Africa: The Dangerous Watchdog – allAfrica.com

How corruption shapes support for media scrutiny in Africa

“Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants,” U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously said, referring to the belief that vigorous reporting on corruption helps citizens hold their leaders accountable and punish wrongdoers. Yet the politics of exposure is rarely so simple, especially where corruption is entrenched, and rulers have incentives and/or power to manage what the public sees.

South Africa offers a textbook example supporting the view that the press should act as a watchdog: Years of media investigations and independent ombud reporting helped publicise state-capture abuses and contributed to President Jacob Zuma’s eventual resignation in 2018 (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, n.d.).

However, when sunlight burns, exposure can feel perilous rather than purifying. Across the continent, many citizens view the negative reporting of government wrongdoing as harmful rather than beneficial to their country. One possible explanation for this is that when corruption is high, governments may take more stringent measures to suppress reporting that might be embarrassing to them, such as framing critical journalism as divisive, unpatriotic, and a threat to the public good (Teplyashina & Golubev, 2019). Citizens may internalise these cues, expressing concern about the harm of reporting on corruption or political failure.

This possibility motivates this paper’s central hypothesis that where corruption is high, citizens are more likely to view reporting on government mistakes and corruption as harmful to the country. Put differently, corruption may shape not only the supply of news (through censorship or self-censorship) but also the demand for scrutiny – public support for watchdog journalism itself.

Accordingly, the paper addresses two core questions: (1) What do Africans think about media involvement in investigating and reporting government wrongdoing? (2) How is corruption related to citizens’ views on media reporting of government wrongdoing? I test the hypothesis and address the questions by conducting a multilevel logistic regression analysis based on Afrobarometer Round 9 (2021/2023) data from 39 African countries. The aim is to bring citizens’ attitudes into a discussion that often focuses on institutions, newsroom practices, and content framing (Stapenhurst, 2000; Solis & Antenangeli, 2017; Fadairo, Fadairo, & Aminu, 2014; Quayle & West, 2025).

The results show that most Africans want the press to investigate and report on government mistakes and corruption. However, the relationship between corruption and support for media scrutiny is nuanced. At the country level, citizens in countries with weaker corruption control are more likely to say that reporting on government wrongdoing harms the country. If corruption can erode support for investigative reporting, it weakens an important accountability mechanism precisely where it is most needed. However, a very different outcome emerges when we examine perceptions of corruption at the individual level: Those who perceive corruption as widespread are more likely to support media reporting on the issue, indicating that they are less likely to share concerns about potential detrimental effects of media exposure of corruption on the country’s image.

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