Corruption, scandals, and the news media coverage of politics in Brazil

Abstract

This article examines the use of political scandals in the news media coverage of presidential elections in Brazil. We analyze the coverage of scandal cases in the 2010 and 2014 elections and discover a marked bias against the candidate of the situation: 95% of texts on scandals were about the pt administration while only 5% dealt with psdb corruption scandals. We also examine the way two psdb scandals were treated by the media in order to control the results of the quantitative analysis and to further confirm our hypothesis of extreme bias.