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Media and Corruption: We Need to Talk about Television
Tania Gosselin (Université du Québec à Montréal)
Marina Nistotskaya (University of Gothenburg)
Victor Lapuente (University of Gothenburg)
Paper prepared for presentation at the Annual Conference of the European Consortium
for Political Research in Montreal, Quebec, August 26-29, 2015. Preliminary draft;
please do not quote without authors’ permission.
2
Introduction
A free, independent and diverse media scene has long been regarded as key ingredient of
democracy and good governance. Greater media presence allows for the diffusion of
information, which enables citizens to hold office holders accountable; in turn, politicians, aware
of media scrutiny, are less likely to engage in corrupt behavior (eg. Adsera et al. 2003; Pellegrini
and Gerlagh 2008). Media freedom, also shows a robust relationship with corruption even when
other determinants are taken into account (Brunetti and Weder 2003; Chowdhury 2004).
However, readership figures do not tell us which kind of information circulates, and freedom
indices typically reveal little about the nature of pressures the media are subjected to. As Lindst
and Naurin (2010) note, media systems are connected to politics and economics in ways that
challenge simple models. The “power of information” is, among other factors, shaped by the
sanctioning capacity of citizens. For example, recent studies find that the impact of press
freedom on corruption is conditioned by regime/level of democracy (Kalenborn and Lessmann
2013; Bhattacharyya and Hodler 2015). Yet, the findings with respect to which political
institutions allow citizens to sanction corrupt behavior are contradictory (see review in Chang et
al 2010.) Corruption studies are just beginning to investigate the interplay between media and
institutions such as electoral systems or presidentialism vs parliamentarism (Camaj 2013).
Comparative investigations of linkages between media characteristics - other than
presence and freedom - and corruption are still largely missing1, though some findings point to
the importance of the relationship between government/political parties and the media.
Attempting to disentangle the effects of various forms of media control, Freille et al. (2007) find
that the political dimension of Freedom House’s Media Freedom Index (rather than its legal
control dimension) is what limits media capacity to act as a check on corruption. Public/party
media ownership has been associated with lesser government performance (Djankov et al. 2003;
Besley and Prat 2006; Besley and Burgess 2002). However, the data exploited in these studies
hardly reflect the variations in characteristics of public broadcasters such as Rai Uno in Italy and
1 The gap is nowhere more glaring than in wealthy democracies, where access to free media and citizens’
sanctioning capacity is typically high. The majority of previous comparative studies involved a larger number of
countries; however, OECD countries almost all range in the highest quintile when it comes to measures of media
access or freedom.
3
the BBC in the UK, for example. A more complete picture of the media is needed to further our
understanding of the link between information and corruption.
We follow Freille et al. (2007) in trying to identify the characteristics of media that bear
most on corruption. We use recent data on media systems in 33 European countries. The expert
survey allows to gauge the extent to which outlets are influenced by politics, as well as the
quality of content measured by argument diversity and information accuracy. Our results show
that greater influence of politics and lower information quality of television news content – not
newspapers - is associated with higher levels of corruption; the link is particularly strong in the
case of public television.
The media, politics and information quality
The importance of the ‘political factor’ resonates with the large literature on the impact of
partisanship on voter evaluation of politicians’ performance (measured by the state of the
economy or corruption, see for example Eggers 2014 for a brief review) as well as with the work
of scholars of media systems. The latter focus on links between politics and media in the form of
political parallelism, ownership and regulation as well as journalists’ professionalism (eg. Hallin
and Mancini 2004; Norris 2000; Blumler, McLeod and Rosengren, 1992). However, comparative
research is constrained by the shortage of standardized measures of the influence of politics on
media. As a result, the bulk of comparative research is qualitative and focused on a limited
number of cases. Quantitative works, often concerned with democratic output such as citizens’
information level, largely uses ownership categories such as public, mixed or private media
systems, differentiated by the importance of public broadcasting services.2
Public service broadcasters (PSB) have been found to contribute to information levels
because of the higher quality public affairs programming (Holtz-Bacha and Norris 2001; Aarts
and Semetko 2003; Toka and Popescu 2009). Shehata et al. (2015) find that in Sweden,
inadvertent learning from exposure to public television was particularly relevant for the least
interested viewers. Curran et al. (2009) find that PSB systems offer more hard and international
news, fostering public knowledge, thus contributing to greater news consumption and narrowing
the knowledge gap between the more and less-educated citizens than market driven or mixed
2 Quantitative studies also feature market size but they are largely focused on the US due to detailed data available at
the local market level in that country.
