The Routledge Companion To Media And Scandal 0815387598, 9780815387596, 1351172980, 9781351172981

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Half Title......Page 2
Title Page......Page 4
Copyright Page......Page 5
Table of Contents......Page 6
List of figures......Page 11
List of tables......Page 12
Contributors......Page 13
Introduction......Page 26
Key concepts in media and scandal studies (Part I)......Page 27
Political context and media dynamics of scandals (Part II)......Page 28
Scandals and journalistic practices (Part III)......Page 29
Themes and settings of media and scandal (Part IV)......Page 31
Consequences and legacies of media scandals (Part V)......Page 33
Chapter 1: Media and scandal......Page 35
Scandal-saturated societies......Page 36
Scandals in the digital society......Page 38
Scandals and globalization in the network society......Page 40
The consequences of scandals......Page 41
Conclusions......Page 44
References......Page 45
PART I: Key concepts in media and scandal studies......Page 48
Evolution of scandals......Page 50
Durkheimian sociology......Page 51
Tribal politics and moral leadership......Page 54
The new public sphere......Page 56
References......Page 57
Defining scandal......Page 59
Case studies of policy scandals......Page 62
References......Page 68
Chapter 4: Moral panics......Page 71
A half-century of change......Page 72
Four unresolved epistemological issues......Page 73
Conclusion: abandon the concept, continue the agenda......Page 77
References......Page 78
Chapter 5: Scandals and agenda setting......Page 80
Agenda setting and scandals in the period 2005–2014......Page 82
Agenda setting and scandals in the age of fake news, bots, and computational propaganda......Page 84
References......Page 87
Chapter 6: Mediatization and political scandal......Page 92
The institutional logic of mediatization......Page 93
The network logic of mediatization......Page 95
The political logic of mediatization......Page 97
References......Page 99
News values......Page 101
A brief history of scandal......Page 102
Scandal: a definition......Page 103
The functions of scandal......Page 105
Political scandal in authoritarian societies......Page 107
Conclusion......Page 108
Notes......Page 109
References......Page 110
Gatekeeping theory......Page 111
Social media gatekeepers......Page 114
The value of scandal......Page 116
References......Page 117
Accountability deficits in new democracies......Page 120
Social accountability or the broadening of O´Donnell´s notion of limited government......Page 122
Social accountability and political scandals......Page 125
References......Page 127
Media coverage of political scandals......Page 129
Framing theory and its application to scandal research......Page 130
How the media frame scandals: evidence from the plagiarism scandal of the German Secretary of Defense......Page 132
Conclusion......Page 135
References......Page 137
Introduction......Page 140
Four misunderstandings of fake news......Page 141
Digital disinformation in the Philippines......Page 143
Conclusion and discussion: fake news and scandal......Page 148
References......Page 149
PART II: Political context and media dynamics of scandals......Page 152
Chapter 12: New Nordic noir: political scandals as drama and media hunts......Page 154
Scandals, news competition and media dramaturgy......Page 155
The increasing incidence of mediated Nordic scandals......Page 156
The effects and consequences of scandals......Page 158
Gender and political scandals......Page 159
Discussion and conclusion......Page 160
References......Page 161
Chapter 13: Political scandal and kompromat: manufactured outrage from Russia......Page 163
History of politicized scandal in Russia......Page 164
Putin and politicized scandal......Page 166
The export of kompromat......Page 167
Towards a model of politicized scandal......Page 168
Conclusions......Page 169
References......Page 170
Scandalogy and right-wing populism......Page 172
Right-wing populism and the media logic......Page 174
Social media logic and populist scandals......Page 175
Conclusions......Page 177
References......Page 178
Chapter 15: Corruption scandals and the media system......Page 181
Market-driven corruption scandals......Page 182
“Custodians of conscience” media scandals......Page 184
Politically oriented corruption scandals......Page 185
References......Page 188
Chapter 16; Social media and scandal......Page 190
What makes a scandal?......Page 191
Arrival of social media......Page 192
What this means for the future......Page 195
References......Page 196
National differences in exposure......Page 199
The Finnish case: the symbiosis of news media, tabloids, and gossip magazines......Page 201
From symbiosis to softening boundaries......Page 203
The normalization of sex scandals......Page 204
References......Page 206
The centrality of talk in the dramatization of political scandals......Page 208
Talk as a scandal in itself......Page 209
Talk scandals and the transformations of mediated politics......Page 211
The negotiation and destabilization of norms and moral values......Page 212
The mediation of political performances......Page 214
The power and methods of journalism......Page 215
References......Page 216
Chapter 19: Legal contexts in reporting scandal in the United States, the United Kingdom and Russia......Page 218
Historical legal context of reporting scandal in the USA......Page 219
Legal justifications for reporting scandal......Page 220
The News of the World phone hacking scandal......Page 222
The legal context of reporting scandal in Russia......Page 223
References......Page 225
Chapter 20: Unreported scandals: the power of personality and legal bluster......Page 227
Case study two: Lance Armstrong......Page 228
Libel threats......Page 229
The media blind eye......Page 231
The lone reporter......Page 232
Conclusion......Page 233
References......Page 234
PART III: Scandals and journalistic practices......Page 238
Sunlight, the best disinfectant......Page 240
Dawn of sunshine......Page 241
Effects on society......Page 242
Watchdogs with bite......Page 243
Threats to transparency......Page 244
Opportunities for openness......Page 245
References......Page 246
Chapter 22: Transnational investigative journalism and scandal......Page 250
The foundations of transnational investigative journalism......Page 251
Transnational investigative journalism in the twenty-first century......Page 253
Scandalous topics......Page 254
Conclusion......Page 256
References......Page 257
A brief history of television media stings in India......Page 261
Media economics and television stings......Page 263
Diffusion and normalization of sting-generated scandals......Page 265
Implications of sting-generated scandals for the Indian media landscape......Page 267
References......Page 268
What is entrapment journalism?......Page 270
Reasons for journalistic entrapment......Page 271
Methods of entrapment......Page 272
Perspectives on entrapment journalism......Page 274
Concluding remarks......Page 276
References......Page 277
Introduction......Page 279
A taxonomy of whistleblowing cases as scandals......Page 280
Whistleblowing and scandal: the igniting match and the fire......Page 282
Networked journalists, networked whistleblowers, networked scandals......Page 284
Conclusion......Page 285
References......Page 286
Chapter 26: Data journalism and the promise of transparency......Page 288
A promise of transparency......Page 289
Historical background of data journalism......Page 290
A new division of labor......Page 291
A shift of epistemologies?......Page 292
Involving citizens in the making of scandals......Page 294
References......Page 295
Introduction......Page 298
WikiLeaks: history and background......Page 299
Transparency, ambiguity and WikiLeaks......Page 300
Understanding scandals: “political scandals” versus“ scandal politics”......Page 302
WikiLeaks as a continuum between politics and scandals......Page 303
Conclusion......Page 304
References......Page 305
Defining political scandal......Page 307
Mediated visibility as constructed and contested......Page 308
A shifting news media landscape?......Page 310
Scandal mining in the context of the 2015 Canadian federal election......Page 311
Discussion and considerations for future research......Page 313
References......Page 315
PART IV: Themes and settings of media scandals......Page 318
Chapter 29: Surveillance scandals and the systemic crisis of the public......Page 320
From scandals to crisis......Page 321
Key actors and their challenges......Page 323
Conclusions......Page 326
References......Page 327
Chapter 30: Scandal and celebrity......Page 329
The nature of celebrity news......Page 330
Theories of interest in bad behavior......Page 331
The Weinstein scandal......Page 332
The Cosby scandal......Page 333
The complicity machine and other barriers to reporting......Page 334
Discussion......Page 335
References......Page 337
Chapter 31: Reframing the gender gap in American political sex scandals in the #MeToo era......Page 340
Sexual harassment and political sex scandals......Page 342
Deconstruction strategies: the congressman’s letter......Page 344
Appendix......Page 346
References......Page 347
Introduction: the sport of scandal......Page 349
Sport and the culture of scandal......Page 350
Cricket’s lost spirit......Page 354
Future scandals......Page 355
References......Page 356
Introduction......Page 358
The scandal of phone hacking......Page 359
Deflecting and diverting scandal......Page 361
Hypocrisy and hype......Page 363
Conclusion: corruption and competition as easy bedfellows......Page 364
References......Page 365
Introduction......Page 367
Latency......Page 368
Reaction......Page 370
Amplification and accountability......Page 372
Conclusion: the humanitarian scandal and the #MeToo movement......Page 373
References......Page 376
Introduction......Page 379
Three phases of mediatized war......Page 380
Scandals and the military......Page 381
Security scandals and military sex scandals in the age of diffused and arrested war......Page 382
Discussion......Page 384
References......Page 385
Scandal as political communication......Page 387
Sex trafficking scandals and U.S. elections......Page 388
Sex trafficking: Scandal, moral panic, or modern-day slavery?......Page 389
Conclusion: sex trafficking, scandal, and conspiracy......Page 391
References......Page 393
Chapter 37: Race scandals as racial projects......Page 395
Racism as scandal......Page 396
Racialized scandals......Page 398
Race scandals in a digital age......Page 399
The future of race scandals......Page 402
References......Page 403
Introduction......Page 405
Defining scandal in the context of science......Page 406
Example cases: nuclear power and fracking......Page 407
Conclusion......Page 410
References......Page 411
Religious and media understanding of scandal......Page 414
Types, frequency, and impact of religious scandals......Page 415
The impact of reporting religious scandal......Page 416
Predictable framing and narrative structure......Page 418
Rhetorical responses to scandal......Page 419
Misunderstanding of religion......Page 420
References......Page 422
Defining the domain of corporate scandal......Page 424
Self-inflicted corporate scandalization......Page 427
Outside-initiated corporate scandalization......Page 429
References......Page 432
Chapter 41: Corporate scandals as denial of reputation......Page 435
From Enron to Volkswagen: research on corporate scandals and the media......Page 436
The public sphere: where corporate scandals unfold......Page 438
Three dimensions of corporate scandals......Page 439
Corporate scandals in the digital age......Page 440
References......Page 441
PART V: Consequences and legacies of media scandals......Page 444
Skimmington rides again......Page 446
‘Public ridicule and contempt’......Page 447
Sexual-political scandals......Page 449
‘Baddest man on the planet’......Page 450
‘Moral bindingness’......Page 451
Targeting shame and scandalmongering......Page 453
‘Stoking the fires of hatred’......Page 454
Scandal sets the agenda......Page 455
‘The age of contempt’......Page 456
References......Page 457
Electoral effects of political scandal coverage......Page 458
Contextualizing political scandal effects......Page 459
Scandal fatigue and the absence of media effects......Page 465
Future directions in political scandal research......Page 466
References......Page 467
Public responses to political scandals......Page 470
Media effects in scandals......Page 473
Digital media and political scandals......Page 475
Concluding remarks......Page 477
References......Page 478
The attitudinal consequences of corruption scandals......Page 481
The electoral consequences of corruption scandals......Page 482
Why do citizens vote for corrupt politicians?......Page 483
Conclusion: the way ahead......Page 486
References......Page 488
Chapter 46: Media priming effects and ethical ambivalence in corruption scandals......Page 491
Why voters support corrupt politicians......Page 492
The problem of who is observing what and how, when measuring perceived corruption......Page 493
External influence on perceptions: media contents and media priming effects......Page 495
A reasoned (re)action: social priming and corruption tolerance......Page 496
References......Page 497
Chapter 47: Protecting public perception: responding to scandal using Benoit’s image repair theory......Page 500
Conceptualizing image repair theory......Page 501
Contextual approaches to image repair research......Page 503
Generalizations and future directions for image repair research......Page 505
References......Page 506
Introduction......Page 510
Rituals, temporality and interrelatedness......Page 511
To play the leading role in an ongoing media scandal......Page 512
Concluding remarks......Page 516
References......Page 518
Chapter 49: Scandal and the law......Page 519
Law and scandal: a complex relationship......Page 520
Privacy law and scandal: preserving elites or protecting privacy?......Page 522
Defamation law, scandal and public discourse......Page 523
Injunctions: still keeping secrets?......Page 526
‘Forgetting’ a scandal: a new role for the law online......Page 527
References (all websites last visited 12 October 2018)......Page 528
Chapter 50: Why scandals (might) be good for democracy......Page 531
The effect of scandals on democracy......Page 532
The potentially positive effects of scandals on democracy......Page 533
Directing attention to issues......Page 534
Systemic corrections......Page 535
Future research questions......Page 536
References......Page 537
Index......Page 540

Citation preview

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO MEDIA AND SCANDAL

The Routledge Companion to Media and Scandal brings together, in one volume, different concepts used in analysing various dimensions of scandals so as to understand media practices and journalism in different countries and cultures. The distinctiveness of the companion is that it encompasses a variety of subject areas: Communication, Media, Journalism Studies, Law, Sociology, Cultural Studies, International Politics, Criminology. The chapters are theoretically pluralist and take various historical and critical approaches to provide an understanding of mediated scandals. The companion is therefore both interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary. Individual essays examine universal principals of scandal making and also culturally specific ideas allowing for varying perspectives and international comparisons. The Routledge Companion to Media and Scandal is divided into five parts: Part I Key concepts in media and scandal studies Part II Political context and media dynamics of scandals Part III Scandals and journalistic practices Part IV Themes and settings of media scandals Part V Consequences and legacies of media scandals With contributions from both leading and emerging scholars, The Routledge Companion to Media and Scandal is essential reading for students and academics in journalism, media studies and communication. Howard Tumber is Professor in the Department of Journalism at City, University of London, UK. He is a founder and co-editor of Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism. He has published widely in the field of the sociology of media and journalism. Silvio Waisbord is Professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, USA. He was the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Communication, and he has published widely on news, politics and social change.

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO MEDIA AND SCANDAL

Edited by Howard Tumber and Silvio Waisbord

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business  2019 selection and editorial matter, Howard Tumber and Silvio Waisbord; individual chapters, the contributors. The right of Howard Tumber and Silvio Waisbord to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Tumber, Howard, editor. | Waisbord, Silvio R. (Silvio Ricardo), 1961- editor. Title: The Routledge companion to media and scandal / edited by Howard Tumber and Silvio Waisbord. Description: 1 Edition. | New York : Routledge, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018052715 (print) | LCCN 2019006979 (ebook) | ISBN 9781351173001 (ebook) | ISBN 9780815387596 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781351173001 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Social media. | Scandals. Classification: LCC HM742 (ebook) | LCC HM742 .R68 2019 (print) | DDC 302.23/1—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018052715 ISBN: 978-0-8153-8759-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-17300-1 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK

CONTENTS

List of figures x List of tables xi Contributors xii Introduction Howard Tumber and Silvio Waisbord

1

  1 Media and scandal Howard Tumber and Silvio Waisbord

10

PART I

Key concepts in media and scandal studies

23

  2 Scandal and social theory Scott Brenton

25

  3 Media coverage of political scandals: effects of personalization and potential for democratic reforms Marion R. Just and Ann N. Crigler

34

  4 Moral panics Rodney Tiffen

46

  5 Scandals and agenda setting Sharon Meraz

55

  6 Mediatization and political scandal Bingchun Meng

67 v

Contents

  7 Scandal and news values Brian McNair

76

  8 Selecting scandal: how legacy and social media gatekeep the news Elizabeth Stoycheff

86

  9 Scandals and social accountability Enrique Peruzzotti

95

10 Media framing of political scandals: theoretical framework and empirical evidence Jürgen Maier, Carolin Jansen and Christian von Sikorski 11 Fake news and scandal Jason Cabañes, C. W. Anderson and Jonathan Corpus Ong PART II

104 115

Political context and media dynamics of scandals

127

12 New Nordic noir: political scandals as drama and media hunts Sigurd Allern and Ester Pollack

129

13 Political scandal and kompromat: manufactured outrage from Russia Sarah Oates

138

14 Right-wing populism, media and political scandal Juha Herkman and Janne Matikainen

147

15 Corruption scandals and the media system Paolo Mancini

156

16 Social media and scandal Gina Masullo Chen

165

17 The shifting boundaries of elite and tabloid media in political sex scandals Esa Väliverronen and Laura Juntunen 18 Talk scandals: the power of mediated talk Mats Ekström and Bengt Johansson 19 Legal contexts in reporting scandal in the United States, the United Kingdom and Russia Lyombe Eko vi

174 183

193

Contents

20 Unreported scandals: the power of personality and legal bluster Judith Townend PART III

202

Scandals and journalistic practices

213

21 Scandals and freedom of information David Cuillier

215

22 Transnational investigative journalism and scandal Michael Bromley

225

23 Media stings and the normalization of scandal in India Kalyani Chadha

236

24 To bark or to bite? Journalism and entrapment Zohar Kampf

245

25 From Snowden to Cambridge Analytica: an overview of whistleblowing cases as scandals Philip Di Salvo 26 Data journalism and the promise of transparency Sylvain Parasie 27 Caught between transparency and scandal-making: conceptualising WikiLeaks Benedetta Brevini and Jorge Valdovinos 28 Scandal mining and socially mediated visibility Daniel Trottier PART IV

254 263

273 282

Themes and settings of media scandals

293

29 Surveillance scandals and the systemic crisis of the public Risto Kunelius and Adrienne Russell

295

30 Scandal and celebrity Linda Steiner

304

31 Reframing the gender gap in American political sex scandals in the #MeToo era Hinda Mandell vii

315

Contents

32 Scandals and sport David Rowe

324

33 The scandalous power of the press: phone hacking in the UK Natalie Fenton

333

34 #AidToo? The 2018 humanitarian scandals in Oxfam GB and Save the Children UK Glenda Cooper

342

35 Scandals and the armed forces Mark Blach-Ørsten and Anker Brink Lund

354

36 Sex trafficking and scandal Gretchen Soderlund

362

37 Race scandals as racial projects Maryann Erigha

370

38 Scandals in science Heather Akin

380

39 Scandals, media and religion Paul A. Soukup

389

40 Corporate scandalization process: unpacking the corporate scandal W. Timothy Coombs and Sherry J. Holladay

399

41 Corporate scandals as denial of reputation Daniel Vogler and Mark Eisenegger

410

PART V

Consequences and legacies of media scandals

419

42 Shame and scandal: making the personal political Julian Petley

421

43 Scandal, media effects and political candidates Clarisse Warren and Dona-Gene Barton

433

44 Scandals, media effects and public opinion Francis L. F. Lee

445

viii

Contents

45 The political consequences of corruption scandals: main findings and challenges Macarena Ares, Sofía Breitenstein and Enrique Hernández 46 Media priming effects and ethical ambivalence in corruption scandals Roberto de Miguel Pascual and Rosa Berganza 47 Protecting public perception: responding to scandal using Benoit’s image repair theory Kenon A. Brown, Qingru Xu and Melanie Formentin

456 466

475

48 The routinization of media scandals Maria Grafström and Karolina Windell

485

49 Scandal and the law Gavin Phillipson

494

50 Why scandals (might) be good for democracy Brandon Rottinghaus

506

Index 515

ix

FIGURES

  3.1   3.2   3.3   3.4 10.1 34.1 40.1

Percentage of Stories Negative to Primary Accused, by Scandal Sensationalism Score (1–5), by Scandal Attribution of Blame (Personalization), by Scandal Personalization Bias Across Scandals Use of Implicit and Explicit Attack and Defense Frames over Time Coverage of Aid Agencies, Scandal and Abuse, 2008–2018 Corporate Scandalization Process

x

38 39 40 41 111 349 401

TABLES

  3.1 10.1 10.2 10.3 12.1 18.1 25.1 47.1

Analysis of Four Contemporaneous Political Scandal Cases Indicators of the Elements of the Attack and the Defense Frame Number of Frames Used by Newspapers Use of Implicit and Explicit Attack and Defense Frames by Newspapers Incidence of National Political Scandals in Four Nordic Countries 1980–2016 Types of Scandals A Taxonomy of Whistleblowing Cases as Scandals Image Repair Theory Response Strategies

xi

38 108 109 109 132 185 256 477

CONTRIBUTORS

Heather Akin is Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources at the University of Missouri. Her research focuses on political communication and public opinion, specifically related to science, health, and environmental issues. Sigurd Allern is Emeritus Professor of Journalism Studies at the Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo. He has been a visiting professor at Stockholm University, Volda University College, and Sciences Po Toulouse, and is affiliated to the Department of Media Studies, Stockholm University as a media researcher. His publications include books and articles on journalism and news values, the political economy of the news media, lobbyism and the relations between PR and journalism, political communication, election debates, and political scandals. C. W. Anderson is Professor of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds, and the author or co-editor of five books: Rebuilding the News (Temple University Press), Remaking the News (The MIT Press), The Sage Handbook of Digital Journalism (Sage), Journalism: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press), and Apostles of Certainty: Data Journalism and the Politics of Doubt (Oxford University Press). Macarena Ares is a post-doctoral researcher at the Political Science Department in the University of Zurich, with a focus on Political Sociology and Behaviour. She obtained her PhD from the European University Institute in Florence. Her doctoral research focused on the link between social class and political preferences and behaviour in post-industrial societies. She is currently part of the WELFAREPRIORITIES project, which studies citizens’ priorities regarding social policy reforms. In her research she has also addressed the determinants of public support for politicians, the government, and the European Union (among other things). Dona-Gene Barton is Associate Professor and Graduate Chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA. Drawing heavily on relevant psychological perspectives while keeping the real world of politics in sight her work focuses on the better understanding of how and how well citizens use political information to inform their judgements. Her current projects explore the temporal dynamics of opinion formation, information xii

Contributors

seeking, and information avoidance in the political sphere and the causes and consequences of political perceptions. Her research has appeared in numerous journals, including the American Journal of Political Science, Political Psychology, and Electoral Studies. Rosa Berganza is Professor and Chair of Journalism and Political Communication at the Faculty of Communication in King Juan Carlos University (Madrid, Spain). Her research interests include: comparative journalism; journalists’ practices and perceptions; big data and journalism; methodology of research in journalism; and gender studies and political communication. Her research has been funded by several science foundation grants as well as grants from the EU research programmes. She is a member of the editorial board of several international scientific journals such as Journalism Studies. Mark Blach-Ørsten is Professor of Journalism at Roskilde University in Denmark. His research interests include political journalism, political scandals, media ethics, and media credibility. His most recent publications include a co-authored article on political scandals in Scandinavia, published in the International Journal of Communication (2018), and a co-authored article on journalism scandals and ethics, published in Journalism Studies (2018). Sofía Breitenstein is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Her dissertation assesses under what conditions voters support corrupt politicians. She is a member of the Democracy, Elections, and Citizenship research group and of the POLEXP network on experimental Political Science research. Her dissertation research is funded by an FPI grant (BES-2015-072756) by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity and the European Social Fund. Scott Brenton is Senior Lecturer in Political Science and Public Policy at the University of Melbourne in Australia. He is the author of The Politics of Budgetary Surplus: Ideology, Economic Governance and Public Management Reform (Palgrave 2016) and co-editor of Constitutional Conventions in Westminster Systems: Controversies, Changes and Challenges (Cambridge University Press 2015). Scott has also published several journal articles in different disciplines, including sociology. Benedetta Brevini is Senior Lecturer in Communication and Media at the University of Sydney and Visiting Fellow of the Centre for Law, Justice and Journalism at City, University of London. She writes on The Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’ and contributes to a number of print and web publications including Index of Censorship, openDemocracy, and the Conversation. She is the author of Public Service Broadcasting Online (Palgrave 2013) and editor of the acclaimed volume Beyond Wikileaks (Palgrave 2013). Her latest volumes are Carbon Capitalism and Communication: Confronting Climate Crisis (Palgrave Macmillan 2017) and Climate Change and the Media (Peter Lang 2018). Michael Bromley is an honorary member of the Centre for the Study of Journalism and History at the University of Sheffield. A former journalist, he worked in universities in Australia, the UK, and the USA, and was head of the School of Journalism and Communication, University of Queensland (2007–12) and head of the Department of Journalism, City, University of London (2014–16). He has published widely on journalism and the news media over almost 30 years. He is a contributor to The Routledge Companion to Media and Human Rights and is co-author with Vera Slavtcheva-Petkova of Global Journalism: An Introduction (2019). xiii

Contributors

Kenon A. Brown is Associate Professor and the graduate coordinator for the Department of Advertising and Public Relations at the University of Alabama, and the 2017 recipient of the Early Career Research Award from the International Communication Association’s Sports Communication Interest Group. His research interests include image and reputation management, particularly in sports, and minority recruitment in mass communication. Kenon is also the programming director for the Alabama Program in Sports Communication and works closely in multiple capacities with several sport and entertainment organizations, including the International Olympic Committee, Twitch, FOX Sports, NASCAR, and the Country Music Association. Jason Cabañes is Associate Professor in Communication and Research Fellow of the Social Development Research Center at De La Salle University – Manila in the Philippines. In the British Council-funded Newton Tech4Dev Network, he co-led the research stream on digital labour in the global South. He has previously co-authored a chapter on the rise of trolling in the Philippines in the book A Duterte Reader. He has also published in top-tier journals such as Journalism Studies, New Media and Society, and Media, Culture and Society. Kalyani Chadha is Associate Professor at the University of Maryland’s Merrill College of Journalism. Her research interests are broadly centred on the media and journalism landscape in India, the implications of new technologies on newsroom practice, as well as issues related to media globalization. Her work has appeared in journals such as Journalism Studies, Journalism Practice, Media, Culture and Society, and the Journal of Media Ethics. She is a co-founder of the Journalism Interactive conference that seeks to bridge the gap between academics and practitioners, and she serves on the editorial boards of Journalism Practice and Digital Journalism. Gina Masullo Chen is Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Assistant Director of the Center for Media Engagement, both at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on the online conversation around the news and how it influences social, civic, and political engagement. She is the author of Online Incivility and Public Debate: Nasty Talk and is the co-editor of Scandal in a Digital Age. She is currently writing her third book, The New Town Hall: Why We Engage Personally with Politicians. W. Timothy Coombs is the George T. and Gladys H. Abell Professor in Liberal Arts in the Department of Communication at Texas A&M University and is an honorary professor in the Department of Business Communication at Aarhus University. His primary areas of research are crisis communication and CSR. He is the current editor of Corporation Communication: An International Journal. His research has appeared in Management Communication Quarterly, Public Relations Review, Corporate Reputation Review, Journal of Public Relations Research, Journal of Communication Management, Business Horizons, and the Journal of Business Communication. Glenda Cooper is Lecturer in Journalism at City, University of London. Her research centres on humanitarian disasters, the relationship between aid agencies and journalists, and ethical issues surrounding the use of user-generated content. She is the author of Reporting Humanitarian Disasters in a Social Media Age (Routledge 2018) and co-editor of Humanitarianism, Communications and Change (Peter Lang 2015). Before that, she was the 14th Guardian Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, and a staff journalist at the BBC, Independent, Daily Mail, Washington Post, Sunday Times and Daily Telegraph.

