‘A building of shame and disgrace’ or ‘trial by media’? Media framing of KPMG Netherlands’ head office
研究荷兰媒体如何通过报道KPMG总部大楼来问责审计行业，揭示媒体框架如何放大指控、压制行业声音并推动改革。
This paper centers on the role that a material artefact—KPMG Netherlands’ head office—has played in the Dutch media’s attempt to hold the audit profession to account. It employs the literatures on news framing and the media’s social control function, to analyze how the press mobilized the building as a perceived space that epitomized extant professional conduct. Using a strategy of temporal bracketing, the paper traces how an initially weak claim against KPMG amplified and expanded after successive revelations, which ultimately triggered a criminal investigation into charges of fraud, tax evasion, and forgery. The paper shows the media’s ability to construct and enact reporting frames that suppress voices from the audit field and that set a reform agenda for both firm and profession. It also reveals the contrast between the values that audit firm offices seek to convey and those they come to embody in the eyes of the public.