Tag Archives: Corruption

Media Influence. A Twitter Based Measure. Case Urdangarin. Allegations of Corruption Against Son-in-Law of King Juan Carlos of Spain

Posted on by • Posted in Corruption, Country - Spain, Political Leaders, Rep Issue - Communication Crisis, Rep Issue - Social Media, Rep Issue - Twitter Analysis, Uncategorized • Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , • Leave a comment

In this post we propose an indirect way to measure influence of news providers. We use Twitter as filtering criteria.

There are plenty of mechanisms, approaches and rankings concerning the most influential newspapers or news providers. Online difussion and social media proliferation is probably making these kind of analysis more difficult to achieve and less reliable. It is difficult to establish the weight and influence of online and offline editions of news providers like newspapers, radio stations, TV broadcasters and pure digital medial like blogs or pure online newspapers.

We propose here an indirect measure of influence of news providers from any source. The idea is to check which are the news providers used by Twitter users to refer to external sources for explaining or interpreting an event. Of course, this means that this restrict the analysis to only online editions of news providers, and not the original offline content, if existing. This means that the measure that we are proposing contain a number of caveats and limitations. But we consider that they do not undermine nevertheless the validity of the underlying intution: in a tweet, an user is constricted to choose a single external source, if any. Referring to an analysis or news offered by a news provider is a way taken by the Twitter user to show her position in the issue, and to share it with her followers and Twitter community. By picking this news provider, the Twitter user is showing trust and credibility to this chosen source. She is also expanding the area of influence of this news provider, as she is making it accessible to other Twitter users.

Thus, a way to measure which are the external references preferred by active social media users is to monitor news providers that have been used by Twitter users as external references during the period of time that an event or issue was active in social media arena, i.e., the event received a sustained amount of tweets inside this period of time.

Applied Case: Iñaki Urdangarín Hearings for Allegations of Fraud

Iñaki Urdangarín is married with Princess Cristina, duaghter of King of Spain Juan Carlos. He has been asked to testify by 25 February 2012, in the framework of an ongoing judicial case of corruption and fraud of public funds by some Government representatives in Balearic Islands region in Spain. Instituto Noos, ruled by Iñaki Urdangarín and others benefited from public contracts suspected to be fraudulent.

This is an extremeny harmful case as reputation crisis for Iñaki Urdangarín and his wife, but also to all Royal Family, and eventually to the monarchy as ruling institution. It is a highly sensitive issue, that has received a notorious media coverage in Spain, even before that any formal accusation had been made against Mr. Urdangarín, Duke of Palma.

Questioning by the judge was openned by 9am local time, and was stopped by 9pm. It will be continued by Sunday 26 February 2012.

We show below the figure concerning the media from any kind that had been cited as reference and link to Twitter messages from 7am to 12pm, 25 February 2012.

Our results show that the leading reference for the coverage of Iñaki Urdangarín hearings was elpais.com, linked to one of main newspapers in Spain, El Pais. Their news appeared as link in 598 different tweets.

Second news provider was publico.es. The offline reference is left oriented newspaper Público. This newspapers was closed just one day ago due to the economic crisis. The online version of it will persist.

Third media reference is elmundo.es, from the newspaper El Mundo, another leading newspaper in Spain.

We find that forth position th online edition of a radio station, cadenaser.com, for Cadena SER. This radio station pertains to the same group than El País, the Grupo PRISA.

Protests in Spain. Media Coverage comparison with Tahrir Square Egypt Revolution

Posted on by • Posted in Countries, Country - Spain, Event - Arab Spring, Issue - Protests, Political Leaders • Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , • 3 Comments

Something really new is emerging in the political life in Spain. An apparently grassroots movement in the verge to create a serisous crisis in the political system in Spain.

The movement Democracia Real Ya (Real Democracy Now) launched a call by mid February for civic demonstrations in Spain by May 15, under the motto “Toma la calle. No somos mercancías de politicos y banqueros”. The call was backed by many organizations (political parties are not allowed to join) and reinforced through Twitter.

The May 15 demonstrations turned into the occupation of several public espaces, being the Puerta del Sol in madrid the main media reference. This has been labelled as the Movimiento 15-M.

