud server as well…

On Tuesday, court documents revealed the State Department recently sent Clinton's

lawyer a request for any emails she may have failed to turn over…

PROC, pronounce

Also of note in this set of correspondence is that we finally see emails Clinton sent

during and after the Benghazi attacks.

It's also worth noting that this information comes to us via a GOP senator a day

after Clinton released an ad attacking congressional Republicans.

Bonus content: She expresses sincere surprise that…

xxxiii

Appendix 9. Engagement → Disclaim in Emailgate News Articles

ENGAGEMENT → DISCLAIM IN EMAILGATE NEWS ARTICLES

Type Fox News

DISCL, denial

Investigators have said that the probe is not criminal in nature and have denied that

Clinton is a target of their inquiries.

There is no evidence Clinton used encryption to shield the emails or her personal

server from foreign intelligence services or other potentially prying eyes.

She said she didn't "stop and think" which email system she should use.

The confusion comes from the fact that Datto was hired by Platte River and not the

Clinton team, so the company had no idea it was backing up data for Clinton until

August of this year…

She also claims that she never sent or received emails marked classified.

DISCL, counter

Because the information was not classified at the time the email was sent, no laws

were violated, but Friday's redaction shows that Clinton received sensitive

information on her unsecured personal server.

The monthly releases all but guarantee a slow drip of revelations from the emails

throughout Clinton's primary campaign

Clinton, the Democratic presidential frontrunner, has repeatedly denied any

wrongdoing related to her private server.

But their existence challenges Clinton's claim that she has handed over the entirety

of her work emails from the account.

Currently, some 1,340 emails designated “classified” have been found on Clinton’s

server, though the Democratic presidential candidate insists the information was not

classified at the time.

Despite Clinton’s recent public statements about not knowing how the technology

works, at least one email suggests…

That indicates a level of classification beyond even “top secret”…


DISCL, denial

Some of the information in Clinton's emails were classified after the fact, but it

wouldn't have been a breach of protocol to email them at the time.

Report: Clinton Never Sent Classified Information From Her Private Email Account

The U.S. intelligence community no longer believes that Clinton sent messages

containing top-secret information…

Clinton has insisted that she never sent or received classified information over her

private email account — at least not information that was classified at the time.

DISCL, counter

Those hoping to find a smoking gun will probably have to wait for next month's

dispatch, but there are still plenty of fascinating Clinton tidbits in Tuesday's release.

Yet she was on good terms with her Bush administration counterpart, Condoleezza

Rice…

Hillary Is Done Playing Defense, But Emailgate Won’t Go Away

With Clinton's authorization, Datto Inc. has agreed to give the FBI any information it

has relating to her account…


the Democratic primary race, save for inspiring a popular meme.

xxxiv

Appendix 10. Graduation in Emailgate News Articles: Fox News

GRADUATION IN EMAILGATE NEWS ARTICLES

Type Fox News

imprecise reckonings of size

↓

precise reckonings of size

Official: Some Clinton emails 'too damaging' to release

The emails released Friday are just a fraction of what the department has in its

custody…

…"several" of Clinton's emails contained classified intelligence information…

…there are more copies of the Clinton emails out there, and even releasing a partial

email would provide enough clues to trace back to the original…

McCullough had previously told Congress that potentially hundreds of classified

emails are among the cache that Clinton provided to the State Department.

The State Department is trying to finish its review and public release of thousands of

Clinton emails…

But their existence challenges Clinton's claim that she has handed over the entirety

of her work emails from the account.

State Department releases over 3,000 Clinton emails on New Year's Eve

…two of four retroactively classified emails found on Clinton's server were deemed

"Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information"…

Totaling 896 pages, the emails show a series of Libya dispatches

The latest batch of 3,105 emails includes 275 documents upgraded to "classified"…

reckonings of time

It is not known when exactly Mrs. Clinton “wiped” her server, nor who was directed

to do so.

…the server installed in Clinton's New York home just prior to her becoming secretary

of state was…

Clinton has been under fire through much of 2015 about her use of a private,

unsecured email server…

Blumenthal gave diplomatic advice to Hillary Clinton as early as 2009, emails show

scaling information

…the highly unusual private server she had installed…

But the next day, he sent Clinton an email with very different information…

…raised deep concerns about the contents of…

[Clinton said “sorry”] but didn’t offer an outright apology for her actions.

The revelation adds to the growing questions related to [Clinton's] unusual usage of…

…an exchange in September 2010 that showed considerable confusion over her email

practices.

scaling emailgate major issues; major document dumps

scaling through repetition

Clinton, the former first lady, senator from New York and top diplomat now

running for the Democratic presidential nomination, announced Tuesday…

The existence of the e-mail server has raised repeated questions about Clinton's

adherence to…

Inspector General: Clinton emails had intel from most secretive, classified programs

isolating information

…at least one Clinton email contained information identified as "HCS-O”

…the news of the upgraded emails as another reason the 2016 presidential candidate

couldn't be taken at her word.

xxxv

Appendix 11. Graduation in Emailgate News Articles: New York Magazine

GRADUATION IN EMAILGATE NEWS ARTICLES


imprecise reckonings of size

↓

precise reckonings of size

They're mostly boring administrative emails — lots of Clinton asking aides to print

things for her…

Many of Hillary Clinton's contributions to the email threads are limited to “Pls print”

or “thx.”

…a handful of emails that she didn't turn over…

Based on the last few releases, they will mostly entail bureaucratic boringness…


the Democratic primary race, save for inspiring a popular meme.

The emails in question, fewer than ten of them, were sent between Clinton…

The roughly 3,000 pages include every email Clinton sent during 2009…

…Hillary Clinton gave the State Department 30,490 emails deemed work-related and

deleted 31,830 personal emails.

reckonings of time

The newest batch of Hillary Clinton emails arrived a little late (they were supposed

to be out December 31), but the State Department worked into the night and finally

released 3,000 pages of "fit n sparkly" new content around 2 a.m.

In an email sent September 11, 2012, at 11 p.m., Clinton describes the attacks to

her daughter, Chelsea, who's using the alias "Diane Reynolds."

The interview took place a day before the 20th anniversary of Hillary Clinton's U.N.

speech in Beijing, where she famously said…

scaling information

…[the emails] which many hope will provide a clearer picture of Clinton's tenure…

…the slow and steady stream of Clinton email news from the past few months…

…actual charges against Clinton are highly unlikely…

scaling emailgate …development in Clinton’s email saga; Clinton addressed the story herself; the whole

emailgate scandal was a distraction; inspiring a popular meme; cliffhanger

isolating information

In yet another Emailgate update that sounds shady but proves nothing…

…the only email marked "secret" features Clinton saying, "Wow — not good."

BIASED REPRESENTATION OF HILLARY CLINTON’S ...er/...2016/06/01 · Magazine (nymag.com) was...

Documents

Transcript of BIASED REPRESENTATION OF HILLARY CLINTON’S ...er/...2016/06/01 · Magazine (nymag.com) was...