Revisiting Tangentopoli 30 Years Later: Why Have the Media Shifted from Party Collateralism to Adversarial Reporting?

17thFebruary, 2022 marked the 30thanniversary ofTangentopoli, the most important cor-ruption scandal in Italian history. In this study we will attempt to reconstruct the contro-versial role of the media in the scandal in order to provide insights that help to understandthe existing link between journalism and corruption. Based on a Bourdieusian perspective,wewilltrytoseehowvariousfactors, exogenousandendogenous, haveproducedpressuresboth in terms of autonomy and heteronomy to the journalistic field. The proposed analy-sis will be both theoretical and empirical, with data retrieved from journalistic coverage ofthe time. Unlike media- and political-centric approaches, which tend to produce mono-causal explanations, the article sheds light on the interplay of different factors (political,economic, judicial and media-related) that made the scandal ofTangentopolipossible.