Democracy, the public sphere, and power elites: examining the Ghanaian private media’s role in political corruption
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Can media liberalization and freedoms make the private media a powerful anti-corruption force in developing countries such as Ghana? Contrary to the popular view that media freedom, pluralism, and competition can help tackle corruption, I argue that democratic freedoms are not adequate safeguards for private media to fight political corruption. In doing so, I use primary data and media reports, Habermas’s theory of the public sphere, and Mills’s theory of power elites. Despite Ghana’s prevailing democratic freedoms, this study indicates that Ghanaian private media actively contribute to political corruption through biased reporting, propaganda peddling, indulgence in corruption, weak investigative journalism, and limited follow-up reporting. By examining whether Habermas’s theory of the public sphere and Mills’s theory of the power elites apply to the African context, this article makes significant contributions to both the theoretical and empirical literature. Policy and future research implications are presented in the conclusion.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".