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Contributors

Ann N. Crigler is Professor of Political Science at the University of Southern California. She has published numerous books, articles, and essays on political communication, elections, emotions, and political behaviour. Her co-authored and edited books include: Common Knowledge: News and the Construction of Political Meaning; Crosstalk: Citizens, Candidates and the Media in a Presidential Campaign; The Psychology of Political Communication; Rethinking the Vote: The Politics and Prospects of American Election Reform; and The Affect Effect: Dynamics of Emotion in Political Thinking and Behavior. Her current research examines social media in US elections, emotions and political decision-making, and civic engagement. David Cuillier is Associate Professor at the University of Arizona School of Journalism and was a reporter and editor at newspapers in the Pacific Northwest before earning his doctorate at Washington State University. He is a board member of the National Freedom of Information Coalition, a former national president and freedom of information chair of the Society of Professional Journalists, and has testified numerous times before the U.S. Congress regarding the Freedom of Information Act. He is co-author with Charles N. Davis of The Art of Access: Strategies for Acquiring Public Records and Transparency 2.0: Digital Data and Privacy in a Wired World. Mark Eisenegger is Full Professor at the Department of Communication and Media Research at the University of Zurich and President of the Research Institute for the Public Sphere & Society also at the University of Zurich. His main research areas are media change, quality in journalism, and organizational communication. He is especially interested in how digitization is transforming the public sphere and how this process affects organizations and journalism. At the moment Mark is leading a research project on the quality of journalism in an international context and a project on media effects in organizational crises. Lyombe Eko is Professor of Journalism and Electronic Media at the College of Media and Communication and is a Humanities Fellow at Texas Tech University. He is a journalist and programme translator. He teaches courses in media law, media ethics, media theory, and contemporary issues in information technology and international communication. His research interests are comparative media law and policy, international communication, and visual communication. He earned his PhD in Journalism from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. He has published four books and numerous book chapters, law review journal articles, and peer-reviewed articles on comparative and international communication. Mats Ekström is Professor at the Department of Journalism, Media and Communication, University of Gothenburg. His research focuses on media discourse, conversation in institutional settings, journalism, and political communication and participation. Recent publications include ‘Right-Wing Populism and the Dynamics of Style’ (Palgrave Communications 2018, with M. Patrona and J. Thornborrow); ‘Social Media, Porous Boundaries, and the Development of Online Political Engagement among Young Citizens’ (New Media & Society 2018, with A. Shehata); The Mediated Politics of Europe: A Comparative Study of Discourse (Palgrave 2017, with J, Firmstone). Maryann Erigha is Assistant Professor at the University of Georgia and jointly appointed in the Department of Sociology and the Institute for African American Studies. She received an MA and PhD in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania and is the author of The Hollywood Jim Crow: The Racial Politics of the Movie Industry.

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Natalie Fenton is Professor of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London, where she is the co-director of Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre and the Centre for the Study of Global Media and Democracy. Natalie’s research addresses issues relating to news and journalism, civil society, political resistance, and democracy and the media. She is Chair of the Media Reform Coalition and for seven years was Vice Chair of the Board of Directors for the campaign group Hacked Off – both of which campaign for a free, plural, and accountable media. Her latest book is Digital, Political, Radical (Polity 2016). Melanie Formentin is an assistant professor of Public Relations in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University. She teaches undergraduate courses in public relations including introductory, writing, and campaigns courses. She also teaches qualitative methods and crisis communication on graduate-level courses. Her research focuses on ethical corporate social responsibility practices and crisis communication, particularly in a professional sport context. She earned her bachelor’s degrees in psychology and public relations and her master’s degree in strategic communication from the University of South Florida and her doctorate in mass communication from The Pennsylvania State University. Maria Grafström is Associate Professor in Business Studies at the Stockholm Centre for Organizational Research, Stockholm University and Stockholm School of Economics. Her research focuses on the mediatization of organizations, the organization of business media, and how media participate in creating and circulating ideas and shape organizational agendas (e.g. development within the field of corporate responsibility and business ethics). Juha Herkman is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland. His latest research project studied the relationship between populism and the media in the Nordic countries. Formerly Herkman worked as a full-time lecturer of Media Studies at the University of Tampere, Finland. His research interests have focused on popular culture, political economy of the media, and political communication. Herkman has published several academic textbooks in Finnish, and articles in such journals as Media, Culture & Society, Javnost: The Public, Nordicom Review, Journalism Studies, Convergence, and Acta Sociologica. Enrique Hernández is a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Political Science at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, where he is a member of the Democracy, Elections and Citizenship research group. He completed a PhD in Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute in 2016. Enrique’s main research interests are in political attitudes, public opinion, electoral behaviour, and political participation. His work has been published in Comparative European Politics, Electoral Studies, the European Journal of Political Research, European Union Politics, and Research & Politics. Sherry J. Holladay is Professor of Communication at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. Her research interests include crisis communication, issues management, corporate social responsibility and irresponsibility, and activism. Her work has appeared in Public Relations Review, Management Communication Quarterly, Journal of Communication Management, Journal of Public Relations Research, and International Journal of Strategic Communication. She is coeditor of the Handbook of Crisis Communication and co-author of It’s Not Just PR: Public Relations in Society, Public Relations Strategies and Applications: Managing Influence, and Managing Corporate Social Responsibility.

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Carolin Jansen is a post-doctoral researcher at HdM Stuttgart Media University, Germany. In her current research, she focuses on political communication, in particular content and linguistic patterns of disinformation, as well as its distribution in social networks. In addition, she is currently engaged in a cross-national comparative analysis of frames in media reporting. Bengt Johansson is Professor in Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. His research and teaching focus is on political communication and crisis communication. Among his latest publications are ‘Struggling for the Upper Hand: News Sources and Crisis Communication in a Digital Media Environment’ (Journalism Studies, with Tomas Odén), ‘Expressing Opinions about the Refugee Crisis in Europe: The Spiral of Silence and Crisis Communication’ (Journal of International Crisis and Risk Communication Research), and the edited volume (together with Christina Holtz-Bacha) Election Posters around the Globe (Springer). Laura Juntunen is a former news journalist and a PhD student in communication studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Her research interests include journalism ethics and media selfregulation as well as changing practices of news journalism. In particular, she has done research on professional ethics in the context of political scandals, crisis journalism, PR and social media. Marion R. Just is Professor Emerita of Political Science at Wellesley College and an Associate at the Shorenstein Centre on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where she also serves on the Advisory Board. Her research focuses on elections, politics, and the media. She is a co-author of Crosstalk: Citizens, Candidates and the Media in a Presidential Campaign and Common Knowledge: News and the Construction of Political Meaning. She is a co-editor of Twitter in Elections around the World, The Routledge Handbook of Political Advertising, Framing Terrorism: The News Media, the Government and the Public and other books and articles. Zohar Kampf is Associate Professor of Communication at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His main interest lies in the multifaceted ties between media, language, and politics. He is the author of two books: Transforming Media Coverage of Violent Conflicts: The New Face of War (Palgrave 2013) and Media at Times of War and Terror (Modan 2012, with Tamar Liebes). He has also written more than 50 chapters and articles for leading communication and discourse journals. He is currently the associate editor of the Journal of Pragmatics. Risto Kunelius is Professor of Journalism at the Faculty of Communication Sciences, University of Tampere, Finland. His work has focused on journalism and political power, professionalism and the public sphere, as well as on the coverage of critical global issues (climate change, surveillance, free speech). Recent books are Media and Global Climate Knowledge: Journalism and the IPCC (Palgrave 2017) and, on surveillance and journalism, Journalism and the NSA Revelations: Privacy, Security, and the Press (Reuters Institute/I.B.Tauris 2017). Francis L. F. Lee is Director and Professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, Chinese University of Hong Kong. He works in the areas of journalism studies, political communication, and social movement studies. He is the lead author of Media and Protest Logics in the Digital Era: The Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong (Oxford University Press 2018) and Media, Social Mobilization and Mass Protests in Post-Colonial Hong Kong (Routledge 2011). He is also currently Chief Editor of the Chinese Journal of Communication and Associate Editor of Mass Communication and Society.

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Anker Brink Lund is Professor of Media Management at Copenhagen Business School. He holds an MA in Political Science and a PhD in Strategic Communication. His primary research interests are civil society studies, stakeholder relations, and media lobbyism. Among his more quoted research contributions are ‘Media System, Public Knowledge and Democracy: A Comparative Study’ (The European Journal of Communication 2009, with James Curran, Shanto Iyengar, and Inka Salovaara-Moring) and ‘A Stakeholder Approach to Media Management’ in Managing Media Firms and Industries (Springer 2016). Jürgen Maier is a professor of Political Communication at the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany. His research focuses on the content and the impact of political communication with an emphasis on televised debates, negative campaigning, and political scandals. Paolo Mancini is Full Professor at the Dipartimento di Scienze Politiche, Università di Perugia. His major publications include Politics, Media and Modern Democracy with David Swanson (Praeger 1996), Elogio della lottizzazione (Laterza 2009), Between Commodification and Lifestyle Politics: Does Silvio Berlusconi Provide a New Model of Politics for the Twenty-First Century? (2011), and Il post partito ( 2015). In 2004 with Dan Hallin, Mancini published Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics (Cambridge University Press). This book won the 2005 Goldsmith Book Award from Harvard University, the 2005 Diamond Anniversary Book Award of the National Communication Association, and the 2006 Outstanding Book Award of the International Communication Association. Hinda Mandell is Associate Professor in the School of Communication at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York and is the author of Sex Scandals, Gender and Power in Contemporary American Politics (Praeger 2017), co-editor of Scandal in a Digital Age (Palgrave 2016), and co-editor of the anthology, Nasty Women and Bad Hombres: Gender and Race in the 2016 US Presidential Election (University of Rochester Press 2018). She researches news coverage of scandal, and her essays on the topic have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, USA Today, the Boston Herald, Palm Beach Post, Politico, and in academic journals, including Women’s Studies in Communication, Visual Communication Quarterly, and Explorations in Media Ecology. Janne Matikainen is Lecturer in Media and Communication Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland. His expertise is concentrated on the social aspects of the internet and his research focuses on interaction in online communication, online participation, and contentgeneration motives in social media. In recent years, he has studied the relationship between traditional and social media, especially from the audience’s perspective. Matikainen has published several academic textbooks in Finnish, and articles in such journals as Media & Communication, Mobile Media & Communication, and Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies. Brian McNair has held chairs of journalism, media, and communications at the Universities of Stirling and Strathclyde in the UK and at Queensland University of Technology in Australia. He is the author of 15 books on media related topics, and hundreds of articles for scholarly journals, edited collections, newspapers, and websites. His books have been translated into 22 languages, including Mandarin, Japanese, Spanish, Greek, Korean, Polish, and Russian. His most recent books are Fake News (Routledge 2018), An Introduction to Political Communication (Routledge 2017, 6th edition), and Communication and Political Crisis (Peter Lang 2016).

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Bingchun Meng is an associate professor in the Department for Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she also directs the Programme in Global Media and Communications. Her research interests include the political economy of media industries, copyright and communication, comparative communication research, and feminist media studies. She has published widely on these subject matters in top communication journals. Her book The Politics of Chinese Media: Consensus and Contestation, was published by Palgrave in early 2018. Sharon Meraz is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Meraz’s work resides in the interplay of political communication, networked journalism, and mass media theory. Her work has explored political activism and political engagement online in such social media platforms as blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and online political discussion groups. She examines the evolution of mass media effect theories, leveraging social network analytic methods to the evolving media ecology. Her published work includes research on such emerging theoretical premises as networked gatekeeping, networked framing, network agenda setting, memetics, and virality. Roberto de Miguel Pascual is Professor in the School of Communication Sciences at King Juan Carlos University (Madrid, Spain). His main research interests include theory of communication, public opinion, political communication, and methods and techniques of communication research. He has participated in nine national competitive projects and two international ones. He has a wide scientific production in communication sciences and social sciences. He is the author of five monographs related to research on human communicative phenomena. Sarah Oates is Professor and Senior Scholar at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, College Park. A former journalist, she is a political communication professor with 25 years of experience in analysing media production, content, and audiences. A major theme in her work is the way in which the traditional media and the internet can support or subvert democracy in places as diverse as Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Jonathan Corpus Ong is Associate Professor in Global Digital Media in the Department of Communication, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA. He is the co-editor-in-chief of the journal Television and New Media and is the founder of the British Council funded ‘Newton Tech4Dev Network’. He is the author of the book The Poverty of Television (Anthem 2015), co-editor of the volume Taking the Square (Rowman & Littlefield 2016), and co-author of the public report ‘Architects of Networked Disinformation: Behind the Scenes of Troll Accounts and Fake News Production in the Philippines’. Sylvain Parasie is Professor of Sociology at University of Paris-Est (France) and is a researcher at LISIS (an interdisciplinary lab on science, innovation, and society). His research explores the interplay between technology, news organizations, and democracy, based on qualitative and computational methods. In the last decade, he has conducted fieldwork, mostly in the USA and France, on the legal regulation of the media, digital innovation in news organizations, and the emerging relationships between journalism and computer science. He also contributes to the definition of new computational methods in sociology. He teaches ‘sociology of the internet’ and ‘sociology of digital communication’.

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Enrique Peruzzotti is Chair of the Department of Political Science and International Studies of Torcuato Di Tella University and an Independent Researcher of CONICET. He specialises in populism, democratic accountability and Latin American politics. His most recent publications are ‘Theorizing Regime Change in Latin America: Transitions, Revolutions, Constitutions’, Constellations. An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory, 24; ‘Conceptualizing Kirchnerismo’, Partecipazione e Conflitto, 10(1); and ‘Populism as Democratization’s Nemesis: The Politics of Regime Hybridization’, Chinese Political Science Review. Julian Petley is Professor of Journalism at Brunel University. He is the editor of Media and Public Shaming (I.B. Tauris/Reuters Institute 2013) and a co-author, with James Curran and Ivor Gaber, of Culture Wars: The Media and the British Left (Routledge 2018, 2nd edition). A former Chair of the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, he is a member of the editorial board of the British Journalism Review and of the advisory board of Index on Censorship. He is currently working on a book about press freedom in Britain for Routledge. Gavin Phillipson has been a professor of law since 2007, previously at Durham and now at Bristol University. His expertise includes privacy, libel, and comparative free speech law. He is author with Helen Fenwick of the leading text, Media Freedom under the Human Rights Act (Oxford University Press 2006), and has published widely in top UK, US, Canadian, and Australian journals. His work on privacy has been cited by the highest courts in the UK and New Zealand. He worked on the Ministry of Justice’s report on Libel Reform (2011) and Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights cited his evidence on the topic extensively. Ester Pollack is Associate Professor of Journalism Studies at the Department of Media Studies, Stockholm University and is deputy head of the department. Her research combines sociological and historical perspectives on the relations between journalism and politics. Pollack has specialized on the development of Swedish crime journalism and criminal policy and the police’s role as a news source. Her publications include articles on political scandals, lobbyism, and think tanks, and the role of the Swedish press in the years before and during the Second World War. Brandon Rottinghaus is Professor and the Pauline Yelderman Endowed Chair in the Department of Political Science at the University of Houston. His primary research and teaching interests include the presidency, the media, public opinion, executive-legislative relations, and research methods. His work on these subjects has appeared in dozens of journals, edited volumes, and law review articles, and in several books. David Rowe is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Research, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University; Honorary Professor, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Bath; and Research Associate, Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy, SOAS University of London. His books include Global Media Sport: Flows, Forms and Futures (2011); Sport, Public Broadcasting, and Cultural Citizenship: Signal Lost? (2014), and Making Culture: Commercialisation, Transnationalism, and the State of ‘Nationing’ in Contemporary Australia (2018). David’s work has been translated into several languages, including Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Korean, Spanish, and Turkish. Adrienne Russell is Mary Laird Wood Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington. She is the author of Networked: A Contemporary History of News xx

Contributors

in Transition (2011) and Journalism as Activism: Recoding Media Power (2016) and is the co-editor of Journalism and the NSA Revelations (2017) and International Blogging: Identity, Politics (2009). She studies the intersection of emerging technologies and pressing social problems, with an eye towards innovations that may bolster public life. Her research has been published in Critical Studies in Media Communication, International Journal of Communication, New Media and Society, and Journalism: Theory, Practice, and Criticism, among others. Philip Di Salvo is a post-doctoral researcher based at the Institute of Media and Journalism at the Università della Svizzera italiana (Lugano, Switzerland) and lecturer at NABA –Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti (Milan, Italy). He conducts research on whistle-blowing, surveillance, and the relationship between journalism and hacking, and teaches journalism both at the bachelor and master level. Philip received his PhD in 2018 in Communication Sciences from the Università della Svizzera italiana with a dissertation about the adoption of encrypted whistleblowing platforms in journalism. As a freelance journalist, Philip writes frequently for Wired, Motherboard/Vice, Esquire, and other publications. He also works as the Italian editor of the European Journalism Observatory. Christian von Sikorski is an assistant professor of political psychology (tenure track) at the Department of Psychology, University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany. Before joining University of Koblenz-Landau he was a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Communication, University of Vienna, Austria. His research focuses on political psychology and the contents and effects of political communication with a special focus on political scandals and terrorism news coverage. Gretchen Soderlund is Associate Professor of Media History in the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication. She is the author of Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism, 1885–1917 (University of Chicago Press) and editor of ‘Charting, Tracking, and Mapping: New Technologies, Labor, and Surveillance’, a special issue of Social Semiotics. Her articles have appeared in such journals as American Quarterly, Feminist Formations, The Communication Review, Humanity, and Critical Studies in Media Communication. Paul A. Soukup, S.J., has explored the connections between communication and theology since 1982. His publications include Communication and Theology (1983), Christian Communication: A Bibliographical Survey (1989), and Media, Culture, and Catholicism (1996). In addition, he and Thomas J. Farrell have edited four volumes of the collected works of Walter J. Ong, S.J., Faith and Contexts (1992–99), as well as An Ong Reader (2002) and Of Ong & Media Ecology: Essays in Communication, Composition, and Literary Studies (2012). A graduate of the University of Texas at Austin (PhD 1985), Soukup teaches in the Communication Department at Santa Clara University. Linda Steiner is Professor in the College of Journalism at the University of Maryland and is the editor of Journalism & Communication Monographs. Her recent co-authored or co-edited books include Key Concepts in Critical-Cultural Studies (2010), The Routledge Companion to Media and Gender (2013), The Handbook of Gender and War (2016), Race, News, and the City: Uncovering Baltimore (2017); and Journalism, Gender and Power (2019). She has published over 100 book chapters and refereed journal articles. She worked for a small newspaper before earning her PhD at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. xxi

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Elizabeth Stoycheff is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and an affiliate faculty of the Center for the Study of Citizenship at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. Her research examines news construction in the digital age and the role that new and legacy media play in democratization. She is a Scripps Howard Social Media fellow and was named a Promising Professor by the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication. Her work is regularly published in flagship communication journals and has been featured in mainstream media outlets, including The Atlantic and The Washington Post. Rodney Tiffen is Emeritus Professor in Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney. His most recent book is Disposable Leaders: Media and Leadership Coups from Menzies to Abbott (2017). One of his earlier books was Scandals: Media, Politics and Corruption in Contemporary Australia (1999). Judith Townend is Lecturer in Media and Information Law at the University of Sussex. Previously, she was Director of the Information Law and Policy Centre at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London. Her research concerns freedom of expression and open justice. Current interests include the funding of public interest journalism, access to courts’ data, and the protection of journalistic sources. She was co-editor of Media Power and Plurality (Palgrave 2015, with Steven Barnett) and has written for a range of academic journals and media publications. Daniel Trottier is Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communication at Erasmus University Rotterdam. His current research considers the use of digital media for the purposes of scrutiny, denunciation, and shaming. Daniel is the Principal Investigator of a fiveyear NWO-funded project on this topic, and has authored several articles in peer-reviewed journals on this and other topics, as well as Social Media as Surveillance (Ashgate 2012), Identity Problems in the Facebook Era (Routledge 2013), and Social Media, Politics and the State (Routledge 2014, co-edited with Christian Fuchs). Jorge Valdovinos is a PhD candidate in the Department of Media and Communication, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, The University of Sydney. His research interests circle around the complex and multifaceted connections between digital technologies and culture. He combines insights from different disciplines including media studies, critical discourse analysis, political economy, and continental philosophy, in order to look at the evolution of key concepts across various traditions of thought. He has recently written on the topics of transparency and the emergence of aesthetic capitalism. Esa Väliverronen is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Helsinki, Faculty of Social Sciences. His research interests include media theories, journalism and social studies of science. He has written extensively on science communication and environmental communication. Currently he leads a project on Public Expertise and Freedom of Expression. Daniel Vogler is Head of Research at the Research Institute for the Public Sphere & Society at the University of Zurich and is a research associate at the Department of Communication and Media Research also at the University of Zurich. In his research he focuses on organizational communication, public relations, political communication, and journalism. He is especially

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interested in the effects of media on organizations and how digitization is transforming communication from and about organizations. Daniel is completing a PhD on the topic of reputation in higher education and is working on a project on media effects in organizational crises. Clarisse Warren is a doctoral student in the Department of Political Science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA. She studies political psychology and biopolitics within the American political system. Her research includes work on the role of motivated reasoning in relation to incongruent and scandalous information, individual differences in political attitudes and behaviour between liberals and conservatives, and biological responses to political information. Karolina Windell is Associate Professor in Business Economics at Stockholm University and previously worked as a researcher at Score at Stockholm University/Stockholm School of Economics as well as the Department of Business Economics at Uppsala University. Her research focuses on corporate social responsibility as well as the mediatization of organizations. Qingru Xu is a PhD candidate in the College of Communication and Information Sciences at the University of Alabama. Her research interests include sports media, identity, and image management. Her research has been published in Communication & Sport, International Review for the Sociology of Sport, International Journal of Sport Management, International Journal of Sport Communication, and Communication Reports.

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INTRODUCTION Howard Tumber and Silvio Waisbord

Various types of scandals are inextricably linked to both the mass media and social media. Although there have been many technological changes in the news media over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the appetite for scandal news has not abated. The advent of social media has arguably intensified the speed of development and scale of both media scandals and the responses and consequences. For journalists and news organizations the wish to pursue scandal stories may be motivated by a variety of reasons – from holding governments to account in pursuance of fourth estate principles, whether it is exposing corruption or sexual exposés, to pursuing stories for audience-building strategies. Scandals can also provide moral and political sanctions against transgressors and deviants. So how are these various aspects of media scandals defined and theorized? How does the study of scandals inform the literature in various disciplines? There is no overall theory about scandal in liberal democracies, or indeed about scandal in authoritarian regimes. Concepts have been ‘borrowed’ from sociology on social construction, criminology on deviancy and moral panics, politics on corruption and institutional analyses, and communication on political economy and journalism practices. The purpose of this companion is to bring together in one volume these different concepts used in analysing various dimensions of scandals and to understand media practices and journalism in different countries and cultures. The contributors come from several areas of specialization, including journalism studies, political communication, feminist media studies, public relations, organizational communication, science communication, digital activism, propaganda studies, media and race, political rhetoric, and law. In Chapter 1 we attempt to highlight the key themes, questions and debates relevant to the field of media and scandal. The companion is divided into five parts: Part I: Key concepts in media and scandal studies; Part II: Political context and media dynamics of scandals; Part III: Scandals and journalistic practices; Part IV: Themes and settings of media scandals; Part V: Consequences and legacies of media scandals. 1

Howard Tumber and Silvio Waisbord

Key concepts in media and scandal studies (Part I) The first part of this book offers a survey of the conceptual scaffolding of the study of media and scandals. Just as this study draws from journalism studies, political communication research and social theory, it also feeds back valuable insights for refining theory-building and understanding key questions in those areas. Scandals are a rich subject of inquiry in which to deploy and test broad concepts and theories because they crystallize communicative, social and political dynamics. The chapters concentrate on the key concepts in media and scandals. What is the purpose of scandal news? Is it a way for the news media to highlight deviant behaviour and/or fulfil their role as the fourth estate in liberal democracies? Or is it for building and maintaining audiences, readers and listeners? One debate that illustrates the value of key concepts is whether contemporary politics are particularly prone to media scandals. Certainly, scandals are not new. Scott Benton (Chapter 2) opens this part by examining the ‘function’ of scandals, and critiques the view that scandals are merely negative features of politics, particularly when the frequency of scandals is high. He looks at the work of Emile Durkheim who suggested how scandals strengthen the community’s collective conscience by punishing deviants so as to reinforce social cohesion. The same scandal can produce both negative and positive effects simultaneously. For example, suspicion and scepticism can increase public accountability while also promoting public acceptance of the human fallibility of elected leaders. Whether scandals can enliven democracy or only entertain is a theme discussed by Marion Just and Ann Crigler (Chapter 3) who question whether personalization, a characteristic of individual scandals, is prevalent in political scandals. They suggest that it may be in the interest of institutions to collaborate in generating a personalized news narrative of political scandals. Through an examination of a number of case studies they also address the potential for scandal coverage to lead to reform in the current state of political polarization. The following five chapters deal with concepts familiar to the analysis of media and communication, and news in particular. ‘Moral panic’, a concept first termed by Stan Cohen in the early 1970s in his famous mods and rockers study, is critiqued by Rod Tiffen (Chapter 4) who provides a historical analysis of the concept indicating the strengths and weaknesses of the term in its use in scandal stories. While celebrating its endurance and relevance to the original study he suggests that the range of phenomena to which the moral panics paradigm fruitfully lends itself is quite limited: ‘For all the value of the original case study and theorizing, it has not generated a fruitful and cumulative research tradition.’ Sharon Meraz (Chapter 5) reviews the relationship between the theory of agenda setting and scandals, pre-social-media environments, on the one hand, and scandals within the altered dynamics of the new media ecology on the other. She concludes by arguing that the mass media’s power to set the agenda on scandals is being eroded by social media platforms in dictating what is truth and what is fiction. Bingchun Meng (Chapter 6) in looking at mediatization and political scandal, argues that the institutional logic of media organizations and the network logic of communication platforms are crucial to the way political scandals unfold. But the caveat is that the political context is always relevant to the media logic itself and hence the mediatization of scandals is a dialectic process that involves the ideological positioning of media outlets. Brian McNair (Chapter 7) considers the factors which shape the news value of scandal in both democratic and authoritarian societies. He maintains that news values have remained more or less constant even as media technology advances and changes the communication environment. From the days of early print media with their lurid front pages to today’s exposés of various sex offenders, ‘problematic reality’, as he terms it, has news value and sells journalism: ‘In this context, scandal is a perennially newsworthy story, as and when the 2

Introduction

problematic realities of certain individuals and organisations become scandalous.’ Gatekeeping is one of the oldest concepts in communication and Elizabeth Stoycheff (Chapter 8) looks at the selection of scandal by examining the factors which influence how legacy media prioritize the news. Although the majority of news shared on social media still originates from legacy news organizations, she points out that news must pass through a new set of gates, or ‘curated flows’, that also prioritize scandal at each level of the influence hierarchy. Social media opinion leaders, algorithms and critical masses of users have emerged as a new set of gatekeepers that cull and present information for individual consumption. Enrique Peruzzotti (Chapter 9) examines social accountability, originally a concept that referred to civil society and independent journalism acting in the public sphere. He argues that exposés driven by society add a specific subtype of political scandal. In this case the primary source of information is civil society rather than political insiders or the media. Social accountability revelations expand the repertoire of watchdog journalism by bringing the voices and claims of grassroots groups into the public sphere. The denunciations brought by social accountability initiatives help to expose deep seated social inequalities resulting in the uneven distribution of the rule of law institutions. In Chapter (10) Jürgen Maier, Carolin Jansen and Christian von Sikorski offer an assessment of the media framing of political scandals by looking at both the conceptual framework and the empirical evidence. Using the case of a plagiarism scandal of a German minister they indicate that ‘by shaping the interpretation of a scandal, the media can influence public discourse and citizens’ knowledge, attitudes, and behavior’. Furthermore, if the media adopt the majority position ‘they co-decide about the careers of accused politicians, electoral success of political parties, and future directions of policy making’. Chapter 11 examines the relatively new idea of fake news in relation to scandal. Jason Cabañes, C. W. Anderson and Jonathan Corpus Ong attempt to integrate the concept of fake news with the more established theories of media sociology. They demonstrate how the term has been used, misused and under-used in academic research. In their own case study of the role played by disinformation workers in the Philippines, they conclude that the concept of fake news requires an overhaul to allow for more creative thinking regarding twenty-first-century-mediated life.

