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BIASED REPRESENTATION OF
HILLARY CLINTON’S EMAIL SCANDAL
IN THE MEDIA
EVALUATIVE LANGUAGE ON
FOX NEWS AND NEW YORK MAGAZINE
Written by: Ákos Csernák
Supervisor: Dr. Nicole Baumgarten
Date of submission: 1 June 2016
Total number of typed characters: 157,346
SYDDANSK UNIVERSITET – UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN DENMARK
i
Table of Contents
Table of Contents .................................................................................................................... i
List of Figures ........................................................................................................................ iv
Plagiarism Statement ............................................................................................................. vi
Summary ............................................................................................................................... vii
1. Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 1
2. Hillary Clinton’s Email Controversy .................................................................................. 3
3. Literature and Theoretical Framework ............................................................................... 6
3.1. Measuring Media Bias ................................................................................................. 7
3.2. The Appraisal Framework: Evaluation in Verbal Language ....................................... 8
3.2.1. The Appraisal Framework in Linguistics .............................................................. 8
3.2.2. The Appraisal Framework: Attitude Overview ................................................... 10
3.2.3. The Appraisal Framework: Engagement Overview ............................................ 12
3.2.4. The Appraisal Framework: Graduation Overview .............................................. 14
3.3. Analytical Approach .................................................................................................. 16
4. Data ................................................................................................................................... 17
4.1. Fox News and New York Magazine: Overview ........................................................ 17
4.1.1. foxnews.com and nymag.com: Overview ........................................................... 18
4.1.2. Situational Characteristics of Fox News and New York Magazine News Articles . 19
4.2. Data Collection .......................................................................................................... 21
4.2.1. Timeframe ........................................................................................................... 21
4.2.2. Defining Written News Articles .......................................................................... 22
4.2.3. Selecting News Articles Using Predefined Criteria ............................................ 23
4.2.4. Selecting News Articles Using Extended Criteria .............................................. 24
4.3. Data Overview ........................................................................................................... 26
4.3.1. Further Commentary on Data: Article #02 ......................................................... 27
4.3.2. Further Commentary on Data: Article #12 ......................................................... 28
4.3.3. Data Measurements ............................................................................................. 30
5. Design of the Analytical Framework................................................................................ 32
5.1. Design of the Appraisal Framework: Attitude ........................................................... 34
5.1.1. Attitude → Affect................................................................................................ 34
5.1.2. Attitude → Judgement ........................................................................................ 36
ii
5.1.3. Attitude → Appreciation ..................................................................................... 38
5.2. Design of the Appraisal Framework: Engagement .................................................... 40
5.2.1. Engagement → Heteroglossia → Expand ........................................................... 41
5.2.2. Engagement → Heteroglossia → Contract ......................................................... 44
5.2.3. Engagement → Heteroglossia → Borderline ...................................................... 47
5.3. Design of the Appraisal Framework: Graduation ...................................................... 52
5.3.1. Graduation → Reckoning.................................................................................... 54
5.3.2. Graduation → Scaling ......................................................................................... 57
5.3.3. Graduation → Isolation ....................................................................................... 59
5.4. Design of the Appraisal Framework: Summary And Out-of-Scope Lexical Items ... 61
6. Results .............................................................................................................................. 63
6.1. Frequencies of Attitude, Engagement, and Graduation ............................................. 63
6.1.1. Normed Rates of Occurrence .............................................................................. 63
6.1.2. Occurrences in Total ........................................................................................... 64
6.2. Frequencies of Attitude Categories ............................................................................ 65
6.3. Frequencies of Engagement Categories ..................................................................... 66
6.4. Frequencies of Graduation Categories ....................................................................... 69
6.5. Attitude: A Closer Look ............................................................................................ 69
6.5.1. Attitude → Affect................................................................................................ 69
6.5.2. Attitude → Judgement ........................................................................................ 71
6.5.3. Attitude → Appreciation ..................................................................................... 72
6.6. Engagement: A Closer Look ...................................................................................... 73
6.6.1. Engagement → Attribute .................................................................................... 74
6.6.2. Engagement → Entertain .................................................................................... 74
6.6.3. Engagement → Proclaim .................................................................................... 76
6.6.4. Engagement → Disclaim .................................................................................... 78
6.7. Graduation: A Closer Look ........................................................................................ 79
6.7.1. Graduation → Reckoning.................................................................................... 79
6.7.2. Graduation → Scaling ......................................................................................... 81
6.7.3. Graduation → Isolation ....................................................................................... 83
6.8. Implicit Meaning Making .......................................................................................... 84
6.8.1. Implicit Meaning Making on Fox News ............................................................. 84
iii
6.8.2. Implicit Meaning Making on New York Magazine ............................................ 86
7. Discussion ......................................................................................................................... 89
8. Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 94
References ........................................................................................................................... xiii
Primary Sources ............................................................................................................... xiii
Secondary Sources .......................................................................................................... xvii
Appendices ........................................................................................................................ xxiv
Appendix 1. Part of the New York Magazine News Archive........................................ xxiv
Appendix 2. Part of the Fox News News Archive .......................................................... xxv
Appendix 3. Attitude → Affect in Emailgate News Articles ....................................... xxvii
Appendix 4. Attitude → Judgement in Emailgate News Articles ............................... xxviii
Appendix 5. Attitude → Appreciation in Emailgate News Articles .............................. xxix
Appendix 6. Engagement → Attribute in Emailgate News Articles .............................. xxx
Appendix 7. Engagement → Entertain in Emailgate News Articles ............................. xxxi
Appendix 8. Engagement → Proclaim in Emailgate News Articles ............................ xxxii
Appendix 9. Engagement → Disclaim in Emailgate News Articles ........................... xxxiii
Appendix 10. Graduation in Emailgate News Articles: Fox News ............................. xxxiv
Appendix 11. Graduation in Emailgate News Articles: New York Magazine ............. xxxv
iv
List of Figures
Chart 1. Instances of Attitude, Engagement, and Graduation per dataset ........................... 64
Chart 2. Frequencies of Attitude Categories ....................................................................... 65
Chart 3. Monoglossic vs. Heteroglossic Utterances ............................................................ 67
Chart 4. Frequencies of Engagement Categories ................................................................ 68
Chart 5. Frequencies of Graduation Categories .................................................................. 69
Figure 1. The Appraisal Framework in Systemic Functional Linguistics,
Its Three Domains and Their Categories ............................................................................. 9
Figure 2. Analytical Approach: Repeated Cycles of Data Analysis
and Framework Consultation .............................................................................................. 17
Figure 3. Attitude Categories in Fox News and
New York Magazine Emailgate News Articles ................................................................... 34
Figure 4. Affect Subcategories in Fox News and
New York Magazine Emailgate News Articles ................................................................... 35
Figure 5. Judgement Subcategories in Fox News and
New York Magazine Emailgate News Articles ................................................................... 37
Figure 6. Appreciation Subcategories in Fox News and
New York Magazine Emailgate News Articles ................................................................... 39
Figure 7. Engagement Categories in Fox News and
New York Magazine Emailgate News Articles ................................................................... 40
Figure 8. Heteroglossia → Expand Subcategories in Fox News and
New York Magazine Emailgate News Articles ................................................................... 43
Figure 9. Heteroglossia → Contract Subcategories in Fox News and
New York Magazine Emailgate News Articles ................................................................... 46
Figure 10. Heteroglossia → Borderline Subcategories in Fox News and
New York Magazine Emailgate News Articles ................................................................... 51
Figure 11. Graduation Categories in Fox News and
New York Magazine Emailgate News Articles ................................................................... 54
Figure 12. Graduation → Reckoning Subcategories in Fox News and
New York Magazine Emailgate News Articles ................................................................... 56
Figure 13. Graduation → Scaling Subcategories in Fox News and
v
New York Magazine Emailgate News Articles ................................................................... 58
Figure 14. Graduation → Isolation Subcategories in Fox News and
New York Magazine Emailgate News Articles ................................................................... 60
Figure 15. The Full Layout of the Appraisal Framework.................................................... 62
Figure 16. Voices and Issues at Stake in Clinton's Email Controversy ............................... 91
Table 1. Key Developments in Clinton's Email Controversy .............................................. 5
Table 2. Examples of Attitude → Affect ............................................................................. 11
Table 3. Examples of Attitude → Judgement...................................................................... 11
Table 4. Examples of Attitude → Appreciation .................................................................. 12
Table 5. Examples of Engagement → Monoglossia ........................................................... 13
Table 6. Examples of Engagement → Heteroglossia .......................................................... 14
Table 7. Examples of Graduation → Force ......................................................................... 15
Table 8. Alexa Internet Metrics for foxnews.com and nymag.com .................................... 19
Table 9. Situational Characteristics of Fox News and New York Magazine Articles ........ 20
Table 10. The Dates of Publication and Titles of the 2x14 Emailgate News Articles ........ 26
Table 11. Word Count of Articles on Emailgate ................................................................. 31
Table 12. Mentions of Hillary Clinton in Emailgate Articles ............................................. 31
Table 13. Out-of-Scope Lexical Items in Articles on Emailgate ........................................ 61
Table 14. The Calculation of Normed Rates of Occurrence ............................................... 63
Table 15. Ten Fox News Sentences with Implicitly Evaluative Language ......................... 85
Table 16. 10 New York Magazine Sentences with Implicitly Evaluative Language .......... 87
vi
Plagiarism Statement
“I hereby solemnly declare that I have personally and independently prepared this paper. All
quotations in the text have been marked as such, and the paper or considerable parts of it
have not previously been subject to any examination or assessment.”
______________________
Ákos Csernák
vii
Summary
The aim of this thesis is to investigate and identify evaluative language in news articles that
discuss Hillary Clinton’s email controversy.
Hillary Clinton’s email scandal, often labeled as emailgate, arose in March 2015, one
month before she announced her run for President of the United States of America. Since
announcing her presidential bid, Clinton and the development of her campaign have been
under close scrutiny in the press. Reports on her controversial email practices, however, have
received frequent and heavy media coverage since March 2015, shifting the focus of the
media from her campaign efforts.
The online edition of Fox News (foxnews.com) was identified as explicitly opposing
the Democratic aspirant Clinton’s presidential bid, whereas the online edition of New York
Magazine (nymag.com) was identified as explicitly supporting it. The question arose as to
whether Fox News and New York Magazine present emailgate news articles in a language
that reflects partisan bias, as well. Thus, this thesis aims to answer the following research
question. Is there evaluative language in Fox News and New York Magazine news articles
discussing Hillary Clinton’s email controversy? If so, how is evaluative language expressed
and how does it build media bias?
In answering the research question, the thesis first offers an overview of how the key
events in Hillary Clinton’s email controversy have unfolded and what repercussions they
have had in the media. Clinton’s email practices gained media attention as The New York
Times revealed in March 2015 that the former secretary of state of the United States
exclusively used a personal email account on her private home server to conduct official
business. As secretary of state and head of the State Department, Clinton was responsible for
the foreign policy of the U.S. between 2009 and 2013. A 2012 terrorist attack on U.S.
diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya, had resulted in the death of four American officials
and had prompted an official investigation into the accountability of U.S. officials in the
events. As part of the investigation, requests were filed for the email correspondences of U.S.
officials including those of Hillary Clinton. The fact that only eight Benghazi-related Clinton
emails were submitted in response to the record requests prompted a Vice News investigative
reporter to file a Freedom of Information Act in search of other Clinton correspondences.
viii
Upon The New York Times breaking the news in March 2015 that Clinton’s official
correspondences passed through her private email address on a private server, Clinton
claimed to have deemed 30,000 emails work-related, which she delivered to the authorities,
and she claimed to have deemed 30,000 pages of emails private, which were deleted without
turning them over. Clinton also said that her emails contained no classified information.
In response to the news, a federal judge ordered the 30,000 work-related emails to be
released to the public on a monthly basis. As two inspectors general found that potentially
hundreds of Clinton’s emails could have classified information, the Federal Bureau of
Investigation launched its own investigation into the Clinton emails. The FBI soon managed
to recover the 30,000 pages of deleted private emails from Clinton’s server.
In the media, Clinton’s email practices generated debate about information security
issues and Clinton’s responsibilities to defend the nation’s security as secretary of state.
Emailgate became a frequently discussed topic in the presidential candidates’ political
debates, as well. The issue will likely remain a revisited topic for the rest of 2016 if Clinton
wins the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party, especially because the FBI’s probe
into Clinton’s email practices has not yet concluded.
The thesis next reviews literature on the measuring of media bias. A common means
of assessing partisan bias in the media is to investigate language with regard to
evaluative/opinionated language use. Martin and White’s Appraisal framework is one way
to identify evaluation in verbal language. The Appraisal framework relies on Systemic
Functional Linguistics, a paradigm of Michael Halliday that approaches language from a
social semiotics perspective. The Appraisal framework comprises three domains: Attitude,
Engagement, and Graduation.
The Appraisal framework is introduced in chapter 3 and its domains exemplified via
sentences from written news articles on Fox News and New York Magazine that discuss
Hillary Clinton’s email controversy. Researchers who apply the Appraisal framework to
field-specific texts often make adjustments to the framework. In this thesis, some
modifications were made to the framework. As a result, the full layout of the system follows
in a later chapter. Chapter 3 also introduces the analytical approach used in this thesis. To
identify evaluative language on Fox News and New York Magazine, induction was used.
ix
Following the inductive approach, the data, written news articles published on the two media
outlets, were taken as the starting point. First, the data were observed for recurring linguistic
elements that construe potentially evaluative meanings. Next, the Appraisal framework was
consulted to systematically interpret the found linguistic elements. Afterwards, the data were
observed again for a deeper scrutiny, after which the Appraisal framework was consulted
again to interpret the new findings. This two-step analytical approach developed into a
repeated cycle of analysis and framework consultation until the data were fully exposed for
evaluative language and the found linguistic patterns systematically interpreted in the
Appraisal framework.
The thesis next introduces the data in greater detail, including an overview of Fox
News and New York Magazine. Fox News is the only outlet on a national scale to propagate
Republican views. New York Magazine is a lesser-known media outlet commonly not
included in media bias studies. It is unofficially viewed as having liberal bias. The online
edition of Fox News has a bigger reader base than New York Magazine. Foxnews.com is
among the 50 most visited American websites, while nymag.com ranks in the top 500. The
situational characteristics of Fox News and New York Magazine articles are detailed next. A
marked difference between the two media outlets is that the author of many Fox News news
articles remain unnamed, decreasing the interactiveness between writers and readers.
Next, data collection is detailed. The data investigated in this thesis are 14 emailgate
news articles published on Fox News and 14 news articles published on New York Magazine
between 12 April 2015 and 1 February 2016. The start date marks Clinton’s official
announcement of her presidential bid. The end date marks the first Democratic electoral
contest in 2016, the first in a series of contests that ends in June 2016, and is designed to help
the Democratic Party select its presidential nominee. The 2x14 news articles were then
filtered for sentences that reference Hillary Clinton. 410 such sentences were found, which
were selected as the core of the data analysis. Narrowing the data was important in order for
the focus of the research to shift to how Clinton as a public figure and Democratic presidential
candidate is depicted on Fox News and New York Magazine against the backdrop of her
email controversy.
x
The thesis then returns to the Appraisal framework and lays out the system in its
entirety based on the data. The Appraisal framework needed modifications in all of its three
domains (Attitude, Engagement, and Graduation) in order for it to better accommodate the
field-specific language that is used to describe Hillary Clinton and emailgate.
First, the Attitude domain is opened up, with its categories and their subcategories
explained in detail and exemplified through language taken from the data. Attitudinal
meanings are words that signal emotional responses (e.g. love, excited, fear, anxiety,
sympathy), evaluate people’s behaviour (e.g. controversial, unusual, shady, sorry), and
assess things, objects, and performances (e.g. unsecured server, boring emails).
Second, Engagement, the second domain of the Appraisal framework, is explained in
detail with examples taken from the data. Engagement deals with whether writers and
speakers express only their own take on an issue, or their language represents other voices,
other opinions, and other takes on an issue, as well. The former is called Monoglossia, where
writers present their own ideas, feelings, and thoughts only. The latter is called Heteroglossia.
Heteroglossia takes place when writers express that the idea presented in their utterances is
only one position out of a range of other positions. The existence of other voices with
different ideas, feelings, and thoughts, is recognised. For instance, when a journalist quotes
a spokesman or Clinton, he or she introduces a new voice into the text and expresses that the
quoted material does not necessarily represent his or her take on the issue. Another example
of Heteroglossia is to use negation. When a journalist writes that Clinton never sent classified
information, he or she introduces another voice into the text, according to which Clinton sent
classified information, a position that is shown not to hold via negation.
Third, Graduation, the third domain of the Appraisal framework, is explained in
detail. Martin and White, the linguists who created the Appraisal framework, suggest that
Graduation is not a separate third domain, but instead it overarches both Attitude and
Engagement. Graduation is language that down-scales or up-scales meanings. For instance,
highly unusual carries an attitudinal meaning (unusual) up-scaled by the word highly. Some
instances of Graduation are less clear-cut. To refer to Clinton’s email scandal as email saga,
stories, and an Internet meme is to down-scale emailgate.
xi
The thesis then presents the research results. New York Magazine news articles are
found to contain more evaluative language than those on Fox News. Evaluations are used
differently by the two outlets, and they build different dispositions toward Clinton and
emailgate.
As for Attitude, Fox News removes the emotional aspect of emailgate, negatively
assesses Clinton’s truthfulness and the appropriateness of her email usage, and often
questions the confidentiality of the Clinton emails. New York Magazine describes Clinton in
a human context surrounded by friends and everyday matters and hobbies, evaluates the
media’s attack on emailgate negatively, and describes the Clinton emails as containing
uninteresting details on Clinton’s everyday life.
As for Engagement, Fox News journalists often distance themselves from what
Clinton has said in relation to emailgate, introduce denial into Clinton’s statements, and
hypothesise that top-secret information leaked from Clinton’s use of emails, thus
jeopardizing the country. New York Magazine journalists often refer to groups of people who
intend to find incriminating evidence against Clinton, introduce commentary to dismiss these
groups of people, stress that Clinton did not break any laws by using a personal email server,
and negate statements that otherwise use incriminating language about Clinton.
As for Graduation, Fox News up-scales the seriousness of emailgate, describes it as
a long-lasting scandal, blows up the amount of emails involved, uses adjectives and adverbs
that increase the severity of emailgate, and lays emphasis on select emails that imply that
top-secret information passed through Clinton’s private server. New York Magazine lays
emphasis on select emails that contain insignificant details of Clinton’s life at the office,
describes the media’s attention as overblown, and expresses that certain groups of people
have failed to use the scandal to hinder Clinton’s presidential run.
The thesis then interprets the findings. Fox News journalists overplay emailgate and
express disbelief of Clinton’s claims in the issue. New York Magazine journalists underplay
emailgate, explicitly dismiss Republicans as the people who wish to find incriminating
evidence against Clinton, and present Clinton in a relatable way. These over- and
underplaying tones remained unchanged on the two media outlets between 12 April 2015 and
1 February 2016. This is interesting because Clinton’s email usage evolved from a political
xii
scandal into a morally questioned practice followed by legal consequences. In total, both
outlets were found to exhibit bias in their presentation of emailgate news. Fox News exhibits
negative bias toward Clinton. New York Magazine uses evaluative language more often than
Fox News, exhibits a positive bias toward Clinton, and makes its Democratic partisan bias
explicit.
The thesis concludes by stating the interesting aspects of the research. The research
sheds light on the responsibility of political journalists in presenting news stories using
evaluative language and, thus, shaping how these stories reach the public. This is relevant
because emailgate has been a highly divisive political issue since 2015, possibly contributing
to Clinton’s lessened chances of winning the presidential nomination. The research also
identifies what linguistic resources can be used to defend public figures and their deeds in
front of a wide audience. Using these linguistic resources can help protect people and other
entities when facing controversies and negative publicity. From the perspective of crisis
communication, the research shows language that has been adjusted to aggravate or mitigate
issues such as scandals. This type of language can be used to over- and underplay key actors’
and entities’ responsibilities in controversies. Lastly, the thesis identifies formatting
conventions (parentheses, scare quotes, dashes) used in journalistic discourse as bearing
evaluative potential. As these formatting options can be used to infuse written texts with
authorial opinions and ambiguity, their further research and possible addition to the Appraisal
framework are recommended.
1
1. Introduction
As President Barack Obama concludes his second term as President of the United States,
America prepares to elect its 45th president in November 2016. 2015 saw a number of
Democratic and Republican politicians announce their run for the 2016 presidential
nomination, launch campaigns and fundraisers, and make clear their political stance on issues
such as immigration, taxes, health care, and other social matters. Among the Democratic
candidates is Hillary Rodham Clinton, secretary of state of the United States from 2009 to
2013, who is currently considered to be the Democratic front-runner for president.
Since Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy for president in April 2015, the
national media have covered her political stance on economic and social issues and her
campaign-related news extensively. However, a matter of a different kind has been catching
the headlines, often overshadowing the politician’s campaign. Clinton's email controversy,
labeled as emailgate, emerged in March 2015. Emailgate soon evolved into a scandal and
became one of the most heavily publicised controversies that an American politician was
involved in in 2015.
The email controversy arose as it was revealed that Clinton used a personal email
account, hosted on a privately run server in her New York home, to conduct official
correspondence during her tenure as secretary of state. Shortly after the news broke in March
2015, Clinton announced that she had turned over around 30,000 pages of work-related email
exchanges for the authorities to investigate whether the emails contained classified
information that could jeopardize the nation’s security. Clinton had considered personal
another set of approximately 30,000 pages’ worth of email, which her campaign team
consequently deleted from the private server without turning them over.
Clinton’s campaign news, including her email controversy, has received wide media
coverage in the past year. I found two media outlets to either oppose her presidential bid or
support it. Fox News, a prominent conservative media outlet leaning toward Republican
values, has commented negatively on Clinton’s run for presidency, saying, “nothing better
defines the hypocrisy of the left than Hillary Clinton’s likely coronation as the 2016
Democratic presidential candidate” (Peek, 2015, para. 1). New York Magazine, a New York-
based online magazine covering politics and culture, has shown a more positive disposition
2
toward Clinton’s candidacy, saying, “the argument for Clinton in 2016 is that she is the
candidate of the only major American political party not run by lunatics. There is only one
choice for voters who want a president who accepts climate science and rejects voodoo
economics, and whose domestic platform would not engineer the largest upward
redistribution of resources in American history” (Chait, 2015, para. 25).
Based on this explicit side-taking by Fox News and New York Magazine, I decided
to research whether these two media outlets display media bias in their propagation of
emailgate news. In general, news articles are expected to preserve neutrality and factuality,
and minimise commentary. The question arises as to whether the news pertaining to Clinton’s
email controversy contains evaluative language owing to the media outlets’ negative or
positive disposition toward Clinton’s presidential bid, i.e. whether journalists exploit
emailgate in their political side-taking.
Thus, my research question can be formulated in the following way. Is there
evaluative language in Fox News and New York Magazine news articles discussing Hillary
Clinton’s email controversy? If so, how is evaluative language expressed and how does it
build media bias?
This thesis is structured as follows. I first give a detailed account of Hillary Clinton’s
email controversy in chapter 2. In chapter 3, I first review literature pertaining to the
measuring of media bias. Next, I present the Appraisal framework, a system that aims to
reveal evaluative language in discourse. Further, I introduce the analytical approach used to
conduct the research. In chapter 4, I introduce the contextual properties and production
circumstances of foxnews.com and nymag.com, the two sources of my investigation. Then I
discuss my data collection process, i.e. the criteria used to select Fox News and New York
Magazine emailgate news articles. In chapter 5, I lay out the Appraisal framework along with
the adjustments made to it for the investigation of emailgate news articles. In chapter 6, I
present my findings by showing explicit evaluative language use in my data. In addition, I
show examples of the interaction of evaluative meanings that result in implicit evaluation. In
chapter 7, I discuss my findings, including how evaluative language contributes to media bias
in the two media outlets, and present limitations to my research. In chapter 8, I summarise
my thesis.
