Tag Archives: media

Does Corruption Flourish in a “Culture of Corruption”?

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A common intuition about corruption is that individuals are more likely to engage in corruption when they witness others committing corrupt acts without facing serious consequences—in other words, a “culture of corruption” can be self-perpetuating (see here and here), and the perception or belief that corruption is widespread can itself be a cause of corruption. While compelling, this intuition has not been subjected to much empirical scrutiny. While there does seem to be some evidence of an association between individuals’ perceptions of the prevalence of domestic corruption and those individuals’ inclination to act corruptly, the research on this topic is relatively thin.

In a recent paper, a group of academics (Israel Waismel-Manor, Patricia Moy, Rico Neumann, and Moran Shechnick) weighed in, presenting the results of a controlled lab experiment that sought to assess whether news about corruption by public officials affected individuals’ incentives to behave dishonestly. The study was conducted in Israel, and participants were required first to watch a short television news segment. The treatment group’s segment revolved around an Israeli mayor suspected of certain corrupt acts, while the control group’s segment was unrelated to corruption. The participants were also given a short quiz about the segment they’d seen, and half of the participants in each group were offered a monetary reward if they answered all the questions correctly; they were told “to answer all questions from memory” and not look anything up on the internet. However, unbeknownst to the participants, one of the questions could not be answered without doing additional searches, so the researchers could use the answer to this question to identify those participants who cheated on the test. The real goal of the study (of which participants were not aware) was to see whether exposure to the corruption news story (alone or in combination with the financial incentive) affected participants’ likelihood of cheating.

Unsurprisingly, participants who were offered money for answering all questions correctly cheated far more often, regardless of which news story they watched. The study’s authors seem to have expected that those participants who watched the corruption-related story would also cheat more (holding constant whether they had financial incentives to answer questions correctly). But this did not occur: Participants who watched the news segment involving a mayor suspected of corruption did not cheat in statistically significantly higher rates than those who watched the other, unrelated-to-corruption segment. The researchers suggested that perhaps the reason was that Israelis had been inundated with so much news about official corruption around the time of the experiment (which took place in 2019), particularly in connection with the investigation and prosecution of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior politicians (see here, here, and here), that the marginal impact of exposure to additional news about corruption, in the form of this one story, would not have much impact.

While that explanation is plausible, I have some other concerns about the research’s design and methodology, which make me question whether this experiment was in fact a good way to assess the “culture of corruption” hypothesis.

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No Strings Attached: Learning from the EU’s Approach to Government Advertising in Private Media

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Recently, the European Union moved forward with comprehensive new media freedom law, the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA). The EMFA includes a number of important reforms meant to protect journalistic independence, including prohibitions on interference in editorial decisionmaking and protections for sources. But one of the proposed reforms is especially important for those who care about preserving the media’s role as an anticorruption watchdog: the EMFA’s rules on government advertising in private media. The EMFA requires that governments (1) adopt fair, transparent, and objective standards for the distribution of state advertising revenue to journalists, and (2) make efforts to disclose how those funds are distributed. Because governments often use advertising spending as implicit or explicit leverage to suppress and deter anticorruption reporting, these changes will likely have a significant effect. As countries outside of the EU struggle with similar issues, they should follow the EMFA model.

The EMFA model may be especially valuable in Central and Eastern Europe. After the post-socialist transitions, media organizations in these countries found themselves free of state control—at least in part. But despite privatization, many of those media companies, struggling to stay afloat, have turned to their governments for advertising revenue. This has proven to be a devil’s bargain. The fact that state advertising has become a major source of revenue for media outlets has given governments a tool that they can leverage to influence coverage, stifling anticorruption reporting. When new parties come to power, they often redirect advertising funds to media organizations that bury corruption news, financially sinking the organizations that are willing to call out misconduct. Journalists that do break corruption stories see their funding quickly disappear. Even without direct pressure, media organizations have been afraid to call out the actors that effectively fund them, and they understand that the government will reward friendly media companies with extra money. The result is that media outlets do not invest time and energy into investigating potential government misconduct, and they fail to run, or underemphasize, stories highlighting corruption allegations. (This problem is hardly limited to Europe: States across the world use advertising to influence the media, often to great success. And studies in Argentina, Ghana, and Turkey, for instance, have found that government advertising in media outlets reduces coverage of government corruption.)

The most direct solution to this problem—eliminating or significantly reducing government ad spending—is unrealistic. Given how unreliable private advertising has become, many journalists are dependent on state dollars, and taking that funding away could tank them economically. Although some organizations are starting to develop alternative business models, it is too risky to rely on those models before they have proven successful. Neither are grants or other support from NGOs plentiful enough as of now. But as the EU recognized, there are ways to mitigate the risk that media dependence on state advertising revenue will lead to the suppression of corruption-related news.

