Perspectives of Corruption and Economic Action in the Ecuadorian Digital Press during Authoritarian Neoliberalism (2017-2019)

Résumé

Abstract: This research characterises the role of the frames of political scandals of corruption and economic action, present in the news of the newspapers El Comercio and El Telégrafo during the first two years of Lenin Moreno's government (2017-2019) in Ecuador. Three theoretical currents are addressed: political scandal as a product of media visibility transformations (Thompson, 2001) and as a contest between the powerful (Narváez, 2004); framing as a message framing phenomenon (Entman, 1993); and authoritarian neoliberalism as the use of state apparatus to promote neoliberal reforms through authoritarian mechanisms (Bruff & Tensel, 2019). In the quantitative methodology, we opted for content analysis, which involves the analysis of a corpus of 1449 units of analysis (687 news items on corruption and 762 on economic measures). The main finding is that the media frames allowed for the justification of a strong intervention and mobilisation of the state apparatus on a legal and judicial basis, bursting into spaces of citizen participation and political opposition to the neoliberalisation of the state.