4
media systems. Yet not all public broadcasters offer the same type of content, nor promote
knowledge about politics equally well; it depends on how well PSBs are insulated from
government interference and market forces (Soroka et al. 2013; Hanretty 2010). Looking at the
diversity of sources of stories aired by televisions channels in 11 countries, Tiffen et al. (2014)
do not find meaningful differences in all contexts. Jenssen (2009) finds that exposure to public or
private television makes no difference for political knowledge in Norway.
Private ownership on the other hand is often associated with ‘commercialism’,
sensationalism, and ‘horse race coverage’ of electoral campaigns (Aalberg et al. 2011). Such
characteristics are generally not deemed as conducive to the type of news that citizens need)3.
But again, this expectation is not borne out in a systematic manner. Operationalizing horse race
coverage by the number of references to polls is EU elections coverage in 27 countries, Banducci
and Hanretty (2014) find that such references are more frequent in broadsheets (typically ‘quality
newspapers’) than on commercial television. They also find greater reliance on polls in less
competitive markets and where journalists are more professionalized.4
A number of authors argue that newspapers are more important than television and radio
when it comes to effects on citizens’ information (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996; Newton 1999;
Price and Zaller 1993), based on the idea that broadsheets offer more or higher quality content.
However, it has been argued that television can more easily attract attention and facilitate
information retention (Graber 2001, Neuman, Just and Crigler 1992, Kwak 1999). At the system
level, Shehata and Stromberg (2011) find that media environments dominated by newspapers are
associated with a greater impact of class on the news consumption gap between those are
interesting in politics and those who are not. Overall, while many micro- and macro-level studies
associate a specific media format(s) with content and effects, there is a need for further
investigation.
Experimental studies (including those exploiting ‘natural’ or quasi-experimental
conditions) shed light on the media-corruption relationship from another angle. Politicians
exposed as corrupt in the media may lose some votes, but are not necessarily thrown out of
3 Horse race type of coverage is based on considerations about the strategy of parties and candidates as well as
opinion polls, as opposed to more substantial coverage of candidates’ views and issue positions. Elenbaas and de
Vreese (2008) finds that it fosters political cynicism in young voters. 4 Another factor that matters in their study is party systems’ polarization (greater polarization is associated with
greater use of polls in the media). ‘Politics as a game’ may well be a characteristics of coverage which attracts
partisan readers (see Iyengar et al. 2004).
5
office. Chang et al.’s (2010) study of Italy after the Second World War demonstrate that media
coverage about corrupt behavior did not lead to the electoral demise of politicians until the Mani
pulite (Clean Hands) investigation received unparalleled media attention in the mid-1990s. Yet
Ferraz and Finan (2008) find that Brasilian mayors’ reelection rates did decrease in the wake of
media exposure, especially where corruption was more severe. In both cases, the effects were
more pronounced where there were press circulation was higher/radio outlets more present.
Studies that directly manipulate media content also show mixed results. Reinnika and
Svensson (2004, 2005) finds that an information campaign in national and local newspapers in
Uganda contributed to curb graft by local officials; the publication of data pertaining to central
grants resulted in schools located closer to a newspaper outlet receiving a greater share of the
grant, and seeing student enrollment and test scores increase. In contrast, Humphreys and
Weinstein (2012) find that Uganda politicians did not respond to country-wide dissemination of
information about their performance; transparency did not impact their chances of reelection in
the subsequent election either. Banerjee et al. (2010) found the same lack of impact for a pre-
election campaign urging villagers in India not to vote for corrupt candidates. Chong et al.
(2015) found only a small negative effect for information dissemination about corrupt mayors in
Mexico; interestingly, when high levels of corruption were reported, challengers’ electoral scores
were even more adversely affected than incumbents’; turnout also took a significant hit.
