The Politicisation of Media Coverage of Corruption Scandals: An Analysis of Four Italian Case Studies

The Italian political system has witnessed several important corruption scandals. In the last years, many politicians at different levels occupied the newspapers’ headlines because of their involvement in cases of corruption. However, the explanation for the Italian media’s interest in covering cases of political corruptions is not always related to a practice of watchdog journalism, but rather to the tendency of conducting “assassination campaigns” (Mancini 2018). This means that the coverage of corruption scandals often responds to the particularistic goals of media owners, their affiliates, and political actors and it serves as an instrument for attacking the reputation of potential competitors. This way, the media fail to act as anti-corruption tools, instead becoming agents of the so-called “politicization of anti-corruption”. Sberna and Vannucci (2012) define politicization as an increase in the polarization of opinions, interests, or values about corruption-related judicial investigations and the extent to which this polarization is strategically used in the political debate by parties, political leaders and the media. The aim of this paper is to study the politicisation of Italian corruption events in the media through a case study analysis. In particular, it will shed light on (a) the specific socio-political and historical conditions that foster the instrumental use of media coverage and (b) the possible existence of different kinds of politicization of corruption scandals depending on which actors have a standing in the news (or who are simply staged in the news) and the different types of representations they support/propose. Indeed, Italy represents an emblematic case to analyse the politicisation in media coverage: among the Western countries, Italy has long shown one of the highest levels of perceived corruption (Transparency International);moreover, Italy is characterized by a politically oriented press and high political parallelism (Hallin and Mancini, 2004), that may constitute a breeding ground for the politicisation of both local and national corruption scandals. Our methodology is based on a qualitative analysis of selected case studies. The cases to be analysed are “The Cusani Trial” (the most important trial in Tangentopoli scandal, occurred in 1993); “Batman Fiorito” (concerning a case of embezzlement in the Regional Council of Lazio occurred in 2012); “The black lady” (concerning a case of bribery in the infrastructure sector occurred in 2015); “Mafia capitale” (concerning a criminal system operating in the city of Rome emerged in 2012). These cases have been selected on the basis of three criteria: they a) were widely covered by the media; b) involve different institutional levels (national and/or local) and different political factions; c) have occurred in different periods. Using qualitative in-depth focuses, this contribution will analyse which actors were involved in the discussion and which frames emerge from the media narration, in order to highlight the politicization of corruption as represented in the news coverage. In this regard, we consider the politicisation of corruption as the result of the competition of different actors in the public arena attempting to impose the most favourable frame in the media coverage.