This book provides a new theoretical framework of determinants that interact together in five hierarchical levels to restrain or produce corruption. The theory suggests a multilevel analysis that tests hypotheses regarding the relations of journalism and corruption within each level and across levels in international comparative research designs. Corruption as the abuse of power for private gain is built into the journalistic, economic, political, and cultural structures of any society and is affected by its interaction within the international system. The important questions of how differences in corruption across countries can be explained or what makes it more or less in a particular society and how press freedom and social media contribute to the fight against corruption are still unanswered. This book represents a significant contribution on the way to answer these critical questions. It discusses a variety of journalism-corruption experiences that provide a wealth of results and analyses. The cases it examines extend from Cuba to Algeria, India, Saudi Arabia, Sub-Saharan African, Gulf Cooperation Countries, Arab World, and Japan. The primary contribution of this book is both theoretical and empirical. Its details as well as the general theoretical frameworks make it a useful book for scholars, academics, undergraduate and graduate students, journalists, and policy makers.

This book provides an applied model of corruption to identify, analyse, and assess the ethics of major types of corruption in the media involving practices such as cash-for-comment, media release journalism, including video news releases (VNRs), fake news, deep fakes, and staged news. The book starts with a conceptual philosophical analysis of corruption in general, followed by an in-depth analysis of media corruption, across its various transformations, from the legacy media of the 4th Estate (e.g. The UK Guardian) to the digital media of the 5th Estate (e.g. Social Media and Wikileaks) to the Network Media of the 6th Estate (e.g. Facebook and Google), and provides key case studies as practical illustrations and contextualisation of those major types of media corruption. It explains how the conversion of the two forms of media communication, corporate and social digital communication, as expressed in the symbiotic relationship between the 4th Estate and the 5th Estate exposes and enables the reporting of corruption, signalling a major shift in the way the media itself can provide an effective means for anti-corruption measures against major practices of corruption that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.

The way in which social media is utilized has changed over the years, making it a growing forum for political discussion. Due to this, analyzing relationships between social media and politics can lead to an increased awareness of current political affairs. Political Scandal, Corruption, and Legitimacy in the Age of Social Media is an essential research source for the latest information on national and international political propaganda and opinions spread by technological forums. Featuring expansive coverage on a number of relevant topics and perspectives, such as environmental justice, alternative ideology, and information and communication technologies (ICTs), this publication is ideally designed for researchers, students, and professionals seeking current research on the connection between social media and politics and its impact on modern society.

Police intimidation, legal harassment, defamation and intimidation campaigns offline and increasingly online, pressure - economic or otherwise - from editors or media owners and sponsors, detentions, threats and physical violence: journalists are constantly exposed to these threats by those who feel threatened by their work. The murder of investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia in October 2017 sent shock waves through Europe. Violence and acts of harassment against journalists have become alarmingly frequent, as was laid bare in the Council of Europe's 2017 survey of 940 journalists across the continent. This follow-up study is about the human cost to journalists who seek to hold the powerful to account. It is based on in-depth interviews with 20 journalists who use their reporting skills to expose corruption, injustice and abuses, often putting their safety at risk. They share their insights into the realities of practising cutting-edge journalism while facing aggression, intimidation and vicious cyber-attacks. Too often the necessary protections fail and crimes against journalists go unpunished. The freedom of the media to report without censorship or fear of reprisals is an essential pre-condition of democratic societies. This study represents a call for action to the 47 member states of the Council of Europe, with practical and forward-looking recommendations for ways to establish effective protection for journalists to enable them to safely fulfil their vital public watchdog role.