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Anti-Defamation Laws: Politicians Abuse Them, But Can Anticorruption Activists Use Them?

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Defamation is a scary word for the anticorruption community. After all, anti-defamation laws are frequently abused to harass, deter, and discredit people who accuse politicians of misconduct. But defamation suits can also be an important tool for anticorruption activists to defend against false and misleading attacks designed to undermine their work. As smear campaigns deter and diminish anticorruption advocacy, we must be cautious in our attempts to weaken or repeal anti-defamation laws, for they may prove to be a necessary line of defense.

To understand why anti-defamation laws can be so important to activists, take the case of Peruvian journalist Gustavo Gorriti. Gorriti has spent much of his life trying to investigate and expose corruption. When the Lava Jato scandal rocked Latin America, his publication, IDL-Reporteros, helped uncover millions in bribe payments to public officials. Gorriti played an important role in what shaped up to be one of the most consequential anticorruption investigations in the continent’s history.

Unsurprisingly, Gorriti came under fire for his investigative work. Among other lines of attack, stories started to pop up in some media outlets falsely accusing Gorriti of having ties to directors of the bribe-paying construction company that he had investigated; these stories were clearly part of a campaign to undermine his credibility by spreading false or misleading information. This is no isolated case. Corrupt politicians and their supporters routinely make use of disinformation campaigns to discredit accusers. The problem is only getting worse, and the consequences are serious. Such campaigns often spark violence and harassment against anticorruption activists, and they can even lead to the opening of criminal investigations purporting to act on the (fabricated) allegations. Other times, disinformation undermines public support for important reforms. These consequences make life harder for the people who, like Gorriti, want to expose corruption.

What did Gorriti do about this problem? Trying to persuade the public through counterspeech wasn’t very helpful. But Gorriti had another idea: sue for defamation. If persuasion couldn’t overcome the lies thrown at him, then perhaps he could use the legal system to hit his attackers where it hurts—their pocketbooks. Claiming to have borrowed the idea from a Finnish journalist who tried the same, he did his research on who was spreading lies and brought them to court. His strategy was successful, and Gorriti scored some important victories, including getting his opponents to retract their false statements and apologize.

Although anticorruption activists and journalists rarely file suits against their attackers, more might (and for that matter, should) start to follow Gorriti’s example. Recent defamation suits against media companies and politicians show that they have a real impact. They correct the record and deter people from initiating smear campaigns in the first place. Continue reading →

New Podcast, Featuring Anastasia Kirilenko

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. During the ongoing emergency in Ukraine, as Russia’s unprovoked military aggression throws the region and the world into crisis, my colleagues at the Interdisciplinary Corruption Research Network (ICRN) and I featuring on KickBack experts who can shed greater light on how issues related to corruption relate to the ongoing crisis. And rather than keeping to our usual schedule of releasing new episodes every two weeks, we will release new episodes as soon as they are available. In the new episode, my ICRN colleague Christopher Starke interviews Anastasia Kirilenko, an investigative journalist and the co-producer of Putin and the Mafia, a documentary about Vladimir Putin’s connections with organized crime. In their conversation, Christopher and Anastasia discuss the themes of this documentary, and also discuss the role of media and civil society in Russia, the role of oligarchs in Russian politics, and what the international anticorruption community could do to more effectively promote change within Russia. You can also find both this episode and an archive of prior episodes at the following locations: KickBack is a collaborative effort between GAB and the Interdisciplinary Corruption Research Network (ICRN). If you like it, please subscribe/follow, and tell all your friends. And if you have suggestions for voices you’d like to hear on the podcast, just send me a message and let me know.

New Podcast Episode, Featuring Will Fitzgibbon

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. In this week’s episode, my colleague Christopher Starke interviews Will Fitzgibbon, a senior reporter with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), about the Pandora Papers leak and what this evidence, and the associated reporting, reveals about international financial secrecy and the ways in which this system facilitates illicit financial flows and enables corruption, tax evasion, and organized crime. You can also find both this episode and an archive of prior episodes at the following locations:

KickBack is a collaborative effort between GAB and the ICRN. If you like it, please subscribe/follow, and tell all your friends! And if you have suggestions for voices you’d like to hear on the podcast, just send me a message and let me know.

