Media framing in Wirecard’s fraud scandal: Facts, failures, and spying fraudster fantasies

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to investigate how fraud scandals are portrayed by the media. While accounting research predominantly explored the role of the media in fraud scandals in terms of their ‘watchdog’ function, how fraud scandals are portrayed by the media has been under-explored in the accounting literature. Drawing on Entman’s and Goffman’s seminal works on frames and framing, we examine the revelatory case of the Wirecard 2020 fraud scandal. Through an abductive analysis of 795 newspaper articles, we identify six frames that differ in selection and salience and that prevail in media coverage to varying degrees. Across these frames, our findings show that not only the selection of certain fraud aspects through bounding and contextualization becomes key, but also how selected aspects are made salient to readers by means of articulation through rhetoric and stylistic devices. Media frames that endure over time utilize rhetoric that is emotional, sensational, and judgmental to evoke feelings of outrage, shock, and fascination which are selectively connected to fraud victims, top managers as perpetrators, and the malpractice of auditing institutions. Our findings shed light on how the media can direct attention through specific frames with which they may steer and shape public opinion about the responsibilities of selected corporate and institutional stakeholders as well as related calls for reforms. Our research contributes to a social construction view of fraud scandals and draws further attention to the media’s ambiguous role as social-control agent.