Lia Walberg. News Coverage of Government Email Scandals. A Master’s Paper for the M.S. in I.S. degree. April, 2018. 70 pages. Advisor: Christopher A. Lee

In this paper, I ask what news coverage of scandals involving the emails of prominent politicians can tell us about why the American public considers these emails to be important. I performed a qualitative content analysis on news articles related to five specific cases to answer this question. I found that the most prominent reason across cases for why authors of these articles expressed interest in the controversies was that they helped to expose character flaws of prominent politicians. However, I also found that the individual circumstances of the cases played a significant role in the reasons for interest in those cases. Ultimately, I hope that a better understanding of the motivations behind these scandals can help records professionals to better manage the risk associated with the records in their care.

Headings:

Management of public records

Email

Electronic public records

Mass media

NEWS COVERAGE OF GOVERNMENT EMAIL SCANDALS

by Lia Walberg

A Master’s paper submitted to the faculty of the School of Information and Library Science of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Information Science.

Chapel Hill, North Carolina April 2018

Approved by

______Christopher A. Lee 1

Contents Introduction ...... 2 Literature Review...... 3 1.1 Email as a Record ...... 3 1.1.1 A Brief History and Important Features ...... 4 1.1.2 Transparency ...... 5 1.1.3 Evidentiary Value ...... 6 1.2 The State of Government Records Management ...... 6 1.2.1 Legal Standards ...... 7 1.2.2 Email Management ...... 7 1.2.3 Federal Records Act ...... 9 1.2.4 Freedom of Information Act ...... 10 1.2.5 DoD 5015.02-STD ...... 11 1.2.6 Obama Era Reforms ...... 11 1.2.7 State Governments ...... 13 1.3 The Cultural Fascination with Celebrity ...... 15 1.3.1 Politicians as Celebrities ...... 16 1.4 The Relationship between the News Media and the Public ...... 18 1.4.1 Influence of the News Media ...... 18 1.4.2 Influences on the News Media ...... 19 Research Design...... 19 1.5 Qualitative Methods ...... 19 1.6 Content Analysis ...... 20 1.7 Sampling...... 21 1.8 Overviews of the Five Email Cases ...... 24 1.8.1 Hillary Clinton Email ...... 24 1.8.2 Chris Christie Email ...... 25 1.8.3 Mike Pence Email ...... 26 1.8.4 Trump White House Email ...... 27 1.8.5 John Podesta Email ...... 27 1.8.6 Emergent Coding ...... 28 1.9 A Note on Personal Biases ...... 29 Results ...... 30 1.10 The Coding Scheme...... 30 1.11 Breakdown of Usage ...... 39 1.11.1 Influence of Political Bias ...... 45 Discussion ...... 49 Limitations and Direction for Future Research ...... 53 Conclusion ...... 55 Bibliography ...... 57

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Introduction

Recently, many news stories have discussed issues that involve records management. The reporting on these issues primarily focused on political aspects of the incidents, but these “scandals” have implications for the professionals charged with managing the information at their core. There is an opportunity for records professionals to learn from these high-profile scandals, and to use this knowledge to improve the way they manage records in an increasingly complex information environment.

There are a variety of lessons to be learned from these scandals, but the present research will focus on public opinion in cases involving the emails of prominent government and political figures. I am interested in studying several of these incidents to shed light on the source of the perceived importance that the public has placed on these records. The goal is to identify why the public is so interested in the information that comes out of the emails, and what about the records themselves the public considers to be important. I will accomplish this by performing content analysis on a collection of news articles about each of the incidents.

While government email scandals do appear in academic writing, they do not appear in the current context. Authors have discussed them as background for papers that were ultimately about computer science solutions to government records management problems. Authors have used those that involve court cases as examples in legal papers.

Authors have also cited them in numerous political science articles on a variety of topics.

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What is missing is an attempt to understand the reasons why the public is interested in these controversies in the first place.

In this study, I ask what news coverage of scandals involving the emails of prominent politicians can tell us about why the American public considers these emails to be important. I performed a qualitative content analysis on news articles related to five specific cases to answer this question. I hope that the results can provide insight into the way the public views these records for those tasked with their management.

Literature Review

Although there is no previous research about the specific topic of this paper, there are several themes in this research that it will be helpful to explore for background. I will give a brief background of previous research on each of these topics in the following section, beginning with an exploration of the role of email as a documentary form.

1.1 Email as a Record Digital governance is widely understood to provide “improved transparency, accountability, services for citizens and economic performance” (Baron & Thurston

2016). As this study aims to better understand citizen opinions of email records, with an eye towards improving management of these records, it will be helpful to address the role and key benefits of email as a record. Gaining this understanding may have benefits beyond email management. Andrew Waugh argues that the issues information professionals have with managing email records are indicative of the issues that they have with managing other types of digital records (Waugh 2014). Therefore, improving email management may help to improve the management of other digital records.

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1.1.1 A Brief History and Important Features Employees at the MIT Computation Center sent the first electronic mail messages on their Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) in the 1960s. These were text files that contained the name of the recipient in the file name, thereby providing the first example of an email “to” field. Our concept of networked email was a product of the Advanced

Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) in 1971. It evolved in stages from that point. Employees at ARPANET created the first email format standard in Request for

Comment 561 (RFC-561), and the years following saw a series of RFCs refining the preferred format of email messages. The eventual result of this refinement process was the basic format of email that we still know today (Zhang 2014).

There are several features that are common to most email systems. There are automatic date and time fields that the system attaches to each email when it is sent.

Users must select a recipient with a valid email address, which will always follow the same general format. Users have the option of organizing messages into various mailboxes to meet their needs. The way these individual features are managed, either by the email system or the user, has the potential to impact the way the email account is managed (Zhang 2014).

Many important features of emails were adapted from traditional mail systems and business structures that were already well known. Both electronic and traditional mail have an author and recipient, whose addresses must be included with the message.

They travel through delivery services, after which the recipient has the option to reply to, then either file or delete, the message (Crocker 2012). The structure of early emails was modeled after the business memo, with headers containing “from”, “subject”, and “date”

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fields. However, some features of email have allowed it to improve upon the functionality of earlier documentary forms. For instance, the digital nature of email facilitates a more robust retrieval system (Zhang 2014). Still, email is similar to already well-known documentary forms.

1.1.2 Transparency President Barack Obama has said “proper records management is the backbone of open government” (Obama 2011). Archivist of the United States David Ferriero agrees, adding that “the central values of Open Government are transparency, citizen participation, and collaboration” (Ferriero 2010b). This appears to be a view shared by our nation’s founders. In fact, some of Congress’s first acts were efforts to maximize government transparency in an age when the mass distribution of information was not nearly as routine or easy as it is today (Jaeger & Bertot 2010). Yet this issue extends beyond our founders, with many worldwide believing that transparency is fundamental to a functioning democracy (Gunnlaugsdottir 2015).

The key function of transparency is to provide the public with information about what the government is doing, thereby strengthening the public’s trust in their government (Obama 2009). Some have argued that to fully realize this goal in the digital information age, elected officials would ideally distribute public records on a regular basis without waiting for citizens to file a request (Zansberg 2015). We are far from achieving this goal, but electronic records management plays a key role in the continued improvement of government transparency. Email, as the dominant form of official communication in many 21st-century workplaces, can provide a particularly intimate

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view into what the government is doing, and its successful management may be necessary in a present-day government that aspires to be transparent.

1.1.3 Evidentiary Value Email records play a prominent role in present-day investigative processes.

Waugh suggests that a reason for this lies in the notion of “unselfconscious creation,” or the idea that users may create email without the explicit awareness that they are creating records. He also points out that email provides a record of collaborations between individuals within an organization (Waugh 2014). Perhaps in part for these reasons, email records are considered substantive evidence in a court of law, meaning that their evidentiary value lies in the content of their messages (Duranti & Rogers 2012). The content of email messages can provide a window into how individuals conduct themselves during their day-to-day work activities. This dynamic can produce significant legal evidence, which courts can use to hold government officials accountable for their actions.

1.2 The State of Government Records Management The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) began conducting a

Records Management Self-Assessment (RMSA) in 2009 to gauge the status and progress of government agency records management programs (NARA 2016). A preliminary analysis of the 2009 RMSA by the Archivist of the United States found that 79% of federal agencies had moderate to high levels of risk associated with their records management programs (Ferriero 2010b). Electronic records management was a major concern, and the only area that did not see consistent improvement in later RMSAs. In

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the 2015 RMSA, more agencies saw elevated risk in electronic records management than in any other category (NARA 2016).