3
2. Hillary Clinton’s Email Controversy
In this chapter, I offer an overview of the main events of Hillary Clinton’s email controversy
including their repercussions in the media.
In January 2009, Hillary Rodham Clinton became secretary of state of the United
States and head of the State Department, primarily responsible for the country’s foreign
policy. On 11 September 2012, a half a year before the end of Clinton’s tenure, Islamic
militants attacked two U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya, killing four American
officials. Clinton took responsibility for the Benghazi attack (New York Daily News, 2015).
A House Select Committee was appointed in May 2014 to investigate what led to the
Benghazi attack and how it could have been prevented, and to assess the accountability of
U.S. officials in the attack (About the Select Committee, n.d.). The Committee sent record
requests to the State Department to obtain Benghazi-related documents including email
correspondences. In response, the State Department delivered 15,000 documents to the
Committee. The batch included only eight Hillary Clinton emails, harvested from state.gov
email accounts (Kiely, 2015). This raised questions given that Clinton was the President’s
principal foreign policy adviser at the time of the Benghazi attack and leader of the State
Department. In search of other Clinton emails about Benghazi, Jason Leopold, a Vice News
investigative reporter, filed a Freedom of Information Act in “November 2014, when it
became clear that [Hillary Clinton] would announce her candidacy for US president”
(Leopold, 2016, para. 11). In response, Clinton’s office delivered 55,000 pages of work-
related emails to the State Department the following month. The email threads were
harvested from her private email server.
On March 2 2015, The New York Times revealed that Clinton “exclusively used a
personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state,” which is a
possible breach to the Federal Records Act (Schmidt, 2015, para. 3). The New York Times
broke the news the following day that several record requests sent from the House Select
Committee to the State Department “came up empty” in the past because the State
Department had no access to Clinton’s privately stored emails (Schmidt & Chozick, 2015,
para. 8).
4
Clinton herself addressed the reports for the first time the following week and claimed
to have already delivered her work-related emails (referring to the 55,000 pages/30,000
emails turned over in November 2014) to the State Department and to not have kept emails
“within the scope of my personal privacy” (amounting to 30,000 pages of emails). Clinton
also pointed out that she “did not email any classified material to anyone” from her private
email server (The New York Times, 2015).
At the end of May 2015, the State Department released a batch of Clinton emails in
relation to the Benghazi attack (Virtual Reading Room Documents Search Results, 2015). A
week later, a federal judge ordered the State Department to release “some of the 55,000
Clinton emails on a monthly basis starting June 30 and ending Jan. 29, 2016” (Ferrechio,
2015).
After the monthly releases began, The New York Times revealed that two inspectors
general requested the Federal Bureau of Investigation to conduct a criminal investigation into
Clinton’s email usage after announcing in a joint memo that Clinton’s private email account
contained “hundreds of potentially classified emails” (Schmidt & Apuzzo, 2015). In August,
the FBI claimed Clinton’s private server and began investigating its contents. Later that
month, the question arose as to whether Clinton had deleted her private email chains or wiped
her server. When a reporter asked her about wiping her server, she responded, “What, like
with a cloth or something?,” furthering the controversy around her use of emails (The Wall
Street Journal, 2015).
In September 2015, IT specialist Bryan Pagliano, who had helped set up Clinton’s
private email server in her New York home, was announced to invoke his Fifth Amendment
right, meaning that he would not have to testify in front of the House Select Committee and
answer questions about Clinton’s email server. Later that month, Clinton was interviewed by
MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell and said that she was “sorry that [her email usage] has been
confusing to people” (MSNBC, 2015). Some media outlets interpreted this as an act of
apologizing for the confusion but not for her email usage. According to Maureen Dowd of
The New York Times, “[Clinton] leaves the impression that she is merely sorry to be facing
criticism, not that she miscalculated in the first place” (Dowd, 2016, para. 17).
5
At the end of September, the FBI recovered the 30,000 Clinton emails from her
private server that had been deemed private and deleted/wiped from the email server
previously. The State Department also received work-related Clinton emails that had not been
turned over by Clinton despite her claims that she and her team had “provided all of them”
(CBS News, 2015). Later, the FBI requested Datto, Inc., a tech company that had been
unknowingly backing up Clinton’s private email server, to hand over all the data that the
company had on the Clinton emails. A month later, the intelligence community announced
that two Clinton emails previously thought to contain top-secret information were no longer
believed to have classified content (Gerstein, 2015).
In the meantime, the State Department continued with its monthly release of Clinton
emails. The Department published over 3,000 emails on the last day of 2015, but failed to
meet its target of releasing at least 82% of all Clinton emails by the end of 2015. To meet the
goal, it released the remaining 1262 emails a week later.
In January 2016, the intelligence community announced that “several dozen emails”
found on Clinton’s server contained intelligence known as Special Access Programs. SAP
information exceeds regular top-secret classifications (Dilanian, 2016). At the end of the
month, the State Department confirmed that 22 Clinton emails found on her private email
server contained top-secret information and withheld their release.
For later reference, Table 1 gives a summary of the key events in Clinton’s email
controversy.
KEY DEVELOPMENTS IN CLINTON’S EMAIL CONTROVERSY
Date Development
January 2009 –
February 2013 Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state
September 2012 Benghazi attack on the American consulate
May 2014 U.S. House Select Committee established
August 2014 Official email server data sent to House Select Committee
November 2014 Request for Benghazi-related Clinton emails
December 2014 Private email server data sent to State Department
February 2015 Private email server data sent to House Select Committee
2 March 2015 The New York Times breaks the news about Clinton’s use of a private email server
6
3 March 2015 The New York Times breaks the news about failed Clinton email requests
March 2015 Clinton holds press conference, speaks up in the issue
22 May 2015 Benghazi-related Clinton emails released to the public
27 May 2015 Court order issued requiring regulated release of Clinton emails
30 June 2015 2nd batch of Clinton emails released
24 July 2015 FBI requests to conduct investigation into Clinton emails
12 August 2015 FBI begins investigation into Clinton emails
18 August 2015 Clinton gives controversial reply about email deletion
3 September 2015 IT specialist working on Clinton’s private email server said to take the 5th Amendment
4 September 2015 Clinton interviewed by Andrea Mitchell, says sorry for email confusion
23 September 2015 FBI recovers erased emails from Clinton’s private email server
25 September 2015 Clinton emails previously not turned over received by State Department
7 October 2015 FBI requests backed up data on Clinton’s private email server
6 November 2015 Two, previously classified Clinton emails no longer thought classified
31 December 2015 –
8 January 2016 End-of-the-year batch of Clinton emails released late
20 January 2016 Several dozen Clinton emails found to have intelligence beyond top secret
29 January 2016 22 Clinton emails contain top secret information, release withheld
Table 1. Key Developments in Clinton's Email Controversy
Although the State Department’s email release process concluded at the end of
February, the FBI’s own investigation into Clinton’s email usage has continued to generate
publicity in the media throughout the spring of 2016. Emailgate has also been frequently
covered in the candidates’ political debates. Additionally, because “The State Department
has not ruled out conducting its own review after the FBI investigation is complete,”
Clinton’s email controversy is bound to receive media coverage for the rest of her campaign
work (Fishel, 2016, para. 12).
3. Literature and Theoretical Framework
In this chapter, I first review literature on how media bias has been measured in the past.
Afterwards, I introduce the Appraisal framework, an analytical model for the investigation
of evaluative language in discourse. Lastly, I introduce the data-driven analytical approach
that I used to investigate evaluative language in emailgate news articles on Fox News and
New York Magazine.
7
3.1. Measuring Media Bias
The American journalistic discourse is often perceived as exhibiting partisan bias, i.e. a
conservative or liberal political bias (Covert & Wasburn, 2009). This is held to commonly
manifest in a slanted coverage of either conservative or liberal perspectives in the discussion
of core social issues. A common approach to measure media bias is to investigate how much
coverage these issues receive in a media outlet. For example, Covert and Wasburn (2009)
looked at the extent to which four social issues (crime, the environment, gender, and poverty)
were covered in two national news magazines and journals. According to the researchers, an
imbalanced coverage of these topics leads to the preferential propagation of partisan issue
positions. Journalists can attain these slanted representations by way of advancing the
political perspectives that they align with and omitting or dismissing positions that belong to
the opposite political side.
Covert and Wasburn (2007) also remark that investigating language use is another
widely used means of detecting bias, because, as communication theorists have argued, bias
in news reporting is unavoidable due to the inherently evaluative character of language (Geis,
1987).
Bednarek (2006) looked at “the expression of opinion through language” in her
investigation of evaluation in media discourse (Bednarek, 2006, p. 3). Bednarek investigated
how tabloid and broadsheet journalists evaluate the world along the clines of, for instance,
what is good/bad, important/unimportant, expected/unexpected, as well as the reliability of
propositions and other parameters. Bednarek also reviews the Appraisal framework, which
this thesis builds on, and identifies issues within it. (Bednarek, 2006, p. 27-35). For instance,
she points out that categorising words and propositions within the framework system is
sometimes problematic. On the other hand, she also states that the Appraisal framework is
“an ongoing research project” and the result of an over 20-year-long research (Bednarek,
2006, p. 34).
Given the progressive nature of the Appraisal framework, the system allows for
extensions and amendments when field-specific texts are under investigation. For example,
Hommerberg and Don (2015) used and amended the Appraisal framework to analyse
winespeak (Hommerberg & Don, 2015). Furthermore, Economou (2009) adapted the
8
Appraisal framework from the verbal to the visual mode and analysed evaluation in news
photos (Economou, 2009).
3.2. The Appraisal Framework: Evaluation in Verbal Language
In this section, I lay out an initial overview of the Appraisal framework as developed by
Martin and White (Martin & White, 2005). The data that I applied the Appraisal framework
to are two text sets: written news articles on Hillary Clinton’s emailgate scandal published
by Fox News and New York Magazine. In order to investigate evaluative language in these
text sets, some adjustments to the Appraisal framework were necessary. Therefore, I describe
the full Appraisal framework specific to my text sets in chapter 5. Here, I briefly describe the
framework as established by Martin and White and exemplify the Appraisal domains with
instances from the Fox News and New York Magazine text sets.
3.2.1. The Appraisal Framework in Linguistics
The Appraisal framework was developed by Martin and White with the aim of identifying
linguistic resources in texts that authors rely on both to formulate stances and to position their
audiences “to supply their own assessments” (Martin & White, 2005, p. 2). As the definition
indicates, the Appraisal framework looks at language from an interpersonal point of view,
i.e. the way people interact and attempt to share feelings and thoughts with each other.
Interpersonal meaning comprises one of the three modes of meaning within Systemic
Functional Linguistics, a paradigm of Michael Halliday and an approach to language from a
social semiotics perspective (Martin & White, 2005, p. 8). The Appraisal framework
comprises three domains that work together in the creation of evaluation: Attitude,
Engagement, and Graduation. Figure 11 shows the modes of SFL, the Appraisal framework,
and the three framework domains along with their categories.
1 The layout of the Appraisal framework as proposed by Martin and White (2005) is not reproducible. Therefore,
I altered the visual layout of the system and use this color-coded version throughout this thesis paper.
9
Before introducing each domain, it is important to note that evaluative meaning
making can be explicit and implicit. Positive and negative evaluations, i.e. stances, are
sometimes explicitly realized by a single lexical item that falls under Attitude, Engagement,
or Graduation. Often, however, meanings are not isolated in such clear-cut ways. Instead, the
Appraisal domains and their categories co-occur and blend to facilitate more subtle, i.e. non-
explicit meaning making. These types of meanings are constructed in a way that they, when
dissected into separate lexical items, lose their evaluative values. As a result, instead of
limiting my research to only one domain within the Appraisal framework, I analyzed
occurrences across all of the three domains in my data.
ATTITUDE
AFFECT | JUDGEMENT | APPRECIATION
ENGAGEMENT
MONOGLOSSIA | HETEROGLOSSIA
GRADUATION
FORCE | FOCUS
A
E
G
Textual mode
Ideational mode
Interpersonal mode
Systemic
Functional
Linguistics
(SFL)
APPRAISAL
FRAMEWORK
Figure 1. The Appraisal Framework in Systemic Functional Linguistics, Its Three Domains and Their Categories
10
According to Martin and White (2005), evaluative linguistic resources can be explicit,
implicit, or provoked. In explicit instances, a single lexical unit carries the meaning. Implicit
statements look factual on the surface, apparently stripped of any evaluation, but they have
the potential to evoke evaluation in the reader depending on whether the reader shares the
emotional, cultural, and/or aesthetic values presented by the writer. Attitudinal positioning
can also be provoked. Lying between explicit and implicit evaluations, provocations contain
detectable, vaguely evaluative language, where a single lexical unit cannot be pinpointed as
the carrier of stance. As a main focus of my research is to show how explicit evaluations co-
occur and interact to express subtle authorial stances, this thesis maintains the difference
between explicit and non-explicit categories. However, due to the sometimes fuzzy
boundaries between provoked and implicit evaluations, I do not make further distinctions
within non-explicit meaning making. Instead, I discuss both implicit and provoked categories
under implicit evaluative meaning making.
3.2.2. The Appraisal Framework: Attitude Overview
Attitude, the first domain within the Appraisal framework, is the sum of linguistic resources
used for the signalling of emotional responses (Affect), the evaluation of people’s behaviour
(Judgement), and the assessment of things, objects, natural phenomena, and performances
(Appreciation).
The category Affect attends to registering positive and negative feelings. Table 2
offers exemplary instances of Attitude → Affect taken from my data. In the Fox News
utterance, Hillary Clinton is quoted by the journalist as she shares her feelings about being
called a “liar”2 and “dishonest” (Malloy, Associates, & Relations, 2016, p. 9). Her use of
good together with the negative clearly indicates her emotional response to a certain event or
occurrence. In the New York Magazine proposition, the journalist assigns an emotional
response to Clinton, “a strong feeling of sadness and regret” (Remorse, n.d.).
2 Examples taken from Fox News and New York Magazine emailgate news articles are italicised throughout
this thesis paper. This is to avoid interference with double quotes, which have evaluative potential. Section
5.2.3. details how double quotes can carry evaluation.
11
Attitude → Affect (emotional responses)
Fox News example New York Magazine example
“Well it certainly doesn’t make me feel good,” Clinton said.
Clinton's remorse was mostly directed at the hell the email hath wrought instead of the fact it existed.
Table 2. Examples of Attitude → Affect
Affect positions the author who selects these words to describe a feeling, but also the
reader: the audience may show solidarity and align with the statements, or reject them and
distance themselves from the emotional perspective of the statement.
The category Judgement, the evaluation of behaviour, is concerned with a person’s
conduct in terms of social esteem, morality, and legality. Table 3 offers exemplary instances
of Attitude → Judgement taken from my data. In the Fox News assertion, improperly points
to the appropriateness of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server to accommodate
classified communication, with legal issues being at stake due to the Justice Department’s
possible involvement in the issue. The journalist proposes a possibility for unethical conduct
by using the adjective in its negative form. The writer of the New York Magazine sentence
states that Clinton has been described as “liar” and “dishonest,” two adjectives of negative
judgement, showing that Clinton’s truthfulness has been called into question.
Attitude → Judgement (evaluating people’s behaviour)
Fox News example New York Magazine example
…key inspectors general asked the Justice Department to open an investigation into whether classified material was improperly shared on the former secretary of state's account.
…the top two words that come to voters’ minds when they hear the words “Hillary Clinton” are “liar” and “dishonest.”
Table 3. Examples of Attitude → Judgement
The category Appreciation deals with the valuation of things and objects surrounding
people, natural phenomena, and performances. Table 4 offers exemplary instances of
Attitude → Appreciation taken from my data. Appreciation occurs explicitly three times in
the Fox News sentence. These instances describe the emails contained on Hillary Clinton’s
private server and their release. The speaker of the utterance, directly quoted by the journalist,
assigns a level of appropriateness to the Clinton emails (while assuming that a percentage of
12
them may be deemed inappropriate), and describes their release as timely and transparent.
These adjectives evaluate the level of suitability (appropriate) of the emails, as well as the
level of punctuality (timely) and the level of veracity/truthfulness (transparent) of the release
process. The second sentence, written by a New York Magazine journalist, assesses the
worthiness of recent email releases, speculating that some upcoming releases will also
contain boring bureaucratic data.
Attitude → Appreciation
(assessing things, objects, natural phenomena, performances)
Fox News example New York Magazine example
“As [Clinton] has said, it is her hope that State and the other agencies involved in the review process will sort out as quickly as possible which emails are appropriate to release to the public, and that the release will be as timely and transparent as possible,” Merrill said Tuesday.
Based on the last few releases, [the releases] will mostly entail bureaucratic boringness…
Table 4. Examples of Attitude → Appreciation
3.2.3. The Appraisal Framework: Engagement Overview
Engagement, the second domain of the Appraisal framework, defines attitudinal positioning
along the dimension of dialogism, opening up two subcategories: Monoglossia and
Heteroglossia. An utterance is monoglossic when there is only one overt voice behind the
assertion: the author. If a proposition references other voices apart from that of the author’s
or opens up alternative positions to the statement, the utterance is heteroglossic.
By invoking other voices or positions, the writer of an utterance reduces the
absoluteness of the statement, relocates some of the responsibility taken for the statement to
an external voice, or expresses that the utterance is not taken for granted but is still up for
discussion. The writer also takes stand with respect to what has been said by others: the author
stands with or against the statement, can remain undecided, or expresses neutrality. A
common way to recognise alternative voices or positions is to quote what another person
stated previously, to use negation, or to open up alternative interpretations by marking the
statement as hypothetical.
From this perspective, heteroglossic utterances can be contractive or expansive.
Contraction happens when alternative voices are invoked to then challenge, shut down, or
13
refute them, thus closing down the space of dialogism. Alternatively, a voice is singled out
as highly warrantable, shutting out any other, possible voices. Expansion, on the other hand,
brings in external voices and accepts their existence, and thus opens up the space of
dialogism.
Table 5 offers exemplary instances of Engagement → Monoglossia taken from my
data. In all of the three sentences, the writers do not invoke any additional voices that the
statement or a part of the statement could be allocated to. The authors, thus, take full
responsibility for their statements and assign a sense of absoluteness to them. Potentially
evaluative language (growing questions, unusual usage, notion inspiring bad headlines) is
formulated by the journalists and remains to be associated with them. As for absoluteness,
the sentences introduce ideas that are shown to be not up for discussion. Instead, they seem
taken-for-granted assertions.
Engagement → Monoglossia (single-voiced utterances)
Fox News example New York Magazine example
The revelation adds to the growing questions related to the Democratic presidential front-runner's unusual usage of a private email account and server while in government.
The notion that Clinton had willfully jeopardized national security for the sake of convenience inspired months of bad headlines for the Democratic front-runner. The interview took place a day before the 20th anniversary of Hillary Clinton's U.N. speech in Beijing, where she famously said, "It is time for us to say here in Beijing, and the world to hear, that it is no longer acceptable to discuss women's rights as separate from human rights.
Table 5. Examples of Engagement → Monoglossia
A further consideration arises when apparently externally sourced, heteroglossic
utterances are overridden by the author, who introduces some attitudinal meaning to express
their own alignment/disalignment with the externally sourced proposition. In the last
sentence in Table 5, the journalist expresses evaluation of Clinton’s speech by assessing it as
famous. Thus, the utterance is considered monoglossic despite Clinton’s external voice
invoked in it, which would otherwise render the assertion heteroglossic.
Heteroglossic utterances have external voices and/or positions that are assigned to
somebody other than the writer. Table 6 offers exemplary instances of Engagement →
14
Heteroglossia taken from my data. Said, comment on, and the quote marks explicitly add
other speakers to the discussion. The writers acknowledge the assertions of the external voice.
These instances expand dialogism.
Another type of Heteroglossia is expressed with negation. It’s not clear, no emails,
and would not comment carry with themselves the positive counterparts, i.e. open up new
dialogic alternatives (e.g. it’s clear, some emails), then reject them. These instances contract
dialogism. Any and but represent a different type of disalignment: they express counter-
expectations, signalling that a different proposition was expected in place of the current one.
These instances also contract dialogism.
If and whether are used to open up the dialogic space: the writer acknowledges the
proposition and announces it as but one of the possible positions in the issue, expanding
dialogism. Lastly, presumably renders the utterance hypothetical and helps the writer
explicitly present the proposition as grounded in its own subjectivity, and invokes dialogic
alternatives, expanding dialogism again.
Engagement → Heteroglossia (utterances sourced out to other voices/positions)
Fox News example New York Magazine example
It's not clear if the device will yield any information — Clinton's attorney said in March that no emails from the main personal address she used while secretary of state still "reside on the server or on back-up systems associated with the server."
A Justice Department spokesman would not comment on whether the feds are looking for another device, but presumably the hunt for Clinton's yoga schedules continues.
Table 6. Examples of Engagement → Heteroglossia
In sum, journalists can use monoglossic and heteroglossic sentences when
propagating news contents. Monoglossic utterances represent the voice of the journalist only.
Heteroglossic utterances introduce other voices to the statements by means of quotation
marks, negation, words that render the statement hypothetical, etc.
3.2.4. The Appraisal Framework: Graduation Overview
The third domain of the Appraisal framework, Graduation, attends to the scalability of both
Attitude and Engagement values. Attitudinal meanings as well as Engagement values can be
mitigated or aggravated in order to convey lesser or greater degrees of positive or negative
15
stances. Graduation involves the down-scaling and up-scaling of e.g. amount (a few, many),
mass (small, heavy), and proximity (recently, in times gone by).
Martin and White (2005) also propose that Graduation overarches both Attitude and
Engagement (Martin & White, 2005, p. 136) by decreasing or increasing the intensity of
attitudinal meanings (a bit sad, somewhat staggering, utterly unacceptable, a most memorable
performance) and scaling Engagement values (she hesitantly suggested, she stated, she firmly
insisted). Further, a single lexical item can carry lower or higher grades of attitudinal
meanings (contented – happy – ecstatic) and Engagement values (suspect – believe – be
convinced).
Martin and White (2005) discuss Graduation in terms of its two categories Force and
Focus. Table 7 offers exemplary instances of Graduation → Force taken from my data. In
the Fox News utterance, Graduation attends to the intensity of the statement. The writer up-
scales Clinton’s denial as he or she intensifies the vigour of the denial via the word
repeatedly. In the New York Magazine statement, the writer discusses a number of emails in
question and chooses not to provide the precise amount of it. Instead, the journalist down-
scales the gravity of the proposition by providing imprecise reckonings of underestimation.
Other common examples that create a similar effect in my data include a handful of emails,
more than 3,600 pages of documents, etc.
Graduation → Force
Fox News example New York Magazine example
Clinton has repeatedly denied sending or receiving any then-classified information on her personal account.
The emails in question, fewer than ten of them, were sent between Clinton — both before and shortly after she became secretary of State — and now-retired general David Petraeus, who was at that point in charge of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Table 7. Examples of Graduation → Force
As for Graduation → Focus, the second Graduation category as proposed by Martin
and White (2005), the data under my investigation contained no linguistic resources that fall
under Focus. Martin and White (2005) discuss here resources that sharpen or soften meanings
that are otherwise not scalable. These involve hedges and vague language, which are
unexpected in written journalistic discourse. The following mock examples, not part of my
16
data, feature Focus: Clinton’s decision to use a private server borders on the unreasonable
and Clinton used kind of/sort of a homebrew server, where borders on, kind of, and sort of
exemplify Focus.