Political context and media dynamics of scandals (Part II) The chapters in this part examine the political contexts and media dynamics of various scandals. Scandals occur in both liberal democracies and authoritarian regimes and can range from institutional ones to neo-populist ones. So this part begins with Sigurd Allern and Ester Pollack (Chapter 12) who present data about the incidence, types and consequences of scandals in liberal democracies, in particular four Scandinavian countries. They discuss the political and societal effects of scandal journalism, showing how the different kinds of mediated political scandals have become a standard feature of political life in Nordic countries. Some of the scandals are instances of the media holding power to account whilst others involve ‘person-oriented media hunts’. They conclude that ‘this lack of distinction between the important and the trivial may undermine the scrutiny of power holders and thus the democratic importance of scandal reporting’. Sarah Oates (Chapter 13) explores politicized scandal in authoritarian media systems. She shows how authoritarian regimes adapt to changing media formats, particularly in the way Russian-style compromising material is moulded into an alluring form of ‘infotainment’ and pseudo-facts that serve as highly effective weapons against political opponents. She argues that ‘through an understanding of the role of scandal in non-free states, we can assess the threat of politicized scandal to democracy in general’. 3

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Returning to liberal democracies Juha Herkman and Janne Matikainen (Chapter 14) discuss how right-wing populist movements exploit political scandals in their communication. The populist parties and politicians in Western liberal democracies have gained remarkable success in elections and politics during recent times, creating several public scandals by explicitly attacking immigrants, refugees and other minorities with comments and behaviour that denigrates and marginalizes them. They point out though that in some countries when these movements are in their infancy they exploit scandals to gain media attention, but after becoming more established political players, they tend to avoid public scandals. Paolo Mancini (Chapter 15) looks at the relation between corruption scandals and media systems. He argues that both the definition and reason for scandals depends to a large extent on the structure and mode of operation of the media system. For example, ‘market driven corruption scandals may occur in media systems influenced by commercial logic and a high level of autonomy from other social powers and the state in particular’. In Chapter (16) Gina Chen reviews how social media have altered the way the news media report scandal. Using the example of sexual scandals she looks at the changes in the way news audiences consume these stories and shows how coverage of scandal shifted from a focus on private failings as a sign of public unworthiness to personal impropriety as a sign of public distrust. Social media, she argues, has amplified that shift, making it both easier and quicker for the media and the public to share news of scandal. Legacy media, she says, is being usurped by social media as the gatekeeper of scandal news. Esa Väliverronen and Laura Juntunen (Chapter 17) continue the theme of sex scandals, focussing on the dynamics between different media in the revelation of political sex scandals. They intervene in the ongoing debate regarding privacy versus the public interest and, using Finland as a case study, they suggest sex scandals have the effect of softening the professional boundaries between different types of media outlets and creating greater coherence in the field. Political scandals are looked at by Mats Ekström and Bengt Johansson (Chapter 18) who discuss the concept of talk scandal which they say was ‘invented to account for the centrality of talk in the performance of politics and in the diverse practices of journalism and media discourse’. They argue that the relevance of the concept is ‘evident in the frequent occurrence of scandals pertaining to transgressive talk in various national contexts, as well as in the number of studies in which the concept has been applied’. The degree of reporting of political scandals, particularly sex ones, is dependent on the political, legal, media-related and cultural conditions of a state. Lyombe Eko (Chapter 19) discusses the legal parameters of media reporting of scandals, using as case studies mass mediated scandals in the USA, the UK and Russia. He adopts an analysis comparing and contrasting different national conceptualizations of freedom of expression which can determine how the media report scandals. His premise is that there are multiple legal contexts for such reporting. As he says, ‘the actual leeway to report scandals depends on the level of editorial independence that specific media law systems allow the press’. In the final chapter in this part Judith Townend (Chapter 20) examines the non-reporting of scandals. Using two UK case studies she shows how a combination of law, legal threats and national-treasure status influenced editorial decisions not to report allegations in the earlier stages of what later became high profile scandals. She claims that the ‘chilling effect’ alone does not provide an immunity for individuals. She highlights the ‘complex interplay between legal and social factors in deterring journalistic investigation and publication’.

Scandals and journalistic practices (Part III) Part III examines the methods and styles of accessing and reporting scandal, its institutional dynamics and how particular scandals occur through whistleblowing, WikiLeaks, entrapment, investigative journalism and technology. How are the new information technologies changing 4

Introduction

the way scandal discourse is presented within the public sphere? David Cuillier in (Chapter 21) discusses the role freedom of information laws play in assisting journalists, special-interest groups and citizens in exposing government transgressions. He examines the underlying premise for government transparency laws in serving as a check on government, and assesses whether these laws actually mitigate corruption through exposure. As he argues, ‘the natural tendency of bureaucracy is secrecy, and only laws supported by the public and those who administer them will fend off darkness and ignorance’. Michael Bromley (Chapter 22) examines how a transnational investigative journalism landscape has evolved in the twenty-first century, which is multi-faceted and multi-layered, and in which the mainstream media and professional journalists work with not-for-profits, NGOs and other groups. This has seen a shift from competitiveness to forms of mutuality as a means of bringing to light a wide range of cross-border abuses and presenting them for public consideration. Indeed in Latin America transnational collaboration has been described as ‘the new paradigm’ in investigative journalism. Kalyani Chadha (Chapter 23) analyses how television stings have been used to highlight scandal. She uses the case of India to show how such stings have emerged as an innovation employed by outlets to present sensationalized information primarily aimed at attracting viewers. She argues that ‘the constant construction of scandal has become a routine mechanism for news organizations to gain a competitive advantage in a financially challenging media landscape’. Zohar Kampf (Chapter 24) shows how a similar mechanism, in this case entrapment, known as one of the dark arts of journalism, is used, which ranges from attempts to induce a source to commit a transgression or misrepresent their own identity to more mitigated ‘betrayal’ strategies, such as exposing off-record information. He discusses how journalists and scholars perceive the ethics surrounding practices of deception and trust violation. He also poses the questions: Are journalists ‘neutral and balanced observers of social and political reality? Or, alternately, are they engaged actors guided by activist ethics?’. Philip Di Salvo (Chapter 25) looks at another way scandal is exposed, namely whistleblowing. Whistleblowers, he points out, can expose the required evidence to highlight a non-visible scandal that would otherwise be silenced. He provides a taxonomy of whistleblowing scandals in the years 2010–18 and shows how news outlets, whilst still playing a major part, have been joined by less traditional players such as online whistleblowing platforms. Moreover, the release by a whistleblower of large amounts of digital data has also become a common phenomenon that has reshaped whistleblowing and reporting practices. Sylvain Parasie (Chapter 26) continues this theme by examining the ‘computational approach’ to news production. Databases and algorithms have become an appropriate means for making news. He argues that similar to previous technological innovations, databases and algorithms are expected to enhance transparency in our democracies by allowing journalists to investigate deeper and in a more robust way, to be less dependent on official sources, and to reach out more easily to the average citizen. The enhancement of transparency is examined by Benedetta Brevini and Jorge Valdovinos (Chapter 27). They look at how WikiLeaks has shaped scandal discourses in the public sphere. They argue that radical disclosure serves a crucial function for democracy and, to reach its full political potential, it has to be articulated so that it can stir and harness the forces of public debate. WikiLeaks’ contribution, they suggest, transcends the potentially scandalous nature of any particular leak by establishing ‘not just the viability or usefulness of a global public intelligence platform, but the necessity of a model for disclosure that can surpass the barriers and limitations imposed by local governments and their vertical hierarchies’. Daniel Trottier (Chapter 28) brings this part to a close by examining scandal mining as an emerging practice shaped by long-standing forms of political denunciation, which in turn shape potentially democratized forms of scrutiny and accountability. He views the 2015 federal election in Canada as a pivotal moment in 5

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scandal mining. During this election, those with political affiliations and press credentials identified and denounced online statements, but so too did unaffiliated actors out of political but also entrepreneurial motivations.

Themes and settings of media and scandal (Part IV) The chapters in Part IV present a selection of case studies to explore themes and settings of media and scandal through a variety of perspectives, methodologies and historical comparisons – an examination of how scandal stories relate to media organizations and journalistic work surrounding the reporting (traditional and online) of business, finance, celebrity, sex, humanitarian action, race, science, sport, celebrities and armed forces. How do the news media report scandal in different cultures and how accurate and consistent is the coverage? Risto Kunelius and Adrienne Russell (Chapter 29) open this section by focussing on surveillance scandals. They argue that the idea of ‘scandals’ can assist in assessing the global outrage provoked by surveillance revelations and in assessing their full historical resonance. They ask ‘how key actors and stakeholders are repositioned in the era of “surveillance logic”? What kind of legitimation challenges are they facing? What new contradictions and tensions are surfacing?’. They highlight the tension and contradictions within and among key institutions of social power. Linda Steiner (Chapter 30) examines celebrity scandals, paying particular attention to the film and television industries. To illustrate how the contemporary dynamics of Hollywood celebrity scandal reporting is both similar to and different from other scandal domains, she looks at the scandals involving Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein. Relating to Townend’s Chapter 20 on non-reporting, Steiner says that ‘conventional wisdom holds that exposure of legal or moral scandal causes surprise and shock. But sometimes many people know about bad behavior and do nothing, which is itself scandalous’. Hinda Mandell (Chapter 31) discusses the gender gap in political sex scandals in the United States. As she points out, despite the plethora of philandering politicians, and with a heightened media always ready to deploy its reporters and commentators, ‘when scandal becomes public there has never been a major political sex scandal where the woman, as the powerful figure, was caught with her proverbial pants down’. When it comes to political sex scandals, women typically occupy either the role of the political wife or the mistress. David Rowe (Chapter 32) tackles the issue of sporting scandals. He demonstrates how scandals relating to sport are ‘highly variable in nature, frequent and occupy extraordinary prominence in the media’. Whilst featuring normative transgression similar to other types of scandal, sporting scandals also ‘possess specific properties that are related to the socio-cultural positioning of sport in the multiple spaces between bounded local communities and seemingly boundless global cyberspace’. In Chapter (33) Natalie Fenton examines the phone hacking scandal in the UK. This scandal was not really a ‘crime’ story in the usual sense but an issue of (lack of) journalism ethics of scandalous (and criminal) proportions when covering a crime. It is an important case study because it is a scandal about the media itself. In 2011 News of the World journalists were accused of illegally hacking the phone of a murdered schoolgirl. The scandal revealed large scale phone hacking was taking place in the tabloid press. Fenton argues that ‘this story reveals the enduring power of the press and its ability to control scandal, direct the national conversation and set the agenda. It also reveals the continuing entanglement between press and politicians’. Glenda Cooper (Chapter 34) tackles recent scandals involving the aid charities Oxfam and Save the Children. The scandals dated back some years but, despite previous efforts of whistleblowers (see Chapter 25), there was little coverage in the mainstream media until 2018 when a succession of exclusives exposed sexual abuse by aid workers towards both beneficiaries and other aid workers. 6

Introduction

Cooper argues that these humanitarian scandals can be viewed as moral panics (see Chapter 4) with aid workers, usually lauded for helping the least powerful in society, transformed in the media into sexual predators and abusers. She concludes that although ‘the revelations were not directly the result of the #MeToo movement (see also Chapter 31), the widespread nature of the scandal may have been aided by the atmosphere generated in its aftermath’. The armed forces are the setting for Mark Blach-Ørsten and Anker Brink Lund’s (Chapter 35) examination of media scandals. They suggest that some of the mediated scandals with a focus on conflict have presented a new and critical visibility on military and government practices. However, they argue that nowadays scandals seem less frequent. They offer several explanations: (1) the military are more savvy in avoiding scandals; (2) elite sources confine the framing of the story around a narrow range; (3) the media eschew reporting complex military scandals in favour of covering trivial and personalized ones. Gretchen Sodelund (Chapter 36) tackles the issue of sex trafficking and asks: At what point does such an issue of public concern rise to the status of full-blown scandal? Which institutions, public actors or social movements stand to lose or gain by these scandals? And how does a sex trafficking scandal differ from a moral panic? She uses two sex trafficking scandals based in the USA to argue that ‘scandal is an important, if under-utilized, framework for understanding sex trafficking claims’. Maryann Erigha (Chapter 37) examines the role of scandals in both the maintenance and disruption of the current racial order. She argues that, as racial projects, some scandals are positive, revealing racism, whilst others are negative, perpetuating racism and reproducing structures of hegemony, domination and oppression. Race scandals in the media swing between these two ends: ‘“racism as scandal” and “racialized scandals” – in competing racial projects. The former exposes the everyday realities and horrors of racism, while the latter perpetuates ideologies that keep racism alive’. Heather Akin (Chapter 38) looks at science, arguing that scandals involving scientific evidence are becoming commonplace, not only because of the moral concerns that scientific developments raise, but also because legacy media and social media can more readily propagate misinformation, intensify debates or provide platforms for vocal critics. In most cases, she suggests, ‘science scandals do not become controversial because experts contest the science, but rather because of the given societal and political circumstances’. Paul Soukup (Chapter 39) continues the issue of moral concerns, looking at the media reporting of religious scandals. Surveying the research he finds that audiences view religious scandals as compelling and easy to provoke outrage. But usually the impact is shortlived. It is only the more complex religious scandals, such as the Catholic Church child-abuse scandal, which stay longer in the news. The research also indicates that religious figures can successfully respond, usually with some form of apology, and that occasionally scandals ‘can trigger a backlash against the media sources when audiences feel that reporters have misunderstood religion or acted unfairly’. The final two chapters in this part examine corporate and financial scandals. W. Timothy Coombs and Sherry J. Holladay (Chapter 40) refine the conceptualization of corporate scandal and the corporate scandalization process. They suggest that scandals are socially constructed and outline the corporation scandalization process model, detailing how a scandal can emerge and the communicative response it can trigger. The construction of a corporate scandal involves stakeholders perceiving that the corporation is responsible for an intentional ethical violation, provoking moral outrage over its behaviour and persuading others of the same. Scandals can cause serious damage to the reputation of respected corporations, and Daniel Vogler and Mark Eisenegger (Chapter 41) examine the way the media play an important role in the emergence and dissemination of such corporate scandals as the recent Volkswagen case. Not only do people learn about scandals from the media, they also constitute an arena where 7

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stakeholders may evaluate corporate behaviour. They argue that digitization has changed the logics of journalism, affecting how corporate scandals are reported, allowing the public to articulate its opinion on corporations directly without having traditional news media as gatekeeper.

Consequences and legacies of media scandals (Part V) Part V of the companion looks at the effects, consequences and legacies of scandals on institutions, governments and politicians. There are also examinations of the way the public’s collective memory is affected by previous mediated scandals and whether trust in politicians, institutions and the media is diminished. There are analyses of the various responses by governments, institutions and individuals to scandal, whether it is through police and judicial actions and procedures, legal recourse, public inquiries or public relations. Chapter 42 by Julian Petley looks at how media scandals in the popular press in the UK function as a modern form of the stocks or the ‘skimmington rides’ – namely an opportunity to shame those who have offended against the sexual mores which popular newspapers supposedly endorse. He shows how significant sections of the British national press scandalmonger in order to shame their ideological and political enemies. By devoting so much journalistic energy to this, ‘not only do such papers marginalise within their own pages issues of real importance, but they also significantly influence the broadcasting agenda, and particularly that of the BBC’. The following four chapters examine the effects of mediated scandals in different contexts. Clarisse Warren and Dona-Gene Barton (Chapter 43) focus on the electoral effects of political scandal coverage. They show how changes in today’s political and media landscapes have intensified the media’s spotlight on the moral mishaps of politicians. But the type of scandal conditions voter reactions. They illustrate how voters react differently to sex scandals, financial scandals and corruption scandals. Francis Lee (Chapter 44) reviews how political studies influence public opinion. He comments on three directions of research on media effects in scandals: the application of media-effects theories in understanding the power of scandals, the further integration of media-effects studies with the communicative event perspective on political scandals, and the analysis of how emergent phenomena in digital political communication may influence the effects of political scandals and the role of media. Macarena Ares, Sofía Breitenstein and Enrique Hernández (Chapter 45) examine the political consequences of corruption scandals. They suggest that, even though there may be agreement about the negative effects of corruption on political attitudes, it is unclear whether this is reflected in electoral behaviour. The chapter provides some of the reasons why citizens may not always hold politicians to account in corruption scandals. Roberto de Miguel Pascual and Rosa Berganza (Chapter 46) continue the theme of corruption and particularly the ambivalence of voters towards corrupt officials. As they point out, some corrupt mayors, members of Congress or MPs may lose their share of votes, while many others are able to retain or even increase their electoral support. They examine the way political scientists investigate the issue and ‘evaluate the importance of measurements of implicit association as additional instruments for observing the effects of political scandals on public opinion’. Kenon A. Brown, Qingru Xu and Melanie Formentin (Chapter 47) focus on a different effect by looking at the restoration of reputation in an age of scandal. They do this by synthesizing the research devoted to examining scandals using Image Repair Theory, particularly in the corporate sector, sports and entertainment, and politics. They go on to interrogate the two approaches of Image Repair Theory: the source-oriented rhetorical/case study method and the audience-oriented experimental method. Maria Grafström and Karolina Windell (Chapter 48) provide an interesting examination of scandal coverage by tracing the media trajectory of a 8

Introduction

scandal over time. As they argue in their chapter, ‘even though both the logic of media and the character of a scandal suggest some kind of novelty and norm breaking aspects, it can be rather repetitive with pre-defined roles and scripts for the actors involved to play’. Using a content analysis case study of the Swedish textile company H&M, they argue that media scandals can be characterized by rituals, temporality and interrelatedness. In the penultimate piece Gavin Phillipson (Chapter 49) provides a legal lens for looking at the way law plays different roles in relation to the reporting of scandal in the USA and in other Western democracies. He examines four areas of comparison: the changing role of the law in protecting privacy; whether court orders can maintain secrets in the digital age; the impact of the law on scandal in an era of ‘fake news’; and the memory of scandal – the ‘right to be forgotten’. In the final chapter we return to a subject briefly touched upon in some of the earlier chapters, namely whether scandal might be good for democracy. Looking at scandal in the USA, Brandon Rottinghaus (Chapter 50) suggests that, although scandals often have negative consequences for the individual players, their aftermath, when the media investigate charges of corruption, malfeasance or lying, can have potentially positive effects on the political system. ‘While the public may quickly tire of scandal, forgive the participants, and return to routine political activity, the system plays a longer game.’ This is a game in which legislators may sanitize the system by impeaching or removing an official and prosecutors can determine whether laws have been broken and the degree of severity of these infractions. The central goal of this book is to offer a comprehensive examination of the multi-levelled relationship between media and scandals. What we trust these 50 essays offer is an expansion of our understanding of scandal in the new media environment. We set out with a range of questions and took on the task of recruiting the best scholars we could identify to discuss, ponder, ruminate and produce some reflections that would both enlighten and illuminate. The chapters provide a rich trove of evidence and insights from around the world that both confirm previous conclusions and offer new arguments about the role of the media in the causes, dynamics and consequences of scandals. We would like to take this opportunity to express our gratitude to all authors for their excellent contributions to the book. We hope that readers will both enjoy and be challenged by it. Ever since we began working together on media and scandal over 15 years ago, our interest in the subject has continued to evolve, culminating in this Routledge Companion to Media and Scandal. We are grateful to Natalie Foster, senior publisher at Routledge, for her encouragement and support in initiating this project and seeing it to completion. We would also like to thank Jennifer Vennall, editorial assistant, who we have worked closely with during the length of the project. Thanks also to the other production staff at Routledge who assisted in the preparation of the manuscript. Thank you to Colin Morgan, project manager, for the production of the book and to copy-editor Nicholas James Fox. We also offer thanks to Zoey Lichtenheld, Sophie Felder and Sarah Dicioccio for their assistance in preparing the manuscript. Howard Tumber City, University of London Silvio Waisbord George Washington University Autumn 2018

9

1 MEDIA AND SCANDAL Howard Tumber and Silvio Waisbord

It is the public scandal that offends; to sin in secret is no sin at all. (Moliere)

Scandals are prime case studies for observing and understanding current dynamics in news and public communication. Scandals are rich with communication processes: multidirectional information flows, different types of public reactions to revelations, responses by individuals and social institutions accused of wrongdoing, and the mobilization of specific narratives for demanding accountability. Just as they illustrate media practices as well as social and political trends, they are rich moments for applying and refining the analytical toolkit of concepts, arguments, and theories. Not surprisingly, the study of scandals sits at the convergence of several lines of inquiry in communication studies, as the thematic foci and the analytical scaffolding of the chapters suggest. Our interest in media and scandal spans many years. Fifteen years ago, we edited a twovolume special issue of American Behavioral Scientist devoted to political scandals and media across democracies (Tumber and Waisbord 2004a; 2004b). At that time, although we acknowledged “how technological innovations contributed to tuning politics into common features of contemporary democracies” (Tumber and Waisbord 2004a, 1147) such as 24-hour cable news and internet news services, we could not envisage the media changes that have emerged since that time. Scandals are generally started by news reporting about behaviors and statements by individuals and institutions that violate laws and transgress moral principles (Lull and Hinerman 1997). Public reaction, political processes, and legal and parliamentary investigations generally follow initial revelations. Affected individuals and institutions generally react to defend their interests, reputation, and social standing. “Scandalous” refers to both the kind of news revelations about illegal or unethical behavior as well as to social reactions to exposés. Scandals and mediated scandals are oftentimes used indistinctively. The reason is that mediated forms of communication are central to scandals (Allern and Pollack 2012). It is hard to imagine that scandals could exist as such without news coverage. Media attention provides the oxygen of scandals. While the media play critical roles, scandals come about as the result of actions by multiple actors. The politics of information disclosure that spark scandals involve sources, whistleblowers, investigators, government agencies and officials, corporations, activists, and civic society 10

Media and scandal

organizations and journalists (Alford 2001; Calland and Dehn 2004; Dworkin and Baucus 1998; Hunt 1995; Lewis 2004; Liebes and Blum-Kulka 2004; van Es and Smit 2003; Wahl-Jorgensen and Hunt 2012). In addition, a plethora of actors take part in scandals in subsequent phases: responses by accused parties, public reaction, further investigations, legal and political processes, and public inquiries. They become involved in scandals for various reasons including the pursuit of particular interests, the compliance with due process, the defense of personal and business reputation, and the advancement of institutional agendas. Consider why news organizations break scandalous information. Although it is hard to generalize, a mix of market, editorial, and journalistic considerations underpin decisions to reveal wrongdoing. Exposés can potentially bolster the credentials of the press as a public watchdog, bring audience attention (and ratings and digital traffic), and reinforce the partisan/ideological positions of news organizations. Scandalous information, especially if related to prominent newsmakers, fit standard news values of conflict, bad news, sensationalism, and elite-driven and elite-centered information. Whereas some news organizations generally follow public journalistic ethics in the pursuit of potentially scandalous information, others engage in dubious newsgathering practices such as deception and privacy invasion to “get the story.” In some cases, the use of questionable practices turn the media into the focus of scandals and throw into question journalism’s self-defined role as ethical crusader. The phone hacking case in the UK is a prime example of this (Davies 2014; Freedman 2012; Mawby 2016). When press exposés are motivated primarily by commercial goals and specific partisan causes, news organizations become complicit in opaque media politics. Scandals spur debates about central issues that define social and political life: legality, morality, ethics, inequity, and the behavior of powerful individuals and institutions. Scandals reveal something more than corruption and wrongdoing. They lay bare the ways societies define acceptable behaviors and norms, and how different publics struggle to define and impose laws and social expectations (Thompson 2000). The literature on morality and moral panics, for example, indicates the degree to which transgression is inextricably linked with mediated scandal (Cohen 1972; Cohen 2011; Critcher 2011; Flinders 2012; Gamson 2001; Garland 2008; Goode and Ben-Yehuda 1994; Hier et al. 2011; Hunt 1997; McRobbie and Thornton 1995; Pearce and Charman 2011; Young 2011). No matter if they happen in politics, business, sports, science, religion, or other social sectors, scandals pry open gaps between expected and actual behaviors. This is why virtually no social realm is exempt from them. What is at the center of scandals are the violations of laws and social expectations regarding a range of issues including the political, the corporate, the financial, workplace relations, sexual identity, and gender roles. Scandals bring to the fore actions that contradict common assumptions about proper, moral behaviors and statements.