At the state level, the Council of State Archives (CoSA) created the State

Electronic Records Initiative (SERI) to assist U.S. states and territories in improving their electronic records management practices. In 2017, they conducted an assessment of the progress made since SERI was launched. They found that 65% of states and territories had some sort of electronic records management program in place, which was up from

41% in 2011, although only 27% had a program that was fully functioning. Additionally, states and territories only spend an average of 0.007% of their budgets on electronic records management. This is despite a 1,693% growth in electronic records in state and territory archives in the ten years prior to the assessment (CoSA 2017).

1.2.1 Legal Standards As technology evolves, the law must attempt to keep up with the societal implications of widespread use of new technologies. Thus, the standards for using electronic records as evidence continue to evolve, and it is essential that the records management profession adapt its practices to meet these standards (Baron & Thurston

2016). Currently, U.S. federal government agencies are required to develop records management solutions adhering to legal requirements outlined in 44 USC Chapter 31 and

OMB Circular No. A-130 (Rodriguez Espinoza 2016). Yet, as technology continues to advance rapidly, the law and, consequently, records management, struggle to keep up.

1.2.2 Email Management Patterson and Sprehe wrote in 2002, “The biggest single worry federal agencies have in the records management field today is how to capture e-mail records” (Patterson

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& Sprehe 2002). This is still an issue today. The government has used a variety of techniques for managing email records in recent years with varying degrees of success.

These include requiring employees to print emails to paper, the use of disaster recovery backup tapes, asking employees to perform records management functions on their own emails, and automated email archiving (Baron & Attfield 2012).

Systems that require printing email records are rarely successful, because users are prone to noncompliance with these requirements (Baron & Attfield 2012). This is the case with many systems that require users to take a significant role in managing their own records. End users have been responsible for performing many records management functions since personal computers first became popular in the workplace in the 1980s.

This has never been a successful strategy (Patterson & Sprehe 2002), but it is in particular need of updating today. The current volume of email records that users produce daily has increased significantly since the 1980s, and it is no longer possible for users to manage all these records effectively (Baron & Attfield 2012).

The Department of Defense (DoD) has attempted to save all their emails in the past by writing them to backup tapes. The opposite problem has also been noticed in agencies that deleted all their emails after a certain amount of time. This was usually due to information technology (IT) department limitations (Patterson & Sprehe 2002).

Neither of these constitutes a long-term solution to email management, as one will lead quickly to information overload, while the other may lead to the destruction of important government records.

Automated email archiving is a relatively new technique that offers great promise.

It involves capturing emails from their proprietary platforms and placing them in separate

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databases where they can be preserved in their original form. It also provides useful options that agencies can take advantage of to improve their records management capabilities. For instance, agencies can set automated rules, such as placing all emails of certain officials or units in default categories. There are also add-ons available, including an add-on that allows the user to create virtual email folders. Because of these benefits, institutions are currently facing pressure to adopt these systems for email archiving

(Baron & Attfield 2012).

However, it is important to note that email archiving is not in itself a solution to the email problem. Records professionals must configure these systems correctly, or they can end up harming an agency’s records management program. It is important to integrate policies and business rules with the email archiving system to ensure that it complies with records management requirements (Ferriero 2010a). Otherwise, the system will hardly function better than systems that automatically save all emails.

1.2.3 Federal Records Act Government agencies are required to preserve proper documentation of their activities under the Federal Records Act (Ferriero 2010b). Congress passed the Federal

Records Act (FRA) in 1950 and, in so doing, repealed the National Archives Act of 1934.

The FRA was designed to modernize and expand the 1934 act. Beyond requiring federal agencies to preserve documentation of their activities, it required them to establish active programs for the continued maintenance of those records. It also required agencies to protect their records against unlawful removal or alteration (American Archivist 1950).

This law is still on the books, but compliance with its mandate has become more difficult for agencies in the digital age.

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1.2.4 Freedom of Information Act Congress passed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in 1966. It guaranteed

American citizens the right to request government information and was the first law of its kind in the world (Jaeger & Bertot 2010). It also placed the burden of proof for resisting a request on the government. At the time, it passed despite strong opposition from the executive branch. Congress passed amendments to FOIA in 1974, 1976, 1986, and 1996 to clarify aspects of the law, ensure more efficient compliance, and update it to address electronic records (Relyea 2009).

Despite these efforts, implementation of FOIA remains a challenge. A 2012 GAO study found that four agencies had seen an increase in their FOIA backlogs since 2009, despite pushes to decrease backlogs. Agencies also struggled to meet a call to favor openness in responding to FOIA requests, with six agencies increasing the number of exemptions they were using since 2009. Finally, the GAO found that agencies were successful at making records available online, but they were not successful at making sure those records were easy to locate. This is an issue that can lead to an increase in

FOIA requests for agencies to manage (GAO 2012).

There are now Freedom of Information Acts in countries around the world, which have met with different reactions from the people of those countries. A survey of

Icelandic citizens, for instance, found that they still did not have access to important government information, despite the passage of their law (Gunnlaugsdottir 2015). A follow-up on that study found that some blamed top politicians for government secrecy and poor access to government information (Gunnlaugsdottir 2016). If American citizens

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form the same opinions, this could influence the value that they place upon the emails of those same politicians.

1.2.5 DoD 5015.02-STD The impetus for DoD 5015.02 came in the early 1990s, when Congress discovered that the Department of Defense had either destroyed or lost many of the records essential to the congressional investigation into the Gulf War Syndrome. In 1993, the Defense Department created a task force to design a new internal records management plan. The task force released a report in 1995, which established functional requirements for records management applications (RMA). The Defense Information

Systems Agency (DISA) further developed this report and released DoD 5015.02-STD two years later. It contained testable criteria for RMAs and has since become an industry- wide standard (JITC 2015).

Many DoD 5015.02 compliant applications require users to do much of the work of managing their email records. These applications offer a variety of functions that users can take advantage of to manage their electronic records, including placing them in categories from dropdown menus, saving them as records, tagging them with functions, or dragging and dropping them into categories. However, users do not always perform these functions reliably (Baron & Attfield 2012). In fact, users need ongoing training to be able to perform these functions adequately, and that training can be expensive when provided by the vendor (Patterson & Sprehe 2002).

1.2.6 Obama Era Reforms The most recent changes to federal records management policy occurred during the tenure of President Barack Obama. President Obama’s administration, along with

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Archivist of the United States David Ferriero, sought to expand upon previous efforts to improve government records management. A day after he took office, President Obama signed two executive orders, one requiring government agencies to favor openness in reviewing FOIA requests, and another opening presidential records to the public (Jaeger

& Bertot 2010). Later that year, on December 8, 2009, President Obama issued the Open

Government Directive (Ferriero 2010b). It required agencies to publish annual digital

FOIA reports, to provide information about how they were improving their records management programs, and to solicit input from the public on which materials to prioritize for declassification. It also required each agency to create an open government plan and website, and to release information to the public in digital format (Obama 2009).

In 2011, President Obama released a memorandum initiating “an executive branch wide effort to reform records management policies and practices.” It promised a directive from the Archivist, Director of Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and

Assistant Attorney General that would discuss specific requirements for improving government records management practices (Obama 2011). That directive came in 2012, with a stated goal to “Require Electronic Recordkeeping to Ensure Transparency,

Efficiency, and Accountability.” It mandated that all government agencies preserve their email records in an accessible format by the end of 2016. An important benefit of the email requirements discussed in the mandate is that they create an opportunity for government agencies to address how they will meet the requirements of FOIA (Baron &

Thurston 2016). Compliance with the directive necessitates the long-term preservation of email records, something that needs to be addressed (Baron & Attfield 2012).

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The Government Accountability Office (GAO) conducted a study in 2015 to assess agencies’ compliance with the mandate. They found that 23 of the 24 major government agencies had begun to implement plans to manage all their records in electronic format. They also found that 23 out of 24 agencies had reported on their progress towards managing their all their email records in electronic format. In total, five agencies were not in full compliance with all the requirements that had due dates prior to the time of the study. The study resulted in ten recommendations to those agencies, all of which have now been completed (GAO 2015).

In 2013, NARA released a bulletin outlining the Capstone approach to managing email. It promised that Capstone would provide “a more simplified and automated approach to managing email.” It did this by transitioning towards automated methods of email management. Agencies could identify individuals who were most likely to generate permanent email records and designate their email accounts for automatic preservation.

