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.
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 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.
The power of online media to influence New Zealand local government politics was made clear in 2013 when a blogger revealed that Len Brown, the popular mayor of Auckland, had conducted a two-year, extramarital affair. The mainstream media picked up the story, Brown's popularity collapsed and in late 2015 he announced he would not stand again for mayor. This media scandal was, in part, driven by the fact that Brown was a celebrity. Unlike several high-profile sex scandals involving politicians overseas, Brown's career did not survive the controversy, perhaps because the public came to regard him as a practised liar. The media itself engaged in self-serving scandalous activity during the controversy. Today's shock bloggers are similar to the proto-journalists of the 17th century. Members of new and old media researching the scandal treated their secret sources very differently. The existence of the internet means such scandals can now exist in perpetuity. If the Len Brown Affair was an example of the media fulfilling its watchdog role - by exposing a lying politician - it was also an example of journalists furthering their own ends - political and commercial - by appealing to their audiences' purient interests.
Successful transitions to enduring democracy are both difficult and rare. In Scandal and Democracy, Mary E. McCoy explores how newly democratizing nations can avoid reverting to authoritarian solutions in response to the daunting problems brought about by sudden change. The troubled transitions that have derailed democratization in nations worldwide make this problem a major concern for scholars and citizens alike. This study of Indonesia's transition from authoritarian rule sheds light on the fragility not just of democratic transitions but of democracy itself and finds that democratization's durability depends, to a surprising extent, on the role of the media, particularly its airing of political scandal and intraelite conflict. More broadly, Scandal and Democracy examines how the media's use of new freedoms can help ward off a slide into pseudodemocracy or a return to authoritarian rule. As Indonesia marks the twentieth anniversary of its democratic revolution of 1998, it remains among the world's most resilient new democracies and one of the few successful democratic transitions in the Muslim world. McCoy explains the media's central role in this change and corroborates that finding with comparative cases from Mexico, Tunisia, and South Korea, offering counterintuitive insights that help make sense of the success and failure of recent transitions to democracy.
After a nation has transitioned from authoritarianism to democracy, how are democratic norms most effectively fostered and maintained? This book uses as its case study Indonesia after the fall of the dictator Suharto to reveal that a contentious, even scandal-obsessed press can actually prove extremely useful for an emergent democracy. A society that can tolerate and protect journalists willing to expose corruption and scandal among elites is one, the author finds, in which ordinary citizens are willing to believe in and support other democratic institutions. Based on extensive interviews and research in Indonesia, this book offers a new and surprising perspective on the role of the press and the nature of scandal-driven journalism in fledgling democracies.
The ankle analyzes the media treatment of two sex scandals: the "Stormy Daniels scandal; which involved the current US President Donald Trump in 2018 and the "Ruby scandal; which involved Silvio Berlusconi in 2010, while he was Italy's Prime Minister. By combining both quantitative and qualitative methodologies the aim is to discover whether the media treatment is different, as we can expect since the two countries belong to two different media systems, or if, following the theory of Americanization of political communication, the Italian media will tend to emulate the American model. Furthermore, another aim of this study is to detect whether a shift towards a more Polarized Pluralist model can be identified in the USA, as some authors have started foreseeing. The results will show that both countries' media behave coherently with the traditional feature of their media system, the Polarized Pluralist and the Liberal.
The study focuses on two Slovak corruption cases, both well-documented and of similar social relevance, of which one did not receive any cross-media coverage. Moreover, the case of large-scale bribery was rather under-hyped in comparison to other major corruption scandals occurring in the country. The case of cronyism formed a typical example of extremely poor inter-media coverage of highly unfair and politicised cronyism. Through these cases, especially in the one in which the media failed to stimulate the creation of a full-blown scandal, the study further analyses the criteria and circumstances that determine the worthiness of a case for wide media coverage. The study on Slovakia is framed within theories of scandalous reporting and the theory of agenda setting and inter-media agenda setting role of the media, and supported by quantitative analysis of actual media coverage of the bribery case.
The study focuses on two Slovak corruption cases, both well-documented and of similar social relevance, of which one did not receive any cross-media coverage. Moreover, the case of large-scale bribery was rather under-hyped in comparison to other major corruption scandals occurring in the country. The case of cronyism formed a typical example of extremely poor inter-media coverage of highly unfair and politicised cronyism. Through these cases, especially in the one in which the media failed to stimulate the creation of a full-blown scandal, the study further analyses the criteria and circumstances that determine the worthiness of a case for wide media coverage. The study on Slovakia is framed within theories of scandalous reporting and the theory of agenda setting and inter-media agenda setting role of the media, and supported by quantitative analysis of actual media coverage of the bribery case.