Scandal-saturated societies Scandals have become frequent, central aspects of contemporary societies. They take place in countries with different political histories, legal traditions, journalistic traditions, and media systems. Certainly, important differences remain. Democracies seem more prone to scandal politics than autocracies. The basic reason is that democracies offer more propitious conditions for publicizing illegal and improper behaviors. Tolerance for public expression and dissent, protection for investigative reporting, public access to government information, and moderate media diversity are fundamental conditions for scandals. We would generally still agree with Markovits and Silverstein’s (1988) claim that political scandals can happen only in liberal democracies (Castells 1997). “Scandals put in evidence the demand for accountability that only democracies, 11

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unlike dictatorial regimes, can deliver. Democracy’s very essence is to provide institutional mechanisms to check state politics” (Tumber and Waisbord 2004a, 1035). Another important difference is the kinds of behaviors that are likely to be the subject of revelations and scandals. Whereas revelations about sexual indiscretions and predatory behaviors by powerful men spark scandals in some countries, they fail to cause major uproars elsewhere. Although exposés about illegal corporate behaviors turn into major scandals in some cases, similar revelations fade without much impact in other cases. Two points can be made here. First, differences in the way scandals are treated and received occur not only between democracies and autocracies but also between different democracies. This can be due to differences in political systems and media systems, but also due to cultural differences. Second, in democracies, corporate scandals involving multinational companies can emerge and evolve in many countries. An example is the Volkswagen emissions scandal. But the manner in which it was dealt with by legal processes varied considerably by country. What accounts for the frequency and pervasiveness of scandals? Although scandals are the result of multiple factors, ongoing transformations in public communication are largely responsible for why scandals are common features of contemporary societies. Certainly, political issues play critical roles: the extent of corrupt behavior, the quality of governance, splits and rivalries within administrations, and the intensity of partisan politics are major causes of scandals. Legal factors are important, too. Certain laws favor (or discourage) press revelations and judicial processes. Just as laws that protect whistleblowers and ensure public access to information support press reporting of wrongdoing, libel laws and corrupt judicial systems have the opposite effect as they stifle news investigations and due process (Calland and Dehn 2004). While we recognize that scandals are not monocausal, our interest is to underscore that the recurrence of scandals has happened alongside unprecedented transformations in the media and the overall conditions for mass publicity. The constant succession of scandals is the symptom of the mediatization of politics. The spread of particular characteristics of media cultures and industries, the so-called “media logic,” into politics has laid down conditions that favor scandals. As the media has become central to various aspects of politics, notably campaigning and governing, particular attributes of the media influence political dynamics. Central trends in media industries, particularly commercialization and tabloidization, till the ground for scandals, as they favor news values such as drama, conflict, novelty, personalities, and negativity. Generally, scandals packed with more conventional news values are more likely to remain newsworthy. Likewise, the mediatization of other social sectors, such as business, religion, sports, and education, also puts in place conditions that favor scandals. The personalization of news fuels scandals, too. It steers press coverage to focus on individual transgressions particularly committed by newsmakers and people in powerful positions. In the case of political scandals, whether sex or corruption, the causal relationship is not straightforward—whether the news media exacerbate personalization or deepseated political personalism drives the process (Apostolidis and Williams 2004; Basinger and Rottinghaus 2012; Entman 2012; Garrard and Nowell 2006; Marion 2010; Sabato, Stencel and Lichter 2000). A common and justifiable lament in the literature is that scandals overwhelmingly focus on flawed, high-profile personalities who defy moral expectations and/or violate laws rather than on structural forces that allow, foster, and condone transgressions. Scandals create huge public commotion as measured by media attention focused on transgressors—public officials, prominent corporate leaders, entertainment celebrities, and other individuals who hold visible positions. Yet what generally attracts large media and public attention are individual peccadillos 12

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rather than systemic, social problems—corruption, wrongdoing, racism, violence, sexism, or corporate abuses. Media narratives accentuate this problem, as they tend to offer simplified stories about heroes and villains instead of deeper examination of social problems that precede and typically remain after specific scandalous behaviors are reported. An alternative, more benevolent position is that even if news narratives focus on individuals, they can be valuable storytelling resources, if capably used, to put the spotlight on structural problems. The focus on personal transgressions does not exclude the possibility that media stories can expose broader social ills such as when individual cases are used as devices to tell bigger stories, foster empathy with victims, and understand the cause of specific social problems. Likewise, the focus on individual transgressions may be prevalent, but it is not similar across scandals. Case studies show that, at times, the news media used individual cases to highlight deeper problems. So, stories focused on sexual abuses by well-known men may also reveal structural misogyny. Child abuse scandals may reveal institutional fault lines (Greer and McLaughlin 2013). News on fraud committed by prominent business executives may expose broad patterns of corporate transgressions, too. Similarly, exposés of the pay, perks, and extravagant lifestyles of high profile executives can lead to similar corporate revelations. An example of this was the focus on Fred Goodwin, the chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland at the height of the 2007/08 financial crisis. ‘Scumbag millionaire’ as he and other directors were labeled by the UK’s The Sun newspaper in 2007.

Scandals in the digital society Another important aspect of scandals are the complex, multilayered dynamics brought about by the digital revolution. A copious literature has documented the ways the digital revolution has rapidly transformed news and public communication. The proliferation of digital platforms has radically altered the news ecology, including information flows, journalistic practices, and the conditions and tactics for gaining public visibility. Not surprisingly, such transformations have affected the dynamics of scandals. As conditions for public communication change, scandals as publicized wrongdoing change too (Demirhan and Çakır-Demirhan 2016; Mandell and Chen 2017). Consequently, the meaning of “mediated scandals” has changed. Contemporary mediated scandals feature the actions, dynamics, and interests of multiple actors with various interests in publicizing corruption and responding to initial revelations. If scandals are revealed wrongdoing, the acts of disclosing illegal and immoral behaviors are not limited to the traditional press. Various actors now participate as they feed tips and information to reporters and members of parliament, amplify press denunciations in social media, and document wrongdoing by collecting and analyzing data. Citizen journalists and activists leak information, publish reports, disseminate commentary, spread rumors, and follow up investigations. Potential leakers interested in weaponizing information can utilize various platforms to make revelations; they are not limited, as in the past, to passing secrets to traditional newsrooms. Also, myriad actors collect and dissect information that may be utilized to produce scandalous revelations and damage reputations, such as intelligence agencies, freelance operatives and consultants, and a new crop of investigative sites. The proliferation of actors that participate in scandals brings in different considerations and motivations. Non-journalism actors are not mindful of conventional news values or standard journalistic ethics. Social media companies are not regulated by the same set of calculations and ethical considerations of journalistic organizations. They allow the publication of scandalous information that legacy media were generally uninterested or reluctant to publish because 13

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it did not conform to editorial positions, journalistic ethics, and legal scrutiny. Also, platforms that do not subscribe to public journalistic ethics are able to publish information that traditional newsrooms generally approached gingerly, such as salacious details, uncorroborated claims, and demonstrated falsehood. Citizens now have the unprecedented ability to participate in scandals in many ways. They engage with news in multiple ways, actively taking part in the intense information flows that characterize scandals through social media, blogs, texting, and other digital spaces. They contact politicians and reporters with potentially damaging information. They comment, curate, and scrutinize press revelations. They willingly spread revelations and unwillingly help to disseminate false information. They record testimonies from key players and produce original reporting. Organized groups and citizens can break news with damaging revelations, surreptitiously record compromising evidence, and distribute information widely. “Citizen witnessing” (Allan 2013) contributes to scandals by bringing up information, collaborating with established news organizations, sharing personal stories, and checking revelations. Citizens use social media to take more active roles such as spreading news, keeping information at the top of daily news feeds, sustaining attention, and fact-checking investigations and reactions. Twitter hashtags serve as popular identifiers to articulate demands for information and justice as well as commentary and discussions. The participation of myriad actors through a range of media platforms has altered the dynamics of scandals in important ways. In the past, the legacy media wielded unmatched power as news gatekeepers. They held a dominant position in decisions about what revelations to publish and to catapult to the top of the news agenda. Persistent media attention was critical to maintain public interest and to cover reactions by political and judicial institutions to press revelations. No doubt, legacy media remain important in breaking scandalous news and further documenting wrongdoing. They have published revelations that started prominent scandals in recent years. They are not the only gatekeepers, however, in the contemporary information ecology. As myriad actors take part, the dynamics of scandal gatekeeping are more complex and fluid than in the past. The unfolding of scandals has become far more unpredictable. The pace and the content of scandals can rapidly, unexpectedly shift as a slew of actors may potentially introduce revelations and make information viral. In this context, scandal management is not what it used to be. Individuals and institutions implicated in scandals confront a more chaotic information ecology to control messages and provide tight, well-organized responses. New damaging information can surface beyond traditional outlets. The digital revolution has also brought about new ways of finding, processing, and reporting sensitive information with scandalous potential. Journalists and citizens explore digital data to reveal wrongdoing and set up collaborative platforms. As digital footprints can be traced and reconstructed, professional and citizen reporters can scrutinize individuals and institutions to shed light on their political and financial records, behaviors, and statements. Collaborations that dig up valuable insights about people in power suggest the democratic potential of “open data” and participatory mechanisms to bring about further transparency and accountability. The emergence of new types of actors determined to unearth secrets and hold powerful actors to account is evident in high-profile scandals. Both the Snowden/NSA revelations as well as stories involving government and corporate corruption originally broken by WikiLeaks attest to these changes (Brevini, Hintz and McCurdy 2013; Leigh and Harding 2011; Russell and Waisbord 2017). Just as new whistleblowers and platforms introduce important innovations as they reveal state and corporate secrets, so the uncontrolled power of state agencies and digital giants tramp on fundamental democratic rights. 14

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Just as it may bring positive consequences, the spreading of scandalous information outside traditional journalism introduces new challenges. This is notably exemplified by the phenomenon of fake news. Unverified and false information finds its way to the public. Rogue actors can disseminate information disguised in conventional news styles to misinform deliberately the public and thereby damage the reputation of individuals and institutions. Yet the growing news-making power of non-traditional platforms and organizations does not mean that they are on equal footing with legacy news in terms of the power to turn revelations into full-blown, long scandals. Continuous attention by leading, established news organizations and digital platforms with large followings is necessary for sparking and fueling scandals. Leading news organizations are more likely to have resources, expertise, and social prominence to bring up original information and continue with investigations.

Scandals and globalization in the network society The globalization of three forces is also important in understanding the dynamics of contemporary scandals: corruption, information gathering and leaking, and networked journalism. Several scandals in recent years, such as the Panama Papers, the Lava Jato in Brazil and other countries in Latin America, and the 2016 election campaign in the United States, exposed new forms of global corruption, such as sophisticated schemes for money laundering and tax evasion, the illegal financing of election campaigns, cash-for-access dealings between corporations and political elites, and the globalization of corrupt practices involving legal and illegitimate business as well as political elites. Vast networks of corruption span the world, aided by the global expansion of the economy, various forms of illegal trade, and financial networks. Global tax avoidance schemes cater to an international clientele of wealthy individuals and corporations. The globalization of industries, such as extractive resources and construction, where corruption is notorious particularly in countries without a strong rule of law, lays out conditions for scandals. Global companies have colluded with local governments and elites to secure access to contracts, valuable natural resources, and markets. In turn, political elites have sought to benefit from global flows of money and investments by seeking personal financial gain and campaign funds. The second component of global scandals is the presence of an array of actors interested in collecting and strategically disclosing information about illegal acts to damage the reputations of corporations, politicians, and transnational institutions. Scandals have revealed the machinations of international networks of politicians, corporations, banks, intelligence services, and civic institutions. The scandal over Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election in the United States is one of the better-known examples concerning the complicity of global and domestic forces in illegal activities to favor certain candidates. Dossiers by rogue spies and consultants that were published by news organizations reveal global intrigues that influence electoral politics. A third factor behind global scandals is the emergence of cross-border information networks that reveal transnational shady dealings involving governments, corporations, and banks. In recent years, transnational news organizations, investigative journalists’ networks, and datadumping sites have documented corrupt practices and broken stunning stories. These networks include news organizations, funders, NGOs, citizens, media companies, technical agencies, and lawyers. Both the “Panama Papers” and the “Paradise Papers” are the most distinctive examples of the workings of cross-border networks interested in uncovering cases of global corruption. In both cases, legacy news organizations had a central role coordinating investigations, sharing data, and publishing exposés. 15

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New types of news sites have contributed to scandals by dumping sensitive information about corruption and wrongdoing. The best-known example is WikiLeaks, which had central roles during the Snowden/NSA revelations as well as the 2016 presidential election in the United States. While the former case brought it admiration from the radical left, leaking information on Hillary Clinton earned WikiLeaks favorable mentions by then-candidate Donald Trump. Its trajectory from embracing pseudo-anarchist, anti-state, leftist politics to getting accolades from right-wing politicians attests to the murky, shifting position of WikiLeaks in global scandals (Halpern 2017). Altogether, the mix of global networks of corruption, information gathering, and reporting have contributed to a series of international and national scandals.

The consequences of scandals A final subject of analysis is the consequences of scandals. Much has been said about this topic, but there are few categorical conclusions. Just as it is difficult to predict exactly the dynamics of scandals, it is equally challenging to assess the impact of scandals on society and politics. Views differ on the consequences of political scandals. Whereas some scholars believe scandals bring about positive consequences both in the short and long term, others remain skeptical. The first position claims that scandals contribute to democracy by putting the spotlight on a host of problems, prompting the resignations of individuals who committed crimes, and forcing governments, corporations, and political parties to revisit practices and introduce reforms to tackle the sources of corruption. The second position, instead, is more skeptical even if selected scandals have yielded modestly positive results. Nor do all scandals have similar consequences especially in terms of addressing structural, long-term issues that foster corrupt practices. As scandals constantly come up, “scandal fatigue” settles in and citizens pay limited, distracted attention. In a fragmented media landscape, not all revelations have similar impact and scandalous information does not lead to public demands and actions to uproot wrongdoing. Reservations about the impact of scandals are warranted. Few scandals have had significant long-term impact in terms of spurring institutional changes and the effective elimination of the causes of wrongdoing. Even if some individuals suffered personal consequences it is hard to point out major, substantive changes that uprooted the deeper problems revealed by scandals—corruption, collusion, human rights violations, and structural racism. The downfall of individuals who resigned, were shamed, and/or received legal sentences after scandalous information was revealed may be seen as positive examples of accountability and justice. Yet the punishment of selected individuals was not necessarily followed by sustained, wide-ranging actions to tackle deeper problems. Companies that were responsible for corrupt behaviors suffered little, if any, economic or legal consequences even if some of its members had resigned or were charged with crimes. There have been some cases though where a company has gone out of business or suffered severe economic loss following a scandal. An example of this occurred in the UK in 1991. Gerald Ratner inherited his father’s jewelry business in 1984. Within six years he had turned a small retailer into a multimillion-dollar empire. In April 1991 he gave a speech to the Institute of Directors, attended by over 6,000 business people and journalists, in which he derided his company’s sherry decanter as “total cr–p” and explained its earrings were "cheaper than an M&S prawn sandwich but probably wouldn’t last as long" (Tumber 1993). The now-infamous joke lost him 2,500 shops and his fortune. Another interesting point about this Ratner scandal is how it has been referred to by journalists and used as a kind of metaphor at various times over the past 27 years. The 1991 joke and its consequences were so far reached that a “Ratner moment” 16

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became shorthand for a catastrophic gaffe. Two recent examples appeared in The Times. In February 2018 Clair Foges, writing about Prime Minister May’s indecision over Brexit, refers to the previous scandal at the end of her article: But if only she (May) had pushed the crunch point of decision much earlier; rounding her cabinet up at chequers in the opening months; ripping off the plaster sooner; abbreviating this national breakdown that all the world has seen. Instead we have had a 20 month Ratner moment, a KFC cock-up, a branding disaster. (Foges 2018, 26) Another article in June 2018 had the headline in its business section “Premier Food chief’s ‘Ratner moment’ leaves a bad taste”. The first paragraph read: “The activist shareholder targeting Premier Foods has accused the chairman of the Mr Kipling cakes and Ambrosia custard maker of a ‘Gerald Ratner’ moment for being critical of his own company’s brands” (Walsh 2018, 53). One begins to wonder though how many readers understand or even recall the link. Scandal legacies are remembered in other ways as well. When Watergate, the high watermark of scandals, is mentioned, it is often to denote good investigative journalism. And of course “gate” has been added to many other scandals since then. The impunity of political and economic elites as well as powerful corporations suggest that scandals, even if they attract enormous attention, do not bring about significant consequences. Specific individual sanctions as well as targeted public responses are more likely than broad reforms. An important issue to consider in the study of the consequences of scandals is that often citizens do not hold consistent and similar views about what constitutes a transgression or what kind of punishment and other actions are necessary. Media revelations generally implicitly assume that certain acts of wrongdoing deserve to be reported because they violate laws as well as certain moral principles. However, at a time of heightened partisanship and political polarization in many countries, public opinion, elites, and the media are divided about the nature, the significance, and the adequate response to specific transgressions. Citizens may not favor news disclosures that shed light on or hold certain politicians accountable, or support actions to tackle the sources of corruption, as long as they are uninterested in castigating their own party or favoring rival political forces. Motivated reasoning has been a strong moderator of public response to revelations and scandals. News organizations identified with specific partisan and ideological positions play key roles when public officials of different political parties are embroiled in scandals. They conduct investigations, denounce wrongdoing, and amplify judicial and parliamentary investigations. Conversely, they take different positions when like-minded political elites become the center of scandals. They passionately defend accused individuals and organizations, and minimize attention to the revelations and charges. Certainly, partisan media have historically tended to cover scandals closely in line with editorial positions, notably in countries with a strong tradition of press organizations affiliated or identified with political parties and other political bodies. However, this situation has become more prominent recently in the fragmented media landscapes and fractured media trust. This is noticeable in the United States, where partisan and ideological media have experienced a resurgence in a country where mainstream journalism, bounded by the norms of even-handedness and detachment, had maintained a dominant position. Consequently, what qualifies as scandalous information as well as the consequences vary according to the ideological positions of news organizations. What is scandalous news for journalistic organizations, institutions, and citizens on the Right does not generally spark similar reactions on the Left. For example, just as the right-wing media led the reporting of the Oxfam 17

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and Save the Children scandals in Britain, its counterpart in the United States downplayed and decried an endless flow of exposés about President Trump and members of his cabinet. Amid media polarization and strong partisanship, scandals reveal the actions of individuals and organized actors to influence the consequences of scandals by disputing the veracity of the original revelations, the motivations of press exposés, the nature and the extent of legal and moral violations, and the appropriate responses. Divided news coverage as well as public reactions and beliefs about legal and moral wrongdoing challenge an influential line of interpretation of scandals grounded in Durkheimian theory (Alexander 1988). For the latter, scandals are moments of moral and cultural crisis that initially endanger core social values and subsequently repair the social order when transgressors are punished. In this process, the news media play the role of moral custodians by upholding values and condemning transgressors. The symbolic and/or legal punishment of individuals and institutions who violated social principles represents the reaffirmation of laws and morals—the institutional anchors of the social order. Therefore, scandals reaffirm the dividing lines between right and wrong. They are powerful reminders of public values; they are moments of conflict and potential social breakdown followed up by stability and order. Endorsing this line of interpretation in toto is fraught with problems for assessing the consequences of scandals. Scandals are not necessarily events that trigger widespread moral panics across societies, shock all citizens in similar ways, reveal threats to core social values, or inevitably lead to social and cultural reaffirmation. Just as the reactions to initial revelations are widely different, the consequences are dissimilar, too. Scandals magnify social disparities and deep-seated political conflict and polarization rather than reinvigorate social agreements and spark consensus-building dynamics. Scandals represent ongoing conflicts between opposite social forces: tolerance and racism, public interest and corporate greed, transparency and secrecy, women’s rights and misogyny, virtuous citizenship and hypocrisy, children’s rights and abuses, truth and deception. What some news media and publics find reprehensible legal and moral transgressions, others hardly show any interest, let alone rush to condemn it or demand investigations or punishment. Not all revealed offences spark a similar level of media attention or public reaction. Revelations about heinous crimes and abuses may get limited coverage or get lost amid a constant barrage of information and noise. The dynamics of dozens of scandals offer sufficient evidence to argue that they express and animate various forms of social conflict. They express deep-seated conflicts over laws and morality rather than unified conceptions about virtuous, moral, and legal behaviors. The social, moral, and legal sanctioning of transgressors signals the triumph of specific actors and movements pushing for transparency and accountability rather than collective social reaffirmation. Scandals expose social rifts that drive conflict and leave societies equally divided rather than united. Scandals are propelled by news organizations and other actors (civic associations, social movements, political parties, consumers) interested in holding power accountable. Their actions inevitably meet the reaction and opposition of others firmly set on dismissing revelations, exonerating accused individuals, and deflecting attention. Because the dynamics and the consequences of scandals are unpredictable and open-ended, it cannot be determined ex ante that scandals necessarily foster moral regeneration, solidify public trust, and reaffirm the rule of law. More than the catalyst for legal and moral renewal, scandals condense different visions about “the good society” and competing interests. Therefore, questions about the consequences of scandals need to be asked differently. Rather than assessing the overall impact of scandals on society and politics, a more targeted, nuanced approach is needed to probe the impact of specific aspects of scandals on particular political and social issues. For example, laws that facilitate access to public information and offer protection 18

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of sources and whistleblowers are virtuous instruments for fostering more information and transparency about government dealings. Even limited reactions by some publics are positive, for they act as reminders about social values. Scandals may contribute to building public awareness about accountability and transparency problems. The downfall of disgraced individuals is symbolically powerful and leaves public records of different forms of justice and accountability. Several questions can help for conducting future research on the consequences of scandals. Do good economic times consistently temper the negative spillovers from scandals for governing officials and parties? Does the constant swirl of accusations and firestorms in the current media chaos reduce the agenda-setting power of individual exposés? How can “scandal fatigue” be measured and examined to determine the consequences of specific scandals? Amid media abundance, what is the impact of the news framing of specific scandals in public attitudes? Does strong partisanship inevitably weaken the effects of press revelations? Why do certain scandals get sustained news and public attention? What explains the political resilience of scandal-scarred politicians? How do scandals affect media credibility, especially given mixed public views about media performance and strong partisanship?

Conclusions In summary, scandals are powerful, analytically rich events for understanding dynamics and structures in public communication. They lay out struggles over social and moral expectations about virtuous behaviors of powerful individuals and institutions. They illustrate the multiple roles of the news media. Just as some provide valuable public service by documenting wrongdoing and holding powerful elites accountable, others are primarily interested in scandalous information for pursuing commercial gains or for simply downplaying or ignoring wrongdoing. They are complex, multileveled instances of mediated politics. The recurrence of scandals across social sectors and around the world reveals ongoing, monumental changes in the news media and political communication. The rise of networked journalism and the proliferation of digital expression have transformed the causes, development, and consequences of scandals. Scandals are no longer affairs played out by elites. They are not limited to the actions of political and economic elites and news organizations; a range of actors now intervenes in various ways, for different reasons and with different outcomes. Just as press exposés potentially trigger scandals, scandals may spark forms of collective action against wrongdoing and abuses, demands for justice and social repair, as well as backlash actions. A series of global scandals reveals the consolidation of media and political spaces for reporting cross-border issues, redefining legal and moral boundaries, and transnational citizenship. It also highlights the cooperation between transnational groups of investigative journalists and whistleblowers. However, the consequences of the revelations in relation to accountability is more complex. Apart from bilateral extradition treaties, which do not cover all countries, and other policing and legal mechanisms such as the European Arrest Warrant, the responsibility for police investigation and future regulation to control tax evasion, for example, rests mainly with individual states. States which want to attract finance may be reluctant to introduce measures to control offshore territories whilst other governments may wish to be more draconian in response to popularity and electoral requirements. Finally, whilst future research on media and scandals will no doubt continue to examine differences in democracies and authoritarian states, media settings and journalistic practices, and case studies, we think that there are three areas that deserve closer scrutiny. The first area is for further analysis of the consequences of scandal. How for example do the media operate during episodes of prolonged scandal (Tumber 2004, 1135)? As Castells commented, “the strategy in 19

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scandal politics does not necessarily aim at an instant blow on the basis of one scandal” (1997, 338). Despite these questions being asked some 20 years ago, little interdisciplinary focus has been brought to bear on the analysis of the consequences arising from political science, law, social psychology, and business. The second area is for a continuation of recent work on the way social media works in exposing and debating scandal. This relatively new phenomenon has changed the nature of scandal revelations as we have outlined above. The third area is for building a body of work on scandal and social theory. Whilst research has pinpointed key concepts in news and journalism in mediated scandal, little work, apart from that on Emile Durkheim, has explored the canon for understanding scandal.