Up to now this movement is a pure anti-violent civic initiative. They are not calling for voting for any single party. Many of them propose not to vote the two majority parties: PSOE (socialist party) and PP (Popular Party, center-right). They are not formally proposing abstention.

Transl: “Square SOLution”. “When will they finally understand that the important issue is the people?”

We show below the manifiesto by Democracia Real:

“We are ordinary people. We are like you: people, who get up every morning to study, work or find a job, people who have family and friends. People, who work hard every day to provide a better future for those around us.”
“Some of us consider ourselves progressive, others conservative. Some of us are believers, some not. Some of us have clearly defined ideologies, others are apolitical, but we are all concerned and angry about the political, economic, and social outlook which we see around us: corruption among politicians, businessmen, bankers, leaving us helpless, without a voice.”
“This situation has become normal, a daily suffering, without hope. But if we join forces, we can change it. It’s time to change things, time to build a better society together.” (DemocraciaRealYa).

Transl: We do not represent any political party or labor union. We are angry citizens.

May 22 is election day in Spain: Local and Regional elections. Political parties in Spain are disconcerted as it is really hard to estimate the impact of this initiative in their electorate. They also fear the implications of this movement in the incoming general elections. Newspapers in Spain find also hard to understand and identify the origin and the consequences of this movement.

How is international media covering news about protests in Spain?

We compare news about protests in comparison with media coverage given to all news about the elections in Spain.

Our results show that right now international media coverage to elections in Spain is completely dominated by the ongoing civic protests: the media reputation profile of both type of news are basically similar in all issues. News about elections in Spain are noticeable because of the protests.

In this framework, the answer to the question about how international media is perceiving the news comes from the marginal analysis of the two types of news.

International media is somehow praising the movement in terms of “Excellence”, especially concerning the vector components innovative, recognition and awareness.

Concerning the vector “Respected, Coherent”, only the component ethical is underlined.

Looking to negative vectors of media reputation, we find that the news about the protests are not linked to higher degree of association to vectors “Scandal” and “Tragedy”. This result confirms that media is not considering up to this point the protests as a focus of violence, insecurity or instability.

Comparison with Tahrir Square Egypt Revolution

Some analysts and journalists compare the civic movement in Spain wth the Arab revolution in Tunis and Egypt, epitomised by the demonstrations at Tahrir Square in the Caire.

We can provide, using the approach by MRI Universidad de Navarra to which extent international media treat both events as similar or dissimilar.

Protests in Spain and in Egypt are similarly viewed in linkage with “Excellence” perception. Protests in Spain are right now most appreciated as “Innovative, Efficiency”.

Substantial differences concerning the media coverage of the two events emerge concerning “Respected, Coherent”. Tahrir Square events are mostly viewed as a values-driven issue. We find an astonishing high degree of association with “Respected” components. This is more pronounced concerning components like compassion, dignity, fairness and happiness. By comparison, the association to these values for explaining the events in Spain are much lower.

Media perception to negative reputation vectors “Scandal” and “Tragedy” are also substantially higher for explaining the Egypt events than the Spanish protests. These results show that the underlying economic and political situation are clearly not judged in the same way by international media. The political framework and implications of the revolt are considered much more serious in Egypt.

Concerning the news about Spain, we find that only in “Tragedy” components worst and failure reach the same levels than news about Egypt. This probably refers to the perception of unsatisfaction about the perceived quality of the Spanish political system and its problems for dealing with corruption and economic issues.

Other posts

Movimiento 15-M, Democracia Real Ya: Perception by Local Newspapers El Mundo, El País, Intereconomía, Público

Fukushima Explosion Media Coverage vs Wikileaks: Portraying Fears of an Unknown and Uncontrolled Disaster

Posted on by • Posted in Companies, Countries, Country - Japan, Disasters, Event - Fukushima, Event - Tsunami Japan, Issue - Nuclear Crisis, Debate, Org - Wikileaks • Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , • 14 Comments

We continue with this second post analysis about Wikileaks media profile by comparing it to the initial media coverage of the disaster in Japan.

Yesterday we provided information of how media covered the massive earthquake and consequent devastating tsunami just in the aftermath of it (three hours later), and with an update of the analysis with additional news published during the day. Before analysing the specific topic of this post, we show the new update of how media in English cover the Japanese disaster one day after. At this point, new footages show the exceptional devastation provoked by the tsunamis in Japan, and media attention start to focus on the nuclear problems in several sites, and specially the Tokyo Electric Power nuclear facility in Fukushima. We also know that by now there are few number of people dead as a consequence of the tsunami outside Japan.