The bulletin suggested that priority be given to the accounts of the highest-level decision makers. It encouraged agencies to use technologies already in use within the agency to implement this approach (NARA 2013). However, two problems that neither the

Archivist’s Directive nor the Capstone approach solved were the question of how to keep personal records out of official records management systems, and whether to allow government employees to decide which of their emails are personal (Baron & Thurston

2016).

1.2.7 State Governments Each state has its records laws, which are often modelled after the federal laws discussed in the previous sections. However, each state drafts its state-level records laws

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independently of the other states, so they all have some differences, which are too numerous to cover fully in this literature review. For example, all states have open records laws in place, but they do not all provide the same level of clarity as to what constitutes a public record. To use to two states most relevant to this study as an example,

New Jersey’s open records law clearly states that email is considered a public record, while Indiana does not explicitly address email’s status in its laws (Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press 2011).

The National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Law (NCCUSL) has made strides towards creating more standard electronic records policy across states.

In 1999, they enacted the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act (UETA) to establish the validity of electronic counterparts to physical documents and signatures in electronic transactions (NCCUSL 1999). In 2004, they built on UETA with the Uniform Real

Property Electronic Recording Act (URPERA), which clarified aspects of the previous act to allow the use of electronic records in real estate transactions (NCCUSL 2004). In

2011, they enacted the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act (UELMA) to establish a framework for states to publish authentic legal material in electronic format (NCCUSL

2011).

Some of the cases examined in this study involve state officials who used their private email accounts to conduct state business. It is common for state officials to use private accounts and devices for their official work, and some of these officials have argued that records created using these accounts and devices should not be subject to state open record laws. However, most state courts have rejected the argument that state business conducted on privately owned devices should be kept private. They have argued

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that it is the content of the records, not ownership of the device, which determines whether the records belong to the state (Senat 2014).

1.3 The Cultural Fascination with Celebrity In addition to being political leaders, the individuals whose emails were at the center of the cases I chose for this study may also be viewed as celebrities. As such, it is important to understand our culture’s general fascination with celebrity, to consider how it might inform the results of the study. The way our culture processes celebrity scandals may be of interest, as all these cases involve some sort of scandal related to government emails. It is interesting to consider whether the public handles these political scandals in a similar way to other types of celebrity scandals.

The public fascination with celebrity is not always positive. The public often takes a strong interest in shamed celebrities. Some theorize that this is due in part to the fact that, when a celebrity’s flaws become public, it appears to bring them closer to the level of an average person (Hanukov 2015). This theory appears to suggest that the public disagrees with the level at which our culture places celebrities on a pedestal and welcomes events that chip away at that tendency.

Earlier in this literature review, I discussed the idea that email records have the inherent benefit of promoting greater accountability. However, that function of email records becomes more complicated in conjunction with the influence that the “cult of celebrity” has on the public. Studies of non-political celebrity scandals appear to reveal a tendency in all parties involved to sidestep notions of accountability for the opportunity to capitalize on the public’s fascination with celebrity. Celebrities, and their representatives, will use the scandal to generate more publicity and money-making

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opportunities for themselves. The press continues to give the shamed celebrity more attention, knowing that the story will sell, and the public continues to consume information about the celebrity. It is this dynamic that validates the idea that “all press is good press” (Hanukov 2015). Because of this, celebrities can benefit from scandals, rather than being held accountable for their actions.

However, sometimes particular aspects of a celebrity’s lifestyle to which the wider public can relate leads the public to hold them to the same moral standards to which they would hold themselves. For instance, Kate Moss faced increased scrutiny during her drug scandal because of her role as a mother (Hanukov 2015). Mayor Len

Brown of Auckland, New Zealand faced such extreme scrutiny after a sex scandal that his political career has not recovered. This can be partially attributed to a sense from the media, and the public, that they must expose scandals to hold those in power accountable

(Hannis 2016). Thus, successful politicians, because of their roles as government leaders, may also experience higher scrutiny when faced with scandal.

1.3.1 Politicians as Celebrities Politicians are similar in many ways to other celebrities. Like other celebrities, their careers depend on popularity, and they employ similar strategies to gain popularity as those used in the entertainment industry (Wood, Corbett & Flinders 2016). This adoption of the marketing and communication strategies of popular culture by politicians is often referred to as celebrity politics (Loader, Vromen & Zenos 2015). It is clear from the literature that today’s successful politicians have developed specific marketing strategies.

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Politicians today strive not to appear exclusively larger-than-life, but to appear normal to everyday citizens. Wood et al found that politicians generally use some combination of marketing strategies that present them as poised “superstar” politicians, and strategies that present them as everyday members of society. In recent years, some of the most successful politicians have found ways to appear both exciting and normal

(Wood, Corbett & Flinders 2016). This may be largely in response to the expectations of citizens, who express desires for politicians to be serious, competent, and relatable. They must be able to navigate seamlessly between the “political, public and private spheres”

(Loader, Vromen & Zenos 2015).

A common strategy that present-day politicians adopt to enhance their popularity is to associate themselves with the domestic sphere (Wood, Corbett & Flinders 2016).

Another strategy is to use social media platforms to engage citizens. This strategy is particularly useful for connecting with younger constituents and is part of a historical trend in which politicians seek to capture the attention of everyday citizens through the most popular forums for communication of the day (Loader, Vromen & Zenos 2015).

Politicians also enlist the help of celebrities from the entertainment industry, appearing with them and welcoming their endorsements to appear more likeable and relatable to their fans (Wheeler 2012).

Some have argued that celebrity politics is a positive experience for a democracy

(Wood, Corbett & Flinders 2016), in part because it helps to encourage public engagement in the policy process. It can introduce alternative discourses that energize citizens who are disillusioned with mainstream politics (Wheeler 2012). Meanwhile, others have noted the “cult of personality” has historically been most common in

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autocratic regimes (Street 2012). This is closely related to a larger debate about the political implications of our culture’s general fascination with celebrity (Turner 2014).

1.4 The Relationship between the News Media and the Public As this study attempts to gauge public opinion by using news stories, it is necessary to explore the influence that the news media has on public opinion. There is a logical aspect to this relationship, which will be discussed below.

1.4.1 Influence of the News Media We know that the public relies on the media for information about important issues and events (Littlefield & Quenette 2007). We also know that “audiences process information provided by the news media and store it in memory” (Scheufele &

Tewskbury 2006). Therefore, it makes sense that the way an issue is framed by the news media and the facts that news sources choose to include or exclude will color the public discourse on the issue (De la Fuente 2010).

The impact of the news media is evident outside the sphere of academia, as well.

In fact, policymakers have noted that the media’s framing of issues impacts the opinions of their constituents in such a way that it limits the policy options available to them, leading some to dub the media as “the fourth branch of government” (De la Fuente 2010).

The media also has the power to influence public opinion of government officials’ job performance, which has real-world consequences for those who are judged poorly. This was certainly the case after Hurricane Katrina, when the lack of federal preparation for disaster relief efforts caught considerable media attention. As a result, President Bush’s approval ratings plummeted, and FEMA Director Michael Brown resigned from his position amidst wide public criticism (Littlefield & Quenette 2007).

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1.4.2 Influences on the News Media The news media is not a completely impartial entity. Several factors influence the way the media reports on stories, one of which is the nature of the industry. Today’s news industry is highly competitive and fast-paced, which has an impact on the way stories are processed and presented to the public. This can lead to a superficial presentation of issues that, in fact, have complex root causes (De la Fuente 2010). This is perhaps truer in the

21st century than ever before, as the news media must compete with a growing volume of citizen-generated content on the Internet (Wheeler 2012). News outlets must compete for the public’s attention in this environment. Thus, they must choose to cover stories that are most likely to capture that attention.

Research Design

In recent years, the American news media has produced many stories related to scandals involving the emails of political figures. Potential sources of the large volume of controversies involving email may well include the nature of email as a record and the archival and records management community’s still ongoing efforts to develop effective policies and systems for managing email. However, the source of the public’s fascination with government email has yet to be explored. For that reason, this study asks what news coverage of five specific controversies involving the email of prominent politicians reveals about the reasons for the public’s interest in these stories.

1.5 Qualitative Methods This study constituted one of the cases, described by Punch, in which “the logic of a study…is clearly qualitative or clearly quantitative” (Punch 2016). Punch’s own

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examples of studies that lend themselves towards qualitative methods involve situations in which one needs to study “meanings” and use “interpretations” (Punch 2016). This was one of those situations. The question of why people feel the way they do about any given issue is complex and difficult to pin down. To approach this question successfully, a researcher needs to have the flexibility to make interpretations and analyze meanings and contexts.