References Alexander, J. (1988). Culture and political crisis: Watergate and Durkheimian sociology. In: J. Alexander (Ed.), Durkheimian sociology: Cultural studies. New York: Cambridge University Press. Alford, C. F. (2001). Whistleblowers: Broken lives and organizational power. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Allan, S. (2013). Citizen witnessing. Cambridge: Polity. Allern S. and Pollack E. (Eds.). (2012). Scandalous! The mediated construction of political scandals in four Nordic countries. Gothenburg: Nordicom. Apostolidis, P. and Williams, J. (2004). Public affairs: Politics in the age of sex scandals. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Basinger, J. and Rottinghaus, B. (2012). Skeletons in White House closets: A discussion of modern presidential scandals. Political Science Quarterly, 127(2), 213–239. Brevini, B., Hintz, A. and McCurdy, P. (Eds.) (2013). Beyond WikiLeaks: Implications for the future of communications, journalism and society. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Calland, R. and Dehn, G. (2004). Whistleblowing around the world: Law, culture & practice. London and Cape Town: ODAC. Castells, M. (1997). The power of identity. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell. Cohen, S. (1972). Folk devils and moral panics: The creation of the mods and rockers. London: MacGibbon and Kee. Cohen, S. (2011). Whose side were we on? The undeclared politics of moral panic theory. Crime Media Culture, 7(3), 237–243. Critcher, C. (2011). For a political economy of moral panics. Crime Media Culture, 7(3), 259–275. Davies, N. (2014). Hack attack: How the truth caught up with Rupert Murdoch. London: Chatto & Windus. Demirhan, K. and Çakır-Demirhan, D. (2016). Political scandal, corruption, and legitimacy in the age of social media. Hershey, PA: IGI Global. Dworkin, T. M. and Baucus, M. S. (1998). Internal vs. external whistleblowers: A comparison of whistleblowing processes. Journal of Business Ethics, 17(12), 1281–1298. Entman, R. M. (2012). Scandal and silence: Media responses to presidential misconduct. Cambridge: Polity. Flinders, M. (2012). The demonisation of politicians: Moral panics, folk devils and MPs’ expenses. Contemporary Politics, 18(1), 1–17. Foges, C. (2018). May’s carnival of indecision over Brexit has cost us dear. The Times, February 26, p. 26. Freedman, D. (2012). The phone hacking scandal: Implications for regulation. Television & New Media, 13(1), 17–20. Gamson, J. (2001). Sex scandal narratives as institutional morality tales. Social Problems, 48(2), 185–205. Garland, D. (2008). On the concept of moral panic. Crime Media Culture, 4(1), 9–30. Garrard J. and Nowell, J. (Eds.) (2006). Scandals in past and contemporary politics. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Goode, E. and Ben-Yehuda, N. (1994). Moral panics: The social construction of deviance. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Greer, C. and McLaughlin, E. (2013). The Sir Jimmy Savile scandal: Child sexual abuse and institutional denial at the BBC. Crime, Media, Culture, 9(3), 243–263. Halpern, S. (2017). The nihilism of Julian Assange. The New Yorker. Available at: https://www.nybooks. com/articles/2017/07/13/nihilism-of-julian-assange-wikileaks/. Accessed July 13, 2018. Hier, S. P., Lett, D., Walby, K. and Smith, A. (2011). Beyond folk devil resistance: Linking moral panic and moral regulation. Criminology & Criminal Justice, 11(3), 259–276. Hunt, A. (1997). “Moral panic” and moral language in the media. British Journal of Sociology, 48(4), 629–648.

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Media and scandal Hunt, G. (1995). Whistleblowing in the health service. London: Edward Arnold. Leigh, D. and Harding, L. (2011). WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s war on secrecy. London: Guardian Books. Lewis, C. (2004). The journalist and the whistleblower: A symbiotic relationship. In R. Calland and G. Dehn (Eds.), Whistleblowing around the world: Law, culture and practice (pp. 21–27). Cape Town: ODAC and PCAW. Liebes, T. and Blum-Kulka, S. (2004). It takes two to blow the whistle: Do journalists control the outbreak of scandal? American Behavioral Scientist, 47(9), 1153–1170. Lull, J. and Hinerman, S. (Eds.) (1997). Media scandals: Morality and desire in the popular culture marketplace. New York: Columbia University Press. Mandell, H. and Chen, G.M. (Eds.) (2017). Scandal in a digital age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Marion, N. E. (2010). The politics of disgrace: The role of political scandal in American politics. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. Markovits, A. S. and Silverstein, M. (Eds.) (1988). Politics of scandal: Power and process in liberal democracies. New York: Holmes & Meier. Mawby, R. C. (2016). A question of scandal? The police and the phone-hacking business. Criminology and Criminal Justice, OnlineFirst, pp. 1–18. McRobbie, A. and Thornton, S. L. (1995). Rethinking “moral panic” for multi-mediated social worlds. British Journal of Sociology, 46(4), 559–574. Pearce, J. M. and Charman, E. (2011). A social psychological approach to understanding moral panic. Crime Media Culture, 7(3), 293–311. Russell, A. and Waisbord, S. (2017). Digital citizenship and surveillance: The Snowden revelations and the networked fourth estate. International Journal of Communication, 11(21). Sabato, L., Stencel, J. and Lichter, S. R. (2000). Peepshow: Media and politics in an age of scandal. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Thompson, J. B. (2000). Political scandal: Power and visibility in the media age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Tumber, H. (1993). “Selling scandal”: Business and the media. Media, Culture & Society, 15(3), 345–363. Tumber, H. (2004). Scandal and media in the United Kingdom. In H. Tumber and S. Waisbord (Eds.), Political scandals and media across democracies, (Vol. 1). American Behavioral Scientist, 47(8). Tumber, H. and Waisbord, S. (Eds.) (2004a). Political scandals and media across democracies, (Vol. 1). American Behavioral Scientist, 47(8). Tumber, H. and Waisbord, S. (Eds.) (2004b). Political scandals and media across democracies, (Vol. 2). American Behavioral Scientist, 47(9). Van Es, R. and Smit, G. (2003). Whistleblowing and media logic: A case study. Business Ethics, A European Review, 12(2), 144–150. Wahl-Jorgensen, K. and Hunt, J. (2012). Journalism, accountability and the possibilities for structural critique: A case study of coverage of whistleblowing. Journalism, 13(4), 399– 416. Walsh, D. (2018). Premier Food chief’s ‘Ratner moment’ leaves a bad taste. The Times, 30 June 30. Young, J. (2011). Moral panics and the transgressive other. Crime Media Culture, 7(3), 245–258.

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PART I

Key concepts in media and scandal studies

2 SCANDAL AND SOCIAL THEORY Scott Brenton

The first written account of a scandal can be traced back to ancient Greece in 415 BC when Athenian commander Alcibiades destroyed the stone images of the gods and was accused of sacrilege (Neckel 2005). Over the centuries and as democracies emerged and developed, scandals came to be used negatively in order to gain political or some other power advantage: from eighteenth-century Britain when conservatives would depict libertines as threats to the family and the state (Clark 2003) to the late nineteenth century when professional journalists became involved as investigators. This continued into the twentieth century with politicians and political parties as key actors and by the end of the century scandals had become a feature of contemporary liberal democratic politics. While the effects of frequent scandals are commonly and intuitively considered damaging to not only the scandalised but also the wider polity, many theorists have identified positive functions. One of the dominant strands of scholarly thought emanates from both early and later work by Émile Durkheim. Some of Durkheim’s early work examines how scandals strengthen the community’s collective conscience by punishing deviants to reinforce social cohesion. In a similar vein, Max Gluckman observes the use of gossip and scandals to vet potential leaders and ultimately to foster overall unity as smaller groups and cliques compete against each other. Scholars such as Jeffrey C. Alexander integrate Durkheim’s ritual theory with theories of social structures and processes to propose five conditions necessary for a fundamental crisis and ritual renewal, along with post-ritual ‘effervescence’. These theories offer different ways of thinking about scandals as indicators of democratic health.

Evolution of scandals The ancient Greeks differentiated between oikos (the home), ecclesia (politics) and agora (public space). As Ortega (2004: 210) explains, the agora was ‘the space in which personal autonomy was achieved and placed at the service of supra-individual objectives in order to strengthen the city to which these citizens belonged’. The concept of the individual and public spaces developed simultaneously as free individuals and free discussion underpin the public sphere; this forum also constrained individuality with the expression of collective values. Scandals generally occur when the boundaries separating these spheres are transgressed, specifically when individual actions violate collective values or morals. 25

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Over the centuries there have obviously been many changes, particularly an increasingly aggressive role of the media and a more personalised practice of politics, and detailing these evolutions could easily comprise this entire chapter. However, this is not the intended focus so the major change to be observed at this point is the proliferation of scandals in recent times, such that they are now considered commonplace and one of the general features of liberal democratic politics (Williams 1998; Neckel 2005). The role of the media and its relationship with the public sphere does still warrant some further examination though, and this will be addressed towards the end of this chapter. In the first part of this chapter I will theorise the ‘function’ of scandals and critique the popularly held view that they are merely negative features of politics, particularly when their frequency is high. This is not to dismiss the negative effects, such as: heightened public distrust, suspicion or scepticism of government; a general aversion towards politics and politicians; and decreased confidence in all politicians and legislative institutions (Garment 1991; Williams 1998). Rather, it is to acknowledge the less appreciated positive effects, while noting that they are not mutually exclusive and that the same scandal can produce both negative and positive effects simultaneously. For example, suspicion and scepticism can increase public accountability while also promoting public acceptance of the human fallibility of elected leaders (Sabato, Stencel and Lichter 2000). Clark (2003) argues that scandals can enliven democracy and actually draw more of the public into politics with simpler narratives, and once involved they focus on deeper political problems and the outrage generated by scandal is used to mobilise constituencies around particular issues. This is of course very contentious, with many others maintaining that scandals only entertain—these criticisms will be canvassed in the second part of this chapter. Firstly, the foundational theory is established, drawing principally on the ideas of Émile Durkheim.

Durkheimian sociology Some of Émile Durkheim’s early work examines how scandals strengthen the community’s collective conscience by punishing deviants so as to reinforce social cohesion. Durkheim defines the collective conscience (or consciousness) as the totality of common beliefs and sentiments of average citizens, which form an independent, determinate, cultural system. The following elucidation appears in Durkheim’s formative work The Division of Labor in Society (1984 [1893]: 38–39): The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society forms a determinate system with a life of its own. It can be termed the collective or common consciousness. Undoubtedly the substratum of this consciousness does not consist of a single organ. By definition it is diffused over society as a whole, but nonetheless possesses specific characteristics that make it a distinctive reality. In fact it is independent of the particular conditions in which individuals find themselves. Individuals pass on, but it abides. However, this idea of the collective consciousness did not endure throughout his later work, and Ritzer (2000) acknowledges that Durkheim himself was critical of the broad and amorphous character of the collective conscience, which was refined into the more specific concept of collective representations. Ritzer (2000: 83) defines collective representations ‘as the norms and values of specific collectives such as the family, occupation, state, and educational and religious institutions’. Thus the concept of collective representations is much more robust, with Ritzer proposing that it can be applied both generally and specifically and that it exists independently 26

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of any particular individual and with a greater temporal span than the lifetime of any individual. Whilst the term ‘collective conscience’ continues to be used throughout this chapter because of its moral connotations, it is important to note both this distinction and how Durkheim’s theories have evolved. When morality is invoked in scandals, there is now a questioning of whose morality it is. Ritzer also discusses the changes in the common morality, such as the diminished significance of the collective conscience in societies with organic solidarity (compared with more traditional societies with mechanical solidarity). However, he also notes that the division of labour and the resulting functionalism are stronger bonds than the collective conscience (for a more detailed explanation see Ritzer 2000). Critics (of which there are many) of Durkheim refer to logical and substantive problems with functional approaches, but this can only be noted briefly here. While some of Durkheim’s ideas, particularly in his early work, might be considered to be underdeveloped, as a ‘father of sociology’ he does offer a useful starting point upon which many notable theorists in this field have based their analytical frameworks, and these will be discussed in this chapter. If anything, it is the theoretical gaps in Durkheim’s work that make him more relevant, as they create more intellectual opportunities in this still emerging field. The earliest theorists working in this field include Jeffrey C. Alexander, who integrates Durkheim’s ritual theory with theories of social structure and processes, and Andrei Markovits and Mark Silverstein, who draw upon Durkheim’s work on social integration. Alexander (1988) dissects the media cues and the broader social signifiers of scandals in his influential work, Durkheimian Sociology: Cultural Studies, in which he examines the Watergate crisis and the televising of the Senate hearings. He argues that: To allow something to assume the form of ritualized event is to give participants in a drama the right to intervene forcefully in the culture of the society; it is to give an event, and to those who are defining its meaning, a special, privileged access to the collective conscience. (201) Alexander outlines five conditions through which a society experiences a fundamental ‘crisis’ and ritual ‘renewal’: firstly, sufficient (which is of course relative) social consensus that the event will be considered ‘deviant’; secondly, significant groups must believe that the event threatens the ‘centre’ of society; thirdly, institutional social controls come into force; fourthly, mobilisation and the struggle of elites and publics takes place; and finally symbolic interpretation (ritual) and purification processes occur to dismiss the deviant or ‘transgressive’ threats while strengthening the symbolic, sacred centre of society. The media are of course ever present in each of these conditions. While this theory, with its references to ‘deviants’, ‘purification’ and the ‘sacred’, seems overly spiritual, it does at least introduce a useful perspective in viewing scandals as a political or media ritual with a higher purpose or with consequences beyond simply the effects on the individual or individuals at the centre of the scandal. Alexander does make some important qualifications. Firstly, these stages are not ‘automatic’ processes, and neither are modern rituals ever complete, because Alexander is referring to a crisis rather than just a scandal. A crisis is a more fundamental threat to political stability. Secondly, not everyone will emerge from the ritual process with a shared set of beliefs. There will be disagreements about whether there was an initial transgression as the ‘collective’ morality is not singular nor universal. The transgressor may even survive the scandal without receiving substantive punishment, or the punishment may take time to be enacted. The reinforcement of the social order occurs through changes in social institutions and processes. Finally and most 27

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significantly, a ritual ‘effervescence’, or the residue from the ritual, continues to permeate postritual life such that confidence in the political system is unaffected. Counter-intuitively, overall confidence may even increase, despite continued distrust in particular institutional actors and authorities. This is what happened after the Watergate crisis, which showed that the ‘system’ ultimately works. This claim is based on the fact that scandals generally do not cause fundamental reassessments of the legitimacy of the political system, but rather the practice of politics within that system. Durkheim’s ideas have a particular resonance in liberal democracies, and the relationship between liberal democracy and political scandals has attracted considerable sociological attention. One of the pioneering works in this field is Andrei Markovits and Mark Silverstein’s The Politics of Scandal: Power and Process in Liberal Democracies (1988). In it they argue that the rituals of scandals concretise the overall legitimacy of the system by reaffirming due process and restraining the arbitrary exercise of political power, thus making the abstract values of liberal democracy tangible and visible to the citizenry. Like Alexander, a political scandal is described as a cycle with specific stages: an unusual event disturbs a period of political normalcy, a third party publicises the event provoking demands for punishment or reforms of the system, then normalcy returns—but it is only transitory. According to Neckel (2005), scandals in politics create opportunities to resolve social norm conflicts in a socially integrative and durable way. Thus social stability is not undermined as scandals are just temporary disruptions that ultimately reinforce the rules for the delegation of political power. For these reasons, Neckel describes political scandal as an exemplary form of conflict, in that opposing social claims to the validity of norms are contested and instruments of power are used. Markovits and Silverstein (1988: 3) argue that ‘scandals are inherent in the very structure of politics and confirm Durkheim’s point that each social system needs pathologies for its successful reproduction . . . scandals constitute important ingredients in the maintenance and development of political life’. Neckel (2005: 102) concurs and further argues that by studying a social pathology social normality can be better understood. Neckel contends that scandals emerge from the normal business of politics itself, and thus reveal insights into private areas of political life. In each country different types of scandals are perceived differently; for example, sex scandals are deemed topical and newsworthy in countries like Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom, but not so much in France. Thus scandals can convey general features of the political culture in an abnormal and personalised way (Logue 1998). The conception of scandals as a social pathology has provoked much debate in the literature. Logue, for example, does not interpret scandals as an aberration or even as pathology, but rather as a normal part of the political system, even though the public may claim to be outraged by them. Scandals offer a valuable insight into broader political life. Gamson (2004) largely agrees, observing that individual transgressors seem more normal than not. The circulation of cultural norms through the media focuses on the normative disorder and what cannot be believed. However, the public can begin to recognise the media’s frames that they do not necessarily share, and then become cynical of the media (Kenski 2003). While Markovits and Silverstein’s work can be located in the Durkheimian tradition, they clearly acknowledge the limitations of some of his ideas. They critique his theory that transgressions are normal and help to reaffirm the violated belief and the social collectivity underpinning the belief, which Durkheim argues is necessary for the maintenance of social order. They question the simplicity of the framework based on the social function of norms, which they claim cannot satisfactorily explain scandals in the modern polity. Finally, Markovits and Silverstein (1988: 4) contend that the Durkheimian analysis ignores the importance of ‘the exercise of, and struggle for, political power’. They reason that power is fundamental to the construction 28

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of social reality, public morality and the collective conscience, and is therefore the single most important element in a scandal. As the title of their book asserts, the issues of power and process are at the centre of their work. Markovits and Silverstein (1988: 5) posit that ‘political scandals in the modern world can be understood only by developing an appreciation for this ambiguity concerning the use of political power—an ambiguity present to varying degrees in all liberal democracies’. This is supported by Neckel, who recognises that for scandals to occur there must be a functional differentiation between power and control bodies in politics, and therefore they are not a feature of dictatorships (other than stage-managed internal power struggles). Markovits and Silverstein review the philosophical inconsistencies between liberalism and democracy. Their theory focuses on the inherent tension between liberalism’s celebration of process as the mechanism controlling and limiting power, and democracy’s statist philosophy that is premised on furthering the communal good through the effective use of political power. It is this contradiction between these two traditions that characterises the political nature of scandals. They argue that, despite liberalism’s commitment to individualism and freedom, the liberal collective conscience also celebrates the ‘collective’ value of process, and that process is the public interest. Schudson (2004: 1237) argues that ‘representative democracy [or more precisely, liberal democracy] is a political system built on distrust of power and the powerful’. Accordingly, Markovits and Silverstein argue that liberals’ inherent misgivings about political power are only accommodated by rule-driven political processes with clear procedures and public scrutiny. When processes are contravened against the common good, the transgression is perceived as being scandalous. Neckel (2005: 104) makes a similar observation in that political scandals always surface when political actors disrupt the normative inventory of politics. This disruption results in conflict between different power groups, and public opinion is used to delegitimise the social position of opposing groups. That is, public opinion is used to condemn either the transgressor embroiled in the scandal, or the prosecutors of the scandal. Gluckman (1963) notes that there are risks and potential penalties for excessive users of scandal or people who over-scandalise, while the victim may benefit from sympathy. Essentially Neckel interprets competing power groups contributing to the moral regulation of politics and scandal as a mechanism for informal social control. Consistent with the Durkheimian tradition, Neckel argues that ultimately scandals enable the symbolic reproduction of the ruling power conditions. In other words, any temporary disruptions to the practice of politics at the time do not significantly affect the overarching political system. Rather the system is strengthened in a functionalist sense by accommodating and resolving the temporary disruptions. For Markovits and Silverstein the rituals of political scandals and their resolutions (or in Durkheimian lexicon, punishments) concretise the overall legitimacy of liberal democracies, as abstract values are made tangible and visible, which reaffirms the functioning of processes.

Tribal politics and moral leadership While the specific events and the moral, ethical and legal issues raised in each scandal differ, the evocation of such questions is precisely what defines scandals and provides a basis for comparison (Lull and Hinerman 1997). Unlike written legal codes, moral and ethical codes are contentious, therefore scandals can produce different consequences for different transgressors. Drawing upon the work of folklorists and anthropologists, such as Gluckman, Bird (1997) proposes that scandals should be analysed in terms of the values being expressed and how the story interrogates morality. According to Bird long-running scandals attempt to make an overarching moral statement about right and wrong. 29

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Anthropologist Max Gluckman’s studies of tribal groups provide parallels with political parties and groups competing for power and influence. Gluckman (1963: 308) contends that gossip and scandals can have important positive virtues: Clearly they maintain the unity, morals and values of social groups. Beyond this, they enable these groups to control the competing cliques and aspiring individuals of which all groups are composed. And finally, they make possible the selection of leaders without embarrassment. That is, gossip and scandals are used to vet potential leaders. Gluckman theorises that scandals unite groups within a larger society as cliques struggle against each other for status and prestige. That is, while cliques use gossip and scandals against each other, they are also used to define the broader social values. For something to be scandalous or worthy of gossip, it must be in contravention of a social value, and the fact that the contravention is seen as negative reinforces the social value and brings the larger group together. As politics is a competition for power, and is inherently ‘dirty’, the ideal conditions exist for scandals to flourish. The pursuit of political power is also discussed by another ‘father of sociology’, Max Weber, in his pivotal essay Politics as a Vocation (see Weber 1918/1919). Durkheim examines the privileged position of the machinery of government in possessing and expressing symbolic authority. While churches perform a similar role, their reach is more limited in secular or multi-faith societies. Politicians also occupy a privileged position due to expectations that as representatives of society they will also personify the collective morality. Neckel (2005) maintains that politicians have a special status that gives both legitimate power and a moral burden, in that they are required to be even more ‘moral’ than ordinary citizens because of their perceived moral obligations to society. Scandals are based on transgressions that are perceived to dishonour a public office or position in society (Williams 1998). Politicians often campaign on a platform of personal integrity and impeccable character, which risks scandals alleging ‘double standards’ and hypocrisy when the transgressor’s behaviour is inconsistent with the norms and values they publicly espouse (Thompson 1997: 41; Tumber and Waisbord 2004: 1036). In this way scandals expose what Tumber and Waisbord (2004) identify as a duality underlying politics: between what is said and what is done; between idealised and ‘dirty’ politics; and between publicly legitimated norms and actual behaviour. The ‘hidden face’ of power is revealed, which undermines the manufactured public facade and is shocking. Yet politicians persist in constructing a public facade despite these risks. Weber is one of the earliest theorists who saw the modern professional politician as exhibiting charisma, passion and a unique principle of personal responsibility (Mahler 2006). Engaging in politics as a ‘vocation’ meant embodying the ethics of responsibility and the ethics of conviction. According to Mahler (2006), politics as a vocation is more than practising politics for personal gain: the individual’s relationship to politics should be characterised by a ‘sense of duty’. This moral sense of duty is often at the heart of the perceived violation. In terms of political scandals, loss of public office is the most obvious form of punishment. Neckel (2005: 208) argues that elections provide an intermittent opportunity for a termination of political power. However, Logue (1988) argues that simply punishing the transgressor does not necessarily produce greater system legitimacy, which is dependent on the effectiveness of the response. Although Logue does acknowledge that individual punishment does encourage vigilance, which is crucial to the maintenance of a healthy liberal democracy, Durkheim (1984 [1893]: 62–63) defines the function of punishment as follows: 30

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It does not serve, or serves only very incidentally, to correct the guilty person or to scare off any possible imitators. From this dual viewpoint its effectiveness may rightly be questioned; in any case it is mediocre. Its real function is to maintain inviolate the cohesion of society by sustaining the common consciousness in all its vigour. If that consciousness were thwarted so categorically, it would necessarily lose some of its power, were an emotional reaction from the community not forthcoming to make good that loss. Thus there would result a relaxation in the bonds of social solidarity. Durkheim reasons that unanimous community aversion is needed to strengthen the consciousness explicitly, as it signals that collective sentiments and the communion of shared beliefs are unbroken.

The new public sphere One of the biggest critics of the contemporary media is Félix Ortega, who identifies some of the more disturbing features of the ‘new’ public sphere. According to Ortega (2004: 220), the new public space of politics is not interested in real problems, interests or affecting political decisions, but rather is an inconsistent and unregulated discourse that lacks logical imperatives—or in Ortega’s words it is a ‘world of fiction’. Ortega argues that media focus on impact, novelty and spectacular images and events, and reasoned discussion is rendered superfluous as it cannot effectively compete with the realities of news production including time and format constraints. However, this analysis exaggerates the supremacy of tabloid values in the media, and indeed assumes homogeneity within the media. Ortega argues that the media have ‘colonised’ the public sphere and created what he describes as a new public space of politics. According to him (2004: 217–221), the media’s role has changed and now defines the public sphere: the media both control and have transformed the space. The public sphere and the media have become almost interchangeable; however, Ortega fails to appreciate fully that within the public sphere there are multiple narratives and multiple issues and events comprising a single political scandal. Scandals can enable an interrogation of the collective conscience in different media and in public discourses, while Ortega’s arguments pertain to the tabloid media in particular. Furthermore, Ortega’s argument assumes that politics only exists within the public sphere. However, his critique is useful in addressing the question of whether scandal coverage does contribute to an informed public sphere and therefore whether it legitimately belongs there. This also raises the issue of why the media choose to make certain issues visible in the first place, and whether the media are actually being guided by the public interest. Schudson (2004: 1237) argues that democracies are more vulnerable to the imperfections and corruptions of their leaders because the media in liberal democracies are more aggressive. It is not that transgressions and corruption do not occur in closed societies—in all probability they occur just as much or even more—it is that such events are not subject to the same scrutiny. In this sense, exposure shows that the ‘system’ is actually working. However, visibility has not only been given to corruption and other transgressions against the state—quite the contrary. According to Ortega the media often exhume intimacy as opposed to constructing the supra-individual sphere, or in other words, the private sphere in terms of individual privacy is no longer regarded as private. In the new public sphere, if even one media outlet chooses to make something visible, it becomes public. This idea of mediated visibility is also addressed by sociologist-cum-scandologist John Thompson, who argues that political scandals have become more pervasive as visibility through the media has increased. Thompson (2005: 49) states that ‘mediated visibility is not just 31

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a vehicle through which aspects of social and political life are brought to the attention of others: it has become a principal means by which social and political struggles are articulated and carried out’. Schudson, drawing upon some of Thompson’s earlier ideas, is critical of the application of Durkheimian theory to some scandals because there can be an entertainment dimension that reaffirms political cynicism rather than reinforcing collective values. For example, Schudson’s (2004: 1236) interpretation of Watergate is that the public grew cynical and disaffected rather than renewing their commitment to the system, despite the system resisting corrupting forces. However, the liberal democratic political system was not criticised and remained fundamentally unchanged. The cynicism was directed towards political actors and even the media, and there was at least some cosmetic or symbolic reform before the public recommitted to the system. Logue, who is also critical of some of the positive functionalist effects of scandals, acknowledges that they can actually weaken confidence in individual leaders while simultaneously strengthening confidence in liberal democracy.

