Media and patterns of political corruption: freeport and hidden face

Abstract

This paper analyzes the role played by the media in denouncing of political
corruption in a context of profound changes in European societies, from 2008,
particularly in Portugal. In this process, political corruption emerge as a national
phenomenon within globalized standards (Johnston, 2005), monitored by
international organizations as well as by national institutions. If, on the one
hand, journalism has investigated and denounced illegal procedures by elites
and interest groups, on the other hand, the media system through journalistic
practices are standardized, by repetition and saturation of visualization exceptional situations and phenomena, giving to the accusations popular entertainment features (Streeck: 2013). Based on these theoretical frameworks we aim to characterize the political corruption in Portugal from the analysis of open access television channels, RTP1 (public channel), SIC and TVI (private channels). For the analysis of the manifest content of this corpus we used a theoretical framework arising from the theory of corruption (Johnston: 2005; Economakis, Rizopoulos & Sergakis: 2010). The results point to the prevalence of the routines in the construction of news and for political personalization on major figures of democracy.