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First Name Initial Last Name 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 2 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. 3 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. 4 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
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