Additionally, Larsson describes qualitative methodology as “appropriate when the researcher wants to stay open to new perspectives on the topic” (Larsson 2014). As this study was exploratory as defined by Babbie (2016), it was necessary to maintain that degree of flexibility. There was no previous research on this specific topic, nor was there an existing coding scheme designed to answer this question. It was always possible that some of the answers that emerged would be unanticipated, and that important coding categories could reveal themselves during the data analysis process. I needed the flexibility of qualitative research methods to adapt to these situations.

1.6 Content Analysis I used content analysis of news media to search for an answer to this research question. Stemler described content analysis as “the most powerful tool in the researcher’s kit” (Stemler 2015). His point was that the amount of data available to researchers in this age of mass media and mass communication is staggering, and that researchers today have a unique opportunity to leverage this data to provide insight into a wide variety of human activities. As this study involved the emails of high-profile individuals, this type of data was amply available in the news media’s coverage of the

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cases. Content analysis a particularly appropriate method for answering the present question.

One such benefit of content analysis was its ability to mitigate a major concern regarding the accuracy of self-reported data. The tendency of study participants to inaccurately report on their own behavior, or to behave differently when they know a researcher is observing them, is a well-known problem in social research (Babbie 2016).

Content analysis can provide a remedy to this problem, as it provides researchers with relevant data created outside of the context of a research study (Stemler 2015). It can be particularly beneficial in addressing a question as complex and nebulous as why people care about issues. Individuals may not be consciously aware of some of their reasons for taking interest in an issue but may inadvertently reveal these reasons when writing about the issue.

Content analysis can be “used to examine language, characterization and imagery” (Guillaume & Bath 2008). This was ideal for an exploratory study such as this, in which a researcher aims to interpret the different ways that individuals might be expressing similar concepts. It is also true that “characterization and imagery” may be key in helping a researcher to parse the possible answers to such a subjective question.

1.7 Sampling I focused on five specific cases involving the release of emails of high profile political figures. Those cases were the Hillary Clinton private server email, the Chris

Christie bridge closing email, the lawsuit over Mike Pence’s email, the private email use of Trump White House officials, and the John Podesta emails disclosed on WikiLeaks. I limited the number of cases to five in order keep the scope of the study within a

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reasonable range for the given timeframe. Focusing in on a few cases, as opposed to analyzing a small number of articles on a variety of different cases, allowed for a more focused approach that could begin to address the influence of specific factors in each case. The chosen cases cover both major political parties and involve officials from national and state government, as well as addressing the tricky issue of the public’s interest in the emails of campaign officials. They also involve email disclosed with varying degrees of willingness and for various reasons. This provides both the most inclusive and the most thorough approach possible given the time constraints.

I analyzed online news articles pertaining to the five cases included in this study.

There is a substantial body of literature that demonstrates a connection between the news media and public opinion. The literature presented evidence to suggest that news coverage of issues both influences and is influenced by public opinion. Therefore, I decided that news articles provided the most efficient means of gaining insight into public opinion.

I located the news articles by using the news aggregators Google News and MSN

News to search for articles about the five cases being examined in this study. I searched both aggregators for the terms Hillary Clinton emails, Chris Christie emails, Mike Pence emails, Trump White House emails, and John Podesta emails. I selected the first 15 unique articles per aggregator for each case that were relevant to the current research question, for a total of 30 articles per case. This allowed me to examine enough articles to address the research question without setting unrealistic goals for the timeframe. For the

Clinton scandal, this basic search was enough to yield an appropriate number of relevant articles. For the other cases, I had to use different search terms to locate enough articles.

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See Table 1 for a full list of search terms used for each case. When searching for articles on the Trump White House email case, however, I was only able to locate nine articles using Google News. To reach 30 articles for this case, I used Google web search to locate the remaining six that I would otherwise have found through Google News.

Table 1. Search terms used for each email case.

In determining the relevance of an article, the primary factor I used was whether it could offer any insight into the present research question. To be included in the study, it must, at some point in the article, have offered an explanation as to why the author, or any individual or group of individuals cited by the author, felt that it was or was not important for the public to have access to the email of the government or political figure being studied. Neither the perceived importance of the emails nor the emails themselves needed to be the primary subject of the article, if it answered the research question in some way. However, the author or individuals cited by the author did need to be

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referencing the case being examined when they offered their opinion on why email matters.

Google News and MSN News provided a large mix of news sources to examine on each case. Searches yielded news sources of differing political leanings on both the national and local levels, as well as sources specializing in topics such as the information technology and financial industries. This was desirable, as this study aimed to gain insight into the opinions of the general public, rather than any segment of the public.

Also, for this reason, I did not consider the political bias or journalistic integrity of the news sources. The goal was simply to understand the reasons why people felt these records were important, not to make judgements about whether those reasons were justified.

1.8 Overviews of the Five Email Cases I selected five specific scandals involving the email of high-profile politicians to examine for this study. I will give a brief description of each case below.

1.8.1 Hillary Clinton Email In 2015, a House committee was investigating the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, which occurred while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State.

They requested to see Mrs. Clinton’s email correspondence related to the Benghazi attack, and it was discovered that she had exclusively used a private email account to conduct government business while Secretary of State. Her staff went through the process of reviewing her email from her time as Secretary of State and determining which messages belonged to the State Department and which were personal. The State

Department then reviewed the 55,000 pages of email returned to them and gave the

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House committee 900 pages that they deemed to be relevant to the inquiry (Schmidt

2015).

Months later, in July of 2015, the inspectors general for the State Department and

Office of the Director of National Intelligence referred the email case to the Justice

Department after discovering classified information in Mrs. Clinton’s emails. They requested that the Justice Department investigate further to determine whether she had mishandled classified information (Welker 2015). This prompted an FBI investigation into Clinton’s private server, to determine whether she had stored her email securely

(Williams 2015).

The investigation concluded nearly a year later in July of 2016. The FBI found

110 emails containing classified information on the Clinton server, with eight of those emails containing top-secret information, the highest level of government classification.

They also found that Clinton had used her personal email while in the territory of foreign adversaries. However, they found no evidence that Clinton or her staff intended to violate laws. For this reason, the FBI recommended no charges be brought against Clinton

(Siemaszko 2016). Two weeks before the 2016 presidential election, in which Clinton was a candidate, the FBI renewed its investigation into her server after finding potentially relevant emails during a separate investigation. They ultimately determined that the new emails did not change their original conclusion.

1.8.2 Chris Christie Email Investigations into the 2013 Bridgegate scandal and subsequent court cases uncovered the email of former New Jersey governor Chris Christie and his senior staff. In

August of 2013, David Wildstein, a Christie ally at the Port Authority, discussed a plan to

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retaliate against Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich for failing to endorse Christie’s reelection with Christie’s deputy chief of staff, Bridget Anne Kelly. The plan involved reducing Fort Lee’s access lanes to the George Washington Bridge from three, down to one. This plan took effect on September 9, 2013, the first day of school, and caused a huge slow-down in traffic for five days, until the lanes were reopened (Flanagan 2016).

The United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey launched an investigation in the aftermath of the incident, during which time emails and text messages between Port Authority officials and Christie staffers became public. An email exchange, in which Kelly wrote “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee”, and Wildstein responded, “Got it”, came to be known as the “smoking gun” in the case. The investigations culminated in a guilty plea of conspiracy and corruption from Wildstein, and the later convictions of Kelly and Port Authority official Bill Baroni on similar charges related to the incident. Wildstein, Kelly, and several other staffers accused

Christie of knowing about the plot in advance, but no charges have been brought against the former governor at the time of this writing (Domonoske 2016).

1.8.3 Mike Pence Email While he was Governor of Indiana, Vice President Mike Pence joined a lawsuit that several governors brought against the Obama Administration, challenging an executive order on immigration. Mr. Pence also hired a private law firm to represent the

State of Indiana in the case. In 2014, Indianapolis attorney William Groth requested records related to Pence’s decision to hire a private law firm for the case. Pence’s office produced the documents, but they were heavily redacted, and a white paper attached to an email message from the Texas Governor’s chief of staff was missing. Groth challenged

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Pence’s decision to withhold the white paper in court, but the court ultimately sided with

Pence (Hussein 2017).

The Indianapolis Star then launched a separate investigation into Pence’s email use as Governor of Indiana. They found that he used a private AOL account to conduct state business, including matters of homeland security and communications with the FBI regarding terrorism arrests in Indiana. They also found that his AOL account was hacked and used in a phishing attack. The hacker did not appear to be targeting him personally

(Cook 2017a).