3.3. Analytical Approach
In order to identify evaluative language in Fox News and New York Magazine news articles,
I relied on the inductive analytical approach. “In inductive reasoning, we begin with specific
observations and measures, begin to detect patterns and regularities, formulate some tentative
hypotheses that we can explore, and finally end up developing some general conclusions or
theories” (Trochim, 2006). Induction takes data as its starting point and the data’s
organization into an analytical model as its goal. Therefore, I started with an initial
investigation of my data for recurring linguistic patterns that construe potentially evaluative
meanings. Second, I consulted Martin and White’s Appraisal framework (2005) to interpret
the linguistic patterns that I had found to be notable with respect to evaluation. Next, I
returned to the data for a deeper scrutiny and then to the Appraisal framework again to
interpret the found linguistic patterns. This two-step analytical work developed into cycles
of data analysis and framework consultation until the news articles under investigation were
fully exposed for evaluative language and the linguistic evidence of evaluation
accommodated to the Appraisal framework. Figure 2 shows the analytical approach used in
my research.
17
A similar approach was used by Economou (2009), whose research, the extension of
the Appraisal framework to visual language, also “involved applying general appraisal
options to a corpus of news photos and proceeding to further delicacy in a repeated cycle of
analysis and system-building” (Economou, 2009, [Abstract]).
4. Data
In this chapter, I introduce the two text sets that comprise my data: written news articles on
Hillary Clinton’s emailgate scandal published by Fox News and New York Magazine. First,
I offer an overview of the two media outlets Fox News and New York Magazine in 4.1.,
including their websites where the data were pulled from and the situational characteristics
of their news articles. In 4.2., I describe the data collection process. In 4.3., I give an overview
of the data.
4.1. Fox News and New York Magazine: Overview
Foxnews.com is an online news website that belongs to Fox News Channel, one of most
widely available cable news channels in the United States. While Fox News self-declares to
be “Fair & Balanced” (Fox News, 2016), it is commonly held to be the only media outlet on
a national level that propagates conservative bias (Goldberg, 2007). The other two highest-
1.
DATA
ANALYSIS
2.
FRAMEWORK
CONSULTATION
Figure 2. Analytical Approach: Repeated Cycles of Data Analysis and Framework Consultation
18
rated cable news channels are CNN and MSNBC, which are viewed as belonging more to
the liberal media (n.a., 2014). Fox News is seen as more aligning with values that closely
represent Republican voices. In this respect, Fox News is in a unique position on a national
scale: not only is it believed to hold Republican views, it is also the sole major, national
media outlet to do so. This requires Fox News to assume a number of roles and represent a
group of ideological positions that are perhaps more evenly distributed among Democratic
media outlets: it needs to express its distance from Democratic values, further a Republican
political standpoint, but remain informative and preferably unbiased in news reporting at the
same time. Media outlets held to advance Democratic values, on the other hand, have more
options in positioning themselves along the clines of factual news propagation and
opinionated commentary publishing, because there are more liberal media outlets available
to assume these roles.
As compared to Fox News, there is less data available on New York Magazine.
Nymag.com self-declares to “cover the new, the undiscovered, the next in politics, culture,
food, fashion, and behavior nationally, through a New York lens” (n.a., 2016). Nymag.com
is the online version of the bi-weekly published print magazine. In 2013, the online media
outlets that belong under the magazine were reported to have increased their number of online
visitors considerably (Pompeo, 2013). While the magazine is usually not measured for bias
in researches, media critic Eric Alterman, the author of What Liberal Media?, described the
outlet as being “in the heart of liberal country” (Alterman, 2003, para. 11).
4.1.1. foxnews.com and nymag.com: Overview
Emailgate news articles were collected on the websites www.foxnews.com and
www.nymag.com. Alexa Internet, a major data analytics company situated in the United
States, offers web traffic details and insights into the visitor metrics of websites (Alexa.com,
2016a, 2016b). Table 8 shows the web traffic data of foxnews.com and nymag.com, as
downloaded in March 2016.
19
ALEXA INTERNET METRICS FOR
WWW.FOXNEWS.COM AND WWW.NYMAG.COM
Alexa Internet Metric foxnews.com nymag.com
Global rank (volume of visitors and page views combined)
209 1687
Rank in the United States 44 482
Percent of visitors in the United States
85.9% 77.4%
Top search word to send visitors to this website
fox news fox news
Physical base New York, NY, US New York, NY, US
Visitorship: Gender
male
female
male
female
Visitorship: Education
no college
some college
grad. school
college
no college
some college
grad. school
college
Table 8. Alexa Internet Metrics for foxnews.com and nymag.com
The data show that foxnews.com has a considerably bigger reader base than
nymag.com, as it is the 44th most visited website in the United States. Its audience is more
U.S.-based than that of nymag.com, and, interestingly, people frequently find their way to
both websites by searching for the keywords fox + news. The diagrams provided by Alexa
Internet show that the readership of foxnews.com is demographically more balanced along
gender and education levels than that of nymag.com. This could reflect the more specific role
of nymag.com and its catering for a narrower audience as compared to foxnews.com, which
captures a wider audience.
4.1.2. Situational Characteristics of Fox News and New York Magazine News Articles
In explaining the context of Fox News and New York Magazine articles, another necessary
step is to introduce their written news articles on Hillary Clinton’s emailgate scandal along
the contextual properties, the production circumstances, and the purpose these articles serve
- in other words, their situational characteristics. Table 9 summarises the situational
characteristics of the Fox News and the New York Magazine text sets. These properties were
20
identified following Biber and Conrad’s (2009) framework for analyzing situational
characteristics of registers and genres (Biber & Conrad, 2009, p. 40).
SITUATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS OF FOX NEWS/
NEW YORK MAGAZINE ARTICLES
Situational characteristics Fox News articles New York Magazine articles
Participants
Addressor One or more journalists, often
unidentified One or more journalists
Addressee
A wide range of readers possibly
scattered across different places
and times;
85.9% of all visitors come from
the United States.
A wide range of readers possibly
scattered across different places
and times;
77.4% of all visitors come from
the United States.
Relations among participants
Interactiveness Limited
Social roles Status/power differences possible
Personal relationship
Strangers
Shared knowledge
Low degree
Channel Mode Writing
Medium Published online
Production circumstances
News articles are revised and edited before publication, sometimes
corrected and updated after the first publication.
Setting Shared time
Time is usually shared between the writer and the reader as news
articles are expected to be read on the day of publication or soon
afterwards; otherwise, date markers and timestamps indicate the
release of the article.
Shared place Online space shared; no physical place shared
Communicative purposes
General Propagating news; explaining news information
Specific Reporting on the developments of Hillary Clinton’s email controversy
Factuality The factual representation of information is assumed.
Topic General Politics
Specific Hillary Clinton, data security, privacy issues, email controversy
Table 9. Situational Characteristics of Fox News and New York Magazine Articles
While researching the situational characteristics of Fox News and New York
Magazine articles, an important difference arose between the two media outlets: the writers
on Fox News often remain unnamed. This decreases the interactiveness between journalists
and their audiences as the readers cannot address the writer of the given news article. From
an evaluative standpoint, the lack of a named author is crucial because it leads the readers to
either align or not with the collective philosophy represented by the media outlet. When the
author is named, on the other hand, the audience has a choice to align or not with the
21
journalist’s position, a stand that might not necessarily reflect the mentality of the whole
media outlet.
As for interactiveness, the readership has the ability to react to the published articles
by way of posting comments under the articles and emailing journalists (except for when the
journalists remain unnamed, which often occurs in Fox News articles). Nevertheless, the
written mode does not allow for direct interaction between the participants, resulting in
limited interactiveness between writers and readers.
Also of note is the low degree of shared knowledge between writers and readers.
While some shared contextual knowledge is assumed to exist between the participants, the
purpose of news propagation indicates more knowledge on the journalist’s part, which is then
passed onto the reader. As a result, the journalist is generally assumed to have information
that has been unknown to the general readership, while the audience is assumed to have at
least some knowledge and interest in the given topic.
4.2. Data Collection
In this section, I present the method that I used to select data, written news articles on Hillary
Clinton’s emailgate scandal published by Fox News and New York Magazine, on
foxnews.com and nymag.com.
4.2.1. Timeframe
Primary data collection began by determining a timeframe within which news articles
discussing Hillary Clinton would be collected on the two media outlets.
The timeframe of my choice runs from 12 April 2015 to 1 February 2016. The start
date marks Clinton’s public and official announcement of running for president in 2016 on
her YouTube channel (Clinton, 2015). 1 February 2016 is the date of the first Democratic
caucus, held in Iowa (Putnam, 2015). Caucuses (and primaries) are part of the presidential
nomination process, which lead the Democratic and the Republican political parties to the
nomination of their presidential candidate based on a voting system. Although caucuses and
primaries last until June 2016, The Washington Post predicted that “the earlier contests will
winnow the field of candidates enough that a candidate is very likely to claim enough
delegates to clinch the nomination prior to the final contest. […] The presidential nomination
22
process has tended to produce essentially two leading candidates, a frontrunner and an
alternative to the frontrunner. These candidates will emerge in the invisible primary or
certainly after the first few contests” (Putnam, 2015, para. 44-45).
As of the middle of May 2016, around the time that this thesis is finalised, Donald
Trump has emerged as the most likely Republican presidential nominee, while no winner has
emerged from the Democratic party. As of 18 May 2016, Clinton has won 1,767 delegate
votes as opposed to her Democratic opponent Bernie Sanders’ 1,488 delegate votes. In order
for a candidate to be nominated by the Democratic Party, one must win 2,383 delegate votes
(Andrews, Bennett, & Parlapiano, 2016). Bernie Sanders announced that he would stay in
the race for the nomination until the Democratic Convention in July 2016, where party
delegates decide whether to nominate Clinton or Sanders for President of the United States
(Alcindor, 2016). Thus, whether Hillary Clinton becomes the Democratic presidential
nominee remains undecided until July 2016.
4.2.2. Defining Written News Articles
Data collection proceeded by distinguishing news articles from other types of posts published
online on Fox News and New York Magazine. Written news articles are understood in this
thesis as written texts whose main purpose is to propagate the news. Additionally, these texts
need to be the first textual references in the news archives of Fox News and New York
Magazine to discuss a given emailgate news event. Furthermore, they must be published on
a separate subpage on either website, i.e. one news article equals one subpage on
foxnews.com or nymag.com. As a final criterion, it is important for any two news articles
discussing the same news event to have been published relatively close to each other in time
on the two media outlets.
These delimiting criteria helped identify and exclude from the data a) video news
published under news headlines on Fox News, and b) commentary articles published under
news headlines on either Fox News or New York Magazine.
Category a) video news were in many cases the first mentions of a given news event
on Fox News. This is owing to the fact that Fox News is primarily an American television
channel, and, consequently, multimodal news reporting is one of its inherent features. In
cases where the news were first propagated exclusively in video format, I continued
23
searching for the first written article that discusses the given news event. Eventually, these
articles were selected to be part of my data even if some audiovisual material was embedded
in them.
Category b) commentaries were distinguished from news articles proper under the
following criteria. Commentaries were assumed to be dated later than when the given news
information broke and to be not the first in a row of articles to discuss the news event. Both
media outlets were expected to first propagate a news event and then provide more subjective
commentary on them. This assumption is not to exclude the possibility that subjective
commentary may be included in the selected news articles themselves.
Furthermore, to ensure that the selected news articles indeed have the property of
news propagation, each selected article was identified either as being the source that broke
the news or as directly referencing a news source that broke the given news event.
These predetermined criteria served their delimiting purpose effectively in most
cases. 4.2.3. exemplifies this. However, there were instances where further research was
necessary to identify a text string as a news article without a doubt. 4.2.4. details this.
4.2.3. Selecting News Articles Using Predefined Criteria
The following is an example of the selection procedure where the predefined criteria
successfully filtered non-relevant articles.
On 4 September 2015, Clinton was interviewed by MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell,
where Clinton’s email controversy arose as one of the main topics under discussion
(MSNBC, 2015). Both Fox News and New York Magazine reported on the event. Appendix
1 shows New York Magazine’s news archive sorted after the date of publication and filtered
for news about Hillary Clinton (Hillary Clinton. Most recent articles, 2016).
To find the news article reporting on the interview, first every post published before
4 September, in this case The Relatable Hillary, was determined as not carrying the potential
to propagate this news event. Next, articles not pertaining to the topic in question, in this case
The Sanders Surge whose main topic of discussion is not Clinton or her email scandal, were
disqualified from being the news article of my interest.
24
The initial exclusions reduced the list of articles to the ones that indeed attend to the
Mitchell-Clinton interview. There was one article published on the day of the interview
(Clinton on Emails), but that does not automatically grant it the news propagation properties
as the news may be distributed later than the day of the event. On 8 and 17 September, two
more articles related to the email scandal were published, To Clarify, and Hillary Clinton is
Hurt, respectively. The question remains as to which of the three articles is the one first
distributing the news on Clinton’s interview with Andrea Mitchell.
The predetermined criteria verified that Clinton on Emails is the article propagating
the interview: the text includes a direct link to MSNBC’s source video, whereas To Clarify,
posted four days later, references Clinton on Emails. Furthermore, while Hillary Clinton is
Hurt, posted on 17 September, seems to discuss the email scandal on the face of it, it in fact
details a televised Clinton interview with Jimmy Kimmel. As a result, Clinton on Emails was
selected and added to the list of news articles as primary data.
4.2.4. Selecting News Articles Using Extended Criteria
In some cases, following the predefined criteria to select content that carries the news did not
suffice. As a result, details beyond what had been preset by the criteria had to be scrutinized.
This applies in particular to Fox News content for two major reasons. First, Fox News articles
are assigned timestamps that reveal the day of publication but not the exact hour, as opposed
to content on New York Magazine. This prevents delicate filtering for the first textual
reference that holds relevant content. Second, posts are not tagged for topic, resulting in all
articles containing the search words Hillary + Clinton to show up in the search results, a
quantity that amounts to thousands of posts in the selected timeframe. Again, the tagging
feature is implemented in the New York Magazine archive, rendering search for Clinton-
related content much faster and efficient than in the rather cumbersome Fox News archive
(Results found for Hillary Clinton, 2016).
For these reasons, it became standard procedure that I would first identify news
content on New York Magazine, and then match it to a corresponding news article published
on Fox News. If no match was found, the New York Magazine news article was discarded,
as well. If a match was found, extended criteria were used to identify one Fox News article
as the propagator of the news event in the written mode.
25
One instance where the predefined criteria proved insufficient to select news content
was when on 22 May 2015 the State Department released Clinton emails about the 2012
Benghazi terror attacks. Both Fox News and New York Magazine reported on the event. New
York Magazine reported on it on 22 May under the headline State Department Releases
Hillary’s Benghazi Emails in Textbook Case of ‘Holiday News Dump.’ To find the Fox News
counterpart, I started by listing articles containing the search words Hillary + Clinton
published on 22 May and later. Appendix 2 shows Fox News’s news archive sorted after the
date of publication and filtered for news about Hillary Clinton (Results found for Hillary
Clinton, 2016).
Headlines not containing Hillary or Clinton were ruled out first, followed by the
exclusion of those articles whose image thumbnails featured a play button, which indicates
exclusively audiovisual content. It is important to mention that posts without a play button
in their image thumbnails may include video content, as well. However, the lack of the icon
indicates content primarily in the written mode on Fox News, making the selection of written
articles easier.
Having discarded 8 of the 10 articles shown in Appendix 2 following this method
nominated Another day of damaging disclosures, and Internal emails show Clinton got
detailed intel, as the potential bearers of the news. Because the news articles are not sorted
alphabetically, one might assume that the exact time of publication is reflected in the order
of the posts, with posts toward the bottom indicating earlier publication times. This
assumption, together with a Fox News First tag on Another day of damaging disclosures
point to this article as the first report on the release of the Benghazi emails.
In the end, Another day of damaging disclosures turned out to be a newsletter-like
aggregation of headlines outlining interesting developments in politics in the recent past and
the foreseeable future. While the article refers to the release of the Benghazi emails, it does
so in the future tense, saying, “later today we will get the first wave of her emails from a
secret server” (Stirewalt, 2015). As a result, Internal emails show Clinton got detailed intel
was selected as the news article propagating the news and corresponding to the one published
by New York Magazine.
26
4.3. Data Overview
In this section, I give an overview of the data and provide calculations of word count.
43 news articles on New York Magazine were selected with a matching 43 news
articles on Fox News that, when paired up from the opposite news website, propagate
Clinton-related news in the period 12 April 2015 to 1 February 2016. Out of the 43 pairs, 20
pertain primarily to the Clinton campaign, including reports about her White House bid,
campaign details, public speeches, debates, and poll results. 14 pairs attend to Clinton’s email
controversy. 9 pairs are concerned with other Clinton-related matters that have been
examined in the campaign context, but nevertheless mainly attend to topics such as Clinton’s
wealth, the Clinton Foundation, a book called Time Bomb that looks to reveal exclusive
information on the Foundation, and a congressional hearing with Clinton testifying in relation
to the 2012 Benghazi attacks.
Table 10 shows the 2x14 news articles that comprise my primary data. Where the
publication dates of the given pair differed, the first date shows that of Fox News, while the
second one shows that of New York Magazine.
FOX NEWS AND NEW YORK MAGAZINE ARTICLES ON EMAILGATE
# Date Fox News article headlines New York Magazine headlines
01 22 May Internal emails show Clinton got detailed intel on 'planned' Benghazi hit
State Department Releases Hillary’s Benghazi Emails in Textbook Case of ‘Holiday News Dump’
02 01 July Blumenthal gave diplomatic advice to Hillary Clinton as early as 2009, emails show
15 Fun Tidbits From Hillary Clinton’s Emails
03 24 July Clinton facing new calls to turn over server after IGs request probe
Justice Department Asked to Investigate Hillary’s Emails
04 12 August FBI investigating security of Hillary Clinton's private email server
Clinton Gives In, Turns Over Email Server to Justice Department
05 13 August State Dept. accused of stiff-arming intel watchdog over Hillary emails
If Clinton Has a Backup of Her Emails, the FBI Would Like to See It
06 03 September Former Clinton aide who helped set up server to plead Fifth Amendment to avoid subpoena
Aide Who Set Up Clinton’s Email Server Will Plead the Fifth
07 04 September Clinton ‘sorry’ for email confusion, stops short of apology for actions
Clinton on Emails: ‘I Am Sorry That This Has Been Confusing to People’
08 23 September FBI reportedly recovers deleted emails from Clinton server
The FBI Managed to Recover Hillary Clinton’s Personal Emails
09 26 September/
25 September
State Dept. receives Clinton email chain apparently not included in pages turned over
Defense Department Finds More Clinton Emails
27
10 07 October FBI probe of Hillary Clinton emails expands to second tech company
Hillary Is Done Playing Defense, But Emailgate Won’t Go Away
11 06 November Intelligence officials reportedly walk back Clinton 'top secret' email claims
Report: Clinton Never Sent Classified Information From Her Private Email Account
12 01 January/
08 January State Department releases over 3,000 Clinton emails on New Year's Eve
Hillary Clinton Reacts to Benghazi in Newest Batch of Emails
13 19 January/
20 January
Inspector General: Clinton emails had intel from most secretive, classified programs
New Report Says Some Emails Sent on Clinton’s Server Were Super Top Secret
14 29 January Official: Some Clinton emails 'too damaging' to release
The State Department Confirms Clinton’s Email Server Hosted ‘Top Secret’ Information
Table 10. The Dates of Publication and Titles of the 2x14 Emailgate News Articles
The overview reveals two peculiarities that require closer inspection: one concerning
the contents of article pair #02, and one pertaining to the production circumstances of article
pair #12.
While most headline pairs show a clear connection regarding their contents, the
headlines of article pair #02 show considerable discrepancy regarding the story that they
cover, the Fox News headline signalling news propagation, while the New York Magazine
one apparently displaying commentary. I address the issue in section 4.3.1.
Further, Table 10 shows that most article pairs were published on the same day by
the two media outlets, satisfying the definition of news articles and other criteria as presented
in section 4.2. In two cases, one media outlet published the news the day after the other
(articles #09 and #13). Of more interest is article #12, which shows a week-long gap in
publication date. The news discussing the State Department’s end-of-the-year release of
Clinton emails sees a discrepancy of 7 days between its release date on Fox News and New
York Magazine. While the delayed propagation of the news is not the main focus of my thesis
paper, the marked time difference emerged as a potential contributor to the biased
representation of emailgate, and, as such, it necessitates further investigation. I address this
in section 4.3.2.
4.3.1. Further Commentary on Data: Article #02
The content mismatch in article pair #02 could result from wrongly selecting 15 Fun Tidbits
From Hillary Clinton’s Emails as the news article on New York Magazine discussing the
28
State Department’s release of a second batch of Clinton’s emails, and that an earlier article
that carried those news had been overlooked.
A re-check of the New York Magazine news archive confirmed, however, that the
article, posted at 4.53 a.m. on 1 July, was the first one on New York Magazine to discuss the
email release that was published online on 30 June (Virtual Reading Room Documents
Search Results, 2015). In addition, the article provides a direct link to the State Department’s
database: by referencing the news source, the article meets the data selection criteria detailed
in section 4.2.
The data analysis later revealed that the language in the article indeed takes up
evaluative resources in a degree different to those represented in the rest of the articles.
Despite this, I decided to keep the article pair in my data for two reasons. First, the article
pair satisfies the preset criteria. Second, it reports on a significant event in the development
of Clinton’s email controversy, namely the State Department’s release of the first extensive,
large-scale batch of emails containing over 1,900 correspondences. (The release prior to that
was specific to the Benghazi attacks and included 296 pages of email.) (Virtual Reading
Room Documents Search Results, 2015).
To conclude, I considered the article 15 Fun Tidbits From Hillary Clinton’s Emails a
news article, albeit with commentary voice infused in it more than in the rest of the articles.
4.3.2. Further Commentary on Data: Article #12
On the face of it, the publishing irregularity that surrounds article #12 seems to be the result
of either one of two scenarios. First, a failure to identify a New York Magazine article is
possible - one that corresponds to the State Department’s end-of-the-year release of Clinton
emails and was published around 1 January 2016. Alternatively, New York Magazine
possibly waited a week (to review the emails first) before construing a conclusion and
propagating the news accordingly.
A re-check of the news archive of Fox News and New York Magazine, however,
suggests a third possibility. According to The Washington Post, the State Department was
obliged under court order to release 82% of all Clinton emails by the end of 2015 (Helderman,
2015). However, the approaching holidays and being understaffed prevented the Department
29
from achieving the court-ordered goal and instead released 3,079 correspondences on 31
December 2015 (Virtual Reading Room Documents Search Results, 2015). As well, they
announced a second batch to be released the following week in order “to make up for the
shortfall” (Helderman, 2015, para. 5). The release of the remaining 1,262 emails eventually
took place at around 2 a.m. on 8 January 2016 (Virtual Reading Room Documents Search
Results, 2016).
New York Magazine did not report on the larger batch of emails released on 31
December 2015. Instead, article #12 Hillary Clinton Reacts to Benghazi in Newest Batch of
Emails was published 9 hours after the State Department released the rest of the document
collection on 8 January 2016. Claire Landsbaum of New York Magazine offered in article
#12 a reflection over these correspondences, suggesting that “they’re mostly boring
administrative emails” (Landsbaum, 2016, para. 2). The journalist further claimed that “the
newest batch of Hillary Clinton emails arrived a little late (they were supposed to be out
December 31), but the State Department worked into the night and finally released 3,000
pages of ‘fit n sparkly’ new content around 2 a.m.” (Landsbaum, 2016, para. 2). The quoted
text contains an external link that points to the State Department’s document collection of
the 1,262 emails published on 8 January 2016.