As in the precedent post, we focus the analysis on the brand vector “Tragedy”. The results refer to all news published during the 26 hours after the earthquake in our data panel (some 33,000 news in English). We observe that the initial trend identified in the precedent update is confirmed. Additional news about the Japan earthquake are increasing the degree of associtation of the disaster to the components tragedy, catastrophic and horrible. The association with worst tend to decrease.

The main purpose of this post is to evaluate the media coverage given to a new collateral issue produced by the earthquake. The Government launched an energy emergency yesterday, as already mentioned in the precedent post. Fron the initial 2km evacuation order followed today an additional 10km evacuation order. At 3pm local time a huge explosion took place in one of the nuclear reactors. The news widespread quickly. Initial official reactions consider it a problem but under control. A new call for evacutation was immediately applied to 20km around the facilities. The press release by TEPCO by 3 pm did not mention the explosion. But soon later came a video aired by BBC news showing a huge blast in the nuclear facility. Fukushima is some 240 km away from Tokyo.

This is the contextual framework at the moment we checked and identified the news about the Fukushima nuclear explosion. There is a lot of incertitude, but also a lot of fears about the implications of this event. Panic word is emerging, altogether with Government calls to tranquility. We count with 900 news about the explosion, published till 11h30 am ECT. Our aim is to compare this very initial stage of media coverage of the Fukushima nuclear plant problems, and to compare it with global media coverage given to the Japan earthquake, and then also to the initial media coverage given to Wikileaks revelations.

Media coverage at this point makes difficult to disentangle the specific profile of how media is considering the Fukushima blast against the treatment given to the Japan earthquake, as they are intrinsically connected and share common press articles. All in all, marginal differences suggest the the Fukushima affaire is more associated than overall news about the Japanese disaster in “Tragedy” components related to harm and failure. The Japan earthquake predominates concerning horrible and worst.

We compare now the media coverage to Fukushima explosion against Wikileaks. As just mentioned, media profile of the nuclear explosion is very similar to the Japan disaster. Probably in the few next hours the nuclear explosion will acquire its own specific media profile. With the results at this point, and comparing it to news published about Wikileaks during the first month (December 2010), we first analyse differences concerning the brand vector “Scandal”. Wikileaks is more associated in general to scandal, even if some media voices start to critisize TEPCO role and conduit in past security nuclear alerts.

The brand vector “Tragedy” is at this point more strongly associated to Wikileaks than to Fukushima concerning the vector components tragedy and failure. Worst and harm are somehow more linked to Fukushima.

Results with new information will be more relevant, depending of course on the direction taken by the events after the blast in the nuclear facility. At this initial moment, reflecting an stage of doubts, questions and fears about something potentially extremely harmful, we conclude again by comparison that the media coverage given to Wikileaks related news and content was substantilly negative in terms of reputational impact.

Japan VIII. Wikileaks on Fukushima and the Japan Nuclear Crisis. Measurement of the Initial Media Storyline.

Japan VII.

Japan VI. Fukushima Second Explosion Media Perception Compared to First Blast

Japan V. Japan Earthquake Media Impact by Cities

Japan IV. Fukushima Nuclear Crisis Media Coverage Evolution

Japan III. Japan Earthquake Initial Media Coverage: Comparison with 2010 Disasters Haiti, Chile and Turkey Earthquakes

Japan II. Fukushima Explosion Media Coverage vs Wikileaks: Portraying Fears of an Unknown and Uncontrolled Disaster

Japan I. Japan Earthquake and Tsunami Vs Wikileaks: Media Coverage of Disasters

Egypt and Tunisia: Twin Wikileaks Stories? (II)

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As a first complement to our precedent post concerning the analysis of the political crisis in Egypt relying on Wikileaks media coverage, we compare the news profile of Tunisia and Egypt to Pakistan.

In the previous post we have shown that media portrays a different storyline of Wikileaks information from Tunisia and Egypt. As we conducted the same analysis presenting the Pakistan case well before in our blog, the aim of this post is to merger the three cases to show the differences and similarities on how media analyses each country profile when using Wikileaks sources.

