The Role of the News Media in Fighting Corruption Practices: A Case Study of Spain

ABSTRACT

This article first outlines the conditions in which the media could contribute to creating and maintaining an atmosphere that discourages corruption practices. Second, based on the content analysis of 4361 online news articles, it demonstrates that these conditions are not present in the media coverage of corruption in Spain. The Spanish media do not promote a substantive frame, i.e., a meaningful discussion on the causes, consequences and remedies of corruption. There is a very low correspondence between how corruption is debated in the parliament, where substantive frames predominate, and how it is reported in the media. Furthermore, the media do not promote a pluralistic debate. The main players in corruption related articles are the judiciary and political actors, mainly executive elites and political parties involved in corruption scandals. Even though civil society actors, such as non-governmental organizations, are important for generating public pressure against corrupt practices, the results show that these groups go practically unnoticed in public debates. The findings also show that the dynamics that could help to curb corruption are neither present in the news articles of a news agency, nor in those published in newspapers with different political orientations.

KEYWORDS:

• News framing
• media coverage
• news scrapping
• content analysis
• journalism
• Press accountability
• Substantive framing

Acknowledgements

The authors greatly appreciate the valuable insights and suggestions provided by the editor and the anonymous reviewers of the article. Previous versions of this manuscript have been presented at the 12th Annual Conference of the Comparative Agendas Project, the XIV AECPA (Asociación Española de Ciencia Política) Conference, and the Research Seminars organized by the Department of Political Science at the University of Barcelona. We are very grateful for the reflective comments made by those who attended these events, and especially to Laura Chaqués-Bonafont, Fernando Jiménez and Manuel Villoria. Finally, we are thankful for the collaboration offered by graduate students (Albert Mallafré, Luís Felipe López and Ricardo da Costa) in coding the news data.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 There is no agreed definition of what the anti-corruption movement is in the literature, but generally, it is used to refer to a network of organizations including civil society actors, like Transparency International, and/or international organizations, like the World Bank, that work to combat corruption (e.g. Sampson 2005).

2 In the following years, the numbers improved with a ranking of 41st and a score of 58 in 2018, and ranking of 30th and a score of 62 in 2019.

3 This percentage decreased down to 34% in 2018 and to 25% in 2019.

4 Europa Press is a private news agency founded in 1957 that has gained a reputation of political independence and a recognition of capitalizing on the stories that Efe (a state-run agency) does not dare to cover because of its political ties (Barrera and Apezarena 2013)

5 In italics the translated version of Anticorrp’s keywords, adapted to the Spanish journalistic style. We used all the Anticorrp keywords with the exception of “kickback” since on its Spanish translation (Comisiones) led too many false positives.

6 The codebook can be provided upon request to the authors. The 26 variables were defined according to the research goals, mainly oriented towards identifying whether a substantive debate exists and to test the plurality of the debate, with a number of questions oriented towards collecting information regarding the characteristics of actors involved in corruption related stories. A number of questions oriented towards providing descriptive information were also included, including the type of article, the topic of the article, the type of corruption reported, the sector where corruption occurs and the status of the corruption case. These last questions, oriented towards collecting descriptive information, were based on questions used by the Anticorrp project.

7 The “tramabus” is a commercial bus promoted by the far left (Podemos) party showing large images of politicians condemned for corruption on its sides that drove around Spanish cities with the aim of giving visibility to corruption scandals.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the European Directorate-General for Migration and Home Affairs, project [HOME/2014/ISFP/AG/EFCE/7222] and by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades projects [CSO2016-78258-R and RTI2018-096950-A-I00].