Fox News, on the other hand, used a different strategy to cover the irregular, two-step
release of the email batch. The unnamed journalist on 1 January 2016 published article #12
State Department releases over 3,000 Clinton emails on New Year's Eve, reporting on the
release of the 3,079 correspondences. Following the State Department’s release of the second
batch of emails on 8 January 2016, Fox News published two more articles detailing the
contents of the document collection of the 1,262 remaining emails. The release and the emails
were referenced in the first of these articles as “the exchange was one of more than 1,200
messages released overnight, under a court order dating back to last year” (Tomlinson, 2016).
In the second article, the release is referenced as “a recently released email” (FoxNews.com,
2016).
The unusual practices in covering the end-of-the-year release of Clinton emails points
to the potential where New York Magazine underreported the release process of the Clinton
emails and misinformed the public about data volume. Conversely, Fox News can be assessed
30
as overreporting emailgate, producing articles with disproportionately great frequency and
on incomplete batches of email releases.
The above detour was necessary in order for me to support my decision in selecting
a pair of news articles with a week-long time difference in their publication date.
Furthermore, the above examples show Hillary Clinton’s email controversy can be mitigated
or aggravated beyond the level of language in order to spread or cover up the scandal. Last,
it justifies once again and prompts a linguistic investigation into emailgate articles to see
whether partisan bias is reflected in how the journalists report on the controversy.
4.3.3. Data Measurements
I performed calculations on the 2x14 emailgate articles to see to what extent the two media
outlets deal with the email controversy. Word count measurements revealed that the 28
articles contain 16,608 words in total, 65.2% of which was produced by Fox News.
It is important to note here that one necessary adjustment to the scope of my
investigation was to sort the 2x14 articles on the sentence level and differentiate between
those sentences that directly reference Hillary Clinton and those that do not. I eventually
narrowed my data to include only those sentences where Hillary Clinton is explicitly
mentioned. This step was crucial to reduce my data scope and to shift the focus of the research
to how the email controversy is described against the backdrop of Clinton’s political persona
and her run for presidency.
The 28 news articles published on Fox News and New York Magazine consist of 653
sentences. After selecting the ones that directly reference Clinton, 410 sentences remained.
These 410 sentences comprise my data.
The 410 sentences, the core of my data analysis, consist of 11,278 words, 61% of
which were published by Fox News. Table 11 below presents this information. A keyword
density analysis performed on the 410 sentences revealed that the most frequently mentioned
words in both text sets are Clinton, emails, and Clinton’s, with State Department, server, and
information present in the top ten keywords list of both groups of sentences. A marked
difference is that classified and secretary are the eighth and tenth most frequently used
keywords in the Fox News sentences, respectively, while neither of the two are in the top ten
31
list of New York Magazine keywords. The opposite applies to the keyword Hillary, which
ranks nine of the top ten keywords list of New York Magazine sentences but is not present
in the same list for Fox News.
WORD COUNT OF ARTICLES ON EMAILGATE
Words in Fox News articles Words in New York Magazine articles
Clinton Clinton Total Clinton Clinton Total
Σ 3943 6898 10841 1387 4390 5777
% 36.4% 63.6% 100% 24% 76% 100%
Table 11. Word Count of Articles on Emailgate
As far as direct references to Hillary Clinton are concerned, 57% of all Fox News
sentences reference Clinton directly; this number rises to 72% in the case of New York
Magazine sentences. The sentences that directly reference Hillary Clinton and are thus added
to my analysis amount to 239 and 171 for Fox News and New York Magazine, respectively.
In search of direct references to Hillary Clinton, three distinct categories were
identified as carriers of such references: name references, including Clinton or Hillary’s,
political positions, such as The 2016 Democratic frontrunner, secretary of state, or former
Secretary Clinton’s, and function words, such as she, her, herself, and in some direct quotes
I and you. In order for a sentence to be included in my data, it had to contain at least one
direct reference of these kinds. Table 12 is an overview of the top ten occurrences throughout
the 410 sentences.
MENTIONS OF HILLARY CLINTON IN ARTICLES ON EMAILGATE
Fox News mentions New York Magazine mentions
Top 10 references Occurrences Top 10 references Occurrences
Clinton 116 Clinton 71
her (possessive determiner) 96 Clinton’s 54
she (personal pronoun) 65 her (possessive determiner) 53
Clinton’s 54 she (personal pronoun) 48
I (personal pronoun) 13 secretary of State 14
Hillary Clinton 12 Hillary Clinton’s 12
Hillary Clinton’s 12 Hillary Clinton 11
secretary of state 12 I (personal pronoun) 11
32
her (personal pronoun) 6 her (personal pronoun) 7
herself 5 Hillary 5
Number of all mentions 452 Number of all mentions 309
Table 12. Mentions of Hillary Clinton in Emailgate Articles
In total, 452 direct references were identified in Fox News articles and 309 in New
York Magazine ones. Fox News used twice as many different expressions to reference
Clinton (56) than New York Magazine (28). This is owing to the fact that Fox News news
articles use a range of expressions that reference Clinton’s past and prospective affiliations
and positions. Examples include presidential candidate, top diplomat, First Lady, former
Secretary Clinton, the secretary’s, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, etc.
During the analysis, the three categories of references were expanded to include
expressions that do not fit in any of the three categories. Examples include the two
(referencing Hillary Clinton and her daughter), their end user (a reference to Hillary Clinton
to whom services were done by the tech company Datto), one of the “three amigos” (a
nickname for Clinton during the 1980’s according to Fox News), and “liar” (used by some
respondents to a Quinnipiac questionnaire that looked into what words come to people’s mind
when they hear the words Hillary Clinton). In addition, those sentences were also added to
my data where there is a lack of direct references to Clinton, but she is the speaker of the
given utterance, and thus her presence is certain.
To sum up, my primary data consist of 239 Fox News and and 171 New York
Magazine sentences that directly reference Clinton and were published as part of emailgate
news articles.
5. Design of the Analytical Framework
As emphasised in section 3.2. The Appraisal Framework: Evaluation in Verbal Language,
certain linguistic patterns found across the emailgate news articles grouped along organizing
principles different to the subcategories proposed by Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal
framework. For instance, feelings (Attitude → Affect) were found to be sourced to the writer,
to Clinton, or a third party. In some cases, they were sourced through more than one actor,
33
as in Top aide Huma Abedin didn't think Clinton would be excited…, where excitement is
assigned to Clinton through a third party. While Martin and White make a distinction between
authorial and non-authorial Affect, multiple sources are not examined. In addition,
distinguishing third party-sourced Affect from Clinton-sourced Affect is specifically
important with regard to the email controversy news, where Clinton plays a central role. As
for Engagement, certain linguistic elements such as scare quotes do not belong to one clear-
cut category but rather border on two or three categories. Scare quotes and other formatting
conventions are not discussed in Martin and White’s Appraisal framework. Thirdly,
registering Graduation yielded the emergence of subcategories that are prevalent throughout
my data but do not necessarily correspond to the Graduation system established by Martin
and White. As mentioned in 3.2.4. The Appraisal Framework: Graduation Overview,
Graduation → Focus had zero occurrences in my data. Further, Martin and White’s
Graduation → Force attends to imprecise reckonings (a handful of emails) among others,
whereas my data showed that overly precise reckonings (31,105 emails) also have evaluative
potential.
Thus, in order to accommodate standout linguistic phenomena across my data,
adjustments were made to the Appraisal framework. This was necessary in order to provide
a full account of evaluative language on Fox News and New York Magazine specific to
Clinton and her email controversy. Therefore, the expanded layout of the Appraisal
framework is one specific to my data and does not completely reflect Martin and White’s
system (Martin & White, 2005).
From sections 5.1. to 5.3., I move from domain to domain in the Appraisal framework
and open up all categories and subcategories to provide a full account of the framework. In
section 5.4., I show the complete map of the Appraisal framework modified for the text sets
written news articles on Hillary Clinton’s emailgate scandal published by Fox News and New
York Magazine. Further, I present lexical items that I deemed non-evaluative and thus did
not assign them to any of the Appraisal framework domains.
34
5.1. Design of the Appraisal Framework: Attitude
Attitudinal meanings needed adjustment in the Affect category. Judgement values and
assessments of Appreciation, on the other hand, were registered according their layout
proposed by Martin and White (Martin & White, 2005). Figure 3 shows Attitude (A) and its
categories.
5.1.1. Attitude → Affect
Affect, the signalling of emotional responses is subcategorised by White according to
whether the source of Affect is authorial or non-authorial (White, 2015). Authorial Affect
means that the writer presents his or her own emotional responses to a given utterance. In
Non-authorial Affect, the writer remains the voice behind the feeling, i.e. they take some
responsibility for the affect value presented in the text, but it is not the author’s emotions that
are described. Rather, they are associated with other individuals or groups of people.
With regard to my data, three additional subcategories were opened under Non-
authorial Affect: feelings sourced to Clinton, feelings sourced to a third party i.e. neither the
author nor Clinton, and multiple non-authorial sources, i.e. when the described feeling is
filtered through one actor and then at least another one. Figure 4 shows the fully expanded
subcategories under Affect with examples taken from my data.
AFFECT
JUDGEMENT
APPRECIATION
AUTHORIAL | NON-AUTHORIAL
SOCIAL ESTEEM | SOCIAL SANCTION
REACTION | COMPOSITION| VALUATION
A
Figure 3. Attitude Categories in Fox News and New York Magazine Emailgate News Articles
35
AFFECT
A
Clin
ton's
FO
MO
is
more
understa
ndable
w
hen
you le
arn
that…
(N
ew
York
Magazin
e)
Clin
ton has
said
sh
e w
ants
the
departm
ent
to
rele
ase
th
e
em
ails
(Fox N
ew
s); Then [C
linto
n]
got sto
od u
p b
y
the entire
ca
bin
et,
confirm
ing
her w
orst fe
ars
(New
York
Magazin
e)
[officia
ls at D
atto
] did
not w
ant
to ru
n in
to a
legal p
roble
m(F
ox
New
s); N
atu
rally
, Republica
ns
were
gid
dy a
bout C
linto
n's co
nce
ssion.
(New
York
Magazin
e)
In th
e in
terv
iew
, M
itchell
also
ask
ed C
linto
n h
ow
she fe
els th
at
a Q
uin
nip
iac
poll
found…
(F
ox
New
s); Top
aid
e
Hum
a
Abedin
did
n't
thin
k C
linto
n w
ould
be e
xcite
d…
(N
ew
York
Magazin
e)
NO
N-A
UT
HO
RIA
L
AU
TH
OR
IAL
Sourc
e: C
linto
n
Sourc
e: 3
rd Party
M
ultip
le S
ourc
es
Fig
ure 4
. Affect S
ub
categ
ories in
Fo
x New
s and
New
Yo
rk Ma
ga
zine E
ma
ilga
te New
s Articles
36
5.1.2. Attitude → Judgement
Judgement, the evaluation of behaviour, falls into two distinct subcategories: Social Esteem
and Social Sanction. Social Esteem covers those positive or negative evaluations that could
boost or diminish the esteem that one is given in society. These judgements mostly answer
to behaviours and deeds that do not have a lawful/unlawful quality to them, but can easily
result in the actor being raised or lowered in the esteem of their community (White, 2015).
Social Sanction, on the other hand, attends to morality or legality and comes into play when
rules have been broken and misconduct is under discussion. People evaluated along Social
Sanction are potentially caught up in some degrees of (im)moral/(un)lawful conduct.
Social Esteem can be further broken down into three subcategories: evaluations
targeted at how unusual someone is (normality), how able they are (capacity), and how
resolute they are (tenacity). Also on the level of subcategories, Social Sanction differentiates
between evaluations of someone’s truthfulness (veracity) and their ethical behaviour
(propriety). Figure 5 shows the fully expanded subcategories under Judgement with examples
taken from my data (examples of tenacity are taken from Martin & White for a lack of
tenacity evaluations in my data) (Martin & White, 2005, p. 53).
37
JU
DG
EM
EN
T
A
Norm
ality
co
ntro
versia
l, unusu
al
(Fox N
ew
s); co
ntro
versia
l, fam
ously
(New
York
Magazin
e)
Capacity
w
ell-tra
ined, stru
ggle
, jum
p o
n
(Fox N
ew
s); te
ch-sa
vvy,
quick
ly
challe
nged,
quick
ly
resp
onded
(New
York
Magazin
e)
Tenacity
[b
rave], [re
ckle
ss]
Vera
city
Clin
ton h
edged, “
liar,”
secre
tive
(Fox N
ew
s); sh
ady, “
liar,”
“dish
onest”
(New
York
Magazin
e)
Pro
prie
ty
inappro
pria
tely
, sh
ould
have
know
n,
avoid
public scru
tiny
(Fox N
ew
s); holid
ay n
ew
s dum
p, sh
ould
, sorry
(New
York
Magazin
e)
SO
CIA
L E
ST
EEM
SO
CIA
L S
AN
CT
ION
Fig
ure 5
. Jud
gem
ent S
ub
categ
ories in
Fo
x New
s and
New
Yo
rk Mag
azin
e Em
ailg
ate N
ews A
rticles
38
5.1.3. Attitude → Appreciation
Appreciation, the assessment of objects, things, natural phenomena, and performances, is
established by Martin and White along “our ‘reactions’ to things (do they catch our attention;
do they please us?), their ‘composition’ (balance and complexity), and their ‘value’ (how
innovative, authentic, timely, etc.)” (Martin & White, 2005, p. 56). Figure 6 shows the fully
expanded subcategories under Appreciation with examples taken from my data.
39
APPRECIA
TIO
N
A
a fla
tterin
g fe
atu
re
(New
York
Magazin
e)
classifie
d p
rogra
ms
(Fox N
ew
s); se
cure
netw
ork
(N
ew
York
Magazin
e)
insu
fficient e
vid
ence
(F
ox N
ew
s); th
e m
ost sig
nifica
nt fin
din
gs
(New
York
Magazin
e)
REA
CT
ION
C
OM
PO
SIT
ION
VA
LU
AT
ION
Fig
ure 6
. Ap
precia
tion S
ub
categ
ories in
Fo
x New
s an
d N
ew Y
ork M
ag
azin
e Em
ailg
ate N
ews A
rticles
40
5.2. Design of the Appraisal Framework: Engagement
The Engagement domain, which attends to whether assertions are sourced internally or
externally, sees a distinction between Monoglossia and Heteroglossia as introduced in 3.2.3.
The Appraisal Framework: Engagement Overview. Categories under Heteroglossia,
utterances where alternative voices or positions are invoked, are detailed in this section.
Figure 7 lists Engagement (E) and its categories.
Heteroglossic utterances influence the dialogic space in either of two ways. The first
possibility is Heteroglossia → Expand, where heteroglossic assertions are used to open up
dialogic space and signal that the position they represent is only one out of a range of possible
positions. In this way, the dialogic space becomes expanded (Martin & White, 2005, p. 103).
Section 5.2.1. details expansion.
The second possibility for heteroglossic assertions to impact the dialogic space is to
restrict the scope of alternative voices or positions (Heteroglossia → Contract). In this way,
the dialogic space is closed down, i.e. contracted. Section 5.2.2. details contraction.
During data analysis, I found language that can be interpreted as both expanding and
contracting the dialogic space. These ambiguous linguistic features are discussed in section
5.2.3.
MONOGLOSSIA
HETEROGLOSSIA → CONTRACT
HETEROGLOSSIA → EXPAND
DISCLAIM | PROCLAIM
ATTRIBUTE | ENTERTAIN
E
Figure 7. Engagement Categories in Fox News and New York Magazine Emailgate News Articles
41
5.2.1. Engagement → Heteroglossia → Expand
There are two ways to show that an assertion expands dialogism, i.e. that it is only one of
many possibilities. First, the authorial voice can disassociate itself from the utterance by way
of sourcing, i.e. attributing it to an external voice (Expand → Attribute). Attribution is often
realised grammatically through reported speech. Attributions can go two different ways: the
authorial voice can acknowledge or distance itself from the attributed statement. When the
authorial voice does not explicitly state where it stands with respect to the displayed
proposition, the voice acknowledges the utterance (Attribute → Acknowledge). When the
author attributes a proposition to an external voice and in doing so refuses to take
responsibility for the attributed utterance, he or she distances him- or herself from the
proposition (Attribute → Distance).
Attribute → Acknowledge is commonly realised by instances such as he said, he
believes, he noted, according to her, in her view, etc. Attribute → Distance is carried through
wordings that stress that the assertion has not been generally accepted. While some may agree
with it, other voices do not accept it. Instances such as he claimed, it’s rumored that, she
maintained, and sometimes he insisted, carry the idea that at least some people do not align
with or believe the statement.
The second way to construe an utterance as but one of a range of alternatives is by
way of entertaining them (Expand → Entertain). By using wordings of probability (might,
probably, possibly, I believe that, it’s possible that… - expressing that there are alternatives,
as well), evidentiality (it seems, the evidence suggests, apparently), and
permission/obligation (must, have to), the authorial voice displays the proposition as one
possibility only but explicitly boosts or decreases the validity of it via wordings of
entertainment. As such, while the authorial voice opens up the possibility that the reader
might think differently about the matter, they entertain, i.e. explicitly and subjectively align
with the presented proposition.
In sum, reported speech and wordings of different levels of probability announce a
proposition to be but one of a number of propositions to align with. When the authorial voice
selects this assertion, they do not overtly indicate their stance with respect to it
(Acknowledge), step back from it (Distance), or advance their own assessment of it
42
(Entertain). When attributing, the authorial voice grounds the utterance in the subjectivity of
an external voice. When entertaining, the authorial voice grounds the proposition in his or
her own subjectivity. Figure 8 shows the fully expanded subcategories under Heteroglossia
→ Expand with examples taken from my data.
43
EN
TERTA
IN
Pro
bability
perh
aps
(Fox N
ew
s); pre
sum
ably
(New
York
Magazin
e)
HETERO
GLO
SSIA
→ E
XPA
ND
E
AT
TRIB
UT
E
Acknow
ledge
acco
rdin
g to
, said
, told
(F
ox N
ew
s); re
port, sa
id
(New
York
Magazin
e)
Dista
nce
m
ain
tain
, claim
(F
ox N
ew
s); cla
im
(New
York
Magazin
e)
Evid
entia
lity
suggest
(Fox N
ew
s); oste
nsib
ly (N
ew
York
Magazin
e)
Oblig
atio
n
must, h
as to
(N
ew
York
Magazin
e)
Fig
ure 8
. Hetero
glo
ssia →
Exp
and
Su
bca
tego
ries in F
ox N
ews a
nd N
ew Y
ork M
aga
zine E
ma
ilga
te New
s Articles
44
5.2.2. Engagement → Heteroglossia → Contract
Similarly to Expand, Heteroglossia → Contract offers two main routes to affect the range of
possible dialogic alternatives. First, the authorial voice can announce one claim to hold fully
and thus excludes other positions or voices from offering an alternative (Contract →
Proclaim). Second, the authorial voice can reject a certain claim or show it as replacing one
that was expected in its place (Contract → Disclaim).
In Proclaim → Concur, the authorial voice explicitly agrees with the single external
voice or position that has been presented. This can take place by using wordings such as of
course, naturally, not surprisingly, certainly, etc. These wordings position the proposition as
the generally agreed and accepted viewpoint.
When the authorial voice introduces an external position and announces them as
valid, correct, or undeniable, they use wordings such as show, demonstrate, prove, reveal,
confirm, corroborate, disclose, confide, etc. These fall under the subcategory Proclaim →
Endorse. An important distinction to make here is the one between endorsing and
acknowledging an utterance. In Contract → Proclaim → Endorse, the authorial voice
explicitly aligns with a statement and takes responsibility for them, thereby rejecting
alternative voices as holding true. In contrast, in Expand → Attribute → Acknowledge, the
authorial voice disassociates from the proposition and takes no responsibility for what has
been said. To say Internal emails show Clinton got detailed intel on 'planned' Benghazi hit
is to nominate the statement as undeniably valid and taken for granted. To say Clinton said
she loves swimming, chocolate, House of Cards, sleep, and ... email, the author reports on
what has been said and expresses that the proposition is valid in the subjectivity of the
external voice – from Clinton’s viewpoint in this case.
A third way to proclaim that a proposition is warrantable is for the authorial voice to
intervene in the utterance and place authorial emphasis on the proposition (Proclaim →
Pronounce). In speech, primary stress is one way to introduce these interpolations. In writing,
formatting including emboldening or italicising text parts can contribute to this effect. Also,
wordings such as indeed, really, as well as the helping verbs does, did, was, were, etc. in
positive sentences to express emphatic assertion (e.g. The judge has yet to rule on that matter,
but he did set hearings for February…) can be used to pronounce a proposition. Proclaim →
45
Pronounce puts solidarity with the audience at risk by confronting and defeating alternative
voices or positions. Unless the reader subscribes to the one pronounced statement and agrees
with alternatives being shut down, the writer risks solidarity with his or her audience.
The second scenario in dialogic contraction concerns the authorial voice dismissing
alternative voices or positions (Contract → Disclaim).
When the authorial voice disclaims alternatives, they show either denial or counter-
expectation. In the first case (Disclaim → Denial), the author uses negation to introduce the
alternative positive position into the dialogue and then reject it. This effect is unavoidable
when negating a statement because the negative invariably carries with it the positive (Martin
& White, 2005, p. 118). Consequently, when the authorial voice says Clinton never sent
classified information, an alternative voice is invoked (stating that Clinton sent classified
information) and shown to not hold, i.e. excluded from the scope of alternative voices. This
does not work reciprocally, i.e. the positive does not necessarily carry with it the negative.
The second way to disclaim alternatives is to introduce a proposition and present it
as replacing another proposition that was expected in its place (Disclaim → Counter). This
is grammatically delivered via conjunctions and connectives (even though, although,
however, yet, but), as well as comment adjuncts and adverbials (surprisingly, even, only,
still). The contrary position invoked by the authorial voice is shown to not hold and shut out
of the alternative propositions. Disclaim → Counter puts solidarity between the writer and
the reader at risk because the author takes the replacing proposition for granted and not up
for discussion. As a result, if the reader does not subscribe to the notion advanced by the
author, the solidarity between them is subject to damage. In this respect, Counter is similar
to Proclaim → Pronounce.
To sum up, dialogic contraction singles out one assertion as legitimate and
warrantable (Contract → Proclaim) or announces a range of propositions as invalid (Contract
→ Disclaim), thereby closing down the dialogic space for alternative voices or positions.
Figure 9 shows the fully expanded subcategories under Heteroglossia → Contract with
examples taken from my data.
46
HETERO
GLO
SSIA
→ C
ON
TRACT
E
DIS
CLA
IM
PR
OC
LA
IM
Denia
l not crim
inal, n
ever se
nt, d
idn’t
(Fox N
ew
s); never, n
ot ta
rgetin
g, n
o e
mails
(New
York
Magazin
e)
Concur
undoubte
dly
, cle
arly
, su
rely
, obvio
usly
(N
ew
York
Magazin
e)
Counte
r all b
ut, h
ow
ever, y
et
(Fox N
ew
s); yet, b
ut, still, a
ny
(New
York
Magazin
e)
Endorse
sh
ow
, reveal, co
nfirm
(F
ox N
ew
s); re
alize
, reveal, sh
ow
(N
ew
York
Magazin
e)
Pro
nounce
re
ally
(Fox N
ew
s); esp
ecia
lly, a
lso o
f note
, (N
ew
York
Magazin
e)
Fig
ure 9
. Hetero
glo
ssia →
Con
tract S
ub
categ
ories in
Fo
x New
s and
New
Yo
rk Mag
azin
e Em
ailg
ate N
ews A
rticles
47
5.2.3. Engagement → Heteroglossia → Borderline
There arose one standout linguistic feature across the data under my investigation that seems
to override the construction of the Appraisal framework system along the duality of
expansion and contraction: formatting conventions, used by the journalists in the data to
infuse voices into their propositions, often represent features of both Expand and Contract.