Scholars have long been interested in political scandals. Yet many analyses focus on a single scandal to better understand the rhetorical features, responses, or effects. This study takes a different approach by studying how different media environments affect the nature of news reporting during political scandals. To do so, I specify three measurable parameters that detail the shifts from traditional to digital media: interactivity, personalization, and liveness. I use this framework to analyze two Hillary Clinton scandals that occurred in different media environments: Whitewater and the e-mail use scandal. The results indicate somewhat greater interactivity in the modern media era. Journalists are also increasingly personalizing their political scandal interpretations and having less contextualized and in-depth discussions. The implications of these shifts are discussed.
Some digital materials which are documentary of specific forms of social transgression comprise an apparent "market niche" for piracy. "Scandals" as unique commodities in the Philippines's informal market for pirated disks are quite distinct from other digital entertainment, being originally candid/unstaged or "stolen"/taken without their subject's knowledge and usually made to non-professional standards/equipment. Enterprisingly put on the market by pirate-entrepreneurs because of apparent consumer-audience interest in the content, such unique "reality" goods became conveniently available through networks of digital piracy outlets. In the context of consumption of pirated goods, the article reads "scandals" as expressive of everyday critique and resistance. The niche market for "scandals" functions as alternative media as these digital goods inherently evade government and (formal) corporate control as sources of news and entertainment. Indicators of the significance of "scandal" in the informal economy and the meaningful convergence between its piracy and consumer-audience demand are examined ethnographically: their translation into commodities through packaging, the range of sites for consumers to access "scandals," pirate-entrepreneurs' sales strategies and standards, and how the market behavior of these "scandals" apparently responded to the unfolding of the social scandals in real time as current events—events that themselves were influenced by the popular circulation and piracy of these commodities. Three cases that took place between 2005–2009—"Hello Garci," the "Kat/Kho sex scandals," and the "Maguindanao massacre" DVD—serve as diverse examples, each with their own issues of authenticity, morality, and social effects consequent to piracy and consumption.
Despite the potential for conflict between news media's idealised socio-political role and its practical commercial role, a qualitative content analysis of the coverage of the 2012 Libor scandal in four newspapers, The Times (London), The Financial Times, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, revealed that these aspects of news media are in fact complementary. Although it is often argued that the commercial function of news media is prioritised over its social and political roles, the commercial aspects of the coverage of the Libor scandal did not overwhelm or significantly compromise the political watchdog role of the media. In fact, the unexpectedly large divide in coverage between the UK newspapers and the US newspapers signifies that the divide between domestic and foreign news is significantly more important than the divide between news media's idealised socio-political role and its commercial aspects. The unexpected similarities between specialist and mainstream publications significantly contributed to this divide between domestic and foreign news. This suggests that scandals represent a unique case in which dramatic mass interest imperatives combine with critical public interest imperatives. The results of the analysis suggest that an equal fulfilment of both watchdog and newsworthiness imperatives – demonstrated by the UK press – can offer a comprehensive investigation of, and increase public concern for, issues within an international scandal. A strong emphasis on news values and construction of a personalised narrative by these newspapers enabled the scandal to attract and maintain audience attention. Their coverage also featured a strong emphasis on the morality of the scandal and used official political sources in order to inform the public of something they needed to know. In contrast, a lack of fulfilment of both watchdog and newsworthiness imperatives – demonstrated by the US press – can result in a weakening of public attention and debate about foreign issues that directly affect domestic political and economic policy. The US coverage failed to emphasise news values or construct a personalised narrative, which stripped the scandal of resonance. It failed to aggressively question the individuals involved and demand official investigations, failed to emphasise the substantive social impact, and used a limited range of sources. This resulted in the US press failing to construct a scandal frame.
During scandals, observers relying on media coverage tend to attribute their perception of triggering events not to their depiction by the media but to the events depicted. A cause of this misattribution is insufficient distinctions between grievances and scandals. A consequence is erroneous conclusions from the number of scandals to the number of grievances—and vice versa. A second consequence is false notions about the likelihood that the framing of grievances as scandals really trigger scandals. A third consequence is—because the media seldom report negative side effects of scandals—biased balances of the costs and benefits of scandals. Necessary are distinctions of four levels of actions: the levels of depicted events, of media depictions of events, of perceptions of events by the public, and of the impact of these factors on related behavior of decision makers in politics, business, science, and so forth.