These results suggests that media effects on corruption are sensitive to a number of
factors, one of them partisanship. In their analysis of the Italian case, Chang and his colleagues
(2010) propose that a threshold in media coverage has to be reached to insure that corruption is
electorally salient5; they also speculate that the information must be credible, which might not be
the case if it is disseminated by partisan media. Individual experimental and survey data also
indicate that partisan attitudes influence how media information is received. Anduiza et al.
(2013) find that partisanship colors citizens’ judgement, making them more tolerant of corrupt
acts committed by members of their preferred parties. Larcinese and Sircar (2014) find the same
moderating role of partisanship in the UK in the wake of the coverage received by a scandal
about MPs’ expenses. In their operationalization of corruption scandals in Spain, Fernandez-
Vazquez et al. (2014) do not consider accusations made by partisan actors, including “partisan-
leaning newspapers[s].”
6
Few macro-level comparative studies of corruption have focused on media ownership.
Observing that state ownership often leads to bias coverage in favor of the government, Djankov
et al. (2003) investigate the link between governance and state/public media ownership in a cross
section of nearly 100 countries. They find that state ownership, especially for newspapers,
translate into more corruption. According to Gentzkow, Glaeser, and Goldin (2004), the
development of a nonpartisan press, allowed by increasing sales and competition, ensured that
newspapers published more and less biased reports about corruption scandals in the United
States in the 20th century.
These suggest that partisan news is bad news when it comes to holding politicians
accountable, in part or mostly because it provides less, or incomplete, or inaccurate information
to citizens. But again this may apply differently based on media systems’ characteristics. In the
highly partisan Spanish media system, Baumgartner and Chaqués-Bonanfont (2015) find that
two newspapers with partisan audience devote significantly greater space to cover corruption
scandals and other faults of the rival party, in an otherwise similar agenda. As noted by Dunaway
et al. (2015, 17), ‘media bias’ has come to designate anything between the “willful distortion of
fact to hard and critical yet ‘earnest’ coverage”. Yet the two are conceptually quite different.
This means that, whenever possible, we should treat political influence and other aspects of
information quality as distinct factors. For example, Dunaway and her colleagues find that
slanted stories offer more information about issues in campaigns news in US local, mainstream
newspapers. That is not to say that political influence and information quality cannot be
connected. As the results below will show, in the real world, they are often related.
Data and hypotheses
We rely on the Control of Corruption Index (CCI) from the World Bank Governance
Indicators (2009) as our dependent variable. It builds on a large number of data sources, which
include expert and citizen perceptions; it thus gauges a wide range of aspects of corruption (see
Bauhr and Grimes 2014; these authors also provide useful remarks on the validity of the CCI).6
6 It is common for measures of governance/corruption to include elements linked to the media. It is also the case of
the CCI, with a survey question about corruption in the media taken from the Transparency International Global
Corruption Barometer Survey). The advantage of an index combining a larger number of factors is to render the
weight of the media element much less significant, rendering it less likely that the measure is directly connected to
7
The independent variables come from the EMSS expert survey conducted in 33 countries in 2009
and 2010 (Popescu, Gosselin and Santana Pereira 2010). The survey queried over 650 experts on
aspects such as media partisanship, information accuracy, diversity of arguments available,
journalist professionalism. Most questions pertained to media systems as a whole; others asked
respondents to evaluate up to ten media outlets offering political coverage on a daily basis in
2009 in each country (3 to 5 TV channels and 3 to 5 newspapers with at least a 5%
audience/readership in each country).
