Tracing corruption in media: a Longitudinal Analysis of Corruption Coverage in Italy

This study provides a long-term comparative analysis of journalistic representations of corruption in the Italian media from the early 1990s to the present. A period that has seen the succession of several major cases of corruption: we start with Tangentopoli scandal in the early nineties, in which an entire political system was invested by judicial investigations and then destroyed, passing through the various cases of corruption that involved Silvio Berlusconi, leader of the center-right coalition and former Prime Minister. The contribution uses a variety of research techniques ranging from content analysis of newspaper articles and social media posts about corruption and anti-corruption to case study analysis. Tangentopoli, the less recent case, was analyzed not only in the pages of major newspapers, but also in the narrative presented by the leading television shows in the early 1990s. In addition to this case study, almost 100,000 articles on the main Italian newspapers with different political orientations from 2006 to 2020 and 670,073 posts on corruption published on Facebook from 2018 to 2021 on pages and public groups were collected.