Why Paying the Media to Uncover Corruption Would Work in India

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Jennifer Kline’s recent post on this blog proposed a novel way to support and encourage investigative journalism that exposes corruption: When such exposés result in legal actions that impose substantial monetary penalties on wrongdoers, the responsible media outlet should receive a percentage of the penalty as a reward—comparable to how some countries have programs that pay whistleblowers a percentage of any monetary recoveries that result from the original information that the whistleblowers supplied. While Jennifer’s discussion of this idea was fairly general, and seemed to have in mind implementation in countries like the United States, her proposal may be especially suitable for a country like India. 

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Breaking News without Breaking the Bank: Monetary Rewards for Media Organizations that Expose Corruption

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Investigative journalists play a key role in exposing corruption. In many cases, as a direct result of media exposés, the government has been able to recover substantial sums. To take just a few examples: In 2011, the Los Angeles Times revealed that officials in a small California city improperly paid themselves exorbitant salaries, and the subsequent court cases ordered restitution awards nearing $20 million. In 2012, the New York Times exposed Walmart’s widespread bribery in Mexico, and the company ultimately agreed to pay $282 million to settle the resulting seven-year investigation into whether Walmart had violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). In 2017, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) shocked the world when its affiliated journalists broke the Panama Papers scandal, exposing extensive fraud and tax evasion by world leaders, drug traffickers, and celebrities alike. As a result of the ICIJ’s investigation, governments around the world have managed to claw back $1.28 billion from perpetrators thus far. A Malaysian-born British journalist’s investigations (prompted by a whistleblower who provided her with more than 200,000 documents) produced the first hard evidence of what became known as Malaysia’s 1MDB scandal, the world’s largest kleptocracy scheme to date, which has produced, among other things, a nearly $2.9 billion settlement for FCPA violations.

But despite the crucial role journalists play in uncovering corruption, investigative journalism is a risky investment for media outlets. For one thing, this sort of investigative journalism is time- and resource-intensive—much more so than straight reporting—and many investigations come to nothing. And when investigative journalism does uncover evidence of wrongdoing by powerful figures, publishing those stories can be legally and politically risky. So, even though media outlets can reap substantial rewards from successful investigations—in the form of clicks, subscriptions, and prestige—media outlets faced with declining revenues and an increasingly hostile environment may not invest nearly as much in investigations into corruption as would be socially optimal.

To mitigate this problem, I propose what may initially seem like a radical way to create stronger incentives for media outlets to invest in this kind of investigative journalism: When media outlets expose corruption or similar wrongdoing, and this exposure leading to monetary sanctions on the culpable entities or individuals, the media outlets responsible for the reporting ought to receive a percentage of the government’s recovery. Such a proposal is inspired by (though distinct from) the whistleblower reward programs that many governments have already adopted. (For example, in the United States, individuals who voluntarily provide the Securities and Exchange Commission with original information pertaining to securities law violations may receive between 10% and 30% of the total penalty collected if their information leads to a successful prosecution.) A similar “media rewards program” could substantially improve the effectiveness of independent investigative journalism in exposing and deterring corruption.

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Guest Post: Highlights from the UNGASS Anticorruption Session Side Events

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Last month, the UN General Assembly held its first-ever Special Session focused specifically on the fight against corruption. In addition to the UN General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) itself, various governments and civil society organizations arranged various side events, held in parallel with the main UNGASS meeting, to allow activists, policymakers, and researchers to share their expertise. Today’s guest post, contributed by Michaella Baker, a JD-MBA student at Northwestern University (working in collaboration with Northwestern Law Professor Juliet Sorensen), summarizes the themes and principal contributions of three of these side events.

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The Decline of Small Newspapers Means Higher Risk of Local Corruption in the U.S.

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There is widespread consensus that a free, objective press plays an important role in fighting corruption and holding public officials accountable (see here, here, and here). That’s why, when countries with high levels of public corruption seek to silence investigative journalists or shutter unbiased news outlets, anticorruption organizations like Transparency International are vocal in their opposition. It’s a bit surprising, then, that so little has been said about how the decline of small newspapers in the United States has increased the risk of local corruption.

The decline of small newspapers in the United States has been precipitous. Between 2004 and 2018, there was a net loss of nearly 1,800 papers, over 1,000 of which had circulations under 5,000. Today, around half of all counties in the United States only have one local newspaper, often circulating only on a weekly basis, while nearly 200 counties don’t have a single newspaper—resulting in “news deserts,” defined as communities “with limited access to the sort of credible and comprehensive news and information that feeds democracy at the grassroots levels.” Furthermore, in many of the small- and medium-circulation outlets that remain, newsrooms have been gutted, often due to layoffs imposed by their parent companies. For example, Digital First Media, a publisher that owns more than 50 newspapers, has eliminated two-thirds of all newspaper staff since 2011.  Between 2001 and 2016, employment in the U.S. newspaper industry decreased by more than 50%.