1.8.4 Trump White House Email In September of 2017, the New York Times reported that several senior officials in the Trump White House had, at least occasionally, been using private email accounts to conduct official business. These officials included Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon,

Reince Priebus, Gary Cohn, Stephen Miller, and Ivanka Trump. Mr. Kushner received additional attention for creating a domain shortly after the election on which to host his family’s emails. None of the officials used a private email exclusively, but the revelations did raise concerns that having relevant emails stored on non-government servers might hinder the special counsel investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the presidential election (Apuzzo & Haberman 2017).

1.8.5 John Podesta Email On October 7, 2016, during the 2016 presidential campaign, WikiLeaks began releasing emails of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. They claimed to have 50,000 of his emails and vowed to release more every day leading up to the election.

The emails covered topics including the Clinton Global Initiative, Mrs. Clinton’s private

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speeches to banks, her own email scandal, and an attack on the U.S. embassy in

Benghazi. U.S. intelligence officials were able to determine that the Russian hacking group Fancy Bear was responsible for the stolen emails, and that the Russian government had likely ordered the attack to interfere with the presidential election (CBS/AP 2016).

1.8.6 Emergent Coding Emergent coding allows one to examine data without an existing coding scheme in mind, allowing relevant concepts to emerge from the data (Stemler 2015). This is founded in the principles of grounded theory, a qualitative research methodology that allows for the development of theories through the flexible interpretation of data (Glaser

& Strauss 1967).

This methodology is particularly useful for an exploratory study such as this. I began analyzing the articles without any theory or coding scheme in mind. I looked for important coding categories and commonly expressed ideas as I went along. As I began to develop more concrete categories and subcategories for my coding scheme, I applied them to new data and reviewed old data with these categories in mind. When I was satisfied that the content analysis stage was complete, I looked for significant patterns in the data, which I used to formulate my findings.

After I had finished the initial coding of the articles, I had a second coder code a subset of 15 articles out of the 150 that I had selected for this study. The results of the second coding helped to inform some changes to the way I had been applying the categories, but they were most helpful for demonstrating the specific ways that the subjectivity of this task can lead to different outcomes with different coders. First, we decided to approach the task from different levels of granularity. She looked for broad

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themes in the articles, while I broke them down sentence-by-sentence and looked for where new reasons for interest were being introduced. As a result, I generally applied more categories.

Second, sometimes the difference between two categories was dependent on personal interpretation of what those categories meant. For example, she interpreted a mention of the “appearance of impropriety” as an expression of “Character Flaws”, with impropriety being the character flaw, while I interpreted it to be an implicit reference to corruption. How we coded this depended on what we considered to be a character flaw and how we defined corruption. Ultimately, I decided to keep my original category assignments in both these cases, but it is helpful to better understand how personal interpretation may lead to different results, depending on who is coding.

1.9 A Note on Personal Biases Although responsible researchers try to remove any bias from their study, the subjective nature of qualitative research means that researchers run the risk of inadvertently allowing their personal biases to influence the results of their study.

Therefore, it is best if I disclose my own biases before delving any further into the research. As this study deals with the emails of high profile political figures, the reader should know that I am a registered Democrat and consider my political views to be left leaning. This has the potential to lead to a difference in the way I view cases involving

Democrats versus cases involving Republicans, which could influence my coding of those cases.

However, I took steps to mitigate the influence that this bias could have on the results of the study. First, the aim of the study was to identify the reasons why people felt

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the emails in these cases were important, not to make judgements about the validity of those reasons. When discussing the results, I will refrain from making any statements on whether I feel the opinions expressed in the articles are justified. I also did not consider my opinions of the news source, the author, or the content when selecting articles. I judged articles solely based on whether they could answer my question, and I took the first 15 for each case, from each aggregator, that met these criteria.

Results

Through the process of examining the 150 articles that I selected for this study, I created a coding scheme that I used to produce the final analysis of my results. Below, I will describe the categories and subcategories that made up the final coding scheme. I will then provide a breakdown of the results of my final analysis.

1.10 The Coding Scheme At the close of the content analysis phase of this research, the coding scheme has

15 categories, five of which are broken down further into subcategories. For each instance of a code assignment, I identified a snippet, which consists of the sentence within the article where I felt the opinion was first introduced. Table 2 contains a list of all coding categories with an example of a snippet for each. I did not impose any limits on the number of codes that could be assigned in each article. If different people expressed the same opinion in the same article, I coded each of those expressions separately. Also, if the same person expressed multiple opinions in the same article, I coded those different opinions separately. However, if the same person expressed the same opinion multiple times in an article, I only coded that opinion once. As the coding

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scheme is a key component of the output of this research which affects the results of the study, I will provide an explanation of each of the coding categories and how I applied them.

Category Example

Character Flaws Most of the attention to Clinton’s emails came from Republicans, who perceived her more generally as dishonest and scandal-plagued. Illegal Activity They still chant ‘Lock her up’ at Trump rallies, just as they did at the New York Stock Exchange as she gave her concession speech. Lack of Transparency The new documents included 115 Clinton email exchanges that were not previously turned over by the State Department. Unimportant This study will be used by liberals as evidence that the media's unnecessary focus on Clinton's email server cost her the election. Security Risk The two stories suggested that the AOL email account was used by Pence to discuss seemingly confidential subjects such as terror attacks and to receive FBI updates. Political As far as is known on the public record, the only Russian Consequences activities of any consequence were the email hacking of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and John Podesta. Corruption The Podesta Emails support accusations that the former Secretary of State had a cozy relationship with bankers. Sheds Additional Whistleblower website WikiLeaks has been dumping hacked emails pertaining to the workings of Democratic candidate Light Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign for weeks now.

Duty of Government John Vecchione, president of the Cause of Action Institute, said it’s the agency’s duty to recover the records. Incompetence After all, it was Clinton who never seemed to grasp the seriousness of the issue and how it eroded the public’s already shaky confidence in her. Interpersonal Conflicts Another email has long-time Clinton aide Doug Band referring to Chelsea Clinton as a ‘spoiled brat’. Additional Questions But the email leaves plenty questions about what kinds of conversations came before it and who else was involved. Costing Taxpayer The former governor’s actions have cost us in terms of time and Money money. Medical Problems Additional documents allegedly show that Chelsea Clinton emails, an email sent by Clinton to Abedin saying she did not

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wish to fly on the same plane with former First Lady Michelle Obama to Betty Ford’s funeral, and an email chain between Clinton staffers showing they drafted a “doctors statement” as to why Mrs. Clinton fainted due to “dehydration” causing her to hit her head and suffer a “concussion” in December 2012. Violent Fallout In December 2016, Edgar Maddison Welch, a man who believed the viral Internet rumor, opened fire in the restaurant in Washington. Table 2. Coding categories with examples.

The most widely used category overall was “Character Flaws,” with 85 uses, 69 of which were implicit, and 16 of which were explicit. I assigned this category any time an individual suggested that either the content of the emails, or the circumstances of the email scandal, carried evidence that a person possessed undesirable character traits. I broke this category down into five subcategories, based on which character flaw the person allegedly possessed. In order of frequency, these subcategories were hypocritical

(63 uses); dishonest (14 uses); cruel, inconsiderate, or selfish (four uses); racist (two uses); and sexist (one use). Explicit uses of this category typically mentioned the name of the character flaw. The statement, “Most of the attention to Clinton’s emails came from

Republicans, who perceived her more generally as dishonest and scandal-plagued”

(Edwards-Levy 2017), is an example of this. Implicit uses did not mention the flaw directly but used language that implied the flaw. For example, in the statement, “But a lawyer working on behalf of a New Jersey newspaper seeking public records from the governor recently argued Christie engaged in somewhat similar behavior” (Arco 2016), the author mentions an accusation that Christie criticized Clinton for doing something like what he was doing but does not explicitly mention hypocrisy.

The second most used category was “Illegal Activity,” with 65 uses, 37 of which were implicit, and 28 of which were explicit. I assigned this category when an individual

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expressed the opinion that either the content of the emails, or the circumstances surrounding the management of the emails, provided evidence of illegal activity. Explicit uses of this category stated that a person may have violated laws or mentioned punishments that result from illegal activity. The statement, “They still chant ‘Lock her up’ at Trump rallies, just as they did at the New York Stock Exchange as she gave her concession speech” (Traister 2017), is an example of this. Implicit references often mentioned the use of the emails as evidence in court cases or criminal investigations. In the statement, “Their attorneys now say Christie deleted text messages and hid emails that may have contradicted his claim that he knew nothing about the lane closures”

(Blitzer 2016), the author mentions accusations that Christie’s emails may provide evidence that he was involved in something that was deemed illegal but falls short of explicitly accusing him of illegal activity.

