Framing Corruption News under the Authoritarian Shadow: The Case of Vietnam

• In Event: Central-Local and State-Society Relations in China and Vietnam

Abstract

This paper explores the heterogeneity in coverage of corruption news in Vietnam. To do this, I employ Iyengar’s (1996) model of framing responsibility: newspapers can report corruption either as an individual malfeasance or an organizational problem. I posit that in the case of Vietnam, a newspaper's choice of frame - be it individual-focused or organizational-focused, is contingent upon its ownership, as well as its sources and scales of funding. I argue that, on the one hand, given their profit-oriented nature and greater susceptibility to state censorship, non-official Vietnamese newspapers are incentivized to adopt individual-focused framing in order to prevent directing criticisms toward the autocratic government. On the other hand, official newspapers are more likely to use organizational-focused framing. As mouthpieces of the Party-government, they are acutely aware of reporting boundaries and can employ this frame without harming the Party-state. Additionally, framing corruption as a structural issue allows the Vietnamese Communist Party and its government to advertise an image of transparency and efficiency, hence improving their legitimacy among the public. To test this theory, I employ topic modeling and regression analysis to analyze the content of news articles on corruption published by six major Vietnamese online newspapers from 2010 to 2020.

Author

• Duong Thi Thuy Pham, University of California, San Diego