Accountability Journalism and Corporate Illegality: An Application of Institutional Anomie Theory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research on the watchdog role of newspapers mainly analyzes the relationship between firm coverage by major newspapers and target firms’ engagement in wrongdoing or negative repercussions. Yet, the dwindling presence of newspapers amidst the past two decades illuminates a distinct need to examine differences observed in the macro-level media landscape. To this end, we advance research on the institutional determinants of corporate illegality by drawing on institutional anomie theory which highlights the role of non-economic institutions in balancing out excessive economic influences on illegality. Applying the key arguments of the theory to the behavior of firms from 29 countries, we first find that firms headquartered in countries with higher newspaper reach are less likely to engage in corporate illegality. Yet, such a pattern is less pronounced when a country is characterized by strong cultural pressure to succeed or the penetration of economic influences into newspapers. Firm-level shareholder orientation, however, did not mitigate the negative association between newspaper reach and illegality. Based on these results, we discuss the importance of analyzing macro-level media landscapes and related institutional conditions that compromise newspapers as social control agents.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".