The third most used category was “Lack of Transparency,” with 64 uses, 54 of which were implicit, and 10 of which were explicit. I assigned this category when an individual expressed the opinion that either the content of the emails, or the circumstances of the email scandal, indicated that a person was not being transparent in his or her professional conduct. Explicit uses of this category mentioned the word transparency or made clear accusations of inappropriate destruction of public records.

The statement, “Two former Christie appointees indicted in the scheme are alleging that

Gibson Dunn destroyed or withheld evidence” (Katz & Bernstein 2016), is an example of this. Implicit uses mentioned missing information and questionable behavior without making clear accusations. For example, the statement, “The new documents included 115

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Clinton email exchanges that were not previously turned over by the State Department”, mentions missing email messages (Singman 2017).

The next most used was the “Unimportant” category, with 48 uses, 45 of which were implicit, and 3 of which were explicit. I assigned this category any time an individual suggested that the email scandal was not important, or that it was not important enough to warrant the level of attention it was receiving. Explicit mentions used the words “unimportant”, “unnecessary”, or equally clear language to describe the attention given to the controversy. The statement, “This study will be used by liberals as evidence that the media’s unnecessary focus on Clinton’s email server cost her the election,” is an example of this (Cillizza 2017). Implicit uses undercut the sense of importance assigned to the scandal without stating outright that it was not important. In the statement, “Christie’s lawyers say they’ve now searched that account and found no emails ‘related to and contemporaneous with the lane realignment’” (Katz & Bernstein

2016), Christie’s lawyers are refuting one of the major reasons for interest in his email.

The next category was “Security Risk,” with 47 uses, 31 of which were implicit, and 16 of which were explicit. I assigned this category when an individual made the case that the email either presented or revealed a security risk. This category was further broken down into subcategories based on whether the risk was to national security (31 instances) or a state’s security (16 instances). Explicit uses mentioned the security risk directly. The statement, “Who knows what kind of security ijkfamily.com has” (Daileda

2017), is an example of this. Implicit uses often referenced improper handling of classified or confidential information. For example, the statement, “The two stories suggested that the AOL email account was used by Pence to discuss seemingly

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confidential subjects such as terror attacks and to receive FBI updates” (Rathi 2017), references the use of an unsecure, private email account to discuss sensitive information.

The next category was “Political Consequences,” with 37 uses, 33 of which were explicit, and 4 of which were implicit. I assigned this category any time an individual presented evidence or expressed the opinion that the emails caused political or professional consequences. I broke this category into three subcategories based on whether the person was making the case that the emails did have political consequences

(29 instances), predicting that they would cause political consequences in the future (six instances), or arguing that they should cause political consequences (two instances).

Explicit uses directly stated that the email caused, would cause, or should cause a political consequence. The statement, “As far as is known on the public record, the only

Russian activities of any consequence were the email hacking of the Democratic National

Committee (DNC) and John Podesta” (Lin 2018), is an example of this. Implicit uses made statements that indirectly suggested consequences. In the statement, “Wikileaks, however, may be holding on to a bag of scandals though, saying Friday’s leak was the first batch of 50,000 emails” (Cox 2016), the author suggests that trouble may be ahead for the Clinton campaign.

The next category was “Corruption,” with 36 uses, 34 of which were implicit, and two of which were explicit. I assigned this category any time an individual suggested that either the content of the emails, or the circumstances surrounding the management of the emails, provided evidence of government corruption. Explicit references directly stated that they were talking about corruption. The statement, “Leaks from emails stolen from

Hillary Clinton advisor John Podesta continued until Election Day, reinforcing the view

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among some in the electorate that the Democratic nomination system was corrupt and rigged” (Pollard, Segal & Devost 2018), is an example of this. Implicit uses discussed behavior that is often associated with corruption. For example, the statement, “The

Podesta Emails support accusations that the former Secretary of State had a cozy relationship with bankers” (Cox 2016), mentions Clinton’s relationship with Wall Street, which is often associated with corruption among the Democratic base.

The next category was “Sheds Additional Light,” with 24 uses, 18 of which were explicit, and six of which were implicit. I assigned this category when a person discussed revelations about other issues that came out of the emails or used the email scandal to enhance a discussion of a separate issue. I broke this category into subcategories based on the other issue being discussed. Clinton campaign strategies was the most common, with five uses. Politicians’ awareness of information security issues, the voter fraud commission’s use of private email, and the ability of the Indiana state judiciary to check the executive branch each had two uses. The following issues each had one use: parole of

Paula Cooper, Mike Pence’s endorsement of Ted Cruz, Jared Kushner’s use of private email, Mike Pence’s opinion of Donald Trump, the firing of James Comey, the

Republican tax reform bill, ISIS’s funding sources, Russian attempts to hack Senate email accounts, the special counsel’s Russia investigation, the publication of the book

Clinton Cash, the Keystone XL pipeline, the Uranium One allegations against Hillary

Clinton, and the investigation into the FBI’s handling of the Clinton email investigation.

Explicit uses clearly addressed the relationship between the email and the separate issue.

The statement, “Whistleblower website WikiLeaks has been dumping hacked emails pertaining to the workings of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s presidential

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campaign for weeks now” (Pascaline 2016), is an example of this. Implicit uses referenced the email as a way of enhancing a discussion of a separate issue. In the statement “Pence was also criticized for his use of a private AOL account for state business while he was governor of Indiana” (Steele 2017), the author uses Pence’s AOL account to provide background information on a controversy involving the voter fraud commission that he led.

The next category was “Duty of Government,” with 21 uses, 19 of which were implicit, and two of which were explicit. I applied this when an individual stated or implied that it is the duty of the government or the official to provide the email to the public. Explicit uses directly mentioned a government’s duty. The statement, “John

Vecchione, president of the Cause of Action Institute, said it’s the agency’s duty to recover the records” (Schoffstall 2017), is an example of this. Implicit uses referenced ethics or the ways that the duty is reinforced through policy. For example, the statement,

“But that doesn’t make their blatant disregard for White House ethics any less alarming”

(Hilton 2017), suggests that the use of private email accounts violates the ethical duties of

White House employees.

The next category was “Incompetence,” with 11 uses, nine of which were implicit, and two of which were explicit. I applied this category any time some individual discussed ways that either the content of the emails, or the circumstances surrounding the email scandal, provided evidence of incompetence within the government or political system. Explicit uses directly referenced incompetence, while implicit uses discussed behavior that is often associated with incompetence. For example, I coded the statement,

“After all, it was Clinton who never seemed to grasp the seriousness of the issue and how

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it eroded the public’s already shaky confidence in her” (Cillizza 2017), as an implicit expression of the “Incompetence” category, because it mentioned Clinton’s email scandal damaging the public’s confidence in her ability to do her job.

The next category was “Interpersonal Conflicts,” with ten uses, eight of which were explicit, and two of which were implicit. I applied this category when an individual discussed interpersonal conflicts between government or political figures that were revealed in the emails. For all ten instances, these conflicts were revealed in the content of the email messages themselves. Explicit uses were clear about the fact that they were interested in an interpersonal conflict, while implicit uses mentioned behavior that was often used as evidence of an interpersonal conflict. For example, I coded the statement,

“Another email has long-time Clinton aide Doug Band referring to Chelsea Clinton as a

‘spoiled brat’” (Berman & Merica 2016), as an explicit expression of the “Interpersonal

Conflicts” category.

The next category was “Additional Questions,” with nine uses, seven of which were explicit, and two of which were implicit. I applied this category when an individual discussed new questions that the email scandal had led them to ask. I broke this category into subcategories based on the question that was being asked. General questions or more information had four instances, while who was involved or had access to the emails had two instances. How sensitive the emails were, the extent of the situation, and what the officials were hiding each had one instance. Explicit uses mentioned that the email caused the person to ask questions, while implicit uses mentioned aspects of the controversy that were not clear. For example, I coded the statement, “But the email leaves plenty questions about what kinds of conversations came before it and who else

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was involved” (Phillip & Walshe 2014), as an explicit expression of the who was involved or had access subcategory within the “Additional Questions” category.

The next category was “Costing Taxpayer Money,” with five instances, four of which were explicit, and one of which was implicit. I applied this category when an individual brought up the concern that taxpayer funds were being used to manage the email scandal. The explicit uses were clear about the use of taxpayer funds to manage the email, while the implicit use referenced the money but was not clear in conveying that it was taxpayer money. For example, I coded the statement, “The former governor’s actions have cost us in terms of time and money” (Cook 2017b), as an explicit expression of the

“Costing Taxpayer Money” category.