We use the battery of questions pertaining to specific outlets, more precisely the
questions aimed at evaluating partisanship, advocacy, accuracy and diversity of views in 289
individual outlets in the 33 countries included in the survey. The question about media
partisanship read thusly: “How far is the political coverage of each of the following media
outlets influenced by a party or parties to which it is close?” (see Table A1 in the Appendix for
question wording and reliability scores). Following Popescu and Toka (2012) we combine these
four questions into two scales: the Political Commitment scale measures the extent to which
party and ideology colors public affairs coverage; the Information Commitment scale gauges the
quality of information based on the factual accuracy as well as the diversity (balance) of political
views available in each outlet’s coverage (see Table 1 for correlations between the scales). The
Political/Information Commitment labels reflect the previously mentioned idea that if
misinformation can be due to partisanship, complete and accurate information and politically
neutral coverage need not go hand in hand. For example, tabloids may provide a poorly
researched yet ‘neutral’ coverage of politics; similarly, the content of a reference newspaper can
be politically colored, yet provide multiple points of view and be the product of serious fact-
checking process). These two dimensions take into account that partisanship and information
quality are key elements in the causal mechanisms proposed by macro and micro level studies of
media effects on corruption. While cross national data does not allow a direct test of either of
these mechanisms (experimental data is better suited for that purpose), the EMSS offers the
possibility to deepen our understanding of the role of the media environments with respect to
corruption; the media remain an overwhelmingly national affair, structured by language, focus
day-to-day variations in media content. We also used Transparency International’s index as a dependent variable
and obtained similar results to those presented below.
8
on national politics/events, distribution networks, as well as the influence they have on each
other’s coverage).
Unlike Popescu and Toka however, we distinguish between newspapers and television, as
well as between private and public television channels. The media and corruption literature has
almost entirely focused on the press; yet television remains an important, if not the main source
of political news for most citizens. While we make no formal hypothesis pertaining to the links
between specific outlet types and corruption control, the works reviewed in the previous section
showed that we can certainly refine our knowledge by examining both types of information
sources (TV\newspapers, public\private) separately.
The EMSS data also includes system-level evaluations of journalistic professionalism, as
well as external diversity (the extent to which it is possible to find a variety of views in the
media), as well as evaluations of information depth, contextualization, sensationalism,
personalization, and the presentation of politics as a game or a horse race. While these
evaluations do not pertain to specific outlet type or ownership, they provide a useful
complementary check on our interpretations of the results for the Political and Information
Commitment dimensions.
Finally, as controls, we use level of democracy (an average of the Freedom House and
Polity measures of democracy) and wealth (GDP in 2000)7, which have been systematically
linked to corruption in previous macro studies. They are entered in OLS regression equations
with each characteristic of media systems taken separately given the limited number of countries
for which data is available. 8
7 Along with the CCI index, level of democracy and GDP are taken from the Quality of Government dataset (Teorell
et al. 2012). 8 We also conducted analyses with party system polarization and competition (we used Banducci and Hanretty’s
(2014) measure of competition in media market to assess whether having more effective players on the media scene
made a difference). The results were not significant (including the coefficients of various interactions terms). This
was to insure that the results we observe for the media variables are not entirely or mostly attributable to
characteristics of the party system. Obviously, media and politics can be more or less tightly enmeshed, depending
on media systems; the relationship is often anchored in traditions and historical developments (see Hallin and
Mancini 2004). The data we use aimed precisely at attempting to take this relationship into account in a quantitative
manner.
9
Based on the existing literature, we hypothesize that:
1) a stronger information commitment will be associated with better control of corruption;
2) a stronger political commitment will be associated with lower control of corruption.
Results
Table 1 displays the bivariate correlations between the Political and the Information
Commitment scales (Table A2 in the Appendix displays a fuller set of correlations). Like
Popescu and Toka (2012) who proposed the two dimensions, we note that certain characteristics
of media tend to go together. Presenting information for television and newspapers separately
yields useful insight: first, political bias often affects both television and newspapers, thus
coloring whole media systems. Second, more politically biased media television outlets – but
interestingly not newspapers - typically display lower commitment to information quality gauged
by factual accuracy and viewpoints diversity. Such linkages between media aspects (as well as
with those of the wider political environment) characterize the ideal types proposed by Hallin
and Mancini (2004) to compare media systems in the western world.
< Table 1 >
In Table 2, the Baseline model shows that the relationship between level of democracy
and wealth on the one hand and corruption on the other is strong, in line with previous works on
the determinants of corruption. Then, the two dimensions of media performance assessed in this
paper, Political and Information Commitments, are subsequently added to the Baseline model to
compare their contribution to overall variance (Tables 2 and 3). The results show that both
dimensions are important for corruption control. A larger influence of parties and an advocacy
stance is linked to less control of corruption, while a more robust commitment to presenting
accurate information and all sides of an argument is linked to better corruption control. However,
the media outlets that matter in this respect are only television channels, and not newspapers.