The salient formatting choices that potentially carry evaluative meanings in the two
text sets under my scrutiny include a) the punctuation marks parentheses, the em dash, the
colon, and b) quote marks.
I traced category a) punctuation marks for heteroglossic features and eventually
categorised them under Proclaim → Pronounce for the following reasons. Parentheses and
the em dash are used throughout Fox News and New York Magazine articles to introduce a
shift in voice toward commentary and separate that content from the rest of the proposition.
Regardless of how subjective the isolated content is, these markers introduce a pause to the
text, a separation that can be assumed to be authorial interventions. The author in these
instances foregrounds the information separated by punctuation marks and nominates it as
more important than the rest of the assertion or at least requiring special attention. In this
respect, the same applies to capitalized wordings followed by a colon: they might not infuse
commentary voice into the text, but they act as significance nominators of text parts. These
punctuation marks achieve an effect very similar to what has been discussed under Proclaim
→ Pronounce: they mark overt authorial intervention in which the writer makes their
subjective role stand out and takes responsibility for marking up assertions as more
significant than other propositions.
Category b) quote marks proved more difficult to categorise along Martin and
White’s description of heteroglossic subcategories (Martin & White, 2005, p. 92). As both
single and double quotes occur frequently in the texts under investigation, a reasonable
starting point to explore the functions fulfilled by quotes is to look into the difference between
these two types of quote marks.
Throughout my data, double quotes are used in body text, while single quotes are
used either inside double quotes to mark a quote inside a quote, or in article headlines. As for
headline punctuation practices, Malcolm Gibson of the University of Kansas points to the
48
following rule: “Headline punctuation is normal with two significant exceptions: Use periods
for abbreviations only, and use single quotes where you would use double quotes in a story”
(Gibson, n.d., para. 16). Further, according to Beth Hill of The Editor’s Blog, “single
quotation marks are used in newspaper headlines when quotation marks are required. (Space
is limited for newspapers; they cut punctuation wherever they can.)” (Hill, 2014, para. 17).
This explains the presence of both types of quote marks in my data and removes this
distinction from the scope of my discussion with regard to evaluative language.
However, a visually less pronounced difference within double quote marks requires
further investigation. Throughout my data, I encountered a small set of quote marks that are
put to use to mark something different from the verbatim account of some external voice.
These quote marks isolate very few words only and seem to encompass hints toward
criticism, irony, vague accusations, disbelief, or pronunciation with regard to the quoted
material. These effects are all the more identifiable against the backdrop of proper quotes in
these texts, which usually cover rather long strings of words or even multiple sentences.
Double quotes of this special usage have been labeled as scare quotes. As The News
Manual points out on the issue,
“Scare quotes are words or short phrases which are placed between quotation marks
when they really do not belong. Usually, the writer is trying to add stress to the
words or to suggest something other than their obvious meaning.
The simplest reason for scare quotes is to add emphasis; A more common use of the
scare quote is to suggest that the word or phrase should not be taken at face value.
It is often used to suggest disbelief or actual disagreement with the words as they
are being used” (Henshall & Ingram, 2008, para. 92).
A further comment comes from Mark Davidson, the author of Right, Wrong, and
Risky: A Dictionary of Today's American English Usage, who advises to “not use quotation
marks for a word or phrase that the speaker happened to use unless the word or phrase is
particularly dramatic or otherwise unusual” (Davidson, 2005, p. 446).
To sum up the above, when the author relies on scare quotes, they might do so to add
stress, suggest disbelief/disagreement, or add a dramatic tone to the dialogue. Based on my
49
data, a number of effects can come into play ranging from actually neutral quotes to the
advancing of factuality, the pronunciation of alignment, disalignment, or the distancing from
what has been externally sourced. An important consideration here is that scare quotes infuse
the text with ambiguity as to where the author stands with regard to the proposition. From
this standpoint, scare quotes have strong evaluative potential because they pass the
responsibility of registering alignment or disalignment entirely to the audience. The
proposition remains ambiguous and subjective in a way that the exact nature of authorial
stance remains unknown, thereby risking solidarity between writer and reader in case the
reader interprets the writing as a proposition that he or she does not subscribe to.
As such, scare quotes are problematic to assign to heteroglossic subcategories and
require the contextual background to pinpoint their assumed evaluative effect.
On the face of it, scare quotes can be categorised under Contract → Proclaim →
Endorse or Pronounce as they mark explicit authorial interventions in support of the
externally sourced material, making them similar in function to other punctuation marks.
However, in New York Magazine’s scare quoted reference to Clinton’s email controversy in
the sentence
Four months after we first learned about “emailgate,” on Tuesday night the State
Department finally released the first batch of Hillary Clinton's emails,
it is safe to assume that the authorial voice does not make an attempt at endorsing the label
emailgate or pronouncing it as highly warrantable. Rather, there seems to be a sense of
disalignment with (Expand → Attribute → Distance), or even disapproval of the use of the
term emailgate. It can also be seen as a means of questioning the existence of the scandal
(Contract → Disclaim → Denial).
Scare quotes are up for discussion in journalistic discourse in particular, where
register conventions foreshadow factual information sharing, and while scare quotes seem to
foreground facts on the surface, they in fact bring evaluative meanings into the assertion. Fox
News’s scare quoted reference in the below sentence exemplifies this.
50
In the [MSNBC] interview, Mitchell also asked Clinton how she feels that a
Quinnipiac poll found that the first words that came to mind among voters when
asked about her were “liar,” “untrustworthy” and “crooked…”
Here, the authorial voice can be surmised at the minimum to have used quote marks
to introduce external voices and reference them properly without explicitly stating his or her
own stance on the quoted material (Expand → Attribute → Acknowledge). However, a
second check of the Quinnipiac poll results – otherwise unreferenced by the Fox News article
– reveals the Fox News statement to be false. In fact, “untrustworthy” was the third word
and “crooked” the nineteenth to have come to voters’ mind when asked about Clinton
(Malloy et al., 2016). The writer of the quoted sentence used quote marks to infuse the
assertion with factuality on the face of it, whereas he or she in fact subjectively selected an
arbitrary group of words and claimed them to be the first in the list. Consequently, the quoted
material is in fact more a statement that the authorial voice aligns with and thus promotes it
(Contract → Proclaim → Pronounce) but without explicitly admitting it.
To sum up, most formatting choices made by the authors were assigned to the
Proclaim → Pronounce category, but a set of scare quotes were retained as having both
expansive and contractive potential and thus relocating the responsibility of interpretation to
the audience. These cases were assigned under Heteroglossia during a calculation of
frequencies of the Appraisal domains in the two text sets, but were left out of calculations
targeting Contract and Expand and their subcategories. Figure 10 shows borderline examples
taken from my data.
51
HETERO
GLO
SSIA
→ B
ORD
ERLIN
E
E
FO
RM
AT
TIN
G: P
UN
CT
UAT
ION
FO
RM
AT
TIN
G: S
CA
RE Q
UO
TES
Pro
cla
im →
Pro
nounce
…
"severa
l" of
Clin
ton's
em
ails
conta
ined cla
ssified in
tellig
ence
in
form
atio
n -- a
nd a
t least o
ne
of th
em
was m
ade p
ublic,
EXCLU
SIV
E: …
(F
ox N
ew
s); But h
er e
mail sca
ndal w
orse
ned
again
on
Tuesd
ay
(with
so
me
help
from
Republica
ns),
Officia
l: …
(New
York
Magazin
e)
Contra
ct →
Pro
cla
im →
Endorse
/Pro
nounce
O
R
Expand →
Attrib
ute
→ A
cknow
ledge/D
istance
so
-calle
d “hom
ebre
w” se
rver,
the “extre
mely
se
rious”
in
vestig
atio
n
(Fox N
ew
s); afte
r we first le
arn
ed a
bout “
em
ailg
ate
”, “
fit n sp
ark
ly”
conte
nt
(New
York
Magazin
e)
Fig
ure 1
0. H
eterog
lossia
→ B
ord
erline S
ub
categ
ories in
Fo
x New
s and
New
Yo
rk Ma
ga
zine E
mailg
ate N
ews A
rticles
52
5.3. Design of the Appraisal Framework: Graduation
Graduation, which is suggested by Martin and White to overarch Attitude and Engagement
rather than being a separate third domain (Martin & White, 2005, p. 136), required several
adjustments with regard to my data.
As stated in section 3.2.4. The Appraisal Framework: Graduation Overview,
instances of Focus, one of the two major fields of Graduation, did not occur in my data. While
Force, the second Graduation category, occurred frequently, I decided to recategorise the
domain according to what gradable linguistic features were salient in my data.
The reason behind this recategorisation is the nature of Graduation. Gradability is
intrinsic in language, and, as such, categories within it blend, and fuzzy boundaries occur
around what can be regarded as a graded utterance and what not. Taking the main distinctive
feature of Graduation into consideration (down-scaling/mitigating and up-
scaling/intensifying the force of a proposition), graded language can be traced in any
proposition and removed until we arrive at a decomposed assertion built from irreducible
meanings. This is the natural semantic metalanguage, a very small set of words such as
good/bad, yes/no, big/small, etc. (Goddard, 2008, p. 33). However, the goal of journalistic
discourse is not to present stories by way of these semantic primitives.
As a result, while acknowledging that strictly speaking words such as never and stated
are up-scaled meanings when compared to their semantic primitive counterparts not and said,
I decided to assess as graded those assertions only which show striking differences in graded
meanings when Fox News wordings and New York Magazine wordings are compared. For
example, word choice in the below two sentences clearly point at graded meanings that
contribute to the seriousness versus the triviality of the email controversy.
Clinton has been under fire through much of 2015 about her use of a private,
unsecured email server as secretary of state, specifically over the security of her
server, and her incomplete retention of her emails. (Fox News)
The questions surrounding Clinton’s private server haven’t taken up much oxygen in
the Democratic primary race save for inspiring a popular meme. (New York
Magazine)
53
Fox News presents an up-scaled substitute for criticism (under fire), imprecise
reckoning of time to elongate the presence of emailgate in time (through much of 2015), up-
scales security issues (private, unsecured email server) and goes on to isolate some content
as being significant (specifically).
The adjective order in private, unsecured email server requires further explanation
here. As Enrica Rosato (2013) points out in her thesis Adjective order in English: A semantic
account with cross-linguistic applications, relative descriptions of a noun concerning quality
are syntactically placed farther from the base noun than intrinsic features such as color,
origin, or material (Rosato, 2013, p. 26). The default word order in the Fox News utterance
would thus be unsecured private email server, a pattern that is followed in general by both
media outlets in their description of Clinton’s email server. Via the irregular adjective order
in private, unsecured email server, the concept of the insecurity of the server is up-scaled by
assessing the server as objectively, irrefutably unsecured.
As for the New York Magazine sentence, it down-scales the scandalous nature of the
controversy (haven’t taken up much oxygen) and trivialises it by down-scaling the scandal to
have inspired a popular (Internet) meme.
Applying this comparative approach of graded wordings on Fox News and New York
Magazine gave rise to three distinct Graduation tendencies in my data that contribute to
intensifying meanings and, as a result, overplay the gravity of the propositions, and to
softening meanings and thus underplaying the gravity of the news content. The three
subcategories are Reckoning, Scaling, and Isolation. While registering these instances in my
data, only those utterances were marked as graduated where the authors selected
configurations from the language that overtly alter meanings along grades. Figure 11 lists
these Graduation (G) categories.
54
From 5.3.1 to 5.3.3., I present the Graduation categories Reckoning, Scaling, and
Isolation.
5.3.1. Graduation → Reckoning
Reckoning deals with how accurately or precisely factual data are described across the text
sets under investigation. Along the cline of preciseness, two main subcategories arose.
Reckoning → Mass comes into play when the journalists describe volumes of emails,
documents, and the level of preciseness in doing so. Rather than marking up all reckonings
as graduated meanings, I focussed on those instances where amounts are made unnecessarily
precise (31,105 emails) or are clearly understated (a handful of emails) in a way that they
imply evaluative meanings that contribute to the aggravation or mitigation of a proposition.
The second subcategory within Reckoning was named Proximity. Proximity attends
to imprecise and precise descriptions of time and space. Again, I selected instances where
reckonings of this type, especially times and dates, are blurred or sharpened to the level that
they carry meanings beyond face value. Instances of proximity were registered when dates
were replaced by imprecise counterparts or were extended with further description to link
events in time that could boost an incriminating tone (Blumenthal gave diplomatic advice to
Hillary Clinton as early as 2009). The same applies to overly precise descriptions of time
where the hour and the minute are disclosed for an email exchange or an email release date.
These are apparently no constructive additions to the text but can be used to evaluate, for
example, the administrative burden imposed by the email server investigation (…the State
RECKONING
SCALING
ISOLATION
MASS | PROXIMITY
SCANDAL | REPETITION G
Figure 11. Graduation Categories in Fox News and New York Magazine Emailgate News Articles
55
Department worked into the night and finally released 3,000 pages of “fit n sparkly” new
content around 2 a.m.). Figure 12 shows the fully expanded subcategories under Graduation
→ Reckoning with examples taken from my data.
56
RECKO
NIN
G
G
MA
SS
som
e, se
vera
l, thousa
nds o
f (F
ox N
ew
s); m
any, a
handfu
l of e
mails
(New
York
Magazin
e)
PR
OXIM
ITY
rece
ntly
(Fox N
ew
s); a little
late
(New
York
Magazin
e)
pre
cisio
n
3,1
05 e
mails
(Fox N
ew
s); 31,8
30 e
mails
(New
York
Magazin
e)
pre
cisio
n
Septe
mber 1
1, 2
012, a
t 11 p
.m.
(New
York
Magazin
e)
Fig
ure 1
2. G
radu
atio
n →
Recko
nin
g S
ub
categ
ories in
Fo
x New
s an
d N
ew Y
ork M
aga
zine E
ma
ilga
te New
s Articles
57
5.3.2. Graduation → Scaling
Scaling was registered when the authorial voice scaled up or down their general descriptors
usually via adjectives or adverbs (e.g. highly unusual). When referring to the emailgate
controversy, the authors sometimes replaced these references with words that explicitly
aggravate (e.g. even more sensitive intelligence) or mitigate (e.g. email saga, stories) what
is at stake in the context of the scandal. Therefore, I opened up the subcategory Scaling →
Context, which attends to graded descriptions surrounding the email controversy proper.
Another type of scaling was identified when individual words expressed that an action
was done over and over or when two synonymous words stood next to each other to intensify
the gravity of the proposition (Scaling → Repetition). Figure 13 shows the fully expanded
subcategories under Graduation → Scaling with examples taken from my data.
58
SCALIN
G
G
hig
hly
unusu
al, g
row
ing q
uestio
ns
(Fox N
ew
s); a cle
are
r pictu
re
(New
York
Magazin
e)
Scandal
crimin
al in
vestig
atio
n, m
ajo
r issues
(Fox N
ew
s); em
ail sa
ga, sto
ries, a
distra
ction
(New
York
Magazin
e)
Repetitio
n
repeate
d
questio
ns,
repeate
dly
denie
d
(Fox N
ew
s)
Fig
ure 1
3. G
radu
atio
n →
Sca
ling S
ub
categ
ories in
Fo
x New
s an
d N
ew Y
ork M
ag
azin
e Em
ailg
ate N
ews A
rticles
59
5.3.3. Graduation → Isolation
Finally, a major theme that runs through my data is related to when the authorial voice singles
out some information and provides extra description about it (Isolation). This was recognised
as a frequently used technique to separate content (usually email contents or emailgate
developments) and nominate them as more significant than other information. When the
author makes prominent email content related to the Benghazi attacks, the wealth of Clinton
aides as against Clinton’s yoga schedule and her daughter’s wedding plans, the authorial
voice fronts content in a way that contributes to the seriousness or triviality of the email
controversy. Two sentences to describe this are taken from Fox News and New York
Magazine, respectively.
In another exchange, Billionaire George Soros, a major donor to liberal causes,
confided to a former Clinton aide that he made the wrong choice in supporting Barack
Obama in the 2008 primaries over Clinton. (Fox News)
When Clinton fractured her elbow, Senator Barbara Mikulski expressed sympathy for
her inability to do lady things. (New York Magazine)
From this standpoint, Isolation is related in functionality to formatting choices
discussed under Engagement. As opposed to text formatting choices, however, the authorial
voice here promotes or relegates content in a way that is interwoven in the narrative of the
news article. Because of this, the presence of the subjective author is not as overtly stated in
Graduation → Isolation as it is in Engagement → Contract → Proclaim → Pronounce. Yet,
singling out content can contribute to an overall impression of all the Clinton emails as
containing texts that can potentially implicate Clinton morally or legally versus comprising
private content irrelevant to the public. Figure 14 shows the fully expanded subcategories
under Graduation → Isolation with examples taken from my data.
60
ISO
LATIO
N
G
anoth
er re
aso
n, a
t least o
ne C
linto
n
em
ail
(Fox N
ew
s); yet a
noth
er E
mailg
ate
update
(N
ew
York
Magazin
e)
Fig
ure 1
4. G
radu
atio
n →
Isola
tion
Sub
categ
ories in
Fo
x New
s and
New
Yo
rk Mag
azin
e Em
ailg
ate N
ews A
rticles
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5.4. Design of the Appraisal Framework: Summary And Out-of-Scope Lexical Items
Figure 15 on the next page shows the full layout of the Appraisal framework adjusted to the
text sets written news articles on Hillary Clinton’s emailgate scandal published by Fox News
and New York Magazine.
Having opened up all subcategories under the Appraisal framework, one
consideration remains to be discussed before I turn to the research results. A small set of
lexical items were taken out of the scope of my research as not qualifying for evaluative
language. Table 13 presents this set.
OUT-OF-SCOPE LEXICAL ITEMS IN ARTICLES ON EMAILGATE
Nouns Verbs Adjectives
batch (of emails) release, receive, send (emails)
private, personal, work-related,
top-secret (emails)
Table 13. Out-of-Scope Lexical Items in Articles on Emailgate
These lexical items were deemed neutral and not carrying evaluation. These items
occur with high frequency not only across my data, but also in other media outlets discussing
emailgate that I relied on as secondary literature. As pervasive items in the narrative of
Clinton’s email controversy, I considered these words commonly used descriptors and
activity verbs used to report on emailgate news.
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FO
RM
AT
TIN
G
Inte
rperso
nal m
ode
Syste
mic
Functio
nal
Lin
guistic
s
(SFL)
APPRAIS
AL
FRAM
EW
ORK
AU
TH
OR
IAL
NO
N-A
UT
HO
RIA
L REA
CT
ION
CO
MPO
SIT
ION
VA
LU
AT
ION
AT
TR
IBU
TE
EN
TERTA
IN
MA
SS
PR
OXIM
ITY
CLIN
TO
N |
3R
D P
AR
TY
| M
ULT
IPLE
SO
UR
CES
SO
CIA
L E
ST
EEM
SO
CIA
L S
AN
CT
ION
V
ERA
CIT
Y |
PR
OPR
IET
Y
NO
RM
ALIT
Y |
CA
PA
CIT
Y |
TEN
AC
ITY
DIS
CLA
IM
PR
OC
LA
IM
DEN
Y |
CO
UN
TER
CO
NC
UR
| E
ND
OR
SE
| P
RO
NO
UN
CE
AC
KN
OW
LED
GE
| D
IST
AN
CE
E
A
G
PR
OBA
BIL
ITY
| E
VID
EN
TIA
LIT
Y|
OBLIG
AT
ION
Fig
ure 1
5. T
he F
ull L
ayo
ut o
f the A
pp
raisa
l Fra
mew
ork
SC
AN
DA
L
REPET
ITIO
N
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6. Results
In this chapter, I first present the frequencies of occurrences of the three Appraisal framework
domains Attitude, Engagement, and Graduation, and their categories across the Fox News
and New York Magazine data in sections 6.1. to 6.4. Sections 6.5 to 6.7. present and discuss
selected examples of all categories and their subcategories in detail. In 6.8., I present the
Appraisal framework analysis on 10 + 10 exemplary sentences from Fox News and New
York Magazine, paying special attention to sentence parts that carry implicit evaluations.
6.1. Frequencies of Attitude, Engagement, and Graduation
This section presents frequencies of the three Appraisal framework domains across the two
text sets written news articles on Hillary Clinton’s emailgate scandal published by Fox News
and New York Magazine.
6.1.1. Normed Rates of Occurrence
To arrive at comparable frequencies across the datasets, I calculated normalised occurrences.
This was necessary because the Fox News data consist of 6898 words, while the New York
Magazine one of 4390. Without normalised computation, the number of occurrences would
not reflect the discrepancy in data volume. For instance, meanings of Attitude were registered
66 times in the Fox News data and 68 times in the New York Magazine one. The two numbers
imply nearly equal use of attitudinal meanings in the two sets of texts. However, when the
difference in data volume is considered, i.e. normalised occurrences are calculated, the New
York Magazine data display a 62% more use of attitudinal meanings than the Fox News one.
Normed rates of occurrence are “the rate at which a feature occurs in a fixed amount
of text” (Biber & Conrad, 2009, p. 62). In my calculations, I chose 1000 words as the fixed
amount of text. Table 14 exemplifies this method.
NORMED RATES OF OCCURRENCE
occurrences of Attitude (Fox News) occurrences of Attitude (New York Magazine)
(66 ÷ 6898) × 1000 (68 ÷ 4390) × 1000
9.57 15.49
Table 14. The Calculation of Normed Rates of Occurrence
64
Table 14 shows that there are 9.57 words expressing attitudinal meanings per 1000
words in the Fox News data. In contrast, there are 15.49 words expressing attitudinal
meanings per 1000 words in the New York Magazine data.
6.1.2. Occurrences in Total
When the two datasets are viewed together, attitudinal meanings were the least employed
evaluative resources to present Hillary Clinton’s email scandal, and Engagement the most
frequently featured domain. When the two text sets are looked at separately, The New York
Magazine data are shown to use each of the three domains more than the Fox News texts.
Chart 1 presents these results.
In sum, Attitude categories are the least frequently used across my data (13%).
Engagement was registered the most (47%), with Graduation categories constituting 40% of
all evaluative meanings in Fox News and New York Magazine news articles. When looking
at the two text sets separately, New York Magazine makes more frequent use of all of the
three Appraisal framework domains than Fox News.
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
Fox News New York Magazine
Instances of Attitude, Engagement, and Graduation per dataset
Attitude Engagement Graduation
Chart 1. Instances of Attitude, Engagement, and Graduation per dataset
65
6.2. Frequencies of Attitude Categories
The Attitude categories were found to distribute differently in the two text sets. Chart 2 below
presents these results. New York Magazine features meanings of Affect over 7 times more
often than Fox News. The Fox News data rely most on Judgement values, while New York
Magazine texts use Appreciation the most often, twice as much as Fox News. This difference
in category distribution shows that the moral and legal implications of emailgate are much
more accentuated on Fox News than on New York Magazine. In turn, the latter lays emphasis
on the emotional aspect of the scandal and attends more to the things, objects, and
performances around Clinton rather than the moral issues surrounding the email controversy.
Chart 2 also shows the distribution of negative versus positive attitudinal meanings
in the two text sets. 90% of Judgement values, the most common Attitude category used by
Fox News authors, are negative on Fox News. 63% of all Appreciation values, the most
frequently used Attitude category by New York Magazine journalists, are positive in New
York Magazine articles. In sum, the Fox News data contain more negative evaluations in
each Attitude category than the New York Magazine data.
