There is a well-developed and multidisciplinary research subject in social science devoted to corruption. The literature has looked at its sources, functioning, and effects on growth and inequality, as well as democratic government. Although top-down and elite-driven policies remain dominant, researchers have highlighted the importance of social transformation, in addition to administrative and law-enforcement changes, in allowing individuals to figure into the "anti-corruption equation" during the last two decades.
While the huge literature emphasizes the significance of investigating anti-corruption, only a few studies have analyzed corruption as a socially constructed phenomena (Wickberg, 2021), that is, a problem of social construction of reality within a given social context (Berger & Luckmann 1966; Sampson 2010). According to Granovetter (2007), corruption always implies a violation of a moral code, which might be written or unwritten, even when no legal standard is violated. This expansion is part of a larger process known as the social construction of corruption (Granovetter 2007, Picci & Vannucci 2018), which is the primary topic of this study. The main argument is that corrupt activities are not ‘natural’ but do involve processes of collective definition and must be claimed and perceived as deviant from social norms to become or not a focal point in the public arena (Katzarova 2019). In other words, corruption is a socially constructed phenomenon perceived as such within a specific social context (Granovetter 2007).
The media are a key arena for tracing mechanisms and processes driving the social construction of corruption in the public realm. Citizens are increasingly immersed in a media ecosystem within which they acquire the elements needed for interpreting the world in which they live. There is wide-ranging research on the link between media and corruption (Berti et al. 2020), which has particularly explored the function of legacy media in counteracting the issue (Stapenhurst 2000). Several studies have examined whether and to what extent legacy media fail in their watchdog role (Mancini 2018). Scholars have found that the media sphere is subject to external influences that undermine its impartiality, leading in some cases to the instrumentalization of news in favor of certain interests (Mancini 2018), particularly in contexts where journalist professionalization is low (Hallin & Mancini 2004), such as Italy or Eastern European countries (Marchetti et al. 2017). More recently, a few studies have investigated the same relationship, focusing on the growth of social media and how corruption is socially produced in a "disrupted public sphere" (Bennett & Pfetsch 2018). Some researchers, for example, contend that their penetration is a successful tool for preventing corruption (Jha & Sarangi 2017; Tang et al. 2019). In the other direction, several researches have indicated that social media, like traditional media, may contribute to the instrumentalization and politicization of corruption (Marchetti et al. forthcoming).
This work intends to make a theoretical reflection on the function of the media in the social construction of corruption based on the bibliographical references given thus far (but not limited to these).
