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Fourteen Norwegian politicians, subject to scandalizing media exposure, were interviewed about their experiences, reactions, and ways of coping. The participants expressed deep feelings of injustice and powerlessness related to the proportion of the coverage, the journalistic practices, and the use of anonymous statements. Most significant were the extent of the exposure, attacks on personal and moral attributes, harmful effects on significant others, and betrayal by political colleagues. It was difficult to publicize their own version of the story or correct dubious facts. They experienced stress both in direct encounters with media and related to the reactions of their family members, friends, and colleagues. Long-term effects were loss of trust in others and avoidance of public exposure. Media coping strategies included approaching personal media contacts, counterattacks, and keeping a low profile. Emotional coping strategies involved conducting business as usual and self-control instructions.

Despite its importance in contemporary American politics, presidential scandal is poorly understood within political science. Scholars typically interpret scandals as resulting from the disclosure of official misbehavior, but the likelihood and intensity of media scandals is also influenced by the political and news context. This article provides a theoretical argument for two independent factors that should increase the president's vulnerability to scandal: low approval among opposition party identifiers and a lack of congestion in the news agenda. Using new data and statistical approaches, I find strong support for both claims. These results suggest that contextual factors shape the occurrence of political events and how such events are interpreted. Adapted from the source document.

Despite its importance in contemporary American politics, presidential scandal is poorly understood within political science. Scholars typically interpret scandals as resulting from the disclosure of official misbehavior, but the likelihood and intensity of media scandals is also influenced by the political and news context. This article provides a theoretical argument for two independent factors that should increase the president's vulnerability to scandal: low approval among opposition party identifiers and a lack of congestion in the news agenda. Using new data and statistical approaches, I find strong support for both claims. These results suggest that contextual factors shape the occurrence of political events and how such events are interpreted.

In a Requiem for Media Jean Baudrillard described the civil war in Timisoara, Romania, in 1989. He discovered that the war was to a large extent instigated by the mass media. Nowadays, the media have the possibility to decontextualize events and objectify them by placing them in a different context, alongside other decontextualized events. This could be very dangerous and lead to serious national security problems. Media could provoke social turbulence and "real" crimes. My aim in this paper is to describe this problem and show possible solutions. While following the methodology adopted, I examine case studies and analyze specific historical events.

Purpose
– This study aims to explore the causes and consequences of media scandals involving nursing homes for older persons in Canada, Norway, Sweden, the UK and the USA.


Design/methodology/approach
– This study uses a descriptive case-study methodology which provides an in-depth, focused, qualitative analysis of one selected nursing home scandal in each jurisdiction. Scandals were selected on the basis of being substantive enough to potentially affect policy. An international comparative perspective was adopted to consider whether and how different social, political and economic contexts might shape scandals and their consequences.


Findings
– This study found that for-profit residential care provision as well as international trends in the ownership and financing of nursing homes were factors in the emergence of all media scandals, as was investigative reporting and a lack of consensus around the role of the state in the delivery of residential care. All scandals resulted in government action but such action generally avoided addressing underlying structural conditions.


Research limitations/implications
– This study examines only the short-term effects of five media scandals.


Originality/value
– While there has been longstanding recognition of the importance of scandals to the development of residential care policy, there have been few studies that have systematically examined the causes and consequences of such scandals. This paper contributes to a research agenda that more fully considers the media's role in the development of residential care policy, attending to both its promises and shortcomings.

In March of 1912, Farley Drew Caminetti and Lola Norris fled to Reno to avoid scandal. Shortly after their arrival, police arrested Caminetti and charged him with violating the Mann Act. The act stemmed from public hysteria over the forced prostitution of young women, termed "white slavery." Immediately following Caminetti's arrest, the press saw the potential for scandal in his story. It included an important element of gossip – socially unacceptable sex. More importantly, Caminetti was the son of the newly appointed Federal Commissioner General of Immigration. The Wilson Administration scrambled to cover up the scandal. Their attempt, however, only reaped more scrutiny as it interfered with the judicial process. Over the course of the case, the media's muckraking did significant damage to the reputation of anyone who threatened the Mann Act. In their final decision, the Supreme Court upheld and expanded the act. Both Congress and the Supreme Court were unwilling to take on the Mann Act's expansion even as it created and aided blackmailing groups. As blackmail continued, public opinion ostracized the Mann Act for the first time in its history. By synthesizing newspapers, court cases and government documents, my project concludes that Caminetti's scandal demonstrates the growing power of media in politics during the Progressive Era. The media effectively dominated the conversation by scrutinizing anyone who posed a threat to the Mann Act. While the media's actions protected the Mann Act from government dissent, they ultimately turned public opinion against the act by supporting its expansion which aided blackmailers. While many historians emphasize the power of Progressive Era muckrakers as reformers, my project reveals how the media's scandals actually inspired government inaction and public dissent through debauched legislation. It speaks to the power of national media in dominating and corrupting the political process.

