Media Framing of Corruption in Western Europe

This research paper seeks to understand how the press media has framed white-collar crime, especially (alleged) corruption-related cases, in France, Sweden and the UK, in the last five years. As suggested by Stuart Hall, an event must become a 'story' before it can become a communicative event. It is thus relevant to look at the news media narratives to understand how people interpret politics and make sense of the world by applying interpretive schemas to classify and analyse information. Framing is an important concept at the intersection of media studies and political psychology that goes beyond the notion of media bias; as Kitzinger (2007) suggests “all accounts involve a framing of reality”. Perceived levels of corruption in advanced liberal democracies are surprisingly high, when few people have had any actual experience of corruption, and is often accompanied by a decline in political trust. This lack of personal experience of corruption require ordinary citizens to infer both its occurrence and frequency, and to form their opinion based on the opinion of others who might have access to more information, such as the media. People are not pure processors of information; as underlined by Kahneman and Tversky (1974) people have a tendency to rely on heuristics and cognitive biases when constructing judgment and making decisions. Attribution theory for instance suggests that individuals constantly look for causes and effects for events and behaviours and use shortcuts such as the representativeness heuristic, evaluating the likelihood of an event occurring based on the degree to which they fit a certain category, thus using previous experience. Similarly analogical reasoning implies that people compare new situations to similar ones they have faced in the past (Houghton 2015). As Stoker, Hay and Barr (2015:3) suggest, when people think about politics, the information is processed “through a thin veil of values, prejudices and hunches”. When exploring the role of the media in people’s opinion formation, it is relevant to identify the way in which journalists frame alleged corruption cases and how they discuss the topic of corruption more generally, as it may very well affect the perception that people have of their leaders and of politics more generally, contributing to analogical reasoning and representativeness heuristics. To analyse the news framing of corruption in French, Swedish and British press media, I collected data from various news databases (LexisNexis, Europresse and Mediearkivet), selecting articles from the main “high-end” daily newspapers as well as “middle-market” daily, in which the term corruption (or related terms in the various languages) is present. I chose to use mixed methods for the framing analysis, combining a quantitative content analysis focussing on word frequency, word association and opinion mining, using R’s text mining and topic modelling packages, and a qualitative discourse analysis aiming at analysing the tone and meaning of the news narratives, using RQDA.