Conclusion This chapter has traversed some challenging terrain as many of the theories are somewhat contradictory when comparing the theorist’s earlier and later work, or are heavily nuanced or qualified, or engage with only certain aspects of another theorist’s ideas while steadfastly contesting other components. Rather than present a completely consistent and integrated account, the purpose has been to showcase some of the diversity, but within a functionalist perspective that emphasises the positive effects. In order to do so, a distinction has been made between the practice of politics and the underlying political system, and between the actors and institutions, including the media as political actors. While the intentions behind exposing scandals may be nefarious, the system of accountability is shown to be healthy. Transgressive behaviour, while also concerning, is part of human fallibility and in some senses unavoidable when money and power is present. The systemic responses are more significant and also generally more reassuring.

References Alexander, Jeffrey C. 1988. Durkheimian Sociology: Cultural Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bird, S. E. 1997. ‘What a Story! Understanding the Audience for Scandal’, in Media Scandals: Morality and Desire in the Popular Culture Marketplace, edited by J. Lull and S. Hinerman. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 99–121. Clark, Anna. 2003. Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Durkheim, Émile. 1984 [1893]. The Division of Labor in Society. New York: Free Press. Gamson, Joshua. 2004. ‘Normal Sins: Sex Scandal Narratives as Institutional Morality Tales’, in Public Affairs: Politics in the Age of Sex Scandals, edited by P. Apostolidis and J. A. Williams. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 39–68. Garment, Suzanne. 1991. Scandal: The Culture of Mistrust in American Politics. New York: Times Books. Gluckman, Max. 1963. ‘Gossip and Scandal’, Current Anthropology, vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 307–316. Kenski, Kate M. 2003. ‘The Framing of Network News Coverage During the First Three Months of the Clinton-Lewinsky Scandal’, in Images, Scandal, and Communication Strategies of the Clinton Presidency, edited by R. E. Denton (Jr.) and R. L. Holloway. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, pp. 247–270. Logue, John. 1988. ‘Appreciating Scandal as a Political Art Form, or, Making an Intellectual Virtue of a Political Vice’, in The Politics of Scandal: Power and Process in Liberal Democracies, edited by A. S. Markovits and M. Silverstein. New York: Holmes & Meier, pp. 254–265. Lull, James and Stephen Hinerman. 1997. ‘The Search for Scandal’, in Media Scandals: Morality and Desire in the Popular Culture Marketplace, edited by J. Lull and S. Hinerman. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 1–33. Mahler, Matthew. 2006. ‘Politics as a Vocation’, Qualitative Sociology, vol. 29, no. 3, pp. 281–300.

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Scandal and social theory Markovits, Andrei S. and Mark Silverstein (eds). 1988. The Politics of Scandal: Power and Process in Liberal Democracies. New York: Holmes & Meier. Neckel, Sighard. 2005. ‘Political Scandals: An Analytical Framework’, Comparative Sociology, vol. 4, no. 1/2, pp. 101–111. Ortega, Félix. 2004. ‘The New Public Space of Politics’, International Review of Sociology, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 209–221. Ritzer, George. 2000. Sociological Theory. New York: McGraw Hill. Sabato, Larry J., Mark Stencel and S. Robert Lichter. 2000, Peepshow: Media and Politics in an Age of Scandal. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. Schudson, Michael. 2004. ‘Notes on Scandal and the Watergate Legacy’, American Behavioral Scientist, vol. 47, no. 9, pp. 1231–1238. Thompson, John B. 1997. ‘Scandal and Social Theory’, in Media Scandals: Morality and Desire in the Popular Culture Marketplace, edited by J. Lull and S. Hinerman. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 34–64. Thompson, John B. 2005. ‘The New Visibility’, Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 22, no. 6, pp. 31–51. Tumber, Howard and Silvio R. Waisbord. 2004. ‘Political Scandals and Media Across Democracies, Volume I’, American Behavioral Scientist, vol. 47, no. 8, pp. 1031–1039. Weber, Max. 1918/1919, Politik als Beruf (Politics as a Vocation). Munich: Duncker & Humboldt. Williams, Robert. 1998. Political Scandals in the USA. Edinburgh: Keele University Press.

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3 MEDIA COVERAGE OF POLITICAL SCANDALS Effects of personalization and potential for democratic reforms Marion R. Just and Ann N. Crigler While journalists view the chief goal of their profession as informing the audience, they labor under the necessity of attracting their attention. As Walter Lippmann remarked, journalists face “the economic necessity of interesting the reader quickly, and the economic risk involved in not interesting him at all” (Lippmann 1965 [1922], 217). Attention-grabbing news helps to maximize audience size and hence the revenues of media outlets in the highly competitive marketplace (McManus 1994; see also Gans 1979; Just 2007; Thompson 2000, 80–81). Researchers have pointed to various news biases or frames that attract audience attention, particularly soft news topics (Baum 2003), and dramatize the story or focus on persons rather than abstract ideas (Bennett 2012). The prominence of news coverage of political scandals can be explained by their inherent drama, personalization, and likelihood of attracting audience attention. These are criteria that fit well with widely shared news values in market-driven American media.

Defining scandal For the purposes of this chapter, we conceptualize scandals as a product of the social construction of meaning. Scandals are defined as actions or events that transgress values, norms, or moral expectations, which are often hidden, and when revealed elicit strong negative reactions (such as anger, shock, disgust, outrage) in the public. Political scandals involve individuals in government policies or institutions and usually revolve around the transgression of values and norms regarding sex, money, or power (Thompson 2000). Scandals are dynamic as competing actors attempt to control narratives and seek to hide or reveal the transgressions. In addition, there may be what Thompson calls “second-order” scandals—ones in which an actor attempts to conceal the original transgression through “deception, obstruction, false denials and straightforward lies giving rise to an intensifying cycle of claim and counter-claim that dwarfs the initial offence and fuels a scandal which escalates with every twist” (Thompson 2000, 17). In liberal democracies, journalists and opposing partisans play a central role in bringing scandals to public attention. Scandals are more likely to come to light in a highly polarized, partisan era when strong opponents seek to tear down one another. News coverage has historically been indexed to elite conflicts which generate attention-grabbing headlines and fit well with the us– them framing that dominates partisan media (Bennett 2016; Iyengar 1991). They are also more 34

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likely to occur when journalists and political officials dislike/disrespect/don’t trust each other. In this case, journalists may take a more proactive, investigative journalism tack to reveal the weaknesses of the official. Scandals may also be more likely to surface if there are splits within an administration and if some people want to reveal the transgressions of their opponents to gain power or protect what they see as a threat to democracy (or at least their own view of democratic values). Not all transgressions rise to the level of scandal. With the widespread use of social media, for example, political actors can bypass the press and reach supporters with their own narratives and facts. In addition, highly partisan media may choose to defend the same party members accused of transgressions or to ignore the stories and focus on other topics. Finally, scandalous incidents may receive less attention in cases where the media or the opposition might be seen as culpable (Entman 2012). For example, if journalists failed to investigate and perform the watchdog functions of the press, transgressions may not be covered or viewed as scandalous. Likewise, scandals may not gain traction when the opposition party is made complicit by going along with the policy, as was the case for invading Iraq. Scandals fit the demands of journalism’s organizational processes, norms, and values (Iyengar and McGrady 2007). News requires novelty—a deviation from what is expected. The definition of scandal is “some deviation from the norm,” so that scandals automatically fit the criterion of surprising news. In addition, scandals are negative stories for the key figures involved, which also fits the journalistic inclination to negative news (Iyengar and McGrady 2007, 61). Finally, blame for scandals is often attributed to an individual or group of individuals rather than institutions (Bennett 2012), which makes the story easy to understand. The presence of heroes or villains makes it easy for the audience to relate to the story. If the scandal involves celebrities or prominent people, the more likely it is that scandal stories will draw the attention of the audience (Gans 1979). Journalists’ standards for news are widely shared and lead to a broad consensus on what topics or aspects of topics should be followed (Gans 1979; Just et al. 1992; Sabato 1991). Political scandals are easily identified as newsworthy and also play into polarized politics by giving partisans a means to attack their opponents. News media with different partisan leanings cover scandals in line with the slant of their editors (Puglisi and Snyder 2011) and readers (Thurman and Schifferes 2012). While much American research on newsworthiness points to agreement on what is news (Galtung and Ruge 1965; Gans 1979; Sabato 1991), other scholars find differences across media. Recent comparative research finds that the criteria of newsworthiness vary across nations based on differences in national interest, national journalistic culture, and editorial policy (Archetti 2010). Cristina Archetti’s analysis of the war in Afghanistan and post–9/11 news coverage in the USA, France, Italy, and Pakistan reveals differences in news content cross-nationally. In addition to cross-national differences, differences in the newsworthiness of scandals have also been shown in research on partisan media within the USA (Entman 2012, 32–33). Partisan media are motivated to diffuse information that favors their fellow partisans and denigrates opponents. These partisan and/or new investigative journalists contribute to what Lanny Davis has termed the “gotcha politics” of the scandal machine in which media, “sanctimonious values of hyper-ethicists,” and the “intervention of what turned out to be an extra-constitutional monster called the ‘independent counsel’” escalates attention to political scandals (Davis 2006, 84) and diverts it away from more substantive debates. Print and broadcast news may also differ in the visual images, personalization, and sensationalism of their coverage with television news tending to contain more of these than newspapers (Graber 2010; Neuman et al. 1992; Rosenstiel et al. 2007). 35

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Media critics are wary of scandal stories precisely because they are so appealing to the audience. In the market for news, easily accessible stories may crowd out more substantive news (Nyhan 2015; Zaller 1998, 2001). Agner Fog, a cultural selection theorist, maintains that “the unavoidable political consequence is that the democratic process will allocate a more than optimal amount of resources to purposes that range high on the media agenda for reasons of attention catching, and a less than optimal amount of resources to purposes with little media appeal” (2005). Brendan Nyhan, however, observes the reverse, that is “pressure from competing news stories has a substantial negative effect on the likelihood and intensity of scandal coverage” (2). Observers are also concerned that a constant stream of sensational stories makes the audience jaded and uninterested in news altogether (Patterson 2000). Still others worry that a plethora of scandal stories and the ways in which politics are covered make citizens cynical and “weaken public regard” for political institutions (Bowler and Karp 2004, 26; Cappella and Jamieson 1997; Sabato 1991; Schudson 2011; Thompson 2000). In light of the impact of muck-raking journalism and historical icons of watchdog reporting, such as Watergate, some scholars see scandal news as an instigator of political reform (Thompson 2000). The divergence of scholarly views about media coverage of scandals can be partly explained by the types of scandals studied. Monographs about sexual scandal generally deplore the appeal to prurient interests and the race to the bottom of “junkyard” journalism (Sabato 1991). Those who study scandals about the abuse of power tend to see the role of journalists in a positive light. So, for example, books about sexual scandals (see for example, Dagnes 2011; Stanyer 2013) tend to deplore the tabloidization of news, while books and articles about Watergate (Bernstein and Woodward 1974; Hume 1997; Lang and Lang 1980) are inclined to praise enterprising journalists. Those who worry about the media’s increased focus on sex scandals, however, should perhaps give American voters more credit. Voters tend to judge sex scandals as less important than financial scandals (Doherty et al. 2014). Faced with a barrage of scandal coverage, voters create a scandal hierarchy, wherein the rare scandals which involve multiple parties or politicians have a much larger negative effect than their increasingly pervasive single-party and single-politician counterparts (Kumlin and Esaiasson 2011, 42). There are many typologies of scandal. However, two of the dominant types, personal and political, have different markets. Personal scandals about sexual misbehavior forge an immediate connection with the audience. Sex scandals are especially appealing to reporters when the miscreants’ behavior flies in the face of their professed values, such as adherence to conservative sexual mores or to homophobia. Political hypocrisy is a perennial target of journalists. In addition, other actors, particularly opposition parties, will seize on personal scandals for political gain from the damage to the reputations of those involved (Thompson 2000). A private moral failing will be framed as a reflection on incompetence, political immorality, untrustworthiness, or “broken promises” (Sabato 2000). The case of the impeachment of Bill Clinton reflects these reframing dimensions, as Republicans likened his sexual dalliances and other transgressions to Nixon and the Watergate affair (Just and Crigler 2000; Marion 2010). Non-sexual political scandals do not have as much audience appeal as hanky-panky in high places, but they play an important role in democratic systems. Financial malfeasance has a longer life in the public memory and is more widely condemned than sexual failings, since they directly break the public trust. Having the government pay for personal expenditures has brought down many elected public officials (Senator Carol Mosely Brown and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chief Scott Pruitt). In covering these political scandals, journalists try to attract the audience by dramatizing the scandalous events and evoking curiosity. Dramatic narratives often humanize the story by centering on particular individuals (Entman 2012; Thompson 2000). 36

Media coverage of political scandals

By attributing blame to one or a few individuals, media coverage of political scandals may divert attention from institutional problems. Iyengar in his path-breaking research on the influences of television news framing on audiences’ causal explanations for issues showed that when the news framed stories around individual victims, viewers were less likely to attribute blame to institutional factors, and vice versa (Iyengar 1991). Framing scandal coverage around the culpability of one or a few people may also trivialize the events. Blaming scandals on “a few bad apples” tends to direct attention away from institutions. Investigations by the Ethics Committee, Department of Justice, or FBI significantly increase the likelihood of scandalous activity receiving coverage, perhaps because such inquiries, and pursuant trials, lend themselves so easily to personalization (Romano 2014). Once guilty parties are revealed and punished, the immediate problem recedes and inevitably loses news value. The larger institutional problems go unresolved. For example, the media’s focus on “a few bad apples” likely stopped the Abu Ghraib scandal from gaining steam (Bennett et al. 2007; Entman 2012). As is the case for personal scandals, other actors may benefit from personalized news framing of political scandals. Opposing parties may use the scandal to run against the party of the blameworthy few, without having to come up with answers for significant institutional problems. Since reform challenges the internal balance of power, institutions involved in political scandals benefit when the scope of conflict or debate is narrowed and blame is placed on a few miscreants rather than on the organization itself (Bennett et al. 2007; Schattschneider 1975; Tait 2012). It is therefore in the interest of institutions to collaborate in generating a personalized news narrative of political scandals.

Case studies of policy scandals Our own investigation into the media coverage of four contemporaneous scandals demonstrates the factors outlined above: the prevalence of the negative tone of scandal coverage, the extent of personalization, sensationalism, and the discussion of the ramifications of the scandals. The scandals we looked at were: the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib during the Iraq War; the attack on consulate personnel in Benghazi, Tunisia; the leaking of security information by Edward Snowden; and sexual assault in the military. Data and methods. Each topic was coded from the time news broke about an event or issue through some kind of resolution, or if the scandal is ongoing through the end of April 2014. We purposely chose issue-based political scandals because we expected they would be a hard case for personalization. Table 3.1 shows the specific media sources, dates, number of stories, and inter-coder reliability results for each scandal. The selection of media sources was not uniform across the scandals but reflects a variety of news sources: foreign and domestic; print and broadcast; more or less recognized for partisan leanings. Approximately 40–50 stories per source were coded, although this varied depending on the availability of stories. The coding was conducted by students at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and the University of Southern California (USC) using a common set of variables and coding instructions. The analyses focused on the: primary accused; tone towards the accused; motivation of the accused; values or norms that were violated; and scope of blame for the scandal (a single individual, two or more individuals, or an organization or institution). In addition, we analyzed each story for: sensationalism of the coverage; Bennett’s information biases (Bennett 2012); and possible ramifications of the scandal. (Consult the authors for the complete content codes used in the analysis.) To assure quality control, a final inter-coder reliability test was conducted by one student for all of the scandals. The student recoded five stories for each scandal and then 37

Marion R. Just and Ann N. Crigler Table 3.1  Analysis of Four Contemporaneous Political Scandal Cases Scandal (% agreement)

Media source

Dates

No. of stories

Abu Ghraib (98.0%)

CBS News New York Times Middle Eastern News Compilation* Associated Press BBC News CBS News FOX News BBC News CNN News FOX News New York Times

9 June 2004 to 8 December 2006 3 May 2004 to 9 December 2006 13 May 2004 to 17 February 2006

47 48 54

12 September 2012 to 13 April 2014 12 September 2012 to 15 January 2014 12 September 2012 to 27 January 2014 12 September 2012 to 23 February 2014 10 June 2013 to 18 April 14 14 June 2013 to 18 April 2014 11 June 2013 to 15 April 2014 7 March 2003 to 21 March 2014

55 42 49 47 50 48 50 50

Washington Post

21 February 2003 to 19 November 2013

40

Benghazi (92.1%)

NSA/Snowden (93.2%) Sexual assault in the military (90.2%)

* Middle Eastern News Compilation consisted of Jerusalem Post, Daily Star (Beirut), Iran News, UPI Arabic News, and Israel National News.

calculated the percentage agreement among coders for each of the variables on the code sheet. All inter-coder results exceeded 90% agreement. Negative tone of coverage. All of the sampled news media covered the four scandals negatively. We found a negative tone toward the person or institution primarily accused in news stories about political scandals. This comes as no surprise since the definition of a scandal is the contravention of social norms or values. The percentage of stories judged negative and the mean score of negativity varied, however, across scandals. The proportion of stories that were negative towards the person or institution blamed ranged from 59.8% for Benghazi to virtually all of the stories about sexual assault in the military (96.7%). The mean negative tone for each scandal (on a scale of 1 negative; 2 neutral/balanced; and 3 positive) never exceeded 1.42 in our sample of media stories, with coverage of sexual assault in the military uniformly negative. See Figure 3.1.

100% 80% 60% 40% 20% 0% NSA/Snowden

Benghazi

Abu Ghraib

Sexual Assault in Military

67.8%

59.8%

81.9%

96.7%

Figure 3.1  Percentage of Stories Negative to Primary Accused, by Scandal

38

Media coverage of political scandals

Sensationalism. The media coverage of all the scandals was not only negative, it also tended to be sensational, but not uniformly across scandals. For example, the sensationalism coverage of sexual assault in the military averaged 4.13 on a scale of 5, the highest we recorded in our analyses. Abu Ghraib was somewhat less sensational with a mean of 3.5, and coverage of Benghazi and NSA/Snowden tended to be in the middle of the scale (2.75 and 2.86, respectively). See Figure 3.2. The correlation between egregiousness of the violation of norms and the sensationalism of coverage is also demonstrated by our results. Abu Ghraib involved Americans torturing Iraqi prisoners, and sexual assault in the military involved incidences of the rape of soldiers serving in the American military, but the two other scandals, Benghazi and NSA/Snowden, scored more in the middle of the 5 point sensationalism scandal. A minority of stories in any of the scandals was covered without any sensationalism. Personal and institutional coverage. Our content analyses of these purportedly institutional scandals did not bear out attribution of blame to individuals rather than institutions. Unlike sexual scandals or financial scandals where the blame is quite reasonably placed on the individuals involved, in the issue-based political scandals we examined, news coverage tended to put the blame on institutions and to a lesser extent on named individuals. The attribution of blame for the scandal did not differ significantly across media within each scandal. Coverage of the sexual assault in the military scandal was overwhelmingly (94%) attributed to the institution of the military rather than individuals. Fifty-eight percent of Benghazi stories primarily attributed blame to institutions. With Abu Ghraib and NSA/Snowden, media coverage was fairly evenly split between institutions and individuals. In the case of Abu Ghraib, the focus was on specific low level individuals directly involved in the abuse, but the institutional failures were never addressed. In the Benghazi case, Fox News in particular sought to pin the blame on Secretary of State Clinton and not on the institutional failures in communication. See Figure 3.3. Our findings reinforce the news consensus view with a few exceptions. Violating personal and institutional norms or values. When journalists covered these scandals they tended to describe how both personal and institutional norms were violated rather than viewing a trade-off between the personal and the institutional. For example, all

4.50 Sensationalism Scale

4 3.50 3 2.50 2 1.50 1 0.50 0

Mean

NSA/Snowden

Benghazi

Abu Ghraib

Sexual Assault Military

2.86

2.75

3.50

4.13

Figure 3.2  Sensationalism Score (1–5), by Scandal

39

Marion R. Just and Ann N. Crigler 100% 80% 60% 40% 20% 0% NSA/Snowden

Benghazi

1 Person

Abu Ghraib

2+ Persons

Sexual Assault Military

Organization/Institution

Figure 3.3  Attribution of Blame (Personalization), by Scandal

of the stories on sexual assaults in the military told of how personal and institutional norms were violated. The stories of individual perpetrators and victims were mixed with the larger institutional problems of the military. This same pattern occurred throughout the years that we analyzed. However, over time both the New York Times and Washington Post significantly shifted whom they blamed the most, but in different directions. The New York Times coverage increasingly focused on individual members of the military, while the Washington Post coverage increasingly treated the institution of the military as the primary accused. The divergence between the Times and the Post suggests that as researchers we cannot take for granted that news outlets that share platforms and missions will cover stories in exactly the same way. There is always room for editorial judgment. It is notable that the media included ramifications of institutional scandals, particularly efforts at reform. In the case of sexual assault in the military there was a public outcry to put an end to these abuses, especially in light of the relatively recent integration of women in the U.S. military. Specific calls for reform from legislators, such as Kirsten Gillibrand, heightened attention toward the institutional ramifications of military sexual abuse. Bennett’s personalization bias. Our findings for Bennett’s personalization bias are consistent with our other measures of personalization and institutionalization (see Table 3.1 and Figure 3.4). Personalization was most typical in the coverage of sexual assault in the military (mean of 1.81 on a scale of 1 to 2 where 81% of the stories exhibited personalization bias) compared to Abu Ghraib (mean of 1.51, 51.4%), NSA/Snowden (1.44, 44%), and Benghazi (1.42, 41.7%). Personalization is definitely present in coverage of political scandals. There were stories detailing accusations against individuals ranging from President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to individual members of the military and Edward Snowden. Even though personalization is used to tell the story of political scandals, however, other evidence suggests that it does not overwhelmingly direct attention away from institutions. Why and how is the coverage of some scandals limited? Donald Trump inoculated himself from scandal by decrying “fake news” which included any news stories that were critical of him. He used that slogan to undermine the credibility of all media that did not praise or support him. He frequently tells his supporters not to believe the press. For example, on a campaign-like speech in the Midwest in July 2018, he remarked, “Don’t believe 40

Personalizat ion Bias Present (1=No, 2=Yes)

Media coverage of political scandals

2 1.9 1.8 1.7 1.6 1.5 1.4 1.3 1.2 1.1 1 NSA/Snow den

Benghazi

Abu Ghraib

Sexual Assault Military

1.44

1.42

1.51

1.81

Figure 3.4  Personalization Bias Across Scandals

the crap you see from these people, the fake news,” gesturing at the journalists watching his speech to veterans (Real Clear Politics, July 25, 2018). Trump’s rejection of news began as soon as his inauguration, when he argued that his crowd was larger than at any preceding inauguration. Several news outlets showed the differences in aerial pictures, making it clear that Obama’s 2008 inaugural attracted many more people. Despite the evidence, Trump continued to tout his numbers, inviting his supporters to believe his claims and “not their lying eyes.” Trump has praised conservative media outlets, such as FOX News, that either did not cover his scandals or argued that the allegations were suspect. The existence of a cable news mouthpiece for the president is a relatively new phenomenon in American politics, although not unknown in other democratic or quasi-democratic systems. Partisan cable news outlets provide Trump supporters with an opportunity to “confirm” their opinions; typically they do not attend to any other news outlet (Vinnick 2014). During the campaign and Trump Administration, whenever the news reflected badly on the president, Fox led with a story about his opponent in the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton. Fox covered Clinton more than any other network in 2017–18 (Chang 2018). The case of Trump demonstrates that highly partisan news outlets not only fail to cover some scandals, but can distract the loyal audience with coverage of another story to shore up their political agenda. This is not the first time that Fox has attempted to distract the audience in this way. Before the invasion of Iraq by President George W. Bush, Fox touted the likelihood of finding weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), which the Bush Administration claimed were developed by the Iraqi government. Fox covered the issues of WMDs more than any other network. After the invasion, with no weapons found, Fox provided almost no coverage of the topic. One-third of Fox viewers did not know that no WMDs were found in Iraq. In other words, ignoring an ongoing story can seriously mislead the public (Kull et al. 2003). The Trump campaign in 2016 and the administration that followed provide an example of another scandal phenomenon, that is scandal matching and scandal fatigue. American journalists 41

Marion R. Just and Ann N. Crigler

who make an effort to be “objective” or neutral often fall into the trap of claiming “both sides” are equally guilty of transgressing norms. During election campaigns, journalists are expected to match accusations against one candidate with accusations against another. At least one journalist has decried false equivalency. Mark Halperin wrote in a memo to his colleagues at ABC: “We have a responsibility to hold both sides accountable to the public interest, but that doesn’t mean we reflexively and artificially hold both sides ‘equally’ accountable when the facts don’t warrant that” (Grann 2004) . For example, lying may be egregious and constant by one candidate, and occasional and less significant by the other candidate. While scandal coverage generally adjusts to the level of egregiousness, during a campaign a major scandal on the one side may be matched with a minor infraction on the other side. Trump made numerous factual errors, faced a scandal of sexual misconduct, and another scandal of Russian interference; yet Clinton’s controversies got more attention than Trump’s (19 % versus 15 %). Trump’s coverage wallowed in a cascade of separate controversies. Clinton-badgering by the press had a laser-like focus on her emails and, as a result, she was alleged to be scandal-prone. Clinton’s controversies received four times the amount of press attention than Trump’s treatment of women; and her controversies got 16 times the amount of news coverage than was given to her most heavily covered policy position (Patterson 2016). The audience may perceive that the scandals have equal weight if and when journalists report them in tandem, implying equivalence, and fail to cover other important topics. Candidate, and then President, Trump lied on a daily basis. One media outlet (the Washington Post’s Fact Checker) kept a running tally of Trump lies and reported an average of more than 4.9 per day in the first quarter of his Administration, which rose to an average of 9.1 in May 2018 (Kessler et al. 2018). That is an incredible number. Some of these “lies” are mistaken historical facts or facts that can easily be disproved; but they are repeated with no apologies. Trump claimed that immigrants engaged in more crime than Americans, even though this is patently untrue. Yet he repeatedly called Mexican immigrants “rapists and murderers.” During the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton claimed she was under fire when she left her plane during the Balkan war. Although hostile fire was possible, it did not occur. During the campaign, the press repeated that single erroneous memory to balance Trump’s daily lies. If a candidate or president lies constantly or commits scandalous acts, it is difficult for the press to perform its regular signaling function. Journalists are supposed to select the stories with the most impact on a given day, but that process is extremely difficult when numerous scandals are ongoing. During Trump’s first year and a half in office, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt was accused of numerous instances of misuse of government funds. In covering the president, the fact that Trump takes so much time off to play golf at courses that he owns might be a scandal in any other Administration, but the press cannot be bothered with that given the more egregious instances of self-dealing represented by his ownership of a hotel down the street from the White House. His hotels are a magnet for foreign and domestic groups and individuals who want to curry favor with the president by renting rooms or convention space in his hotels. Trump made no attempt to divest himself of his properties or put his interests in a blind trust, with the result of a daily scandal that is rarely mentioned by the press. Even Trump’s self-dealing may be regarded as less of a scandal than some of his policy actions, that is the pursuit of policies that contravene accepted norms or harm the majority of people. Trump’s staff’s involvement with Russian operatives during the election campaign might be seen as less important than the policy changes that result from his appointment of several cabinet secretaries who have conflicts of interest in the industries they regulate (e.g., oil and gas or drug manufacturing). One could argue that the threats to public health from deregulation of clean air and clean water are themselves a greater immediate and widespread hazard than Russian interference in the election campaign. It is, in fact, difficult to catalog all of the scandals that journalists 42

Media coverage of political scandals

could be writing about under the Trump Administration. Where do the rejection of climate change and the refusal of the USA to sign climate accords lie on the scale of egregiousness? The separation of families at the southern U.S. border (some of whom are applying for asylum) is a clear human rights abuse and was roundly condemned on both sides of the partisan divide as an affront to family values, norms of justice, and rules of amnesty. It received a great deal of attention, but as the story is ongoing, other events crowd it out. Which should be at the center of press coverage? Only the most adept and agile newsrooms can hope to cover the breadth of the scandals of the Trump Administration. Trump deplores any criticism as “vicious, partisan attacks” coming from unfair, biased media going after him—ignoring his own attacks on others. By crying “fake news,” Trump took on the media framing of stories. His undermining of the press has diminished the American public’s faith not only in the press, but also in other institutions, such as the FBI. To maintain their majorities in Congress, Republican leaders have not stood up to Trump regarding investigations into Russian interference in U.S. elections, the FBI, and the press. The few exceptions among the President’s own party were those marginalized by illness (McCain) or not running for reelection (Jeff Flake and Bob Corker). As long as the news media are employing the personalized, “What bad thing did Trump do today?” framing, they play right into his blame frame. Democratic governance depends upon the self-correcting mechanisms of open information. Would the Watergate scandal have resulted in Nixon’s resignation if he had had Fox News? Or was the key element in his fall the fact that his party did not control the legislature, making it possible for Congress to go forward with impeachment? Today, with polarized parties and partisan media, and the rise of social media, defining “What’s news?” has different answers, even when the topic is a major political scandal. The partisan nature of news outlets is contested and in some outlets is constructed by journalists themselves to rouse support from loyal segments of the audience. Attacks of partisan bias have been leveled against the “liberal” media by critics on the right and against conservative media by critics on the left and center. When a partisan outlet, such as Fox, makes statements about who is responsible for political scandal and the rest of the media does not follow its lead, it feels vindicated in its claim that the media have a liberal bias. A partisan press increases the heat on scandal coverage, but may not enlighten the audience, which tends to self-segregate according to their previously held beliefs. If investigation, discussion of institutional problems, and evaluation of policy reforms were dependent only on journalists, our own study suggests that we might see these efforts succeed. Policies, however, are constructed by many actors: political and business elites, public opinion, and media organizations all play roles in the process under constraints of time, space, and other competing events. The journalists cannot carry the burden of reform by themselves. Coverage of political scandals (like Watergate or the separation of families at the border) may lead to reforms and new laws and rules that enhance democratic accountability. Likewise, scandals can lead to investigation in Congress and elsewhere. Factors beyond media coverage— especially the polarization and gridlock of the political process—may preclude actual reforms. Even though the media are doing a creditable job covering institutional responsibilities in political scandals, the political process may not produce significant reform.