Fox News
New York Magazine
Frequencies of Attitude categories
Affect Judgement Appreciation
90% - | 10% +
70% - | 30% +
37% - | 63% +
32% - | 68% +
50% - | 50% +
70% - | 30% +
Chart 2. Frequencies of Attitude Categories
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6.3. Frequencies of Engagement Categories
As for Engagement, the dialogism of the data, the majority of sentences in both text sets are
heteroglossic and a smaller amount monoglossic. The Fox News data have twice as many
monoglossic sentences than New York Magazine ones, indicating that Fox News journalists
advanced their own interpretation of the email controversy as opposed to New York
Magazine journalists, who referenced more external sources.
Monoglossia was found to override heteroglossia once: one New York Magazine
sentence expressed explicit evaluation when presenting a Hillary Clinton quote as an
assertion which the presidential front-runner famously said. The full sentence goes, The
[Clinton-Mitchell] interview took place a day before the 20th anniversary of Hillary
Clinton's U.N. speech in Beijing, where she famously said, “It is time for us to say here in
Beijing, and the world to hear, that it is no longer acceptable to discuss women's rights as
separate from human rights.” The New York Magazine journalist inserts this information in
article #07 Clinton on Emails: ‘I Am Sorry That This Has Been Confusing to People’ in
relation to a Clinton interview with Andrea Mitchell targeting Clinton’s email usage. While
there is a four-minute-long discussion of Clinton’s U.N. speech in the interview (MSNBC,
2015) lasting from 23:00 to 26:50, the New York Magazine article details the speech on
women’s right in four paragraphs and two embedded videos, making up for 40% of the article
in terms of word count. Against this backdrop, the unusual emphasis placed by the journalist
on Clinton’s fight for women’s rights can be viewed as removing the focus from the main
topic of the interview, emailgate. Furthermore, introducing a detailed description of Clinton’s
humanitarian deeds as famous is a way to praise her work and express sympathy or even
admiration. As a result, while the quoted material points at the sentence being heteroglossic,
I categorised the assertion as monoglossic, in which the writer positively evaluates a quoted
material and thus positions the audience to take up similar standpoints.
Chart 3 presents the ratio of monoglossic versus heteroglossic assertions.
Heteroglossic utterances were further investigated to identify heteroglossic subcategories
across the text sets.
67
To further break down Heteroglossia, an overwhelming majority of heteroglossic
utterances feature Attribute where the authorial voice remains neutral or expresses distance
from the evoked external voice. Most attributions were carried by said, reported, and
claimed.
Entertain was registered the least, with New York Magazine relying on it over four
times more than Fox News, lending certain utterances a hypothetical, uncertain value via the
words perhaps, probably, raises the possibility, and likely.
Proclaim was used twice as much by New York Magazine than by Fox News.
Examples include obviously, really, surely, naturally, and also of note. The calculations
include the formatting choices previously discussed in section 4.2.3. Engagement →
Heteroglossia → Borderline. Scare quotes were not added to the calculations as they
potentially belong to more than one subcategory. In total, scare quotes were registered 13
times across the Fox News data and 5 times in the New York Magazine data.
Fox News
New York Magazine
Monoglossic vs. Heteroglossic utterances
Monoglossia Heteroglossia
Chart 3. Monoglossic vs. Heteroglossic Utterances
68
Disclaim shows the most balanced usage of engagement resources between the two
text sets. Disclaim is also the second most frequently used category, mainly because most
details around emailgate were still up for discussion at the time when the articles were
published, resulting in the authorial voices frequently refuting the claims coming from
external voices. Chart 4 shows the frequencies of Engagement categories.
Fox News
New York Magazine
Frequencies of Engagement categories
Disclaim Proclaim Entertain Attribute
Chart 4. Frequencies of Engagement Categories
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6.4. Frequencies of Graduation Categories
All Graduation categories are more prevalent in New York Magazine news articles than in
Fox News ones. The Reckoning category appears the most often in both sets of texts, while
Scaling and Isolation are both less frequently used. The two media outlets make near equal
use of Scaling and Isolation. Chart 5 presents these results.
6.5. Attitude: A Closer Look
Sections 6.5. to 6.7. present the way the categories of the Appraisal domains are used across
my data. To illustrate my points, I use examples from each text set. An extended list of
examples is in Appendix 3-11.
6.5.1. Attitude → Affect
Attitude → Affect was not only found to be used in the two text sets to a different extent, but
it is also used to create different feelings and dispositions toward Clinton and the email
controversy. The Fox News data made scarce use of Affect, with none of the affect values
being authorial-sourced. In most cases, they express desire as in what Clinton, a third party,
or a multiple sourced actor wants to do about the rising email controversy, e.g. Clinton has
Fox News
New York Magazine
Frequencies of Graduation categories
Reckoning Scaling Isolation
Chart 5. Frequencies of Graduation Categories
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said she wants the department to release the emails. In one instance, the authorial voice
describes how employees at Datto, Inc., a data security company, were surprised that
Clinton’s email server was backing up to two backup servers, and how they did not want to
run into a legal problem. Affect values were found most frequently in multiple sourced
assertions.
The New York Magazine dataset shows a different distribution of affect values across
their subcategories. The authorial voice steps up as the source of a given feeling more often
(understandable, surprised), and third parties as well as multiple sourced actors show a
greater occurrence than in the Fox News data.
Apart from the authorial voice introducing their own feelings into the assertions more
often, a marked difference is in the amount of Clinton-sourced feelings that New York
Magazine presents the reader with. One part of assigning emotions to Clinton appears where
the author singles out, dissects, and presents some of the released emails (Graduation →
Isolation). The journalists interpret the content of the emails in a way that Clinton’s feelings
are foregrounded. Examples include Clinton […] got worried that everyone was hanging out
with her, Clinton liked Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, Clinton said she loves swimming,
and Clinton receives a cheerful note from her BFF Senator Mikulski. In other cases, the
author ventures to guess and describe how Clinton might be feeling in the course of the email
scandal developments. Examples include Clinton […] was being a tad too optimistic,
Clinton’s remorse, Hillary Clinton will surely be relieved to learn, and the use of the informal
internet slang FOMO (fear of missing out) in Clinton's FOMO is more understandable when
you learn that… (FOMO, 2011).
In sum, the affect values presented on New York Magazine describe Clinton in a
human context as surrounded by friends and having feelings in everyday life, and they thus
make Clinton relatable as a human being. Some of the negative affect values also attain to
this goal, as in [Clinton] got stood up and confirming [Clinton’s] worst fears. As opposed to
this presentation, Fox News removes the emotional aspect of the email controversy and does
not aim to describe Clinton from this perspective. Appendix 3 shows more examples of
Affect.
71
6.5.2. Attitude → Judgement
Attitude → Judgement is the only category in any domain that is more frequently used by
Fox News than by New York Magazine. It is notable that only 10% of all judgement values
are positive evaluations in the Fox News data. These are usually assigned to third parties such
as the Republicans (e.g. Congressional Republicans seized on Clinton’s reversal and the
Republican National Committee quickly jumped on Clinton’s remarks, where seized on and
quickly jumped on are evaluations of Social Esteem → Capacity). The majority of negative
evaluations, making up for 90% of all instances of judgement, are descriptive of Clinton and
her use of a private email server. For instance, Social Esteem → Normality describes the out-
of-the-ordinary nature of Clinton’s email usage (e.g. Clinton controversially conducted
official State Department business and Clinton’s unusual usage of a private email account),
while some are targeted at people with strong ties to Clinton (e.g. the controversial confidant
Blumenthal).
As for Judgement subcategories in the Fox News texts, instances of Social Sanction
far outnumber those of Social Esteem, which indicates that Fox News journalists often form
opinions on moral and legal implications. In Social Sanction → Veracity, Clinton is evaluated
as hedging questions and stating that she couldn’t be taken at her word, assigning to her an
untruthful quality. Social Sanction → Propriety is the most frequently used subcategory
across the Fox News data. Evaluations here often target the email release process (e.g.
document dumps, which stands for “releasing bad news or documents on a Friday afternoon
in an attempt to avoid media scrutiny” (Friday News Dump, n.d.). In other cases, Clinton is
the subject of Social Propriety evaluations (e.g. [Clinton’s use of a private email account] to
avoid public scrutiny, Clinton repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, and Clinton had handled
classified materials inappropriately). Thirdly, Social Propriety describes Clinton’s email
usage in the passive mode (e.g. whether classified information was improperly shared,
mishandled).
An interesting pattern that runs through the Fox News data is the morphological
negation of positive judgement values to construe negative judgements. Words such as
improperly, inappropriately, and unusual, are constructions where “a lexical item is used to
deny the truth of an expression” (Hamawand, 2009, p. 1). In this way, these words create
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effects similar to Engagement → Disclaim in that they introduce an alternative, expected
course of events (proper, appropriate, usual), which are then proven to not hold.
Judgement values were less frequently used by New York Magazine. In that set of
texts, positive judgement values were registered 30% of the time, evaluating Clinton’s
campaign team which quickly challenged the story that a criminal investigation against
Clinton was under preparation (Social Esteem → Capacity), and Republicans who quickly
responded to the news that at least four Clinton emails contained classified information
(Social Esteem → Capacity).
The 70% negative judgement values evaluate people around Clinton (e.g.
controversial aide Sidney Blumenthal, Social Esteem → Normality), the representation of
the scandal in the media (e.g. In yet another Emailgate update that sounds shady but proves
nothing, Social Sanction → Veracity), and the release process of the emails (e.g. Textbook
Case of ‘Holiday News Dump’, Social Sanction → Propriety).
Judgement evaluations of Clinton include her Beijing speech (Clinton famously said,
positive evaluation, Social Esteem → Normality), and the Quinnipiac poll results that are
words coming from external voices (“liar” and “dishonest,” negative evaluation, Social
Sanction → Veracity).
In sum, Fox News texts rely on more Judgement than New York Magazine ones. Fox
News assigns negative evaluations of Veracity and Propriety to Clinton the most, while New
York Magazine evaluates negatively the representation of the scandal in the media more
often. Appendix 4 shows more examples of Judgement.
6.5.3. Attitude → Appreciation
Attitude → Appreciation is also used in a different manner by Fox News and New York
Magazine. In the Fox News data, 70% of all instances of Appreciation are negative. There
are zero occurrences of Reaction, the emotional response to things or performances.
Composition, the balance and complexity of things, is the most frequently occurring
Appreciation subcategory in the Fox News data. It mostly evaluates the contents of Clinton’s
email server via words such as detailed, sensitive, classified, and upgraded. Few adjectives
73
show Valuation, where the authorial voice assesses the value of a thing (insufficient evidence,
an awkward time for Clinton, and Clinton’s ill-fated 2008 campaign).
Appreciation is not only used more frequently by New York Magazine, but the
distribution of its subcategories is also highly different from that of Fox News. In the New
York Magazine data, 37% of all Appreciation values are negative. The data show the most
reliance on Reaction. While some of these are descriptive of Clinton (e.g. a flattering feature
on Clinton and her fun side), the majority evaluate the email content (e.g. [stories that say]
nice things about [Clinton], fun tidbits, bureaucratic boringness, boring administrative
emails, a cheerful note, “fit n sparkly” new content, thrilling update, and less than
remarkable update). Some of these seem positive evaluations at face value (fun, thrilling),
but when placed in the context of the details that they are used to describe (e.g. Clinton’s
daily errands, her yoga schedule, and her daughter’s wedding plans), they create the
impression of sarcastic descriptions of an overblown investigation that sheds light on
Clinton’s personal matters - uninteresting to the public. Composition values (e.g. secure
network, sensitive emails, technical, and opaque) occur the least in the New York Magazine
texts. Assessments of Valuation occur the second most often, and they mostly describe
Clinton’s performance (e.g. a rare interview, [Clinton’s] last big television appearance,
Clinton’s pointed criticism of China’s policy toward women, and Clinton rounded off her
summer in the best way possible: by giving back).
To sum up, Appreciation in Fox News is represented by Composition the most,
evaluating Clinton’s email server by questioning the confidentiality level of the email
contents. New York Magazine, on the other hand, relies the most on Reaction, with the
authors evaluating Clinton’s media presence positively and describing the email contents as
carrying minute, personal, uninteresting details on Clinton’s everyday life. Appendix 5 shows
more examples of Appreciation.
6.6. Engagement: A Closer Look
In section 6.3., I provided an overview of how mono- and heteroglossic utterances are
distributed across the Fox News and the New York Magazine data. In this section, I detail
occurrences of heteroglossic assertions in its four categories Attribute, Entertain, Proclaim,
and Disclaim.
74
6.6.1. Engagement → Attribute
The majority of heteroglossic utterances in both text sets take place when an utterance is
attributed to an external voice. While the majority of attributions occur by way of
acknowledging other positions (Attribute → Acknowledge), of more interest is distancing,
where the journalist introduces an external voice to the text and disaligns with its proposition.
In the Fox News data, 91% of Attribute → Distance was registered as Clinton-
sourced, i.e. the journalist reports on what she has said and expresses disalignment with the
proposition. Examples include [Clinton] went on to reiterate her claim that her use of email
was “fully above board and allowed by the State Department…”, She also claims that she
never sent or received emails marked classified, Clinton insists the information was not
classified at the time…, and Clinton has maintained that she turned over all relevant federal
records before deleting her emails off her sever… (Maintain, n.d.).
Attribute → Distance is infrequent in the New York Magazine data. The authorial
voice distances itself from a Clinton statement on one occasion (Clinton has insisted that she
never sent or received classified information over her private email account). Distance in the
direction of third parties is more common (e.g. General I. Charles McCullough III had
claimed that two emails sent from Clinton’s private account contained top-secret
information…).
In summation, the writers of both datasets rely heavily on attributing propositions
through Acknowledge, which is a neutral, or at least not explicitly side-taking means of
introducing alternative positions to the texts. When the writers introduce other voices and
express disalignment with them, Fox News journalists more often distance themselves from
what Clinton has said, while New York Magazine journalists do so from what a third party
has stated. Appendix 6 shows more examples of Attribute.
6.6.2. Engagement → Entertain
Instances of Entertain, when the authorial voice selects one voice or position and attaches
high probability to it, are four times less prevalent in the Fox News data than in the New
York Magazine one. Fox News often uses probability markers (perhaps, assumption) to
describe data security concerns around emailgate (e.g. Only [Clinton] and perhaps a small
75
circle of advisers know the content of the discarded communications, and the intelligence
agencies are operating on the assumption there are more copies of the Clinton emails out
there). Evidentiality markers (apparently, suggests), which stress that Clinton failed to turn
over all of her work-related emails to the authorities, are also frequent (e.g. State Dept.
receives Clinton email chain apparently not included in pages turned over, and at least one
email suggests she directed a subordinate to work around the rules).
New York Magazine uses over three times as many probability markers as Fox News.
In these instances, the writer surmises that some groupings of people are interested in
Clinton’s everyday matters and wish criminal evidence against Clinton to emerge from the
email chains. Examples include probably, presumably, and possibility in the following
sentences. Clinton is scheduled to testify in front of the House Select Committee on Benghazi
on October 22 — a date conservatives are probably looking forward to. Those hoping to find
a smoking gun will probably have to wait for next month's dispatch. …presumably the hunt
for Clinton's yoga schedules continues. This raises the possibility that someday the public
will be able to learn all about her yoga schedules and Chelsea's wedding-planning process.
A lower number of words show evidentiality (e.g. ostensibly personal emails), and
even less express obligation (e.g. Independent experts have suggested that actual charges
against Clinton are highly unlikely, as publicly available evidence has to indicate that she
broke any laws).
When using Entertainment, New York Magazine frequently addresses its presumed
audience directly and in a colloquial way (e.g. despite what you’re likely to hear in the coming
year, and Cliffhanger: You’ll have to read the next batch of emails to find out whether Hillary
and Huma ever figured out how to use the fax machine.). This, along with previously
exemplified acronyms and Internet slang words (BFF, FOMO), add a casual, non-formal tone
to the New York Magazine articles.
In sum, the use of Entertain in the two text sets is directed at different themes that
comprise Clinton’s email scandal. Fox News journalists take guesses at how Clinton’s
unsecured email communications exposed confidential information and thus put the United
States in jeopardy. They also emphasise with markers of evidentiality that Clinton deleted
half of her communications without turning them over to the Sate Department. New York
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Magazine writers, on the other hand, entertain other voices in the email controversy. They
bring in voices of people who aim to find incriminating evidence in the Clinton emails.
Entertaining these with probability markers is a way to mitigate the accusatory tone that the
writers use when describing these groups of people. Appendix 7 shows more examples of
Entertain.
6.6.3. Engagement → Proclaim
Proclaim, when the author presents one external voice as highly warrantable and dismisses
the rest, occurred 50% less in the Fox News data than in the New York Magazine texts. As
for the Proclaim subcategories, Proclaim → Concur, which expresses explicit standing with
that one external position, was registered zero times in the Fox News texts. Proclaim →
Endorse occurs frequently and describes what the Clinton emails showed or revealed about
the presidential candidate, her use of emails, and her personal matters. Proclaim →
Pronounce appeared once lexically in the Fox News texts, carried by really in the sentence
Republican critics have demanded to know if any of those emails were really work-related
emails that should have been turned over to the State Department…
Formatting conventions were also assigned to the Pronounce subcategory. In the Fox
News data, formatting choices are used to boost the credibility of a given utterance, as
exemplified by the dash in the following sentence. However, the inspectors general wrote in
a subsequent memo last week that “several” of Clinton’s emails contained classified
intelligence information -- and at least one of them was made public. Other formatting
choices that attain the same goal include words in all caps followed by a colon, as in
EXCLUSIVE: Hillary Clinton’s emails on her unsecured, homebrew server contained
intelligence from the U.S. government’s most secretive and highly classified programs, and
Official: Some Clinton emails ‘too damaging’ to release. These Fox News pronouncements
invariably reinforce the incriminating load of the journalists’ utterances.
In the New York Magazine texts, all of the three Proclaim subcategories occur with
a higher frequency than in the Fox News data. There, instances of Proclaim → Concur are
carried by undoubtedly, clearly, surely, and obviously. Some of these are directed at groups
of people who are presumably interested in finding incriminating evidence against Clinton
(e.g. While there are undoubtedly teams of people scouring the documents for information
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that will torpedo Clinton's 2016 bid, and many — especially those critical of Hillary Clinton's
use of a personal email account during her tenure at the State Department — are sure to
interpret the discovery of these emails as a sign that there may be more work-related emails
Clinton failed to make available to the public). Often, words of Concur reinforce the casual,
non-serious tone in the description of the email releases and contents (e.g. Clearly, being
secretary of State has its perks, such as directing underlings to track down that rad rug you
saw during your trip to China, and Hillary Clinton will surely be relieved to learn that the
FBI has recovered the 60,000 emails she carelessly deleted.). On one occasion, the authorial
voice shows giddiness to be a natural part of Republican conduct by saying Naturally,
Republicans were giddy about Clinton's concession.
Similarly to its use on Fox News, Proclaim → Endorse occurs most often around
emails that show or reveal details about Clinton, her work as secretary of state, and personal
matters.
While Proclaim → Pronounce was registered on one word in the Fox News data, it
occurred lexically nine times in New York Magazine, making the authorial presence more
emphasised throughout the New York Magazine articles. Examples include especially, the
helping verb did, and also of note. For example, the authorial voice of New York Magazine
made a statement about Clinton’s October Benghazi hearing, adding that it is a date
conservatives are probably looking forward to given the slow and steady stream of Clinton
email news from the past few months, especially since none of the news has done anything to
sink her campaign yet. Also, when news broke that Clinton’s email server was backing up to
two backup servers, and, as a result, retrieving her previously deleted email chains became a
possibility, a New York Magazine journalist wrote It’s also worth noting that this
information comes to us via a GOP [=Republican] senator a day after Clinton released an
ad attacking congressional Republicans. In this instance, the authorial voice openly refutes
a claim which came from the Republicans and stresses its lack of credibility via It’s also
worth noting that.
The use of formatting conventions to advance the author’s own stand with an issue,
also assigned to Proclaim → Pronounce, was registered almost five times more across New
York Magazine texts than in Fox News ones. Standout examples include the use of
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parentheses in But [Clinton’s] email scandal worsened again on Tuesday (with some help
from Republicans). Another example is the em dash in the last batch — which offered yet
another look at the less than exciting conversations inspired by bureaucracy — was
published Monday as well as in an FBI investigation into the server [was set off] — an
investigation that is not targeting Clinton. Nominating information as highly credible by
using the colon and adding Attitude → Appreciation also occurred frequently. Examples
include Report: Clinton Never Sent Classified Information From Her Private Email Account,
and Bonus content: She expresses sincere surprise that a State Department employee is using
his personal email account, where bonus expresses positive appreciation. These inserts of
commentary nature stress the insignificance of the Clinton email contents, the existence of
people hoping to see Clinton prosecuted, and that Clinton did not break the law by using a
personal email server. Appendix 8 shows more examples of Proclaim.
6.6.4. Engagement → Disclaim
Fox News and New York Magazine data show balance in the amount of Engagement →
Disclaim values that they present. Markers of disclaim, however, are targeted at different
voices in Fox News than in New York Magazine. Throughout the Fox News data, Disclaim
→ Denial and Counter are frequently used to illustrate what Clinton has claimed, thereby
signalling that an opposing statement was expected in place of what she has said. Examples
include Clinton has repeatedly denied sending or receiving any classified information on her
personal account and Clinton, the Democratic presidential frontrunner, has repeatedly
denied any wrongdoing related to her private server. These utterances express that some
might rightfully think that Clinton did send or receive classified information, and that Clinton
has committed wrongdoing. On other occasions, utterances where Clinton is said to not have
had top-secret information on her private email server are further infused with Attribute →
Distance in order for the journalist to advance his or her doubtful tone about the Clinton
statement, e.g. She also claims (Distance) that she never sent or received (Denial) emails
marked classified.
Disclaim → Denial and Counter are used differently in New York Magazine texts.
There is a marked acquitting tone in the following negated sentences. Some of the information
in Clinton's emails were classified after the fact, but it wouldn't have been a breach of
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protocol to email them at the time. The U.S. intelligence community no longer believes that
Clinton sent messages containing top-secret information. In these cases, the authorial voice
itself argues that Clinton did not break any laws or introduces external positions via Attribute
→ Acknowledge that state that Clinton did not have classified information on her private
email server. The authorial voice also relies on Attribute → Acknowledge to introduce a
proposition that Clinton has denied, e.g. Clinton and her campaign team have argued that
the emails didn't contain classified information when sent…
In sum, Disclaim instances occur frequently across both text sets, but they are used
in different configurations to advance different perspectives on Clinton’s email scandal. Fox
News journalists mostly infuse Clinton statements with denial and often add to these
presentations their own disalignment via Attribute → Distance. New York Magazine authors
negate propositions that would otherwise incriminate Clinton if they were written in the
positive, and introduce statements which Clinton has denied via Attribute → Acknowledge.
Appendix 9 shows more examples of Disclaim.
6.7. Graduation: A Closer Look
As stated in section 6.4., Graduation categories occurred more frequently in the New York
Magazine data than in the Fox News texts. In this section, I detail how Reckoning, Scaling,
and Isolation are used by the two media outlets in their presentation of Clinton’s email
controversy. Appendix 10 shows examples of Graduation on Fox News. Appendix 11 shows
examples of Graduation on New York Magazine.