Fourteen Norwegian politicians, subject to scandalizing media exposure, were interviewed about their experiences, reactions, and ways of coping. The participants expressed deep feelings of injustice and powerlessness related to the proportion of the coverage, the journalistic practices, and the use of anonymous statements. Most significant were the extent of the exposure, attacks on personal and moral attributes, harmful effects on significant others, and betrayal by political colleagues. It was difficult to publicize their own version of the story or correct dubious facts. They experienced stress both in direct encounters with media and related to the reactions of their family members, friends, and colleagues. Long-term effects were loss of trust in others and avoidance of public exposure. Media coping strategies included approaching personal media contacts, counterattacks, and keeping a low profile. Emotional coping strategies involved conducting business as usual and self-control instructions.

First of all we wish to reveal certain universally-structuralist qualities, same as culturally-relative features of scandals and their mediation in a non-Western society. Secondly, we will illuminate how the mass media take active part in processing political issues in Japan, where as anywhere else in the media-saturated modern industrial world politicians significantly depend on the media (and vice versa); where political live shows and news programs – including scandals – became an important force, at times driving public sentiment while eventually generating support for opposition; and where wealth and its surplus is in evitably tied to a higher potential to grasp and secure power. We will then proceed to the main part of the paper, where we focus more closely on Japanese political scandals whereby preparing theoretical ground for a discourse analysis in the scandal case study of Ozawa Ichirō – one of the most powerful political heavyweights, and simultaneously one of the epitomes of political corruption in Japan.1 In our endeavor we were motivated by the fact that there exists plethora of literature on scandals in the west, but a detailed media discourse analysis of Japanese scandals is still lacking in academia worldwide.

This article offers a comparative study of three media scandals arising from two types of leaks: official ones (the Monedero Case and the Pujol Case) and those originating from citizens (the Falciani List). Official leaks are carried out by elites and respond to private/partisan interests. Citizens' leaks come from anonymous individuals who deliver huge databases to the media for journalistic treatment. Our objective is to analyse the coverage received by both types of leaks in the Spanish press. The results show the use of official leaks as a political weapon in Polarized Pluralism media systems. Scandals based on citizens' leaks, which refer to transnational problems with greater ramifications, receive less attention. We discuss the extent to which the polarization of conventional political communication has increased and the future of new formats of information based on citizens' digital participation in an emerging Networked Fourth Estate.

This article offers a different view of media scandals than the one that is prevalent in the West. In many countries (and partially also in the West), corruption scandals respond mainly to a logic of instrumentalization: They come to light and occupy the front pages of newspapers and privileged slots on television news because they are occasions and tools to attack political and business competitors following the logic of what John Thompson calls the "politics of trust." With findings from a series of studies on media corruption, the article explores how instrumentalization drives the coverage of corruption cases in new and transitional democracies.

When political scandals erupt in the press, we usually blame misconduct by public officials, but these episodes are political events whose occurrence and severity also depend in part on the political and media context. Using data on U.S. governors, I show that several key factors affect the likelihood and intensity that alleged misconduct will be politicized by the opposition and publicized by the press. First, lower approval ratings, which decrease the cost of politicizing and publicizing an allegation, are generally associated with more frequent and intense media scandals. By contrast, competing news events can crowd potential scandals off the news agenda. However, no evidence is found that opposition control of state political institutions leads to more media scandal. These results suggest that the occurrence of media scandal depends more on circumstance than we typically assume.

Introduction; Key concepts in media and scandal studies (Part I); Political context and media dynamics of scandals (Part II); Scandals and journalistic practices (Part III); Themes and settings of media and scandal (Part IV); Consequences and legacies of media scandals (Part V); Chapter 1: Media and scandal; Scandal-saturated societies; Scandals in the digital society; Scandals and globalization in the network society; The consequences of scandals; Conclusions; References