Social norms as reflected by the press media’s coverage of corruption

When covering corruption cases, the mainstream press media reflects particular social norms on politics and what society generally finds to be acceptable or reprehensible behaviour on the part of public elites. This research paper uses the media discourse on corruption as a proxy for the broader public discourse on the topic and seeks to understand how the press media has framed corruption in France, Sweden and the UK, in the last five years. By comparing how corruption is explained and narrated in the media, we can get a glimpse at how the issue itself and its importance appears to the public in these various polities. It is 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”. Despite international efforts to find a common definition of corruption and the evidence that that people in different cultural settings seem to have a similar notion of what corruption is and have a clear stance against it (Rothstein and Torsello, 2013), I would argue with Heidenheimer and Johnston (2002:3) that “in English and other languages the word corruption has a history of vastly different meanings and connotations.” The devil is in the details and it is the understanding of and reaction to the various forms of corruption that reflect a society or community’s norms and values. Deviance defines the acts that violate social norms, whether legally recognised or symbolic. “Deviant behaviour is behaviour that people so label” (Becker, 1963). Using media discourse as a proxy is justified by the fact that social norms and values have been found to be some of the most prominent factors that may influence how journalist frame a certain issue (Scheufele, 1999). As argued by Gamson (1994), cultural resonance is key to making the discourse on a particular issue salient; the most efficient frames are therefore often the most difficult to detect as they come across as common sense (Kitzinger, 2007). Comparing the media framing of corruption in different countries can thus reveal a lot about the prevailing norms in each particular context. 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 package, and a qualitative discourse analysis aiming at analysing the tone and meaning of the news narratives, using Atlas.ti.