6.7.1. Graduation → Reckoning
Precise and imprecise reckonings of the email data volume, dates, space, and other
quantifiable data are used differently by the two media outlets. Fox News journalists often
up-scale the volume of email chains by imprecise reckonings, e.g. potentially hundreds of
classified emails, and public release of thousands of Clinton emails. Other wordings that
signal impreciseness include some, more, partial, enough, and just a fraction. For instance,
in the clauses there are more copies of the Clinton emails out there, and even releasing a
partial email would provide enough clues to trace back to the original, the journalist implies
that a big number of Clinton emails contain classified information, and the release of even
small parts of them could allow the identification of “special access programs” intelligence,
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i.e. top-secret information. In the case of overly precise reckonings, e.g. The latest batch of
3,105 emails includes 275 documents upgraded to “classified”…, the precise presentation
of large numbers adds a shock value to the utterance to underscore claims that the Clinton
emails indeed have confidential information that could jeopardize the country’s security.
When reckonings are connected to time, the imprecise presentation of dates act to
elongate the email scandal, aggrandising its coverage in the media, as in Clinton has been
under fire through much of 2015 about her use of a private, unsecured email server…
As for Reckoning in the other set of texts, New York Magazine uses overly imprecise
reckonings when the journalist selects some exemplary email content and, via quantifying
these, he or she renders the examples representative of the entirety of the email chains. For
example, a release is described as containing mostly boring administrative emails — lots of
Clinton asking aides to print things for her… In another example, the author says Many of
Hillary Clinton's contributions to the email threads are limited to “Pls print” or “thx.” In
these utterances, mostly, lots of, and many highlight the representativeness of the examples
on the scale of all the emails.
Imprecise reckonings are also used to shift focus from an act to the quantities involved
in the act in, for instance, two consecutive sentences that discuss the fact that the State
Department found emails that Clinton had not turned over to the authorities. ...the Defense
Department just found a handful of emails that she didn’t turn over with the rest of her work-
related emails. The emails in question, fewer than ten of them, were sent between Clinton —
both before and shortly after she became secretary of State — and now-retired general David
Petraeus... Here, the imprecise reckonings a handful of emails and fewer than ten of them
play down the amount of emails not turned over, thereby acquitting the act of not turning
emails over by presenting them as only very few. A similar effect is advanced by the
imprecise reckoning of time shortly after she became secretary of State, a vaguely acquitting
assertion proposing that the act of not turning emails over is justifiable by how soon they
were sent or received after Clinton took position.
Time reckonings also stand out when they are unnecessarily precise, as in the
following sentence. The newest batch of Hillary Clinton emails arrived a little late (they were
supposed to be out December 31), but the State Department worked into the night and finally
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released 3,000 pages of "fit n sparkly" new content around 2 a.m. Here, it is implied that the
email controversy – apparently aimless as it is sparkled by documents of bureaucratic
boringness, according to other New York Magazine articles – has placed undue burden on
the State Department. The journalist describes that officials had to make every endeavour on
New Year’s Eve and the week after to release 3,000 email threads, a goal that was met around
2 a.m.
Overall, reckonings are used throughout the text sets to blow up or reduce the amount
of potentially incriminating emails, to move the focus of an utterance from the described act
to quantities, and to present emailgate as long-lasting and demanding. In general, Fox News
uses reckonings to advance the seriousness of emailgate and its ramifications, whereas New
York Magazine describes the disproportionate public attention paid to emailgate as compared
to the insignificance of the contents of the emails.
6.7.2. Graduation → Scaling
Scaling marks a more explicitly evaluative description of Clinton’s email usage and the
public’s response to emailgate. Carried usually by adjectives and adverbs, Fox News
journalists tend to scale up the email controversy by way of discussing the highly unusual
private server, deep concerns about the contents, the revelation adds to the growing
questions, and an exchange in September 2010 […] showed considerable confusion over
[Clinton’s] email practices. In these instances, the authorial voice aggravates the described
objects and things by up-scaling them via highly, deep, growing, and considerable. To refer
to the scandal proper, Fox News uses up-scaled utterances including major issues and major
document dumps.
The above examples stand out especially when compared to Scaling used in the New
York Magazine data. Examples here include actual charges against Clinton are highly
unlikely, [the emails] which many hope will provide a clearer picture of Clinton's tenure,
and conservatives are probably looking forward to [the Benghazi hearings] given the slow
and steady stream of Clinton email news from the past few months. In these examples, actual,
highly, clearer, and slow and steady carry scaled meanings. In the first sentence, scaled
meanings imply a reduced likelihood of legal consequences for Clinton. The second sentence
is sourced out to conservatives, a frequently dismissed group of people throughout the New
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York Magazine articles, as exemplified in 6.6.2. Engagement → Entertain and 6.6.3.
Engagement → Proclaim. Slow and steady scales down the effectiveness of emailgate, which
has done [nothing] to sink [Clinton’s] campaign yet.
In addition, to refer to the scandal proper, New York Magazine often relies on
wordings such as Clinton’s email saga, story, cliffhanger, inspiring a popular meme, and the
whole emailgate scandal was a distraction. The first four wordings are in play to reinforce
the scandal as belonging to the yellow press, taking away from the seriousness of the
controversy. The tabloid quality assigned to the scandal by New York Magazine writers is
reinforced by the sentence If you're hungry for more Clinton email news, get ready for next
Wednesday, when the new batch will be released to the public, where devouring emailgate
like a scandal story implicitly evaluates the controversy as overblown, exaggerated, and
sensationalised. The last example, the whole emailgate scandal was a distraction, discusses
the controversy in the past tense, implying that the talk about Clinton’s email usage
diminished and is no longer up for discussion. Because this sentence comes from 15 Fun
Tidbits From Hillary Clinton’s Emails, published 1 July 2015, this tense choice is
unmotivated in retrospect.
Repetition is a subcategory of Scaling which looks to up- or down-scale information
through the recycling of the same information. Repetition was found prevalent in Fox News
articles, especially with regard to statements about the job position and ranks of an external
actor. Presenting people’s official titles seems accusatory when used differently from the
norm (e.g. Clinton knowingly sent classified information during her tenure as America's top
diplomat on Fox News, where the usual reference to Clinton is secretary of state), or have an
undertone that justifies Clinton’s email usage (e.g. top White House staffers at the time,
including David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel, were aware that she was using a personal
email address on New York Magazine).
In one salient example, official titles are recycled in a Fox News article to up-scale
the seriousness of the assertion. The sentence is as follows. Clinton, the former first lady,
senator from New York and top diplomat now running for the Democratic presidential
nomination, announced Tuesday that she had told aides to turn over the actual server to the
Justice Department, giving in to months of demands that she relinquish the device she used
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to store her correspondence while secretary of state. Here, the unnecessarily long listing of
Clinton’s past and present positions is used in a vaguely accusatory way to imply how much
is at stake in the email controversy.
In sum, Scaling is used by Fox News journalists to aggravate Clinton’s email
controversy and overplay the severity of her use of a private email server. New York
Magazine takes a different approach in that it expresses the ineffectiveness of the questions
around Clinton’s email usage for a lack of incriminating evidence.
6.7.3. Graduation → Isolation
Isolation is the least frequently used Graduation subcategory in both text sets. In the case of
Isolation, the authorial voice, while detailing Clinton’s emails, nominates one email as
exemplary and describes that one at length. Based on the offered description, the seriousness
of the scandal is aggravated or mitigated. Examples in the Fox News dataset include at least
one and another in the following sentences. Fox News reported Friday that at least one
Clinton email contained information identified as "HCS-O," which is the code for
intelligence from human spying. Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Reince
Priebus seized upon the news of the upgraded emails as another reason the 2016 presidential
candidate couldn't be taken at her word.” Here, the Fox News author selects one email
attribute as especially important and expresses that these features may also apply to other
emails.
In a similar vein, New York Magazine in one example describes an emailgate content
as yet another update, implying that other updates carry the same quality. In In yet another
Emailgate update that sounds shady but proves nothing…, the writer up-scales the dubious
and ineffective character of the scandal. In another example, content is isolated via only:
They’re mostly boring administrative emails — lots of Clinton asking aides to print things
for her — but 66 were retroactively classified, and the only email marked “secret” features
Clinton saying, “Wow — not good.” The approach here is the opposite of how the Fox News
sentences use Isolation. The New York Magazine journalist selects the sole email that has
been marked classified during the review of the Clinton emails, and by way of a scare quote
and Clinton’s quoted words, the writer makes the statement that the email has been marked
up as secret unnecessarily and without good reason.
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To sum up, Fox News propagates select email details to imply that top-secret
information potentially passed through Clinton’s private email server. On the contrary, New
York Magazine isolates and presents content that discusses Clinton’s everyday office work
(e.g. printing, quick letters of response), and shows one classified email as apparently
containing top-secret information.
6.8. Implicit Meaning Making
In this section, I show analysis of evaluative meanings on the sentence level. For this
demonstration, I selected 10 Fox News and 10 New York Magazine sentences from the data
that make outstanding use of evaluative resources. I highlight in blue wordings that explicitly
express Attitude, in red those that render the utterance heteroglossic, and in green Graduation
categories. Those sentence parts are underlined where the interplay of evaluative resources
construe implicitly opinionated assertions, but a single word cannot be pinpointed as
explicitly carrying the evaluative meaning. These are implicitly evaluative propositions. In
my explanations, I focus on how the underlined sentence parts contribute to the opinionated
discussion of Clinton and her email controversy.
6.8.1. Implicit Meaning Making on Fox News
Emailgate articles on Fox News tend to use a vaguely accusatory tone where nation-wide
security risks are implied resulting from Clinton’s email usage. Fox News journalists tend to
stress the significance and seriousness of the investigations into Clinton’s email threads and
frequently point out that they possibly contain classified information, such as the
government’s closely held secrets. The journalists often describe this sensitive information
as potentially exposed to the prying eyes of foreign intelligence, as they hypothesise that
Clinton failed to encrypt her homebrew email server.
The writers also often emphasise that the email controversy has left its damaging
mark on Clinton’s past year, and, as more and more revelations come to light, Clinton’s
presidential bid may be at risk.
Another salient aspect in the Fox News articles concerns the journalists’ treatment of
authority. The writers often present Clinton as having the power to direct subordinates to
work around the rules. When external voices are introduced to a proposition, the journalists
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tend to make mentions of the voices’ ranks and titles to lend authenticity to the utterance.
Entities such as the FBI, lawmakers, and other officials are often described as A-team, senior,
and top. This is to underscore the authenticity and trustworthiness of their announcements
about the email chains.
Table 15 below shows 10 Fox News sentences marked up for explicitly and implicitly
evaluative language. The sentences are in chronological order of publication.
EVALUATIVE LANGUAGE ON FOX NEWS
Sentence Evaluative meanings
There is no evidence Clinton used encryption to shield the emails or her personal server from foreign intelligence services or other potentially prying eyes.
no, Disclaim → Denial
other, Isolation
potentially, Entertain → Probability
prying, Judgement → Propriety
The FBI is investigating whether classified information that passed through Clinton's so-called “homebrew” server during her time as secretary of state was mishandled.
whether, Attribute → Acknowledge
scare quotes
homebrew, Judgement → Veracity
mishandled, Judgement → Propriety
The source also told Fox News an FBI “A-team” is leading the “extremely serious” investigation into Clinton's server and the focus includes a provision of the law pertaining to “gathering, transmitting or losing defense information.”
also, Reckoning
told, Attribute → Acknowledge
scare quotes
scare quotes
extremely, Scaling
quote marks, Attribute → Acknowledge
The revelation adds to the growing questions related to the Democratic presidential front-runner's unusual usage of a private email account and server while in government.
growing, Scaling
unusual, Judgement → Normality
The source familiar with the investigation said that like all major tech companies on the front lines, Datto has faced cyberattacks, another subject of great interest to the FBI in its probe of Clinton’s server.
said, Attribute → Acknowledge
all, Reckoning
major, Appreciation → Composition
another, Isolation
great, Scaling
The U.S. intelligence community has reportedly stepped away from claims that two emails in Hillary Clinton’s private email server contained top secret information, according to POLITICO.
reportedly, Attribute → Acknowledge
two, Reckoning
according to, Attribute → Acknowledge
Clinton has been under fire through much of 2015 about her use of a private, unsecured email server as secretary of state, specifically over the security of her server, and her incomplete retention of her emails.
much, Reckoning
unsecured, Appreciation → Valuation
specifically, Isolation
incomplete, Appreciation →
Composition
EXCLUSIVE: Hillary Clinton’s emails on her unsecured, homebrew server contained intelligence from the U.S. government's most secretive and highly classified programs,
formatting, Proclaim → Pronounce
unsecured, Appreciation → Valuation
homebrew, Judgement → Veracity
most, Scaling
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according to an unclassified letter from a top inspector general to senior lawmakers.
secretive, Judgement → Veracity
highly, Scaling
classified, Valuation → Composition
according to, Attribute → Acknowledge
unclassified, Valuation → Composition
That indicates a level of classification beyond even “top secret,” the label previously given to two emails found on her server, and brings even more scrutiny to the presidential candidate’s handling of the government’s closely held secrets.
even, Disclaim → Counter
quote marks
two, Reckoning
even, Disclaim → Counter
more, Scaling
closely, Reckoning
Despite Clinton’s recent public statements about not knowing how the technology works, at least one email suggests she directed a subordinate to work around the rules.
despite, Disclaim → Counter
recent, Reckoning
not, Disclaim → Denial
at least one, Isolation
suggests, Entertain → Evidentiality
Table 15. Ten Fox News Sentences with Implicitly Evaluative Language
6.8.2. Implicit Meaning Making on New York Magazine
New York Magazine articles tend to highlight the media’s unnecessary and undue scrutiny
on emailgate. In doing so, the authors often discuss personal information found in the email
chains in detail, attending to how Clinton received sympathy emails after she fractured her
elbow and became unable to do lady things. This and the repeated mentions of Clinton’s yoga
schedules and her private thoughts on home furnishings are made prominent when the
journalists bring in external voices who say that emailgate was a distraction from the real
issues facing our country. To further this perspective, the journalists sometimes introduce
popular culture references, e.g. describing the email contents as moments that could have
been stolen from an episode of Veep, an HBO comedy series (HBO, n.d.).
New York Magazine lays focus on Hillary Clinton’s character, often presenting her
feelings, private thoughts, and everyday matters. Throughout the articles, she is also
construed as a fighter who attacks Republicans, gears up for fights, and goes on the offensive.
Against this backdrop, emailgate is presented as a sensationalised burden that has no real
substance yet annoyingly prevents Clinton from focussing on her campaign efforts.
Table 16 shows the 10 selected New York Magazine sentences marked up for
explicitly and implicitly evaluative language. The sentences are in chronological order of
their publication date.
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EVALUATIVE LANGUAGE ON NEW YORK MAGAZINE
Sentence Evaluative meanings
Some people said the whole emailgate scandal was a distraction from the real issues facing our country, but we think they'll change their tune once they read Clinton's nickname for Senator Dianne Feinstein, and more of her private thoughts on home furnishings.
some, Reckoning
said, Attribute → Acknowledge
whole, Scaling
but, Disclaim → Counter
think, Attribute → Acknowledge
will, Entertain → Probability
When Clinton fractured her elbow, Senator Barbara Mikulski expressed sympathy for her inability to do lady things.
expressed, Attribute → Acknowledge
sympathy, Attitude → Affect
inability, Judgement → Capacity
In yet another Emailgate update that sounds shady but proves nothing, a lawyer for Hillary Clinton's former aide Bryan Pagliano said Wednesday that his client intends to invoke his Fifth Amendment right in response to questions from the House committee investigating the 2012 Benghazi attack.
yet, Disclaim → Counter
another, Isolation
shady, Judgement → Veracity
but, Disclaim → Counter
nothing, Disclaim → Denial, Reckoning
said, Attribute → Acknowledge
The FBI is still investigating, and Clinton's personal emails may be protected by public-information laws, but this raises the possibility that someday the public will be able to learn all about her yoga schedules and Chelsea's wedding-planning process.
still, Disclaim → Counter
may, Entertain → Probability
but, Disclaim → Counter
possibility, Entertain → Probability
someday, Reckoning
will, Entertain → Probability
able, Judgement → Capacity
all, Reckoning
If Hillary Clinton hoped that saying sorry would make all of her email problems go away, she was being a tad too optimistic — especially since the Defense Department just found a handful of emails that she didn't turn over with the rest of her work-related emails.
if, Attribute → Acknowledge
hoped, Attitude → Affect
saying, Attribute → Acknowledge
sorry, Judgement → Propriety
would, Entertain → Probability
all, Reckoning
email problems, Scaling
tad too, Scaling
optimistic, Attitude → Affect
dash, Proclaim → Pronounce
especially, Proclaim → Pronounce
just, Reckoning
a handful, Reckoning
didn’t, Disclaim → Denial
the rest, Isolation
However, many — especially those critical of Hillary Clinton's use of a personal email account during her tenure at the State Department — are sure to interpret the discovery of these emails as a sign that there may be more work-related emails Clinton failed to make available to the public.
however, Disclaim → Counter
many, Reckoning
dash, Proclaim → Pronounce
especially, Proclaim → Pronounce
those, Reckoning
critical, Judgement → Normality
sure, Proclaim → Concur
interpret, Attribute → Acknowledge
these, Isolation
may, Entertain → Probability
failed, Judgement → Capacity
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Based on the last few releases, they will mostly entail bureaucratic boringness, sharing links to stories that say nice things about the secretary of State, and other moments that could have been stolen from an episode of Veep.
last few, Isolation
will, Entertain → Probability
mostly, Reckoning
bureaucratic boringness, Appreciation
→ Reaction
say, Attribute → Acknowledge
nice things, Appreciation → Reaction
other, Isolation
could, Entertain → Probability
From showing off her fun side on Saturday Night Live, to attacking Republicans over their Benghazi obsession, to gearing up for a potential primary fight against Joe Biden, everything Hillary Clinton has done in recent days suggests that she's ready to go on the offensive and move past the issues that plagued the first six months of her campaign.
fun side, Appreciation → Reaction
everything, → Reckoning
suggests, Entertain → Evidentiality
ready, Judgement → Capacity
first six, Reckoning
The questions surrounding Clinton’s private server haven’t taken up much oxygen in the Democratic primary race, save for inspiring a popular meme.
much, Reckoning
save for, Disclaim → Counter
popular, Appreciation → Reaction
Possibly because the details are technical and opaque, Democratic voters have, to this point, been entirely uninterested in another alleged Clinton scandal.
possibly, Entertain → Probability
technical, Appreciation → Composition
opaque, Appreciation → Composition
entirely, Scaling
uninterested, Attitude → Affect
another, Isolation
alleged, Appreciation → Valuation
Table 16. 10 New York Magazine Sentences with Implicitly Evaluative Language
Sections 6.8.1. and 6.8.2. detailed the approaches used by Fox News and New York
Magazine in their presentation of Clinton’s public image and the email scandal. Explicit and
implicit meaning making shows that Fox News approaches Clinton’s email usage in a
dismissive voice, while New York Magazine in a defensive voice. Between 22 May 2015
and 29 January 2016, these voices remained largely unchanged. This lack of change is
notable because this period saw Clinton’s email usage grow from a political scandal into a
morally and legally questioned controversy, resulting in probes and investigations. I address
this lack of change of voices in more detail in chapter 7. Discussion.
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7. Discussion
This thesis paper aimed to answer the following research question: Is there evaluative
language in Fox News and New York Magazine news articles discussing Hillary Clinton’s
email controversy? If so, how is evaluative language expressed and how does it build media
bias?
I found that Fox News uses negative evaluative language in its coverage of Clinton’s
email scandal. The authorial voice on Fox News overplays the importance of emailgate,
presenting it as a security risk to the United States, and expresses that this is the result of
Hillary Clinton’s unusual and improper use of a homebrew private server. This evaluation is
often expressed by wordings of negative Judgement, by way of bringing sources into the
narrative that make dismissive statements about Clinton’s email usage, showing disbelief of
Clinton’s own claims, up-scaling the amount of emails involved in the security breach, and
detailing email threads that contained potentially top-secret information.
I found that New York Magazine, on the other hand, uses negative evaluative
language to report on the dismissive opinions surrounding Clinton’s email scandal. The
authorial voice on New York Magazine underplays the relevance of the email controversy,
showing that it is a sensationalised and overblown matter in the media, and that it takes away
attention from the important issues that the United States face. New York Magazine uses
values of positive Affect and Appreciation to present Clinton as a relatable person dealing
with everyday matters and having everyday feelings, and details email correspondences that
underscore how her emails contain personal information irrelevant to the public. Moreover,
New York Magazine journalists often name the Republicans as a group of people who wish
to find incriminating evidence against Clinton in the email threads, and stress that emailgate
was a futile attempt to undermine Clinton’s presidential bid.
These types of evaluations lead to a biased representation of Clinton and her email
controversy both on Fox News and on New York Magazine. Fox News is biased against
Clinton as it overplays the importance and gravity of her email practices, often expressing
concerns over how Clinton put the nation at risk. The negative disposition of Fox News
journalists toward Clinton results also from the largely dismissive tone of their language.
New York Magazine is biased toward Clinton as it underplays emailgate, stressing that it is
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largely overblown in other media only to hinder her run for presidency. New York Magazine
journalists discuss Clinton’s email usage in a defending and permissive way and dismiss the
media’s exaggerated focus on it.
These two divergent ways of presenting emailgate are notable especially because the
controversy did not only create a public divide, but it has also grown to operate on more
levels than a political scandal. First and foremost, Clinton as a public figure has been from
the beginning deeply embedded in the controversy. Thus, voices of approval and disapproval
may be grounded in whether the given journalist has an endorsing or opposing attitude toward
Clinton, including the sum of her public image and her political persona (ideology). Second,
opinions on emailgate have also been positioned along morality: questions have been raised
about how ethical it is from a United States official to store sensitive information on a private
email server instead of a governmental one. A third layer to the scandal pertains to legal
concerns: once the FBI’s involvement in emailgate was revealed in July 2015, the filing of
criminal charges against Clinton became a possibility.
Despite the perspectives of morality and legality gaining relevance later in the
scandal, the narratives on Fox News and New York Magazine have remained largely
unaffected between 22 May 2015 (the publication date of the first article under investigation)
and 29 January 2016 (the publication date of the last article under investigation). Fox News
advances a dismissing voice and New York Magazine a defending or permissive voice when
discussing Clinton’s email practices. The two media outlets show little resilience in
reassessing their narratives of emailgate throughout the development of the scandal. As
Figure 16 shows, the voices around emailgate in the two media outlets are grounded in
Clinton’s political stand and public image. The arising legal concerns from May 2015 to
January 2016 did little to affect how the journalists described the email scandal later.
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The persistent use of the same narrative over time applies in particular to New York
Magazine. Following Clinton’s controversial remarks about wiping her server, the
intelligence community’s finding of several dozen emails containing intelligence beyond top-
secret, and the FBI’s launching of its own investigation into Clinton’s email usage, the last
article in the New York Magazine data still described emailgate as another alleged Clinton
scandal that Democratic voters have been entirely uninterested in.
To compare the two media outlets, I found New York Magazine to be more biased
than Fox News in its presentation of the email controversy. First, New York Magazine news
articles contain more evaluative language from a metric standpoint. New York Magazine
journalists tend to infuse their subjective viewpoints into their texts in a more salient way.
These viewpoints defend Clinton’s email usage, and, because of the growing moral and legal
implications around the issue, a gradually more defensive tone was necessary for the New
York Magazine narrative to remain unchanged.
Despite lesser amounts of evaluative language in its news articles, Fox News also
persistently uses one approach to interpret emailgate developments. For example, when the
intelligence community announced that two Clinton emails were found to not have contained
classified information after a flawed first review, Fox News reported Intelligence officials
DEFENSIVE VOICE
DISMISSIVE VOICE
personality (political ideology)
morality
legality
Figure 16. Voices and Issues at Stake in Clinton's Email Controversy
92
reportedly walk back Clinton ‘top secret’ email claims, implicitly suggesting that the emails
could in fact contain top-secret communication, and it might only be the latest assessment
that claims otherwise.