This confirms the importance of considering these types of outlets separately when trying to
assess the impact of media contexts. The different outcomes for broadcasting outlets and the
press may be due to a number of reasons. One might be historical traditions; after all, newspapers
10
started out as partisan affairs and in many media systems, have kept a partisan/ideological
coloring. There are also typically more newspapers than television channels in a media system;
the audience of the former is likely to be more segmented than the latter’s, conferring greater
weight to television news content. Public television, which in some countries commands a very
significant audience, has yet a distinct status, imbued (at least in theory) with a civic orientation.
Because of this status of public broadcasting services, we also present the analysis for
public and private TV channels separately in the right side columns of Tables 2 and 3. Political
Commitment of public TV channels adds the most to the level of explained variance in our
measure of corruption; private channels also matter, albeit less so. Where information quality is
concerned, it is public television outlets alone that drive the positive association between TV
Information Commitment and control of corruption; the coefficient for private television outlets
is not significant. These results highlight the key relationship between the performance of public
broadcasting and holding corruption in check.
< Tables 2 and 3 >
Other questions featured in the EMSS allow us to further check on the robustness of the
association found between the political and informational aspects of media performance. The
measures are available at the system level only (and not for each outlet like the variables behind
Political and Information Commitments).9 When journalists’ political orientations are public
knowledge, control of corruption is significantly lower. It is also the case when “media outlets in
general succeed in serving as watchdogs scrutinizing the actions of government official on behalf
of citizens”. External diversity (the presence of all major political opinions) in broadcasting
outlets is significantly associated with better control of corruption control; however, external
diversity in newspapers is not.
Still at the system level, whether tabloid and quality newspapers cover the news
differently or not did not display a significant coefficient; nor did the question gauging the
reliance of the media in general on a more or less wide range of specialists to present information
and analyses, nor questions about the depth/richness of media information. The EMSS includes a
9 The results pertaining to these complementary, system level media characteristics are not shown but are available
from the authors.
11
Commercialisation Index gauging personalization, sensationalism and gamification of the
depiction of politics in national media systems. Taken separately, these three variables do not
pass the significance threshold. However, the index displays a significant negative coefficient,
albeit only at the .1 level.
Potentially anchored as much in the political and the information dimensions, journalists’
professionalism (gauged with three questions about journalists’ ethical motivations, excellence
criteria and training quality) and overall media credibility in a country make the strongest
contributions to overall explained variance in corruption control than any other individual media
characteristics considered in this analysis (always in addition to the Baseline model). Overall, the
information gleaned at the system level supports the results shown in Tables 2 and 3:
politicization matters most (in a bad way), and information quality too (in a good way), but to a
lesser extent. And it is television that stands behind the relationships, not newspapers.
Conclusion
In this paper, we investigate in further details the aspects of media that might be at work
behind the oft noted relationship between media and corruption in macro studies. The expert
survey data we used provides comparable measures of characteristics of 289 media outlets in 33
countries in Europe. In this preliminary analysis, we relied on two dimensions of media
performance for which up to ten outlets were individually evaluated in each country. The
analysis shows that politicized news content spells bad news for corruption control, while
information quality is associated with less corruption. However, this applies only to television
(and especially public television), and not to newspapers.
It is hard to tell whether it is because of political commitment per se in television that
corruption is less under control, or because political commitment is often the companion of less
accurate and less diverse information in the 33 countries involved in the analysis. Despite the
fact that this cross national study cannot reveal much about causality, it does suggest citizens
need both credible (not overly partisan) and quality information to hold politicians accountable.
The results are compatible with the criticism addressed to the principal-agent mechanism; the
idea that once the media tells about corruption citizens will activate sanctioning mechanisms is
too simple. This mechanism supposes that citizens consider all corruption information in the
12
same manner, no matter the media source or their own beliefs; we know from survey and
experimental studies that it is not the case.