The final two categories, “Medical Problems” and “Violent Fallout”, had only one instance each. The “Medical Problems” instance had to do with a doctor’s statement that

Clinton’s staff drafted after she suffered a concussion in 2012, which was discussed in her released emails. The “Violent Fallout” instance involved a shooting in a Washington pizza parlor by a man who believed the debunked “Pizzagate” rumors. These rumors began after the release in the Podesta emails, when conspiracy theorists found what they believed to be references to a child sex trafficking ring in the emails.

1.11 Breakdown of Usage While “Character Flaws” was the most-used category overall (Figure 1), with

18.3% of total category assignments, it only accounted for 3.9% of assignments related to

Hillary Clinton’s email scandal. For Clinton’s case (Figure 2), “Political Consequences” was the most prominent category, with 30.3% of assignments. In fact, her case accounts for 62.2% of all assignments of the “Political Consequences” category. “Illegal Activity”

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and “Security Risk” were also prominent in the Clinton case, with each accounting for

15.8% of assignments for Clinton’s controversy. This is similar to the percentage of

“Illegal Activity” assignments overall, which was 14%. However, it is higher than the overall percentage for “Security Risk”, which was 10.1%, and accounts for a quarter of all uses of this category.

Figure 1. Total distribution of categories.

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Figure 2. Category distribution for Hillary Clinton’s case.

The top three categories in Chris Christie’s case were the same as the top three overall, although they did not fall in the same order (Figure 3). “Character Flaws” was third in Christie’s case, and held a similar percentage in his case as it did overall, with

19.4%. “Illegal Activity” was the top category for Christie, with 27.2% of category assignments. This accounts for 43% of all the assignments of the “Illegal Activity” category. “Lack of Transparency” was second, with 22.3% of assignments in Christie’s case, compared to 13.8% of assignments overall. This accounts for 35.9% of all assignments for this category. “Duty of Government” was also more prominent for

Christie than it was across cases, as it was in fourth place for Christie but ninth overall. It had 9.7% of assignments in Christie’s case, but 4.5% overall. This accounts for 47.6% of all assignments of this category.

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Figure 3. Category distribution for Chris Christie’s case.

Of the top five overall categories, “Illegal Activity” was the only one that was not among the top categories in Mike Pence’s case, with only 4% of category assignments in his case (Figure 4). The most used category for Pence’s case was “Lack of

Transparency,” with a quarter of assignments, accounting for 48.4% of all uses of this category. “Character Flaws” was close behind, with 24.4% of assignments for Pence, accounting for 35.3% of all uses of this category. “Unimportant” was also common for

Pence, with 15.4% of assignments in his case, accounting for 39.6% of all assignments for the category. “Security Risk” was the final member of Pence’s top four categories, with 13% of assignments, and accounting for 34% of all assignments for that category.

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Figure 4. Category distribution for Mike Pence’s case.

The top three categories for the Trump White House staffers were also among the top categories overall (Figure 5). “Character Flaws” was the most common, with a third of all category assignments for this case, accounting for 37.6% of assignments for the category overall. Although this far exceeded the numbers for all other categories that were assigned in this case, “Illegal Activity” came closest, with 14.4% of assignments.

“Unimportant” was next, with 12.4% of assignments, accounting for a quarter of all assignments in that category. “Corruption” was a bit of an outlier. It only had 10% of assignments for the Trump White House staffers, but this accounted for 27.8% of all assignments for the category and is slightly larger than the 7.8% of assignments that this category makes up overall.

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Figure 5. Category distribution for the Trump White House case.

“Security Risk” figured prominently in Podesta’s case, with 18.5% of category assignments (Figure 6). This was higher than the overall percentage for this category and accounted for a quarter of its total assignments. However, the biggest outlier for Podesta was “Sheds Additional Light”, which was the most common category for this case with

20% of assignments. This is in comparison to the 5% of assignments that this category received overall, and accounts for 54.2% of all assignments of this category.

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Figure 6. Category distribution for John Podesta’s case.

1.11.1 Influence of Political Bias I consulted the AllSides and Media Bias Fact Check websites to assign a political bias category to each of the news sources I used. AllSides uses multiple methods to determine their bias rating. They consult the source itself for self-reporting of bias, third party research, and independent reviews. They also have developed their own metric, which calculates the bias rating based on how people in different bias groups rate articles from the source (AllSides 2018). Media Bias Fact Check reviews several articles from each source, and assigns scores in four different categories, which they then average to determine the final bias rating. The four categories are Biased Wording/Headlines,

Factual/Sourcing, Story Choices, and Political Affiliation (Media Bias Fact Check). I used the ratings from these two websites to assign biases to the news sources I used.

When a news source was not listed on either site, I categorized it as “Not Rated”. This was most common for local news sources.

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Of the news sources that I used, 26.7% were Center-Left, 25.6% were Not Rated,

16.3% were Left, 15.1% were Center, 8.1% were Center-Right, and 7% were Right

(Figure 7). Media Bias Fact Check classified one source as Conspiracy-Pseudoscience, a special category that the site assigns to sources whose general theme is centered around advancing conspiracy theories or pseudoscience. This accounts for 1.2% of sources.

Figure 7. Distribution of news sources by political bias.

Because some of the articles I used came from the same news sources, the distribution of bias ratings across articles is somewhat different. Of the articles used, 34% were from a Center-Left news source, 22.7% were from a Center news source, 15.3% were from a Left news source, 14.7% were from a Not Rated news source, 6.7% were from a Right news source, 6% were from a Center-Right news source, and 0.7% were from a Conspiracy-Pseudoscience news source (Figure 8). CNN and Newsweek were tied for the most used news sources, with eight articles each.

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Figure 8. Distribution of political bias across articles.

Because there could only be one bias category per article, and because there were so few right-of-center news sources represented, it is difficult to gain an understanding of case-by-case trends related to political bias from this study. Still, the data produced by this study did reveal some trends. First, I had no articles from Right news sources for any of the three cases that centered around Republican officials. By contrast, Hillary

Clinton’s case had six articles from Right news sources, while John Podesta’s had four.

Additionally, among cases that had articles from Center-Right sources, there was not much difference between Republican-centered and Democrat-centered cases in the number of articles from these sources. However, Mike Pence’s case did not have any articles from Center-Right sources, meaning I had no right-of-center articles for his case.

When looking at how categories were assigned across news bias categories, some additional trends appear. One is that the “Security Risk” category makes up 6.76% of category assignments for Left news sources, 12.07% for Center-Left news sources,

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14.29% for Center-Right news sources, and 19.35% for Right news sources. So, partisan- leaning news sources were more likely to mention “Security Risk” the farther right they leaned. However, a news source was more likely to mention “Lack of Transparency” the closer it fell to the center of the political bias spectrum. Among partisan-leaning news sources, those that leaned left were more likely to express concerns about transparency than those that leaned right. Specifically, this category made up 3.23% of assignments for

Right sources, 8.11% for Left sources, 9.52% for Center-Right sources, 12.64% for

Center-Left sources, 21.01% for Center sources, and 18.18% for sources that were Not

Rated.

Sources that leaned to the right were more likely than any other bias category to have “Political Consequences” assignments. This category made up 16.13% of assignments for Right news sources and 14.29% for Center-Right sources, but the next highest percentage was Center, with 8.4%. However, no right-of-center news sources had any mentions of “Prompts Additional Questions.” “Character Flaws” had a fairly high percentage for most bias categories, but it was significantly higher among Left sources than all others, with 31.08% of assignments for Left sources and 20.45% of the next- highest bias category, Not Rated. However, news sources on the other far end of the political spectrum – Right – had no mentions of “Character Flaws.”

The two far ends of the political spectrum were the most likely to mention

“Corruption”. This made up 14.86% of category assignments on the Left and 16.13% on the Right, compared to the next-highest, Center-Right, with 9.52%. This was also the only category that received a mention from the Conspiracy-Pseudoscience news source.

Finally, “Unimportant” was more likely to be mentioned by news sources closer to the

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center of the political spectrum. It made up 19.57% of category assignments in Center news sources, 10.34% for Center-Left, and 9.52% for Center-Right. Left sources were slightly more likely to mention this category than Right sources, with “Unimportant” making up 6.76% of Left’s category assignments, compared to Right’s 3.23%.