Applying the comparative analysis, we find that the focus when referring to Pakistan is terrorism and corruption, while human rights and dictatorship issues dominate in Tunisia and Egypt media coverage. We confirm once again that Wikileaks does not generate an uniform set of issues and cocnerns in term of media coverage.

Moving to the graph that we presented in the precedent post as more in line with the current unrest and political crisis, the comparative analysis confirms that the use of Wikileaks sources is somehow “contaminated” by ongoing local events. By comparison, “unrest”, “violence” or “revolutionnaires”, or even “freedom” and “crisis” are unrelated to Pakistan Wikileaks news profile.

Egypt and Tunisia: Twin Wikileaks Stories? (I)

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In a recent post we showed some empirical results about what we considered the first political crisis after Wikileaks revelation of secret US Department Cables. Tunisia opened the new era where media counts with official documents on how the US diplomacy evaluate the political situation in every country.

Now, a fast developing political crisis takes place in Egypt. Up to now President Hosni Mubarak has removed entirely his Government, and has announced that he will not present as candidate in the next general elections, September 2011. President Mubarak has refused to quit the Presidency and the country, as he considers essential to conduct the transition in order to avoid chaos. Demonstrators still urge President Mubarak demission. There are clashes between partisans and opposition to Hosni Mubarak.

At this stage of the political crisis, not still closed, we present the results concerning the pieces of the storyline of the crisis in Egypt based exclusively on the news directly related to cables revealed by Wikileaks. This is the same exercise we ran with the Tunisia case.

As both the Egyptian and the Tunisian case are apparently extremely close in time, the country profile and the inception of the political unrest and crisis, we propose to show the Wikileaks news on Egypt by comparison with the Wikileaks news referring to Tunisia. This expercise offers us a quite nice check of how media uses and gives interpretation to the content of US Department cables. As the cases of the two countries are rather similar for a foreign reader (and probably also for some journalists) unfamiliar with the reality of both countries before the crisis started, we can address here the research question: do international media portray a similar picture for Egypt and Tunisia when referring to Wikielaks sources? As we have pointed out in many of our precedent posts, we do not assume the mission to elaborate or propose theoretical models from any field before presenting the empirical results. Our goal is just to provide empirical results to interested scientist and readers, as raw material for their own analysis and consideration.

We show then how international media publishing in English explain the situation in Egypt and Tunisia using Wikileaks sources. We follow the same approach used to analyse the case of Pakistan. We have also included a third set of observations, referring to the news where both countries are explicitly mentioned.

The empirical analysis we show is based in content analysis of some 3.000 articles about Egypt (with explicit mention to Wikileaks),  2.000 articles about Tunisia and 900 articles about Egypt and Tunisia together. Values in the graph are relative, and reflect the quantitative weight each issue has in the storilyne of the crisis and the secrets revealed.

First two graphs refer to terms that we consider that are basically showing how media depict the country politics and the Government based in the leaked cables. These terms should probable be those more in relation with the content of the secrets and confidential information revealed.

Our empirical results suggest clearly that the country and Government profile depicted when using Wikileaks sources is not homogeneous at all, as the weight of some terms changes dramatically in Tunisia and Egypt. The most extreme case is “Corruption”. It appears as the most present term in the Tunisian framework, while it counts some five times less in Egypt. In coherence with this result, a similar thing happens with the terms “Scandal” and “Bribe”. In the other side “Human Rights” and “Accontability” has a higger prevalence in Egypt than in Tunisia. As for the underlying economic conditions, it does not appear a clear picture: “Poverty” issues prevail in Egypt media coverage, while “Economic Crisis” is more present in Tunisia related news. “Terrorism” does not appear to be a key player in both countries and take a similar media attention.

 

The following results are  more related to the description of the ongoing political unrest and crisis, according to our understanding. We find again a specific media coverage for each country, even if the relevant issues are basically the same in both Egypt and Tunisia.

News related to “Freedom”, “Unrest”, “Riot” and “Conflict” prevail when explaining the crisis in Tunisia. “Chaos”, “Revolutionnaires”, “Violence”, “Demonstration” and “Concern” are much more associated to the crisis in Egypt.