Our next step is to bring together a quantitative analysis and a more detailed qualitative
examination of how media characteristics – partisanship and information quality as well as other
aspects covered by the EMSS - combine in patterns that may be linked to corruption in different
settings.
13
Table 1. Bivariate correlations – Political and Information Commitments
Political
commitment
TV
Political
Commitment
Newspapers
Information
Commitment
TV
Information
commitment
Newspapers
Political Commitment
TV .466*** -.622*** .045
Political Commitment
Newspapers -.119 -.254
Information Commitment
TV .106
Information Commitment
Newspapers
14
Table 2. Political Commitment and Control of Corruption (OLS)
Baseline
(controls only)
Political
Commitment
TV
Political
Commitment
Newspapers
Political
Commitment
Public TV
Political
Commitment
Private TV
beta Sig beta Sig beta Sig beta Sig beta Sig
Constant
.000
.024
.004 .028 .006
Democracy
(FH/Polity
2009)
0.314 .002 .326 .001 .312 .002 .329 .001 .342 .001
Real GDP
(2000) 0.694 .000 .496 .000 .679 .000 .457 .000 .542 .000
Variable of
interest
-.267 .002 -.086 .291 -.304 .001 -.306 .014
Adjusted Rsq
.804
.860
.805
.869
.843
N 33
15
Table 3. Information Commitment and Control of Corruption (OLS)
Information
Commitment
TV
Information
Commitment
Newspapers
Information
Commitment
Public TV
Information
Commitment
Private TV
beta sig beta sig beta sig beta sig
Constant
.000 .001 .000 .000
Democracy
(FH/Polity
2009)
.374 .000 .323 .002 .319 .004 305 .003
Real GDP
(2000) .526 .000 .000 .538 .000 714 .000
Variable of
interest .226 .006 .037 .669 .200 .032 076 .357
Adjusted Rsq .852 .798 .835 .803
N 33
16
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20
Appendix
Table A1. Media Characteristics – question wording and reliability scores (EMSS 2009-10)
Variable name Question wording Item
reliability
Partisanship How far is the political coverage of each of the following
media outlets influenced by a party or parties to which it is
close?
(0=not at all; 10=strongly)
0.92
Advocacy To what extent does each advocate particular views and
policies?
(0=never; 10=always)
0.90
Accuracy To what extent do these media provide accurate information
on facts backed by credible sources and expertise?
(0=never; 10=always)
0.94
Diversity To what extent does each present equally well the arguments
of all sides in political debates?
(0=never; 10=always)
0.91
Political Commitment: the weighted national mean of the sum of the Partisanship and Advocacy
variables, themselves the mean expert rating of (all TV, public TV, private TV and newspapers)
outlets on the questions in Table A1 above. The weight of each outlet was proportional to its
2009 audience size reported in European Audiovisual Observatory (2010) and, for newspapers,
circulation as reported in Zenith (2010). In the EMSS data, the corresponding variables are
‘partall’, ‘partpbtv’, ‘partprtv’ and ‘partnews’.
Information Commitment: the weighted national mean of the sum of the Accuracy and Diversity
variables, themselves the mean expert rating of (all TV, public TV, private TV and newspapers)
outlets on the questions in Table A1 above. Weighting was similar to Political Commitment. In
the EMSS data, the corresponding variables are ‘qualall’, ‘qualpbtv’, ‘qualprtv’ and ‘qualnews’.
21
Table A2. Bivariate correlations - Media Characteristics
Note: Only significant coefficients appear in the table.
Partisans
hip TV
Partisans
hip
Newspap
ers
Advocac
y
TV
Advocac
y
Newspap
ers
Argumen
t
Diversity
TV
Argumen
t
Diversity
Newspap
ers
Accuracy
TV
Accuracy
Newspap
ers
Partisanship
TV
Partisanship
Newspapers
.636
Advocacy
TV
.825 .460
Advocacy
Newspapers
.666
Argument
Diversity TV
-.599 -.641
Argument
Diversity
Newspapers
-.348 -.294
Accuracy
TV
-.459 -.521 .734
Accuracy
Newspapers
.876