Another marked difference between the two media outlets is in their expression of
partisan bias. In the investigated data, Fox News seldom referred to Democrats or
Republicans. Instances where this happened include positive evaluations of the Republican
Party’s agile response to emailgate developments (Judgement → Capacity). While New York
Magazine sometimes evaluates the Republican Party similarly, it makes its political stand
very explicit throughout the news articles. New York Magazine refers to giddy Republicans
and blames them for aggrandising emailgate. The journalists also express their alignment
with the Democrats when they stress the Democrats’ lack of interest in the overblown scandal
made up of uninteresting details about Clinton’s yoga schedule that have surfaced. The media
outlet also tends to address its audience directly with the frequent use of you. The
combination of explicit partisan references and the directly addressed audience positions
New York Magazine readers and prompts them to take stands similar to those of the
journalists. When, for example, a New York Magazine journalist describes emailgate as a
shallow creation of the yellow press and goes on to say that If you're hungry for more Clinton
email news, get ready for next Wednesday…, the journalist positions his or her audience to
subscribe to the writer’s ideas and, ideally, dismiss the sensationalised scandal.
In sum, I found that Fox News exhibits negative bias toward Clinton. Also, New York
Magazine shows positive bias toward Clinton and makes its Democratic partisan bias
explicit, thereby positioning its readership to also stand with the Democrats in the email
controversy.
For future research, it is important to note that further refinements can be made to the
Appraisal framework analysis of emailgate news articles. Each Appraisal framework
category could be further broken down into finer subcategories in order to account
quantitatively for who or what exactly is targeted in each subcategory. Measuring who of
what political affiliation is evoked in heteroglossic utterances, and how those assertions are
presented by the authorial voice is one consideration. This could shed light on how frequently
Republican and Democratic voices are introduced to the texts and whether the journalists
93
align or disalign with these voices. As Tawnya Adkins-Covert (2007) points out, “one of the
most common methods for measuring bias emphasizes who is quoted/given voice in news
coverage of social and political issues” (Covert & Wasburn, 2007, p. 691). The question
arises as to what the ratio is among heteroglossic propositions uttered by Clinton, a
Democratic third party, or a Republican third party. To what extent do writers introduce these
voices with dismissal (Distance, Disclaim), permission, or endorsement (Acknowledge,
Endorse, Entertain)? To answer these questions, the dataset must be extended to include all
sentences of the 2x14 emailgate news articles rather than investigating the ones with
references to Clinton only. In addition, background checks of the political affiliations of these
people are also necessary to find out what their political stand is. In many cases, both Fox
News and New York Magazine report on what the Republican chairman has said in relation
to emailgate. However, the political affiliations of most of the other actors are not explicitly
stated in the articles.
Assessing the importance of background information also requires further
investigation. The Fox News data at one point remind the readers of Clinton’s partnership at
a law firm in the 1980s, and the journalist refers to her as one of “three amigos.” New York
Magazine, on the other hand, recalls how the Mitchell-Clinton interview took place a day
before the 20th anniversary of Hillary Clinton’s U.N. speech in Beijing and goes on to
elaborate on how she famously stepped up for women’s rights. These two instances introduce
background information directly irrelevant to emailgate. What other background information
of such nature is included in the two media outlets’ news articles? What purpose do they
serve, and how do they help the authorial voice shape Clinton’s image through evaluative
resources? This again requires world knowledge and the scrutiny of background information.
Lastly, scare quotes also require further analysis. A large-scale investigation of
journalistic corpora including scare quotes could help categorise this ambiguous formatting
choice in the Appraisal framework to see what effect(s) the authorial voice attempts to make,
and to what extent these equivocal scare quotes endanger solidarity between the writer and
the reader.
94
8. Conclusion
In sum, this thesis looked at how political journalists use language to advance their own
opinions in news stories, thereby creating bias.
I first introduced Hillary Clinton’s email controversy, then Martin and White’s (2005)
Appraisal framework, an analytical framework used to identify evaluative language. Second,
I introduced two media outlets, Fox News and New York Magazine, whose news articles on
emailgate I investigated. Next, I detailed the Appraisal framework adjusted for the data under
investigation. By analyzing news article texts in the framework, I found that Fox News uses
dismissive language in its description of Clinton’s email usage, showing its negative bias
toward Clinton. I also found that New York Magazine defends Clinton’s email usage in its
language and shows positive bias toward Clinton and negative bias toward Republicans.
These findings shed light on the responsibility of political journalists in presenting
news stories through evaluative language and, by those means, creating bias and shaping how
stories across the political landscape reach the public. As Leon V. Sigal (1973) remarks,
“news is not what happens but what someone says has happened or will happen” (Sigal, 1973,
p. 15). Through evaluative language, political journalists load into their news articles their
own evaluations of factual news information. This results in a slanted retelling of events.
This, in return, can help journalists win over large audiences to support their cases. Winning
or losing support of one’s audience is especially significant during political election periods,
when politicians are constantly tested in public. The fact that Hillary Clinton’s chances of
winning in the 2016 presidential elections of delegate counts have lessened in the spring of
2016 is a result of a number of factors. The presentation of her email controversy in the press
is one of these factors, especially because emailgate has continued to be highly publicised
and divisive throughout 2016 so far.
Another important finding of the research is the identification of linguistic resources
that are used to defend public figures and their deeds in front of a wide audience. This can be
relevant in the field of public reputation work. Using these linguistic resources can help
protect, for instance, a client who is caught up in controversies and negative publicity.
Because Clinton’s email controversy has political, moral and legal repercussions which,
throughout the Fox News and the New York Magazine articles, have been infused with
95
dismissing and defending tones, my research uncovers evaluative language that can be used
to protect and attack public figures from political, moral, and legal perspectives. In this way,
this thesis showed what types of evaluative language can be useful when a public figure faces
challenges in the press.
Furthermore, this thesis is interesting with respect to crisis communication work by
showing how language can be adjusted to aggravate or mitigate issues. Linguistic resources
of aggravation and mitigation can make or break scandals. The evaluative language identified
in this thesis also helps over- or underplay key actors’ and entities’ involvement and
responsibilities in these controversies.
Lastly, my research revealed that formatting conventions – previously outside the
scope of the Appraisal framework – carry evaluative potential beyond the word level. This
thesis showed instances where the use of quote marks, parentheses, and dashes can be used
to infuse written language with the writer’s opinions in a subtle and often ambiguous way.
xiii
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tunisian-official-by-wrong-name-emails-show.html
Virtual Reading Room Documents Search Results. (2015, May 22). Retrieved
February 1, 2016, from
https://foia.state.gov/Search/Results.aspx?collection=Clinton_Email_May_Release
Virtual Reading Room Documents Search Results. (2015, June 30). Retrieved
February 1, 2016, from
https://foia.state.gov/Search/Results.aspx?collection=Clinton_Email_June_Release
Virtual Reading Room Documents Search Results. (2015, December 31). Retrieved
February 1, 2016, from
https://foia.state.gov/Search/Results.aspx?collection=Clinton_Email_December_Release
Virtual Reading Room Documents Search Results. (2016, January 7). Retrieved
February 1, 2016, from
https://foia.state.gov/Search/Results.aspx?collection=Clinton_Email_January_7_Release
White, P. R. R. (2015). 1. Attitude/Affect 5. Retrieved January 26, 2016, from
http://www.grammatics.com/appraisal/appraisalguide/framed/stage1-attitude-affect-
04.htm#P57_12861
White, P. R. R. (2015). 2. Attitude/Judgement 1. Retrieved January 26, 2016, from
http://www.grammatics.com/appraisal/appraisalguide/framed/stage2-attitude-
judgement.htm#P6_797
Word Counter: The Word Count Calculator. (n.d.). Retrieved January 25, 2016, from
https://wordcounter.net/
xxiv
Appendices
Appendix 1. Part of the New York Magazine News Archive
xxv
Appendix 2. Part of the Fox News News Archive
xxvi
xxvii
Appendix 3. Attitude → Affect in Emailgate News Articles
ATTITUDE → AFFECT IN EMAILGATE NEWS ARTICLES
Type Fox News
+AFF, Clinton Clinton has said she wants the department to release the emails…
−AFF, multiple Though the source noted that this summer Platte River employees were “surprised” to learn that the Clinton data was being backed up in an offsite cloud, which wasa [sic] more extensive backup than Platte River officials had anticipated…
Type New York Magazine
+AFF, author Clinton's FOMO is more understandable when you learn that…
+AFF, Clinton
In the softball section of the interview, Clinton said she loves swimming, chocolate,
House of Cards, sleep, and ... email…
She's super excited about Raj Shah's “dynamite talk” packed with “stunning
statistics” and ends the whole exchange on a high note…
That summer Clinton receives a cheerful note from her BFF Senator Mikulski…
−AFF, Clinton
Clinton's FOMO is more understandable when you learn that…
Clinton used a Richard Nixon burn to mask her anxiety over her comparative lack of
Oval Office time…
+AFF, 3rd party When Clinton fractured her elbow, Senator Barbara Mikulski expressed sympathy
for her inability to do lady things…
−AFF, 3rd party Naturally, Republicans were giddy about Clinton's concession…
xxviii
Appendix 4. Attitude → Judgement in Emailgate News Articles
ATTITUDE → JUDGEMENT IN EMAILGATE NEWS ARTICLES
Type Fox News
−JUDG, normality
The revelation adds to the growing questions related to the Democratic presidential
front-runner's unusual usage of a private email account and server while in
government…
…Clinton’s private email server from which she controversially conducted official State Department business…
−JUDG, veracity …Clinton hedged [when asked if she was sorry for her decision to use personal email]… …the 2016 presidential candidate couldn’t be taken at her word…
−JUDG, propriety
...the FBI will further determine whether Clinton should have known [...] that emails passing through her server contained classified information regardless of the markings... ...Republicans accuse her of using a private account rather than the standard government address to avoid public scrutiny of her correspondence... ...Nick Merrill issued a statement early Friday denying that Clinton had handled classified materials inappropriately...
Type New York Magazine
+JUDG, normality The interview took place a day before the 20th anniversary of Hillary Clinton's U.N.
speech in Beijing, where she famously said…
+JUDG, capacity Clinton's campaign and several people in the federal government quickly challenged
that story
−JUDG, veracity In yet another Emailgate update that sounds shady but proves nothing…
−JUDG, propriety
State Department Releases Hillary’s Benghazi Emails in Textbook Case of ‘Holiday
News Dump’
…[at least four emails that] should have been sent through the federal government’s
secure network…
If Hillary Clinton hoped that saying sorry would make all of her email problems go
away…
xxix
Appendix 5. Attitude → Appreciation in Emailgate News Articles
ATTITUDE → APPRECIATION IN EMAILGATE NEWS ARTICLES
Type Fox News
+APP, composition Hillary Clinton's emails on her unsecured, homebrew server contained intelligence from the U.S. government's most secretive and highly classified programs…
-APP, valuation
The revelations come at an awkward time for Clinton…
Hillary Clinton's emails on her unsecured, homebrew server contained intelligence from the U.S. government's most secretive and highly classified programs…
Type New York Magazine
+APP, reaction Parade Magazine promised to do a flattering feature on Clinton…
-APP, reaction They're mostly boring administrative emails...
…[the releases] will mostly entail bureaucratic boringness…
-APP, composition Possibly because the details are technical and opaque, Democratic voters have, to
this point, been entirely uninterested in another alleged Clinton scandal.
+APP, valuation
MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell […] sat down with the Democratic presidential candidate for
a rare interview…
…since [Clinton’s] last big television appearance…
-APP, valuation
Possibly because the details are technical and opaque, Democratic voters have, to
this point, been entirely uninterested in another alleged Clinton scandal.
[Clinton] showing off her fun side on Saturday Night Live…
…there are still plenty of fascinating Clinton tidbits in Tuesday's release…
xxx
Appendix 6. Engagement → Attribute in Emailgate News Articles
ENGAGEMENT → ATTRIBUTE IN EMAILGATE NEWS ARTICLES
Type Fox News
ATTR, acknowledge
EXCLUSIVE: Hillary Clinton's emails on her unsecured, homebrew server contained
intelligence from the U.S. government's most secretive and highly classified
programs, according to an unclassified letter from a top inspector general to senior
lawmakers.
FBI reportedly recovers deleted emails from Clinton server
Gowdy had also demanded that Pagliano provide documents related to all servers or
computer systems controlled or owned by Clinton between 2009 and 2013.
A source familiar with the probe told Fox News that the watchdogs recommended a
criminal investigation into the handling of her email
The probe, which was first reported by The Washington Post, comes days after
watchdogs from the State Department and the intelligence community asked the
Justice Department to explore whether classified material was improperly shared or
stored on the former secretary of state's private e-mail account.
ATTR, distance
Clinton has maintained that she turned over all relevant federal records before
deleting her emails off her sever
The 2016 Democratic frontrunner went on to reiterate her claim that…
She also claims that she never sent or received emails marked classified…
But [the emails’] existence challenges Clinton's claim that she has handed over the
entirety of her work emails from the account…
Type New York Magazine
ATTR, acknowledge
Independent experts have suggested that actual charges against Clinton are highly
unlikely
Brian Fallon, the Clinton campaign's press secretary, called the State Department’s
decision to withhold the emails an "overclassification run amok," and then elaborated
on that comment in an official statement.
but 66 were retroactively classified, and the only email marked "secret" features
Clinton saying, "Wow — not good."
The U.S. intelligence community no longer believes that Clinton sent messages
containing top-secret information from her private email account during her time as
Secretary of State, Politico reports.
ATTR, distance
General I. Charles McCullough III had claimed that two emails sent from Clinton’s
private account contained top-secret information…
Platte River had directed Datto to keep Clinton's emails for 60 days, but Johnson
claims that in late 2014 and 2015 — around the time the State Department asked for
Clinton's work-related emails — one of her staffers asked the firm to have Datto save
only 30 days worth of emails.
xxxi
Appendix 7. Engagement → Entertain in Emailgate News Articles
ENGAGEMENT → ENTERTAIN IN EMAILGATE NEWS ARTICLES
Type Fox News
ENT, probability Only she and perhaps a small circle of advisers know the content of the discarded
communications…
ENT, evidentiality at least one email suggests she directed a subordinate to work around the rules…
Type New York Magazine
ENT, probability
The State Department released 296 emails from Hillary Clinton's private email
account today, perhaps hoping that the holiday weekend would wipe them from
everyone's memory as quickly as the emails were wiped from her server.
A Justice Department spokesman would not comment on whether the feds are looking
for another device, but presumably the hunt for Clinton's yoga schedules continues.
Clinton is scheduled to testify in front of the House Select Committee on Benghazi on
October 22 — a date conservatives are probably looking forward to…
The American people may finally be done hearing about Hillary Clinton’s “damn
emails.”
ENT, evidentiality
…investigators will have another way to obtain the tens of thousands of ostensibly
personal emails that Clinton's team deleted…
…everything Hillary Clinton has done in recent days suggests that she's ready to go
on the offensive and move past the issues that plagued the first six months of her
campaign
ENT, obligation Independent experts have suggested that actual charges against Clinton are highly
unlikely, as publicly available evidence has to indicate that she broke any laws.
xxxii
Appendix 8. Engagement → Proclaim in Emailgate News Articles
ENGAGEMENT → PROCLAIM IN EMAILGATE NEWS ARTICLES
Type Fox News
PROC, endorse
…amid recent polls showing potential slack in her public support.
Patrick Kennedy said a review of Clinton's email archive showed "hundreds of
potentially classified emails."
The developments, taken together, show Clinton finding herself once again at the
epicenter of a controversy over incomplete records.
Subsequent reports revealed that the account was run through a personal so-called
"homebrew" server based at her New York home.
The FBI has begun investigating the security of Hillary Clinton's private e-mail server,
an attorney for the Democratic presidential front-runner confirmed to Fox News
late Tuesday.
The FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email has now expanded to include
obtaining data from a second tech company, which is fully cooperating with the FBI
probe that has threatened Clinton’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination,
Fox News has learned.
PROC, pronounce
Republican critics have demanded to know if any of those emails were really work-
related emails that should have been turned over to the State Department along
with…
EXCLUSIVE: The intelligence community has deemed some of Hillary Clinton’s emails
“too damaging"
Type New York Magazine
PROC, concur
Naturally, Republicans were giddy about Clinton's concession
However, many — especially those critical of Hillary Clinton's use of a personal email
account during her tenure at the State Department — are sure to interpret the
discovery of these emails as a sign that there may be more work-related emails
Clinton failed to make available to the public.
Clearly, being secretary of State has its perks, such as directing underlings to track
down that rad rug you saw during your trip to China.
PROC, endorse
A new report from the intelligence inspector general shows that there may be a few
emails from Hillary Clinton's server that are even more classified than originally
believed.
Then she got stood up by the entire cabinet, confirming her worst fears…
But according to Politico, in August, Platte River employees realized that Clinton's
emails were syncing to Datto's cloud server as well…
On Tuesday, court documents revealed the State Department recently sent Clinton's
lawyer a request for any emails she may have failed to turn over…
PROC, pronounce
Also of note in this set of correspondence is that we finally see emails Clinton sent
during and after the Benghazi attacks.
It's also worth noting that this information comes to us via a GOP senator a day
after Clinton released an ad attacking congressional Republicans.
Bonus content: She expresses sincere surprise that…
xxxiii
Appendix 9. Engagement → Disclaim in Emailgate News Articles
ENGAGEMENT → DISCLAIM IN EMAILGATE NEWS ARTICLES
Type Fox News
DISCL, denial
Investigators have said that the probe is not criminal in nature and have denied that
Clinton is a target of their inquiries.
There is no evidence Clinton used encryption to shield the emails or her personal
server from foreign intelligence services or other potentially prying eyes.
She said she didn't "stop and think" which email system she should use.
The confusion comes from the fact that Datto was hired by Platte River and not the
Clinton team, so the company had no idea it was backing up data for Clinton until
August of this year…
She also claims that she never sent or received emails marked classified.
DISCL, counter
Because the information was not classified at the time the email was sent, no laws
were violated, but Friday's redaction shows that Clinton received sensitive
information on her unsecured personal server.
The monthly releases all but guarantee a slow drip of revelations from the emails
throughout Clinton's primary campaign
Clinton, the Democratic presidential frontrunner, has repeatedly denied any
wrongdoing related to her private server.
But their existence challenges Clinton's claim that she has handed over the entirety
of her work emails from the account.
Currently, some 1,340 emails designated “classified” have been found on Clinton’s
server, though the Democratic presidential candidate insists the information was not
classified at the time.
Despite Clinton’s recent public statements about not knowing how the technology
works, at least one email suggests…
That indicates a level of classification beyond even “top secret”…
Type New York Magazine
DISCL, denial
Some of the information in Clinton's emails were classified after the fact, but it
wouldn't have been a breach of protocol to email them at the time.
Report: Clinton Never Sent Classified Information From Her Private Email Account
The U.S. intelligence community no longer believes that Clinton sent messages
containing top-secret information…
Clinton has insisted that she never sent or received classified information over her
private email account — at least not information that was classified at the time.
DISCL, counter
Those hoping to find a smoking gun will probably have to wait for next month's
dispatch, but there are still plenty of fascinating Clinton tidbits in Tuesday's release.
Yet she was on good terms with her Bush administration counterpart, Condoleezza
Rice…
Hillary Is Done Playing Defense, But Emailgate Won’t Go Away
With Clinton's authorization, Datto Inc. has agreed to give the FBI any information it
has relating to her account…
The questions surrounding Clinton’s private server haven’t taken up much oxygen in
the Democratic primary race, save for inspiring a popular meme.
xxxiv
Appendix 10. Graduation in Emailgate News Articles: Fox News
GRADUATION IN EMAILGATE NEWS ARTICLES
Type Fox News
imprecise reckonings of size
↓
precise reckonings of size
Official: Some Clinton emails 'too damaging' to release
The emails released Friday are just a fraction of what the department has in its
custody…
…"several" of Clinton's emails contained classified intelligence information…
…there are more copies of the Clinton emails out there, and even releasing a partial
email would provide enough clues to trace back to the original…
McCullough had previously told Congress that potentially hundreds of classified
emails are among the cache that Clinton provided to the State Department.
The State Department is trying to finish its review and public release of thousands of
Clinton emails…
But their existence challenges Clinton's claim that she has handed over the entirety
of her work emails from the account.
State Department releases over 3,000 Clinton emails on New Year's Eve
…two of four retroactively classified emails found on Clinton's server were deemed
"Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information"…
Totaling 896 pages, the emails show a series of Libya dispatches
The latest batch of 3,105 emails includes 275 documents upgraded to "classified"…
reckonings of time
It is not known when exactly Mrs. Clinton “wiped” her server, nor who was directed
to do so.
…the server installed in Clinton's New York home just prior to her becoming secretary
of state was…
Clinton has been under fire through much of 2015 about her use of a private,
unsecured email server…
Blumenthal gave diplomatic advice to Hillary Clinton as early as 2009, emails show
scaling information
…the highly unusual private server she had installed…
But the next day, he sent Clinton an email with very different information…
…raised deep concerns about the contents of…
[Clinton said “sorry”] but didn’t offer an outright apology for her actions.
The revelation adds to the growing questions related to [Clinton's] unusual usage of…
…an exchange in September 2010 that showed considerable confusion over her email
practices.
scaling emailgate major issues; major document dumps
scaling through repetition
Clinton, the former first lady, senator from New York and top diplomat now
running for the Democratic presidential nomination, announced Tuesday…
The existence of the e-mail server has raised repeated questions about Clinton's
adherence to…
Inspector General: Clinton emails had intel from most secretive, classified programs
isolating information
…at least one Clinton email contained information identified as "HCS-O”
…the news of the upgraded emails as another reason the 2016 presidential candidate
couldn't be taken at her word.
xxxv
Appendix 11. Graduation in Emailgate News Articles: New York Magazine
GRADUATION IN EMAILGATE NEWS ARTICLES
Type New York Magazine
imprecise reckonings of size
↓
precise reckonings of size
They're mostly boring administrative emails — lots of Clinton asking aides to print
things for her…
Many of Hillary Clinton's contributions to the email threads are limited to “Pls print”
or “thx.”
…a handful of emails that she didn't turn over…
Based on the last few releases, they will mostly entail bureaucratic boringness…
The questions surrounding Clinton’s private server haven’t taken up much oxygen in
the Democratic primary race, save for inspiring a popular meme.
The emails in question, fewer than ten of them, were sent between Clinton…
The roughly 3,000 pages include every email Clinton sent during 2009…
…Hillary Clinton gave the State Department 30,490 emails deemed work-related and
deleted 31,830 personal emails.
reckonings of time
The newest batch of Hillary Clinton emails arrived a little late (they were supposed
to be out December 31), but the State Department worked into the night and finally
released 3,000 pages of "fit n sparkly" new content around 2 a.m.
In an email sent September 11, 2012, at 11 p.m., Clinton describes the attacks to
her daughter, Chelsea, who's using the alias "Diane Reynolds."
The interview took place a day before the 20th anniversary of Hillary Clinton's U.N.
speech in Beijing, where she famously said…
scaling information
…[the emails] which many hope will provide a clearer picture of Clinton's tenure…
…the slow and steady stream of Clinton email news from the past few months…
…actual charges against Clinton are highly unlikely…
scaling emailgate …development in Clinton’s email saga; Clinton addressed the story herself; the whole
emailgate scandal was a distraction; inspiring a popular meme; cliffhanger
isolating information
In yet another Emailgate update that sounds shady but proves nothing…
…the only email marked "secret" features Clinton saying, "Wow — not good."