Suchergebnisse

The aim of this paper is to analyse the role of media and journalists in uncovering of corruption cases in Hungary. How does the Hungarian media deal with corruption cases and how do the structure of political polarization and ownership structure of Hungarian media influence this special activity of journalists? The paper consists of two parts describing the relation between the corruption and media in Hungary from two perspectives. In the first section we present four particular Hungarian corruption cases by briefly describing their background and analysing thoroughly the role of media in the outbreak of these scandals. The cases were selected in order to be able to explain the function of the Hungarian press, especially its investigative departments. The second part of the study focuses on the general nature of the Hungarian press with special emphasis on investigative journalism. The aim of this chapter is to provide insights into the Hungarian media market and its influencing factors. The cases of the first section are often quoted to make the findings more illustrative. At the end of the paper we summarize the main lessons from this analysis. The study is based on eight semi-structured interviews with leading investigative journalists and one with a media expert in Hungary. The results of the fieldwork were processed anonymously; the conversations were not recorded. We subsequently analysed the articles and documents using the Google and other applications and databases3 related to the topic. The findings related to people, organizations or news outlets that are based on publicly available sources are indicated in the footnotes.

A havi jövedelem kényes kérdés. A TÁRKI és a Budapesti Corvinus Egyetem BESPOprojektje többek között arra kereste a választ, hogy növelhető-e a fizetéssel kapcsolatos kérdésekre adott válaszok száma, illetve érvényessége kérdőíves adatfelvétel esetében. Azt tapasztaltuk, hogy a rugalmaskérdőív-technika (amely antropológiai terepmunka-technikai elemeket felhasználva, nem standard módon kérdez) a természetesebb kommunikáció révén mind a fizetéssel kapcsolatos válaszok érvényességére, mind pedig a válaszadási hajlandóságára pozitív hatással van.

The article presents and summarizes some results from extensive cross-national content analysis of media coverage of corruption. The authors examined a sample containing 12,742 articles published in France, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Romania, Slovakia and the United Kingdom from 2004 to 2013. A limited number of studies have been done thus far to reveal how the media deals with corruption cases in certain countries, and cross-national comparative analyses are exceedingly scarce. The core focus of the study is to reveal the significant differences in the corruption cases covered by the media according to the countries under analysis. We assume that some differences exist between the media coverage of corruption in the new and the old European Union member states and also that by classifying countries into groups based on their perception of the level of the corruption, some dissimilarities will be revealed between them. We conclude that the distinction between countries based on whether they are old or new European Union members does not wholly determine the nature of reporting on international or national corruption cases, for example, Italy was more similar to the old European Union member states in this sense. Considering the level of institutionalization of corruption cases, Italy appears to be more similar to the other old European Union members, but we should clarify that differences based on this feature of the cases are not clearly highlighted in the interaction model. However, if we use the variable perceptions of corruption to classify countries, we find that countries with a 'cleaner' environment (the United Kingdom, France) place more focus on reporting corruption cases in the international arena.

Coverage of corruption in the Hungarian media was analysed for four online news portals, Magyar Nemzet Online (short name: MNO, web: mno.hu), Népszava (web: nepszava.hu) and Heti Világgazdaság (web: hvg.hu) and Origo (web: origo.hu). The first three have both online and printed versions. MNO is considered a centre-right elite/general portal, HVG may be considered a center-left, economics-focused newspaper, while Népszava is a centre-left elite/general medium. Origo does not have a precise political affiliation; it is considered here a neutral, tabloid-like portal due to its variety of entertainment-focused content, but it has a more professional journalistic style than most tabloids, especially in the case of political (domestic and international) articles. In the following section we describe the news portals separately, but refer to the typologies by political affiliation and by media typology.

Gossip – talking about relevant others in their absence – is believed to constitute a large part of informal communication. The perception of the prevalence of gossip implies that it can be unambiguously identified and distinguished from other topics in spontaneous conversation. Its distinctiveness may be justified by multiple theoretical perspectives, including one that describes in-group gossip as an informal device for enforcing norms and punishing norm violators, and another that claims that gossip is used to release frustration and communicate envy. If the ultimate reason for gossip is to facilitate social bonding between the sender and the receiver, however, this would not differentiate gossip from other conversational topics that provide social enjoyment, such as entertainment and food. In a novel contribution, we explore the topics included in a corpus containing 550 hours of unfiltered spontaneous conversation and identify using LDA topic modeling whether some topics are unambiguously prominent in in-group gossip. The explorative approach is integrated with the manual annotation of instances of gossip across the entire corpus. We identified coherent topics of in-group gossip that are clearly different from those of small talk and storytelling. Our analysis finds that feelings, intentions, and opinions are frequently expressed in in-group gossip, more than habits, manners, and behavior. In-group gossip topics are characterized by more words associated with anger, in line with theoretical perspectives that attribute the motives of norm enhancement and punishment or frustration and envy to gossip.