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Paris, May 26th, 2010. Spain ranks high in the news when international TV reports about corruption according to the Media Tenor trust study presented today at the OECD Forum in Paris. Roland Schatz, founder and President of Media Tenor International, the Zurich-based research institute and OECD Knowledge Partner, points out, how the reputation of financial institutions, politicians and public institutions has suffered from the trust meltdown in the wake of the worldwide financial crisis, “International support for Spain and foreign investment in the country therefore not only suffer from the banking and mortgage crises or the staggering public debt, but also from the perception of weak standards of public governance.”

Corruption – the “victimless crime” – is only infrequently addressed by international TV news, as only a few high-profile court cases and annual figures from Transparency International lift the issue beyond the awareness threshold. “Spanish and Italian TV devoted a significant share of their reporting to corruption, but Turkish, Chinese news and Arabic channels did not report at all”, explains Roland Schatz. “This reflects to some degree the cautious approach to deficiencies in public governance in those countries – but staying mute does not support trust in public institutions.”

Generally TV news tends to put the blame on individual faults. The fact that high manager salaries received notably more coverage in 2009 than corruption underscores this fact. Structural deficits, that pave the way for corruption on the other hand, do not make it into the news very often. Most of the countries that rank high in the corruption indices, do not figure prominently in the media. Roland Schatz: “Journalists who are reluctant to deal with corruption issues contribute to the perpetuation of graft”.

“The commitment to the fight against corruption plays an important role in the process of reconstructing trust in private business and market economies”, concludes Roland Schatz, who is participating in the Business Ethics Panel at the OECD Forum. “People, who have lost their trust in the market system, pull back from society and stop contributing to the public good – it is time for a return to basics.”


* Long-term analysis 2006-2010: 819,546 stories in 29 media 2006-2010.
For the years 2009/2010, 125,373 / 243,144 news stories in 36 / 40 international TV news programs and 54,154 / 71,786 reports about companies have been analyzed in 36 / 40 international TV news programs.All media content has been analyzed by trained human coders. Average inter-coder reliability equaled 87% in the IV. quarter of 2009.

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