A collection of groundbreaking investigations by Wayne Barrett, the intrepid, muckraking Village Voice journalist who exposed corruption in New York City and beyond. With piercing moral clarity and exacting rigor, Wayne Barrett tracked political corruption in the pages of the Village Voice fact by fact, document by document for 40 years. The first to report on the scams and crooked deals that fueled the rise of Donald Trump in 1979, Barrett went on to expose the shady dealings of small-time slum lords and powerful New York City politicians alike, from Ed Koch to Rudy Giuliani to Michael Bloomberg. Without Compromise is the first anthology of Barrett's investigative work, accompanied by essays from colleagues and those he trained. In an age of lies, fog, and propaganda, when the profession of journalism is degraded by the White House and the industry is under financial threat, Barrett reminds us that facts, when clearly accumulated, are our best defense of democracy. Featuring essays by:Joe ConasonKim Phillips-Fein Errol LouisGerson BorreroTom RobbinsTracie McMillanPeter NoelAdam FifieldJarrett MurphyAndrea BernsteinJennifer GonnermanMac Barrett

It imagines the media's odd conventions, pretenses, and rhetorical tics - for instance, the assumption that the President of the United States is delusional and/or brainless, or that the publicly displayed feelings of pop stars and celebrities are prophylactics against global warming - are reality indeed. "Media Madness" can be amusing when confined to journalists, but as it increasingly infects politicians and others in public life, it has resulted in a political life characterized by empty gesture, incivility, and most seriously, paralysis."--BOOK JACKET.

Recent years have seen an unprecedented rise in interest in the topic of corruption, resulting in a rising demand for suitable teaching materials. This edited collection brings together two different approaches to the study of corruption — the first represented by a large, practically-oriented literature devoted to identifying the causes of corruption, assessing its incidence and working out how to bring it under control; the second by a smaller collection of critical literature in political theory and intellectual history that addresses conceptual and historical issues concerned with how corruption should be, and how it has been, understood — and uses the second to reflect on the first. This collection will be of interest to post-graduate students in political science, law, sociology, public policy and development studies, to senior public servants, and to professionals working in multilateral agencies, NGOs and the media.

Who controls the media today? There are many media systems across the globe that claim to be free yet whose independence has been eroded. As demagogues rise, independent voices have been squeezed out. Corporate-owned media companies that act in the service of power increasingly exercise soft censorship. Tech giants such as Facebook and Google have dramatically changed how people access information, with consequences that are only beginning to be felt. This book features pathbreaking analysis from journalists and academics of the changing nature and peril of media capture—how formerly independent institutions fall under the sway of governments, plutocrats, and corporations. Contributors including Emily Bell, Felix Salmon, Joshua Marshall, Joel Simon, and Nikki Usher analyze diverse cases of media capture worldwide—from the United Kingdom to Turkey to India and beyond—many drawn from firsthand experience. They examine the role played by new media companies and funders, showing how the confluence of the growth of big tech and falling revenues for legacy media has led to new forms of control. Contributions also shed light on how the rise of right-wing populists has catalyzed the crisis of global media. They also chart a way forward, exploring the growing need for a policy response and sustainable models for public-interest investigative journalism. Providing valuable insight into today’s urgent threats to media independence, Media Capture is essential reading for anyone concerned with defending press freedom in the digital age.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter details “how the U.S. business press could miss the most important economic implosion of the past eighty years” (Eric Alterman, media columnist for The Nation). In this sweeping, incisive post-mortem, Dean Starkman exposes the critical shortcomings that softened coverage in the business press during the mortgage era and the years leading up to the financial collapse of 2008. He examines the deep cultural and structural shifts—some unavoidable, some self-inflicted—that eroded journalism’s appetite for its role as watchdog. The result was a deafening silence about systemic corruption in the financial industry. Tragically, this silence grew only more profound as the mortgage madness reached its terrible apogee from 2004 through 2006. Starkman frames his analysis in a broad argument about journalism itself, dividing the profession into two competing approaches—access reporting and accountability reporting—which rely on entirely different sources and produce radically different representations of reality. As Starkman explains, access journalism came to dominate business reporting in the 1990s, a process he calls “CNBCization,” and rather than examining risky, even corrupt, corporate behavior, mainstream reporters focused on profiling executives and informing investors. Starkman concludes with a critique of the digital-news ideology and corporate influence, which threaten to further undermine investigative reporting, and he shows how financial coverage, and journalism as a whole, can reclaim its bite. “Can stand as a potentially enduring case study of what went wrong and why.”—Alec Klein, national bestselling author of Aftermath “With detailed statistics, Starkman provides keen analysis of how the media failed in its mission at a crucial time for the U.S. economy.”—Booklist