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Media coverage of political scandals Patterson, T. E. (2000). “Doing Well and Doing Good: How Soft News and Critical Journalism Are Shrinking the News Audience and Weakening Democracy—And What News Outlets Can Do About It.” Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Patterson, T. E. (2016). “News Coverage of the 2016 General Election: How the Press Failed the Voters.” Shorenstein Center Report, December. https://shorensteincenter.org/news-coverage-2016general-election/. Puglisi, R. and J. M. Snyder. (2011). “Newspaper Coverage of Political Scandals.” The Journal of Politics, 73 (3): 931–50. Romano, M. K. (2014). “Tuning in to Scandal: Television News Coverage of Congressional Scandals.” PS: Political Science & Politics 47 (2): 386–390. Rosenstiel, T., M. Just, T. Belt, A. Pertilla, W. Dean and D. Chinni. (2007). We Interrupt this Newscast: How to Improve Local News and Win Ratings, Too. New York: Cambridge University Press. Sabato, L. J. (1991) Feeding Frenzy: How Attack Journalism Has Transformed American Politics. New York: The Free Press. Sabato, L., Lichter, R. S., Stencel, M., and Lichter, S. R. (2000). Peepshow: Media and Politics in an Age of Scandal. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Schattschneider, E. E. (1975). The Semi-sovereign People. Hinsdale, IL: The Dryden Press. Schudson, M. (2011). The Sociology of News (2nd ed.). New York: W.W. Norton. Stanyer, J. (2013). Intimate Politics: Publicity, Privacy and the Personal Lives of Politicians in Media Saturated Democracies. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Tait, R. (2012). “Never Waste a Good Crisis: The British Phone Hacking Scandal and its Implications for Politics and the Press.” In Holli A. Semetko and Margaret Scammell (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of Political Communication (pp. 518–26). Los Angeles: Sage. Thompson, J. B. (2000). Political Scandal: Power and Visibility in the Media Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Thurman, N. and S. Schifferes. (2012). “The Future of Personalization at News Websites: Lessons from a Longitudinal Study.” Journalism Studies, 13 (5–6): 775–90. doi: 10.1080/1461670X.2012.664341. Vinnick, Danny. (2014). “The Right-Wing Echo Chamber Extends Far Beyond Fox News.” The New Republic, October. https://newrepublic.com/article/119922/pew-survey-finds-conservativesmostly-watch-FOX-news. Zaller, J. (1998). “Monica Lewinsky’s Contribution to Political Science.” PS: Political Science and Politics, 31 (2): 182–89. http://www.jstor.org/stable/420248. Zaller, J. (2001). “Monica Lewinsky and the Mainsprings of American Politics.” In W. Lance Bennett and Robert Entman (Eds.), Mediated Politics: Communication in the Future of Democracy (pp. 252–78). New York: Cambridge University Press.

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4 MORAL PANICS Rodney Tiffen

The word ‘scandal’ sometimes refers to a scandalous offence, to a transgression that invites a judgement of moral opprobrium. Equally scandal can refer to the response of condemnation that greets such a transgression. The study of scandals thus has two principal aspects: the incidence and aetiology of transgressions, and the responses to their disclosure. Often in talk about scandals the two are conflated (Tiffen 1999: 8–11). But there is no necessary symmetry between offence and response. The gravity of the offence is not a good guide to the intensity which the public and political response will acquire. It is the beginning of wisdom in the study of scandals to realize that the dynamics of reaction are separate from and only loosely connected with the nature of the transgressions. A justly famous landmark in the study of social reactions is Stanley Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972). The case study which Cohen’s analytical scheme is built to illuminate was a rather banal series of events, beginning in Easter 1964. Some English seaside towns saw confrontations between two groups of youths – mods and rockers – distinguished by their dress and musical tastes. The outcome was some limited damage to property and some scuffles between the groups. These prosaic events were framed in melodramatic terms by the media – riot, battle, screaming mob. The extent of the damage and the numbers taking part were grossly exaggerated. The coverage was self-reinforcing. The media were scouring the beachside resorts for more examples that fitted their frame. Various incidents which probably would have been ignored by the media a year earlier, or a few years later, were now hugely newsworthy. Dire predictions of what might happen allowed the commentary to go considerably beyond reporting the facts. Comment was sought from what Cohen called socially accredited experts and right-thinking people, and these moral entrepreneurs, including politicians, further escalated the sense of crisis. Cohen was struck by the ‘fundamentally inappropriate’ reaction of the police, the media and legislators to these minor incidents (Goode and Ben-Yehuda 2013: 25). Control attempts led to more clashes; the broad publicity may have acted as a recruiting drive for other youths, while it possibly hardened the groups’ attitudes to each other. The tendency to stereotype the youths was captured in the title – folk devils – while the other half of the title – moral panics – has become a widely used term in sociological analysis. Authors of an influential book on moral panics, Goode and Ben-Yehuda have offered a succinct definition: ‘A moral panic is the outbreak of moral concern over a supposed threat from an agent of corruption that is out of proportion to its actual danger or potential harm’ (2013: 26). 46

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The response to the mods and rockers violence was not just the disorder itself, but its larger moral significance (Best 2013: 69). To qualify as a moral panic, a phenomenon must be seen as ‘a threat to the social order itself’ (Thompson 1998: 8). The deviant conduct is viewed as symptomatic of a wider social malaise (Garland 2008: 11).

A half-century of change Cohen’s book fed upon and further reinforced the developing discipline of the sociology of deviance. In the words of Cohen’s partner in radical criminology, Jock Young, the work of American scholars – such as Howard Becker, Albert Cohen, Erving Goffman and Kai Erikson – over the previous decade had been ‘a time of extraordinary creativity’ in the study of deviance (2009: 6). The essence of their approach is captured in an often cited quotation from Erikson: ‘Deviance is not a property inherent in certain forms of behavior; it is a property conferred upon these forms by the audiences which directly or indirectly witness them’ (1962). Or as Young himself (2009: 7) put it, deviance is a constructed category rather than some fixed essence. Before then social problems scholars had largely taken the social labels for granted, and probed – sometimes sympathetically, sometimes judgementally – the reasons for the undesirable behaviour. Now the sociologist’s attention moved away from the actor and the nature of the act, to the audiences judging, evaluating and reacting to them. Now it was the prohibition as much as the breaking of the prohibition that needed to be explained. The actions and motives of many social deviants were now seen not simply as pathological, but also as embracing alternative values. While previous approaches were seen as annihilating the meanings deviant people brought to their behaviour, the new approach sought to appreciate their world view. This worked best for such relatively sympathetic deviant groups as, for example, Becker’s study of marijuana-smoking jazz musicians in Outsiders (1973) and Young’s (1971) ‘participant observation’ study of marijuana use among bohemian residents in London. Another achievement of Cohen’s book was to accord the media a central role in amplifying the attention given to deviant groups or issues. Cohen and Young followed this up with a reader (1973) on media and deviance which became one of the most widely used texts in sociology. So the book was conceived (in the second half of the 1960s) at a time when sociology was in great ferment. Beyond deviance, the sociology of knowledge, perhaps best marked by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (1966), was changing approaches throughout the discipline. Apart from theoretical excitement, this was a period of huge increases in sociology enrolments (and hence also in staffing positions) throughout the Western world. Cohen’s book is therefore a product of its time, but many of that time’s key social features only became clearly visible in retrospect. It was written at a pivotal moment with a cracking religious hegemony and the emergence of youth culture. The basis for that youth culture was the prolonged adolescence brought on by teenagers spending much longer in education than previous generations. Both of these were made possible by the onset of what J. K. Galbraith called the ‘affluent society’. As the economic historian Angus Maddison (1995) has documented, the years from the late 1940s to 1973 were the period of the greatest economic growth in history. Moreover, in many Western countries it was a time of tangible improvement in the quality of life. More people owned their own homes than ever before. They were the first generation in which the benefits of having a car, a washing machine and a television were widely diffused. While their parents had grown up in times of depression and war, the youth of the 1960s took affluence for granted. 47

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Although in subsequent generations new youth cultures provoked new sets of outrage – and indeed from Bill Haley and Elvis Presley on, youth cultures often sought to shock and provoke older generations as a marketing ploy (Garland 2008: 13) – it is plausible that the later ones did not generate such widespread moral panics. As Garland (2008: 17) points out, the mid-1960s when Cohen was developing his theories of moral panics, a relatively cohesive establishment and a narrowly focused mass media could give the impression of a unified public reaction. The growing secularization of society and the greater cultural pluralism meant that attitudes to some types of social deviance changed and became more varied. An area that the sociology of deviance illuminated, and that was a frequent source of scandal, was victimless crimes. This has seen considerable reform in the decades since. Victimless crimes should more accurately be called crimes without a complainant, as – in contrast for example to the victim of a robbery – there is often no-one willing or able to report them, and this is the key factor affecting their policing. Traditionally, victimless crimes – including abortion, prostitution, illegal drugs, illegal gambling, restrictions on alcohol consumption and homosexuality – were the most prolific area for institutionalized police corruption (Morris and Hawkins 1970). They were areas where a strong constituency, often religious, sought to enforce personal moral standards through legislation but where outlawing the activity or substance did not stop the demand for it. Even when there existed a strong will to do so, police found these types of crime almost impossible to eradicate. These laws were expensive to enforce, and typically the high expense only delivered limited effectiveness. The legal prohibition greatly increased the prices that could be charged, so the supply of illicit goods and services typically provided a lucrative industry for the criminal organizations involved. Cosy and mutually profitable arrangements with the police, aimed at containment, often replaced normal law enforcement. Prosecution was marked by a high degree of inconsistency, sometimes subject to the payment of bribes and even police partisanship for favoured criminals against their rivals. In the decades since the 1960s, in different countries at different times, corruption in these areas – and hence the number of scandals – has been reduced principally through legal liberalization. Opportunities for legal gambling and consumption of alcohol have been greatly increased. Policies regarding prostitution have become more flexible. Homosexuality – where some of the worst instances of police entrapment and blackmail occurred – is no longer a crime in Western societies; indeed many countries now have marriage equality, symbolizing the official acceptance of gay relationships. Coalitions – often tacit – of civil liberties groups, of those concerned with reducing corruption, and those who saw a business opportunity in a legalized market encouraged liberalization. The old tendency to generate moral scandals/panics in these areas has given way to policy pragmatism. There are some areas where restrictive laws are still in force, including most significantly illegal drugs. Even here though attitudes seem to be changing. Young (2008: 5) in his study of drug takers in the 1960s thought that the moral panic was not against drugs per se, but against a hippie culture that proposed extravagant levels of hedonism and opposition to the values of work and discipline. The narratives surrounding drug taking now though are less about opposition to illicit pleasures and more about addiction and crime.

Four unresolved epistemological issues Cohen’s case study and analytical framework were a perfect fit – its major lines of argument were coherent and persuasive. The strengths of the original study, though, conceal some 48

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unresolved issues which became more important as scholars have sought to use moral panics as a general model.

An inbuilt pejorative judgement To label something a moral panic is not just to say it is socially constructed, but also that the constructed reality is wrong. Since the advent of the sociology of knowledge, there have been recurring issues about people wanting to embrace constructivist relativism, but also wanting to assert counter-judgements, to critique the prevailing social reality. It is probably impossible for anyone to live consistently within relativist assumptions, nor for anyone to assume that all realities have equal validity. Molotch and Lester (1974), for example, began their influential article unpromisingly by suggesting we suspend our belief in an objective world. It makes a considerable difference, though, whether the socially constructed weather forecast conforms to the subsequent weather. Moral panic is a term that only outsiders, and critical outsiders – not those who are involved in mobilizing the ‘panic’, or who are sympathetic to it – will use. This negative judgement is too easy to assume rather than argue through, and leaves unaddressed any good values that the reaction may be manifesting. Perhaps ironically, the inbuilt negative judgement means that the term can be used as part of a strategy to contain a scandal. Horsfield (1997) found that following the issue of clergy sexual abuse in Australia in 1992, church leaders used a moral panic paradigm to defuse the revelations and to suppress the experiences of lay people who had suffered. Can there be a ‘good’ moral panic (Wright Monod 2017)? The original idea conjoined two dimensions, which do not necessarily go together: (1) an unrealistic sense of threat, plus (2) the irrationality of the response. Sometimes the urgency of the threat or problem may be real, but a panic response is ineffective in countering it. The sense of panic may make things worse, as can happen during a fire in a crowded theatre, when casualties are also caused by the trampling of people in their desire to escape. Conversely, the sense of threat may be exaggerated, but the response well directed. It is sometimes claimed that public health authorities have exaggerated the threat of a pandemic, but the preventative measures then taken have effectively reduced the spread of the threat. A similar example was the intense and some said overly sensational ‘Grim Reaper’ advertising campaign in Australia in the late 1980s to combat HIV/AIDS (Gorman 2016). This featured a giant bowling ball knocking people over in a campaign that cost the government more than $3 million. However, it was part of generating a sense of urgency that arguably helped Australia’s relatively effective response to the AIDS threat.

Failing to address issues in judging proportionality Goode and Ben-Yehuda (2013) argue that disproportionality is the key feature of a moral panic. Proportionality is often the most contentious issue in news coverage of scandals. It does not involve issues of accuracy in a narrow sense but rather judgements about the amount of coverage and the degree of intensity that the scandal assumes. Issues of proportion cannot be arbitrated according to some absolute standard. This issue was first crystallized for me when visiting Thailand after a right-wing military coup in 1976. There was much resentment among conservative Thais at what they saw as the liberal, left-wing bias of the Western media covering the coup. One contentious issue concerned the killing of 29 student demonstrators at Thammasat University. The critics did not dispute the accuracy of the reports of the killings but rather that they had received too much attention. But what 49

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was the right amount of attention that such an event deserved? The answer will depend at least partly on the values of the observer. Garland (2008) cited the case of Philip Jenkins, a moral panic scholar, who began a study of child pornography on the internet, intending to portray it as a moral panic. Instead his investigation led him to the opposite view, that it was an authentic and awful problem that had rather received too little attention. The disproportion in the responses to mods and rockers in Cohen’s original study is all too evident. But the theory as first constructed offers no guide for judging proportionality, and few people using it since have made any progress in what precise criteria may help in doing so.

Presuming rather than demonstrating consensus Cohen was impressed by the degree of consensus in responding to the mods and rockers moral panic, that politicians, press, experts and public opinion were all pressing in the same direction. It may be that there is less consensus on such issues now, but more fundamentally the degree of consensus needs to be traced empirically. It is particularly hard to gauge consensus because media often act as if they are speaking for the public, when their views are in fact not widely shared. It is a fallacy to mistake vocal opinion for public opinion. How widely shared are the views of the loudest voices? With the greater cultural pluralism in contemporary societies, and the rise of more sectarian journalism, especially promoting right-wing populist agendas, there are more likely to be contested panics. Indeed ‘culture wars’ have become part of contemporary politics and media, and among conservative media these are marked by attempts to manufacture ‘moral panics’, to mobilize outrage against those on the other side of the political spectrum. An annual feature at America’s Fox News is the ‘War on Christmas’, where Fox blows up ‘typically insignificant local incidents into nationwide controversies’. In December 2010 Fox reported that an elementary school in Florida had banned ‘traditional Christmas colours’. Several programmes covered the story, but no-one called the school district – the entire story was a lie; all the bluster and outrage had no basis. In December 2012, The O’Reilly Factor devoted more than three times as much airtime to the ‘War on Christmas’ as it did to actual wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and Gaza (Tiffen 2014: 240). The confected outrage rarely reaches beyond Fox’s own narrow constituency.

Resorting to invisible explanatory factors A recurring theme through the moral panic literature is the strong indignation towards the deviant behaviour. Cohen and Young, building most immediately on the work of Albert Cohen, posit the idea that self-restraint and self-discipline create resentments that lead to ‘righteous puritanical wrath’ (Goode and Ben-Yehuda 2013: 29). For Garland, the ‘psychoanalytic aspects – the symptomatic character of panics, the projective nature of folk devil construction, the social and psychic conflicts that underlie these processes – are relatively straightforward’. He argues that ‘a specific group of deviants is singled out for “folk devil” status, in large part, because it possesses characteristics that make it a suitable screen upon which society can project sentiments of guilt and ambivalence’ (2008: 18, 15). To some extent, this emphasis on the psychoanalytic roots of socially aggressive attitudes recalls the work on seeking to explain the appeals of fascism through the authoritarian personality (Adorno et al. 1950), a body of work criticized for its ahistorical nature and for its psychologizing and reductionist approach to macro-social phenomena, and which is now largely abandoned. 50

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Cohen (2011: 13) offers a somewhat different emphasis when he argues that ‘a moral panic does not occur when hegemony is successful, but rather when it is in crisis’. Then, he says, the moral panic is proportionate to the anxiety not to the actual event. The propositions that moral panics reflect cultural anxiety, and that moral panics are proportionate to the anxiety, are all but unverifiable. It is not obvious, especially given later developments, that in the prosperous 1960s hegemony was in crisis, and it would be interesting to know in what recent periods Cohen thought hegemony was most successful. However plausible different people find these arguments, little evidence is produced to support them. While the sociological imagination should not be confined to what is easily researched, neither should scholars be content with making broad assertions with no attempt to argue in detail for them. Cohen’s book was originally prized for the new insights it offered, but since then a research genre has been built around moral panics. Now that it is a mature research and analytical paradigm, we need to ask whether it has been a fruitful orthodoxy. What research achievements and traditions has it produced? How well does it extend to areas beyond its original concerns? At best the result is mixed, as the following two examples show. Hunt compiled an ‘assemblage’ of moral panics centred on health threats. He writes about tobacco thus (2013: 63): The whole field of smoking is hegemonized by the powerful discourses of health . . .  There is a persistent moral aspect to the idea that the smoker needs to be segregated from the virtuous non-smoker. This moralization is explicit in the degradation ceremonies daily imposed on smokers as they are forced to stand outside their places of work or recreation in order to demonstrate their failings to all who pass by. These prohibitions were given the most profound impetus through the “discovery” of secondhand or passive smoking that transformed the cigarette from an object of pleasure and attraction to a symbol of personal disregard for the health of others and thus a sign of personal weakness. There are two notable features of this passage. The first is that although there are many (problematic) empirical propositions it is an evidence-free zone. It makes several claims about motives and perceptions and effects without any supporting data. The second is the way it imposes moral panic frames on actions, without considering others. Are they ‘degradation ceremonies’ or is this simply the only practical way to give people smoke-free work places? It is curious that the author puts quotation marks around the ‘discovery’ of the dangers of passive smoking. Does he deny the science? Furedi (2015: 208), like Garland (2008: 17), in his article ‘The Moral Crusade against Paedophilia’ believes the ‘panic over child abuse’ is an example of a ‘genuine moral panic’. He thinks it has become a ‘permanent panic’, and takes as a precedent for such an ongoing moral anxiety the fear of witchcraft and hence demonology in earlier centuries. He argues that exaggerating the prevalence of the dangers of paedophilia to children has led to an enveloping mistrust of adults working with them. He concludes that ‘arguably, the permanent moral crusade against paedophilia bears comparison with the targeting of witchcraft in the early modern era’ (2015: 210). There are less than subtle differences between witches and paedophiles. Witches in the Western world did not have victims; the victims of paedophilia often had their lives ruined as a result of the abuse they suffered. People punished for being witches were innocent; the overwhelming bulk of people convicted of paedophilia are guilty. Witches were tried by primitive 51

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methods ruled by superstition, such as trial by ordeal, while paedophiles are tried according to codified procedures and rules of admissible evidence. Furedi’s conclusion may have shock value, but adds nothing to analytical understanding. It suggests that on issues of moral gravity, such as paedophilia, the moral panic approach may have little to contribute.

Conclusion: abandon the concept, continue the agenda A science that hesitates to forget its founders is lost. (A. N. Whitehead) Cohen, conceding that he had no objective baseline for the claim, has the ‘strong impression’ that since the mid-1990s there has been a significant increase in ‘the sheer number of new moral panics’ (2011: 239). On the other hand, Goode and Ben-Yehuda think ‘it has become increasingly difficult to stir up a traditional moral panic’ (Best 2013: 74). Altheide, reviewing the growing use of the concept not only in the scholarly literature but in the mass media, thinks ‘the range of topics associated with moral panics seems limitless’ (2009: 90). As we have seen the topics range from tobacco smoking to paedophilia, although the proliferation may simply be testimony to scholars’ capacity for conceptual stretch. Another of the pioneers, Charles Critcher, has argued that the pervasive consciousness of risk in modern society lends itself to a moral panics approach (2015: xxx–xxxi). Others are more doubtful – ‘Risk Issues or Moral Issues’ asks Wright Monod (2017: 13), while Best ponders ‘moral panics or moral panics’ (2013: 69). Jock Young is unequivocal about the centrality of the moral dimension: ‘moral panics are moral happenings. They are not simply panics’, and they are ‘characterized by a feeling of anxiety, and emotional energy’ (2009: 13). All political issues have emotional and moral dimensions but that does not mean that a moral panics approach is a fruitful way of understanding them all. How the media and political system respond to risks is clearly a central issue of contemporary democratic politics. Even when the risks are exaggerated, as the scholars above suggest, it does not signify a moral panic. Moreover risk has uncertainty and prediction at its core. While some risks are exaggerated, others are underestimated. ‘At the other pole [from moral panics] is the phenomenon of “denial” where the problem is the opposite – a tendency to silence [and] a pattern of under-reaction’ (Garland 2008: 26). The range of phenomena to which the moral panics paradigm fruitfully lends itself is quite limited. The desire to extend it to a wider range of phenomena on balance has not been analytically helpful. It has generated a prolific literature on moral panics, but much of the time it seems the effort goes into making the case fit the model, rather than the model throwing new light on the case. For all the value of the original case study and theorizing, it has not generated a fruitful and cumulative research tradition. However, the analytical concerns that animated the original studies are still pertinent. The study of scandals is the study of social reactions, and Cohen’s work points to what should be continuing concerns in the dynamics of reactions: Moral polarization. Cohen argued that the social reaction stereotyped the mods and rockers, making no effort to appreciate or understand what appealed to them. Newsworthiness and moral simplicity tend to go together. In a running scandal, there often is a process of ‘othering’, of casting the offenders in a wholly negative light, where any ambiguities or compensating positive attractions are eliminated. An ongoing task for scholars of scandals is not simply to accept the stereotypes and labels used in the public controversy. Of course sometimes scandals have at their centre terrible villains, but nevertheless probing stereotypes and value judgements should always be part of the analysis. 52

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Moral entrepreneurs. A central part of Cohen’s analysis was the way that various ‘moral entrepreneurs’ fanned the reaction. The publicity interests and strategies of those promoting condemnation and outrage should always be examined. Sometimes they will be heroic; sometimes they are driven by self-interested ulterior motives. There are occasions when there is political kudos and no immediate, tangible costs for inflating a problem, where judgements of newsworthiness and political expedience push in the same direction. Prevalence and proportion in media coverage. The disproportion in media coverage of the mods and rockers was obvious. It was a telling demonstration that media attention does not follow actual trends in a problem’s incidence, but rather that the social reaction follows its own peculiar dynamics affected by changing newsworthiness and the mobilization of concerned groups. Factors shaping the volatility of news coverage should be a central concern in the study of scandals. News concentrates on the reporting of particular actions. There are many disciplines in news reporting about individuals and individual events, but there are far fewer when they are making generalizations. Anomalously, to say a specific police officer is corrupt may be defamatory and enormous care would be needed before making such a claim. But to say the police force is full of corrupt officers means no-one can sue for defamation. Similarly often there are few authoritative statistics about a phenomenon’s prevalence, and the vacuum is filled by selfinterested projections. Policy ‘solutions’. Cohen was struck by the inappropriate and counter-productive responses to the mods and rockers. The analyst must always critically probe responses to scandals – whether the punishment of individual offenders or of policy reforms to stop future abuses. Even when the problem may be acute, and the need for action clear and urgent, remedial actions can have unintended consequences. The aim may be less substantive than symbolic, as Gusfield’s (1963) work on the status politics of the American temperance movement so eloquently demonstrated. McConnell (2010) distinguishes between programme success (how well the policy achieves the objectives of policymakers) and political success (whether it provides political and electoral benefits for the government). The success of the Reagan administration’s war on drugs was more political than programme, but perhaps its framers always thought it would be. Cohen’s work on moral panics is properly celebrated as a landmark study on media and scandals. It has been endlessly cited by others since, and has inspired many studies and social commentaries using the central concepts. Nevertheless when used outside situations like the one that inspired it, the theory of moral panic has intrinsic problems. The concerns it raised are enduring and these should be pursued in their own right.

