ANTICORRP five years later: what has changed in the journalistic coverage of corruption in Italy?

This paper comes in the footsteps of the project co-funded by the European Commission under the Seventh Framework Program: Anticorruption Policies Revisited (ANTICORRP), in particular of its “Work Package 6” which analysed the relationship between media and corruption. Through that research project it was demonstrated how, from January 2004 to December 2013, the Italian newspapers provided extensive attention to the issue of corruption. In particular, they have focused on various scandals linked to corruption crimes, involving leading figures in the Italian political and institutional arena, but underestimating some aspects such as petty corruption or anti-corruption policies (Mancini et al 2016). It has been demonstrated that in Italy, due to the historical peculiarities of Italian journalism (Hallin and Mancini 2004), the coverage of corruption was mostly instrumentalized (Mancini et al 2017). The political and economic interests that influence the work of the Italian newsrooms sometimes lead to cover cases to pursue political interests, that is to attack or defend a particular politician. After 5 years from the end of the ANTICORRP project many things have changed in Italy. First, a new anti-corruption law has been implemented, which has made a number of policy changes. Secondly, populist parties have achieved broad consensus in the last elections by winning government roles. In regards to this, some studies have shown strong correlations between the issue of corruption and the emergence of populist movements (Kubbe and Loli 2020), with the latter using the issue of corruption as a piece de resistance to distinguish themselves from the elites. Finally, the explosion of digital media has redesigned the canons of journalistic newsworthiness (Harcup and O’Neill 2017). Based on these considerations, the aim of this paper is to investigate how the coverage of corruption has changed in Italy since the end of ANTICORRP. The main research questions are: (i) has media attention to corruption increased or decreased in light of the political changes that have affected the Italian political system? (ii) Has the coverage of anti-corruption policies increased in light of legislative changes in this field? (iii) Have there been any changes to the newsworthiness of corruption? (iv) Has the level of instrumentalization changed over time, even in light of the rise of populist parties in government? (v) Has media coverage of corruption changed in the last year during the pandemic period? In order to answer our research questions, we will make a computerized content analysis of articles from a wide selection of Italian newspapers (Corriere della Sera; la Repubblica; Il Giornale; La Stampa; Libero; Il Fatto Quotidiano; Avvenire; Il Tempo; Il Resto del Carlino; ItaliaOggi both in their printed and digital edition) and a selection of online-only newspapers (huffingtonpost.it; fanpage.it; ilpost.it; open) between January 2015 and December 2020. The articles will be selected through keywords related to corruption and anti-corruption and analyzed with the QDA Miner software, a tool for the computer-assisted qualitative analysis of texts, and its quantitative component WordStat, a text mining tool capable of identifying the recurring themes within the text.