Dataset for Media framing of integrity scandals and institutional legitimacy in global esports

This dataset supports the manuscript “Media framing of integrity scandals and institutional legitimacy in global esports”. It contains a purposively selected corpus of 50 publicly accessible news reports and institutional communications concerning 12 esports integrity case clusters, published between 17 January 2015 and 20 March 2024. The corpus includes 47 media items and three institutional communications from 34 source labels. The Excel workbook contains three worksheets: “Corpus”, with item-level records and final coding assignments; “Códigos”, with the Spanish codebook, category definitions and case descriptions; and “Resumen”, with formula-linked descriptive summaries. Each record includes a stable identifier, publication date, source, source location, URL, original headline, infringement category, game or competitive setting, principal actor, Spanish summary, primary frame and secondary frame. The material covers betting-related controversies and match manipulation, cognitive stimulant use, digital performance manipulation, hacks and cheats, exploit abuse, identity substitution and competitive cyberattacks. The source material comprises 49 English-language items and one German-language item. Variable labels, coding definitions and summaries are provided in Spanish. The dataset contains the authors’ coding and summaries, source URLs and original headlines. Full third-party article texts are not redistributed. The sample is exploratory and does not represent the prevalence of misconduct across esports. Separate independent coder-rating records are not included, and numerical intercoder reliability estimates are not provided.