Discussion

The clearest takeaway from these results is that the most dominant reason for showing interest in these email scandals was that they revealed character flaws in prominent government figures. This seems to be a convergence of several ideas previously discussed in the literature review. First, this reflects the idea that people are drawn to celebrity scandals, in part because they have the effect of lowering the individuals from their pedestal of celebrity and bringing them closer to the average person. It also reflects the idea that people may hold government leaders to a higher standard than other types of celebrity, and that they may be drawn to politicians that can appear both relatable and larger-than-life. Being flawed can make these politicians seem more like regular people but having their most glaring character flaws laid bare makes them seem less like the polished leaders they need to be.

On the surface, this seems to suggest that people are interested in these scandals primarily because they value the insight emails can give into how these politicians behave and what they say when they think the public cannot hear them. After all, learning about these flaws is so significant because it contradicts the public image that they have crafted for themselves. The fact that hypocrisy was the most common flaw by such a large margin seems to further support that people are interested in how they are privately

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contradicting their public images. But only 12.9% of the mentions of character flaws were referring to flaws that were revealed in the content of the emails themselves, while the rest were evident in the circumstances surrounding the controversy. Therefore, these scandals seem to be operating as typical celebrity scandals, at least in terms of the way they are revealing information about the character of the individuals involved.

Still, some of the other highly-used categories seem to suggest that these are different from the typical celebrity scandal. “Illegal Activity” and “Lack of

Transparency” were also top categories. “Illegal Activity” was almost evenly split between content and circumstances in terms of how the activity was revealed, with content being slightly more prominent. This seems to signify two different things. First, people care about the evidentiary value that emails possess as a documentary form.

Second, they place a great deal of value on the roles emails play both as evidence in the legal system and as a tool for greater accountability. They take records laws seriously and judge people harshly who even appear to violate them.

This goes together with the “Lack of Transparency” category. People feel that, even when no illegal activity has occurred, having access to the emails is still essential to hold their government accountable in other ways. This reflects another idea discussed in the literature review – that transparency in government has been a key value throughout

America’s history, and that emails play a key role in upholding that value in the modern era. In the interest in this, and in illegal activity, one can begin to see the appreciation for the ability of emails to provide insight in how people behave outside the public eye that was missing in the mentions of character flaws.

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The results of this study also highlight the importance of circumstance in how people perceive and assign importance to a case. Hillary Clinton’s email scandal coincided closely with a presidential election in which she was one of the primary candidates, so it is no surprise that people would be interested in the political consequences of the controversy. The emails that came out in Chris Christie’s case were being used as evidence in a criminal investigation, so it is also clear to see why people were interested in how those emails revealed illegal activity. Donald Trump ran a presidential campaign that heavily featured criticism of Hillary Clinton’s email scandal, then several of the people who worked on that campaign went on to use personal email in their White House jobs. The primary concern here was hypocrisy. John Podesta was not particularly high-profile before his emails were released, but he was running a political campaign for Hillary Clinton, who had been a high-profile politician for some time. His emails were later revealed to have been stolen by Russian hackers. So, “Sheds Additional

Light” and “Security Risk” were both of particular relevance to his case.

There seems to be an interesting relationship between the top two categories in

Mike Pence’s case. Some of the news sources mentioned that he had cultivated a belief in transparency as part of his public image. Others suggested that this scandal confirmed already existing concerns that Pence’s belief in transparency may not be sincere. Many others either implied or explicitly stated that his indignation in response to Hillary

Clinton’s email scandal was hypocritical, and that the circumvention of accountability was the same in both cases despite the difference in scale. So, both the concerns about lack of transparency, and about hypocrisy, appear to be related. It is possible that the presence of both these issues combined to create a feeling of importance for this case.

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The results may also signify that political bias also factors into what people find to be important, at least to some degree. Those farther to the right may be more likely to be concerned about protecting national security and the political consequences of an email scandal, while they may be less interested in what further questions may come out of the controversy. Those on the left may be more interested in assuring transparency and learning about the character of their leaders. Those closer to the center of the spectrum may be more likely to be concerned about transparency, and to question whether the scandal is important at all. Those on the far ends may be more interested in uncovering government corruption. Meanwhile, those on the far right may not consider scandals involving politicians with whom they are ideologically aligned to be important at all.

Finally, these results carry some implications for records professionals responsible for managing government records. The need for improved government email management is not new. It is the level of interest that this issue is currently receiving from the public that has changed. Understanding that increased interest can help records professionals to better understand how to approach their priorities in a time when both the volume of records and interest in those records are growing.

One conclusion that these results suggest is that much of the interest is rooted in an understanding of the role of email as a record and desire to ensure that the benefits of email records are preserved. This suggests that the interest is genuine and not likely to go away quickly. This may underscore a need to prioritize improved management of these records, as even the appearance of improper email use can be met with public backlash.

However, the wide interest in character flaws may complicate this point. As mentioned above, this points both to a genuine interest in knowing that our leaders are people of

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good character, but also to the wider world of celebrity scandals, in which people seek to see celebrities lowered from the pedestal on which society has placed them. This suggests a need for balance. While it is important to prioritize access to and usability of government records for citizens, that needs to be balanced with a consideration for the privacy of government officials.

These results also emphasize the importance of circumstance in propelling an instance of oversight in email management into a national scandal. There were categories that were prevalent overall, but each individual case had different categories that stood out when compared to the whole. As mentioned above, these were often connected to the details of the case. These differences can help records professionals identify situations that are likely to generate increased interest in email records. It is clear that elections and criminal investigations are two such situations. But these results also seem to suggest that politicians who focus more on transparency and improved access to public records are likely to see more public interest in their own records.

Limitations and Direction for Future Research

One limitation of this study was sample size. For an exploratory study,150 articles over five cases was a sufficient size, because it allowed me to get an idea of what major categories were present and report on broad trends. However, future research can learn more by expanding the size. Expanding the number of cases examined can allow for insights into the influence of specific factors, such as political party and level of government, on the results. Including local and state-level government officials who are not also receiving attention at the national level can also allow for insights into the impact

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of level of government. As previously mentioned, expanding the number of articles examined per case can support a case-by-case analysis of the influence of the political bias of news sources.

Obtaining a more representative sample of news sources across the political spectrum can allow for more conclusive results on the impact of political bias. It is unclear why so few right-of-center news sources appeared in my searches, but it made it difficult to discern whether the trends related to political bias would still hold with more right-leaning sources included. If the trends do still hold, then it is possible that including more right-leaning sources would influence the overall results in favor of categories towards which these sources showed a greater tendency. Of course, it is worth noting that one of the possible reasons why fewer right-leaning sources appeared in my search results is that they wrote fewer articles on these topics. If this is the case, then news sources I consulted may be a representative sample of sources that wrote on these cases, and it may be unnecessary to try to find more articles from right-leaning sources.

Considering the timing of the articles could be another useful direction for future research to take. I made no attempt in this study to take timing into account when selecting articles, and news aggregators tend to prioritize more recent articles in search results. As a result, many of the articles I consulted for this study were written after the main events of the scandals had already played out. It would be interesting to see whether consulting articles written as the controversy unfolded would yield different results. It would also be interesting to see the results of a study that consulted a more carefully planned mix of articles written during and after the events of the scandal.

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Potential future research may want to consider earlier scandals as well. Hillary

Clinton’s scandal was the earliest that I examined, and it was the first to receive significant media attention. It was also referenced by articles about all the other cases.

However, it was not the first government email controversy. It would be interesting for future research to explore whether the Clinton scandal was consequential enough that there is a significant difference between earlier and later controversies.

Finally, it is important to note that this study was limited by the motivations that people expressed in the articles. There was no way to get a sense of sincerity or underlying motives. While I was able to code for implications, it is still possible that there are other reasons for showing interest in these cases that I was not able to capture.

Conclusion

The steady rise in volume of electronic records, coupled with the recent rise in public interest in those records, presents a new challenge for government records professionals. As the American public is a major user group of government records, it is important for records managers to understand their increased interest to meet the challenge it presents. This study is a first attempt at reaching that understanding.

This study asked what news articles about five scandals involving the email of prominent U.S. politicians could reveal about the reasons for public interest in those scandals. By performing content analysis on 150 articles, I was able to create a coding scheme for assessing reasons for interest in email controversies. Applying that coding scheme to the articles yielded results that suggest the public understands and appreciates the benefits of email as a record, but also that there is at least some connection between

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these scandals and the broader world of celebrity scandals. Records management professionals can use these results to assess priorities going forward in this environment of increased interest, while future research can broaden the understanding that this study begins to provide.

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