What Motivates Some Ghanaian Private Media To Expose Political Corruption?

Abstract

The private media are often seen as a part of the corrupt network, particularly in developing countries considered corrupt. Using Giddens’s theory of structuration and data from in-depth semi-structured interviews, this article addresses a key question: What motivates some Ghanaian private media to expose political corruption? I argue that human agency and structural conditions are important in understanding whether the private media tackle political corruption. Whether the private media choose to expose political corruption depends on democratic freedoms, journalistic professionalism, financial considerations, personal experience, and political interests among different agents, including media owners, journalists, politicians, and business owners. The findings indicate that unless media owners and journalists are determined to address political corruption, the enabling structural conditions for the performance of media watchdog functions are meaningless. This study suggests that agents and, for that matter, human beings are not machines programmed to act only in certain ways based on structural conditions in which they are embedded. This article makes significant contributions to the literature in the fields of media, corruption, political science, and sociology.