The decline of small newspapers is just one component of a shifting media landscape in the United States. Some of the other trends, like the rise of social media and the proliferation of unverified and sometimes apocryphal online new sources, have been at the center of political discourse. The decline of small newspapers, on the other hand, is often lamented as a regrettable casualty of changing times, but there isn’t enough appreciation of the fact that the decline of small newspapers poses a risk of increased local corruption. Continue reading →

Adapting Anticorruption Enforcement to an Age of Populism and Polarization

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Shortly after the U.S. Senate acquitted President Clinton in 1999, he apologized for triggering the impeachment process. President Trump, in contrast, declared that his acquittal called for “a day of celebration,” and immediately started firing White House employees who had testified before the House of Representatives. In 2008, then-Israeli Prime Minister Olmert resigned shortly after the police recommended that he should be indicted on corruption charges. In contrast, after Prime Minister Netanyahu was indicted on multiple bribery charges, he infamously said that Israeli citizens should “investigate the investigators,” and even with the trial approaching, Netanyahu shows no signs of considering resignation. Instead, he is currently fiercely promoting legislation to amend several of the Israeli Constitutional Basic Laws in ways that will allow him to remain in office for years to come. These troubling examples illustrate how the resurgence of populism, coupled with increasing polarization, are making it easier for corrupt politicians to evade accountability, even in countries with functional legal and judicial systems. Deep political divisions and strong partisan loyalty are not new, but in the past, it seems there was a degree of overlapping consensus on minimum standards of integrity and propriety, and enough citizens were willing to enforce these standards on a non-partisan basis that leaders would be restrained by political checks—enforced through things like elections and internal party discipline—that could complement judicial processes.

Moreover, leaders like Trump and Netanyahu have acted aggressively to undermine the institutions of justice in order to protect themselves. Both leaders have cavalierly attacked the professionalism and integrity of their country’s law enforcement agencies by suggesting that investigations targeting the leader or his associates are politically motivated “witch hunts.” And both have taken more concrete action to undermine the ordinary operation of the machinery of justice. In the U.S., after his Senate trial acquittal, President Trump intervened to help allies who had been found guilty in cases related to investigations of impropriety by Trump’s 2016 campaign. For example, Trump’s Attorney General ordered the Department of Justice to seek a more lenient sentence for Trump’s former consultant Roger Stone, and Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of several others in a short and unorthodox process. Netanyahu has been even more aggressive in trying to weaken legal institutions in order to protect himself. After being indicted, Netanyahu fired the Minister of Justice and appointed in her place a low-ranking member of his party with no prior ministerial experience. The new Minister’s first action was to appoint a new Solicitor General—the immediate superior of the prosecution team in Netanyahu’s case–through an irregular process and against the recommendation of the non-partisan Attorney General. (Due to the political deadlock, the Minister is part of a caretaker government and could therefore appoint an interim Solicitor General without the approval of the public committee that the law would otherwise require.) On the eve of Israel’s third round of elections, the new Solicitor General decided—against the opinion of the Attorney General and many others—to launch a police investigation into a firm in which Netanyahu’s chief rival Benny Gantz served as a director (obscuring the fact that Gantz himself is not a suspect). More recently, the Minister of Justice gave the unprecedented order to freeze all non-urgent judicial procedures due to the Covid-19 outbreak—a move that indefinitely postpones Netanyahu’s trial. While the Covid-19 outbreak has disrupted or delayed judicial proceedings in many countries, there was no expert opinion supporting such drastic measures in Israel, especially given that Israel has more per capita testing and ventilators capacity than nearly any country on earth. Even now, when newly detected cases are close to zero, a new date for the trial has yet to be set. Moreover, to avoid a fourth round of elections, given the continued deadlock, Netanyahu is now fiercely and unprecedently promoting legislative amendments to Israel’s Constitutional Basic Laws that would allow him to hold onto office for years to come.

When professional, and traditionally non-partisan, law enforcement agencies find themselves under attack by corrupt populists, these agencies often do not respond, presumably due to the belief that the only way to maintain integrity, legitimacy, and professionalism in the face of such attacks is to refrain from commenting on unfounded claims meant to disparage state attorneys and police investigators. There is much to be said for that approach, but at the same time, the institutions of justice can and should do more to counter the attempts of corrupt populists to undermine those institutions in order to remain in power.

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