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Online Public Response to Dutch News About Money Laundering

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Abstract

In this paper we analyze how Dutch Public Prosecution’s press releases about money laundering and underground banking are received by producers and consumers of online news reports. First we take a closer look at how journalists (re)framed six official press releases in 75 news reports. It turns out that journalists do not regularly adopt the success frame that the Public Prosecution uses in its press releases. Furthermore, the role of the Public Prosecution Service or the police is downplayed. The moral message that “crime should not pay” receives no coverage in news reports. Second, we analyze how the news reports generated 276 online comments. We distinguish three ways in which online commenters respond to news reports; they (1) appreciate, (2) downplay or (3) condemn the authorities’ success. Commenters are particularly likely to downplay or condemn the police’s success. When a news report focuses on ‘underground bankers’, commenters often express a negative opinion about the effort to curb money laundering. It also appears that readers did not always understand the use of a term like underground banking.

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Notes

  1. Article 1 of Council Directive 91/308 EC; Directive 2001/97/EC; and Directive 2005/60/EC.

  2. We originally collected eight press releases, but two press releases did not result in articles that included online comments. These press releases (number 3 and 8) were removed from the corpus.

  3. Lexis Nexis is a database of (online) news reports. We used Google to find articles based on the chosen press releases on more popular news websites and online forums.

  4. For instance, if the title of the press release was “20 million euros confiscated in fight against underground bankers”, we searched using the following keywords: ‘20 million’, ‘confiscated’, ‘underground bankers’ and ‘underground banking’.

  5. The photos merely served as an illustration to the title but had no real bearing on the case. For instance, a report on money laundering would show the cliché image of euro bills on a clothes line.

  6. These categories are not clearly distinct, but often overlap. Moreover, the categories comprise only those comments in which commenters give their opinions about money laundering, penalties, government institutions or the court system.

  7. All translations in this article are ours. In order to make the translations reflect the original Dutch comments as much as possible, we sometimes maintained grammatical or spelling mistakes in our translations.

  8. For readability purposes, all commenters will be treated as males and will be referred to as ‘he’.

  9. Although not explicitly stated, “rented house” (huurwoning) often refers to social housing.

  10. Gerrit Zalm is the former Dutch Minister of Finance and now works as the CEO of the Dutch bank ABN AMRO.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Language, Literature and Communication (Faculty of Humanities), VU University, De Boelelaan 1105, 1085 HV, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Romy M. Veul

  2. Department of Languages, Literature and Communication (Faculty of Humanities), Utrecht University, Trans 10, 3512 JK, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Tessa C. van Charldorp

  3. Central Intelligence Division, Research & Analysis, The National Police of the Netherlands, Postbus 891, 2700 AW, Zoetermeer, The Netherlands

    Melvin R. J. Soudijn

Authors
  1. Romy M. Veul
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  2. Tessa C. van Charldorp
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  3. Melvin R. J. Soudijn
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Correspondence to Melvin R. J. Soudijn.

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Veul, R.M., van Charldorp, T.C. & Soudijn, M.R.J. Online Public Response to Dutch News About Money Laundering. Eur J Crim Policy Res 23, 227–244 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10610-016-9315-0

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