References Adorno, T., Frenkel-Brunswick, E., Levinson, D. and Sanford, N. (1950). The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Harper. Altheide, D. (2009). ‘Moral panic: From sociological concept to public discourse.’ Crime, Media, Culture 5(1): 79–99. Becker, H. (1973). Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: The Free Press. Berger, P. and Luckmann, T. (1966). The Social Construction of Reality. New York: Doubleday. Best, J. (2013). ‘The problems with moral panic: The concept’s limitations.’ In Charles Krinsky (ed.) The Ashgate Research Companion to Moral Panics. London: Ashgate. Cohen, S. (1972). Folk Devils and Moral Panics. London: Granada Publishing. Cohen, S. (2011). ‘Whose side were we on? The undeclared politics of moral panic theory.’ Crime, Media, Society 7(3): 237-243 Cohen, S. and Young, J. (eds). (1973). The Manufacture of News: Deviance, Social Problems and the Mass Media. London: Constable.

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Rodney Tiffen Critcher, C. (2015). ‘Commentary.’ In Viviene E. Cree, Gary Clapton and Mark Smith (eds) Revisiting Moral Panics. Bristol: Policy Press. Erikson, K. (1962). ‘Notes on the sociology of deviance.’ Social Problems 9(4): 307–314. Furedi, F. (2015). ‘The moral crusade against paedophilia.’ In Viviene E. Cree, Gary Clapton and Mark Smith (eds) Revisiting Moral Panics. Bristol: Policy Press. Garland, D. (2008). ‘On the concept of moral panic.’ Crime, Media, Culture 4(1): 9–30. Goode, E. and Ben-Yehuda, N. (2013). ‘The genealogy and trajectory of the moral panic concept.’ In Charles Krinsky (ed.) The Ashgate Research Companion to Moral Panics. London: Ashgate. Gorman, J. (2016). ‘“Grim Reaper” ad guru says his 1987 commercial has never been equaled.’ Nine.com.au, 21 March 2016. Gusfield, J. (1963). Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Horsfield, P. (1997). ‘Moral panic or moral action? The appropriation of moral panics in the exercise of social control.’ Media International Australia 85: 32–39. Hunt, A. (2013). ‘Assemblages of moral politics: Yesterday and today.’ In Charles Krinsky (ed.) The Ashgate Research Companion to Moral Panics. London: Ashgate. Maddison, A. (1995). Monitoring the World Economy 1820–1992. Paris: OECD Development Centre. McConnell, A. (2010). ‘Policy success, policy failure and grey areas in-between.’ Journal of Public Policy 30(3): 345–362. Molotch, H. and Lester, M. (1974). ‘News as purposive behaviour: On the strategic use of routine events, accidents and scandals.’ American Sociological Review 39: 101–112. Morris, N. and Hawkins, G. (1970). The Honest Politician’s Guide to Crime Control. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Thompson, K. (1998). Moral Panics. London: Routledge. Tiffen, R. (1999). Scandals: Media, Politics and Corruption in Contemporary Australia. Sydney: New South. Tiffen, R. (2014). Rupert Murdoch: A Reassessment. Sydney: New South. Wright Monod, S. (2017). Making Sense of Moral Panics. Cham: Palgrave.Young, J. (1971). The Drugtakers: The Social Meaning of Drug Use. London: Judson, McGibbon and Kee. Young, J. (2008). ‘Moral panic: Its origins in resistance, ressentiment and the translation of fantasy into reality.’ British Journal of Criminology 49: 4–16.

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5 SCANDALS AND AGENDA SETTING Sharon Meraz

Agenda setting theory has been a very influential theory in the field of political communication and political science, providing solid evidence of the role of the mass media in influencing the salience of issues and issue perspectives (Weaver, 2007). Alongside framing and gatekeeping theory, agenda setting has been a foundational theory to the field of mass communication, orienting our assessment of the mass media’s effects away from short term measurement of attitudes and behaviors and towards its impact on our cognitions and knowledge (McCombs, 2014). As a mature theory established since the 1970s, the evolution of agenda setting theory has gone through distinct phases in its development, with two of the three phases of its maturation occurring before the widespread uptake of social media technologies post-2005. Since the first published study of the mass media’s ability to set the agenda of undecided voters in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 1972 (McCombs & Shaw, 1972), there has been strong and steady statistical evidence of the ability of it to transfer its issue salience to the public’s agenda, a phenomenon known as first level agenda setting (McCombs, 2014). A second development in the agenda setting theory was the expansion of the mass media’s influence into the interpretation of issues: it was shown to have the power to transfer the salience of issue interpretations or perspectives from its agenda to the public’s agenda, a phenomenon known as attribute or second level agenda setting (Shaw & McCombs, 1977). In addition to these two distinct phases of agenda setting research, there was the awareness that not all publics are influenced by the media in the same way, and that some publics need more orientation based on the relevance of select issues and the uncertainty they feel towards knowledge of the issue (McCombs & Weaver, 1973). This psychological component to agenda setting was dubbed the “need for orientation” and was itself mediated by the nature of the issue, that is, its abstractness and obscurity. The sources that feed the media’s agenda of issues and issue perspectives also encompassed another dimension of agenda setting research, with the awareness that other societal elites like politicians and public relations practitioners have an inordinate ability to set the media’s agenda due to their offline power and influence in pre-social media environments (McCombs, 2014). These components to agenda setting theory were developed largely before mass media’s ecology was transformed by the participatory turn in social media technologies and the growth of networked publics online in the 2000s. In 2011, the theory was extended to take account of the growth of networked publics and introduced a third level to agenda setting: network 55

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agenda setting (NAS). NAS suggests that the mass media can transfer the salience of a networked agenda of issues and issue attributes to the public’s agenda (Guo, 2012; Guo & McCombs, 2016). Alongside these theoretical extensions there were others. Agenda melding was further developed with the acknowledgment that vertical mass media and horizontal alternative/social media can have different influences (Vargo et al., 2014). Post-2005, what is clear is that the mass media’s capacity singularly to influence the agenda of participatory publics is now difficult to support unequivocally across all levels of agenda setting (Shehata & Stromback, 2013). With the growth of social media applications, a growing trend among emerging studies is a waning of the mass media’s capacity to dictate singularly the agenda of networked publics and alternative media outlets. The alteration of the media ecology away from one way, unidirectional flows of vertical elite to nonelite influence and towards more fluid, hybrid forms of elite and nonelite mutual interaction has altered the capacity of the mass media to utilize its power solely to dictate the news and issues that publics and alternative media outlets use to set their agendas (Meraz & Papacharissi, 2013). A burgeoning media supply, negating the premise of limited media supply in the past, has afforded publics an expanded repertoire of news media channels, involving a mix of alternative outlets, fake news channels, and algorithmically/automated curated news feeds. There are now more media, more actors, and more agents (including computer algorithms and software code called “bots”) that exert influence on the agenda setting process (Witschge et al., 2016). It is within this atmosphere of a changed media ecology that media agenda setting and scandals will be investigated. The media is now expanded beyond mass media to include a range of media outlets. Scandals, the domain of investigative journalism that heightened the credibility of the press in its exposure of President Richard Nixon’s political corruption during the Watergate era, is now seeded and amplified by rumor, disinformation, fake news, conspiracies, and hoaxes (Marwick & Lewis, 2017). Computational propaganda—propaganda spread by automation and algorithms (Wooley & Howard, 2016)—is now consciously pushed through nonhuman bots (chunks of software code) interacting with human agents. Publics readily selfselect into homophilous or like-minded ideological enclaves online (Stroud, 2010), for the theory of homophily predicts that shared values or beliefs work as powerful undercurrents to align networks along similar viewpoints. As the relationship between partisanship and scandal cascades, it is imperative to examine how our social media architectures alter the media’s ability to investigate true scandal and to react to deliberate, false scandals which are seeded through our social media technologies. This chapter will review the relationship between the theory of agenda setting and scandals pre-social media environments, before situating agenda setting and scandals within the altered dynamics of the new media ecology. Focus on the new media ecology will emphasize how current scandals have been seeded and gain contagion in ideological networks and how the mass media, alternative media, and networked publics play a role in viral scandal contagion. I will break down the relationship between the theory of agenda setting and scandals through an examination of three main media points: (1) pre-social media, but in the era of the Internet and the World Wide Web; (2) post-2005 and before 2014, capturing the rise of social media; and (3) post-2014 to the present, with the palpable rise of bots, algorithms, and malicious activity through computational propaganda within social media architectures. The broadening of scandals to these new zones of disinformation optimizes scandal as an orchestrated campaign designed to activate partisan, homophilous, political enclaves which are held together by partisan selective exposure (Garrett & Stroud, 2014; Stroud. 2010) and partisan motivated reasoning (Bolsen, Druckman & Cook, 2013).

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Agenda setting and scandals before the growth of the Web Investigative journalism was tangible in the 1960s and 1970s media environment (Puglisi & Snyder, 2011) and one of the earliest political scandals to be investigated for evidence of mass media agenda setting was the Watergate scandal. This scandal was exposed in 1972, forcing the US president Richard Nixon to resign the presidency in 1974 after it was revealed that “dirty tricks” were used in his presidential campaigning, including abuses of power and illegal wiretapping (Schudson, 2004). Weaver, McCombs & Spellman (1975) found that the ability of the mass media to set the agenda of Charlotte, North Carolina voters was highest among those with a high need for orientation and a high exposure to media coverage of the Watergate scandal, which was driven by solid, investigative, media coverage and by political actors keen on utilizing the scandal for political gain (Liebes & Blum-Kulka, 2004). The rise of the Internet in the 1990s wrought changes in the media ecology with the World Wide Web and text-box search engines. These changes compounded the already existing broadcast changes in the rise of cable news and its continuous 24/7 media monitoring. Williams and Delli Carpini (2000, 2004) record the press’s failure to set the public agenda of voters in relation to the Clinton–Lewinsky sex scandal, a tabloid scandal where President Bill Clinton was accused of having an affair with his intern Monica Lewinsky. The details of this affair, exposed by the conservative partisan site Drudge Report and independent counsel Kenneth Star, emerged after prior reporting of tabloid and mass media stories on Clinton’s relationships with many other women, including Connie Hamzey, Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, and Kathleen Willey. These authors note that the failure of the mass media to set the public’s agenda in relation to Clinton’s sexual scandals was evidence of outdated metaphors of gate and gatekeeping in the age of the Internet, which had given rise to multiple media sources and channels. Conversely, Shah et al. (2002) note that the mass media sustained widespread approval for Clinton by framing the scandal as an attack by conservatives. These authors closely examine how the mass media framed the scandal, noting that the latter was more likely to frame it in terms of (1) actions/accusations of conservative elites and (2) liberal questioning of the motives of Republican actions, both of which propelled Clinton during the scandal to some of the highest approval ratings during his time in office.

Agenda setting and scandals in the period 2005–2014 During the period in which social media burgeoned, between 2005 and 2014, it became apparent that the mass media was losing its singular influence on audience agenda setting. Audiences have now morphed into “produsers,” a term coined by Bruns (2008) to capture the hybrid activities of participatory publics that engage in a mix of production (“prod”) and consumption (“users”), as they seek both to create personal media and to select existing media to fulfill their needs. The growth of alternative media outlets, social media streams, and networked collectives online had a palpable effect on the agenda setting process (Meraz, 2012). Studies in this period found that blogs and the mass media either mutually influenced each other (Meraz, 2009; Messner & Distaso, 2008; Wallsten, 2007) or, in some cases, set the media’s agenda (Meraz, 2011a, 2011b). With the growth of social media, there was growing awareness of increased political fragmentation online among partisan blogs which appeared to network together through dense hyperlinking patterns (Adamic & Glance, 2005; Meraz, 2011a; Nahon & Hemsley, 2014). Social media applications appeared to enhance fragmentation, or at the very least, make it more likely that homophilous publics were easily capable of self-selecting into

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ideological enclaves (Stroud, 2010; Sunstein, 2009). Among partisan alternative media, there was a complicated two-step flow process, where more elite alternative social media set the agenda for the less elite followers, thus expanding our theoretical understanding of intermedia agenda setting (Nahon & Hemsley, 2014). Active publics could now set the scandal agenda for the media if they were in the right place at the right time. Bartender Scott Prouty secretly recorded Mitt Romney at a private Florida fundraiser saying that 47 percent of Americans were dependent on government and would not vote for him (CBS, 2013). Prouty released the video, only to set the agenda of the mass media. This recorded scandal was recirculated through the mass media and was used as strong evidence by progressives of Romney’s unsuitability for office. Mayhill Fowler of Huffington Post’s “Off the Bus” secretly recorded then US President Barack Obama at a fundraising event in April 2008 noting that working-class voters in failed manufacturing towns often “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” This scandal was utilized by then presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton to try to win over Democratic voters in the Pennsylvania primary (Fowler, 2008). Examining the emergent role of the web and Google in scandal promotion during the 2004 presidential election between George Bush and John Kerry, Rojecki and Meraz (2016) coin factitious information blends (FIBS) to describe the spread of a form of scandal/disinformation that is qualitatively different from definitions of rumor, gossip, disinformation, and propaganda. FIBS are spread by elites and opinion makers, are aimed at discrediting political rivals, and are unverifiable. Utilizing time series analysis and Granger causality, Rojecki and Meraz (2016) examined two scandals during the 2004 campaign, one against Kerry (the Swift Boat Campaign) and one against George Bush (Bush AWOL from National Guard) finding that the Web alone did not have an independent impact, but that Google searches did set the agenda of traditional media newspapers and NBC coverage. Rojecki and Meraz (2016) also found a well-integrated conservative network of partisan blogs, partisan alternative media sites, and partisan well-known media sources like talk radio and Fox news, which helped to perpetuate and sustain the Kerry scandal among conservative publics. Progressive publics were less likely to engage in anti-rumor tactics, or to employ such integrated networked communication to spread the Bush scandal. President Barack Obama became the first biracial US president through the years 2008–2016, winning two terms in office. Yet, his presidency was plagued by a pervasive scandal. The Obama birth certificate scandal, dubbed the “birther movement” or “birtherism,” was aimed at discrediting Obama’s claim to the presidency because it suggested he was not a natural born citizen, and thus could not legitimately be the US president (Pasek et al., 2015). Between 2008 and 2012, 15–45 percent of Americans believed in the birther claims in spite of Obama producing his birth certificate to prove otherwise. Pasek et al. (2015) found that publics who were partisan, conservative, and held animus against blacks were significantly more likely to have their agenda set by sources that spread the birther scandal. Obama released his birth certificate in 2008 and another long-form version in 2011; yet, the authenticity of these documents remained in question through his presidency (Howell, 2012). Recent polling in 2016 revealed that 72 percent of registered Republicans still doubt President Obama’s citizenship (Clinton & Roush, 2016), suggesting the political scandal has strong ties to political conservatism (Crawford & Bhatia, 2012). The birther scandal highlighted the role of several partisan interest groups and offline elites in spreading this political scandal. The birthers formed an official website, WorldNetDaily.com, said to draw over 2 million visitors daily in 2009, promulgated by Joseph Farah, a conservative activist and evangelical Christian. In 2009, Farah wrote stories on the birther scandal and produced a DVD titled “A Question of Eligibility: Is Obama’s Presidency Constitutionally 58

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Legitimate?” (Wallsten & Fiore, 2010). The birther scandal was also fueled by the Tea Party Movement (Enck-Wazner, 2011; Meraz, 2013; Skocpol & Williamson, 2013; Wiegand, 2010). Polling in 2010 revealed that as many as 30 percent of Tea Partiers believed that Obama was born in another country, alongside 32 percent of Republicans (Condon, 2010). The Tea Party movement also drove an associated “Obama is a Muslim” scandal alongside these birtherism claims. Weeks & Southwell (2010) examined this “Obama in Muslim” scandal, finding that the traditional media agenda’s attempts to dispel the rumor had an agenda setting impact on the electorate in convincing them to pay attention to the scandal. Other agenda setters of the birther scandal included Orly Taitz, a California based dentist and lawyer dubbed the “birther queen” (Mencimer, 2010), and the conservative blog FreeRepublic (Weeks & Southwell, 2010). In keeping with traditional agenda setting theory regarding the inordinate power of political elites as sources of the media’s agenda (McCombs, 2014), Donald Trump has also been accused of initiating this rumor about Obama from as far back as 2011 (Gentile, 2017). Oddly, Trump has often claimed publicly that Hillary Clinton was the instigator of the birther scandal rumor, a claim debunked by fact checking websites like Snopes, PoliFact, and FactCheck.org.

Agenda setting and scandals in the age of fake news, bots, and computational propaganda Post-2014, the new media landscape for news and information has been dominated by five companies, dubbed the “frightful five,” the tech companies Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Google (Manjoo, 2017a, 2017b). The media ecology is now characterized by hybridity and polyvocality (Chadwick, 2017) as social media applications permit a multiplicity of voices to join the network, altering the processes of mass media power to include crowd-centered logics and networked effects (Bennett & Segerberg, 2013; Meraz & Papacharissi, 2013). The majority of networked publics connect to the Internet through a variety of devices within their household (Howard, 2015). As of August 2017, two-thirds of Americans report getting news from social media (Shearer & Gottfried, 2017), while only 32 percent profess a great deal of faith or trust in the mass media (Bernstein, 2017). Since 2014, the majority of studies on agenda setting with social media have found that the power of the mass media has diminished considerably (Meraz, 2016; Vargo & Guo, 2016) to the point where partisan social and alternative media appear as the agenda setters in large scale, big data environments. Studies have shown that deeper involvement in online communities and greater participation in social media results in greater dependence on partisan media for agenda setting (McGregor & Vargo, 2017). It is clear that the news media landscape has been altered considerably and irrevocably. There is now a proliferation of rumors and disinformation online (Marwick & Lewis, 2016). Rumors have been afforded an algorithmically enhanced capacity to cascade online (Garrett, 2011), resulting in a significant impact on electoral outcomes. Scholars have noted the steady proliferation of hate speech agendas online (Phillips & Milner, 2017), fueling the growth of white nationalist agendas online and offline (Salter, 2017). The burgeoning of a fake news market has further come to set the agenda of online partisan news outlets (Vargo, Guo & Amazeen, 2017). Fake news and disinformation is encountered by many but appears to impact disproportionately susceptible publics with specific epistemic beliefs. In relation to the latter, publics that view reality as a political construct with no basis in fact are more likely to have their agendas set by conspiracy theories (Garrett & Weeks, 2017). In terms of partisanship, conservative publics are also more likely to show agendas in online social media platforms that trade in speculative politics, fake news, and conspiracy theories (Benkler et al., 2017b; Meraz, 2017a, 2017b; Meraz & Yin, 2018). During the 2016 US presidential election, Twitter conservative publics shared 59

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articles and news sources that were overtly Islamaphobic and anti-immigrant, with the majority of these stories based on fake scandals invented to frame immigrants as criminals and terrorists (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017; Faris et al., 2016; Meraz, 2017a, 2017b, 2017c). Personal scandals related to Donald Trump were prevalent, from his Access Hollywood tape where he boasted that he routinely sexually assaulted women to his liaisons with adult porn star Stormy Daniels and playboy model Karen McDougal. Not surprisingly, these stories failed to impact swaths of the electorate in terms of setting their agenda about his suitability for the job of US president (Waxman, 2018). Conservative publics, including white evangelical publics, provided Trump with immunity from these scandals (Blow, 2018; Leonhardt, 2018a, 2018b; Stanton, 2018). Hillary Clinton, however, was plagued by a series of scandals, the primary one being her usage of a private email server to conduct State Department business. Though the FBI closed the case and cleared her of wrongdoing in July 2016, James Comey of the FBI reopened the case two weeks before the November 2016 election when it was discovered that Anthony Weiner, the disgraced New York politician embroiled in a sexting scandal with an underage girl, had some of the Clinton emails (Goldman & Rappeport, 2016). Clinton would face several additional scandals as fake news disseminators sought to paint a picture of her as corrupt and untrustworthy to the electorate. Clinton was accused of deleting 33,000 emails from her private server after being given the FBI subpoena from the Trump campaign, though Clinton noted she had deleted these well before the subpoena because they were personal and not related to the investigation (Chozick & Schmidt, 2015). In a separate network of scandals, Clinton’s foundation was accused of helping foreign entities in exchange for donations, using the State Department to help Bill Clinton, selling access to the US State Department, and accepting sketchy donations from abusive nations (Schow, 2016). Studies have revealed that these scandals set the Twitter agenda for many conservative networked publics (Meraz, 2017a, 2017b) who used these scandals to create a narrative of her unsuitability for office. In the 2016 US presidential election, Democrats were unseated by scandal after scandal, with many of these email scandals (tantamount to cyberwarfare) breaking through the channels of social media versus the mass media. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) email accounts were hacked and published by WikiLeaks in July 2016, and these emails were said to reveal favoritism by the DNC staffers towards Clinton as opposed to presidential Democratic hopeful Bernie Sanders. This scandal, which resulted in the resignation of DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the appointment of Donna Brazile, continued through the campaign when it was revealed Brazile had leaked questions to Clinton ahead of the latter’s town hall forum with Donald Trump. John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, also had his emails hacked, only to have it released in daily “scandal batches” on WikiLeaks, a phenomenon which set the agenda for conservative Twitter users in relation to Twitter trending topics (Meraz, 2017a). The mass media had a significant role to play in setting the agenda of publics towards a favorable assessment of Trump, in spite of the scandals that circulated about him. It was shown to have covered Clinton’s 2016 scandals in greater proportion than Trump’s scandals, with Trump’s coverage more focused on his positions on immigration, jobs, and trade (Benkler et al., 2017a). Though much blame has been cast on network and cable news coverage for their framing of Trump as a celebrity businessman through the many decades of his show The Apprentice (Douthat, 2018), Patterson (2016) found that Trump was heavily favored among eight elite mass media, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, receiving more coverage that all Republican and Democratic challengers during the primary season. Trump’s dexterity in utilizing the Twitter platform to debase rivals and debunk the mass media’s coverage of him is 60

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also unprecedented in modern history. Trump, known as the Twitter president, has utilized the platform to build an alternative post-truth, post-news world (Ott, 2016), bypassing the authority and influence of the mass media while also using Twitter to debunk and critique the mass media as a fake news establishment (Enli, 2017). Studies have found that Trump’s daily tweets set the agenda for the news and mass media, while the latter has had no agenda setting effect on the tweets (Wells et al., 2016). Trump’s scorn and ridicule at the authority of the mass media has also set the agenda for his supportive conservative publics: studies reveal that these publics that voted for Trump were less likely to have their agenda set by mass media on social streams such as Facebook and Twitter (Meraz, 2018, 2017a, 2017b, 2017). More conservative publics than progressive publics register distrust of the mass media (Gallup, 2018). Alternatively, conservative publics were more likely to share or circulate fake/conspiratorial scandal news about Clinton on Facebook and Twitter from sources or “junk news” sites like Breitbart and Infowars (Benkler et al., 2017b; Meraz, 2018, 2017a, 2017b, 2017c; Narayanan et al. 2018). The 2016 US presidential scandal agenda was also driven in large part by social bots in our social media platforms. During the 2016 US presidential election, Russia’s involvement in deploying armies of bots (Westervelt, 2017), as well as encouraging young teens from Macedonia to seed and amplify fake news with promises of payment (Silverman & Alexander, 2016), enabled fake scandals about Clinton to be amplified by the power of automation and algorithms, showing code to be a powerful agenda setting agent. The Trump–Russia scandal emerged shortly after the former’s presidential victory on January 6, 2017, as the American Intelligence Committee issued findings that Russia had intervened in the election. The scandal has already implicated Michael Flynn (Trump’s national security advisor), Paul Manafort (Trump’s campaign chairman), and George Papadopoulos (Trump’s former campaign foreign policy advisor), and has revealed surreptitious meetings between Trump campaign officials and Russian personnel in meetings at Trump tower and over email communications (Goldberg, 2018). The crisis in the media’s agenda setting authority is evidenced by the lack of resonance of this scandal’s significance with conservative partisan publics. Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee released a report in March 2018 concluding no evidence of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign (Herb, 2018). Though mounting evidence pouring out of mass media daily reportage suggests increasing significance to this Russia scandal probe, only 25 percent of Republican publics believe there was improper contact between the Trump campaign and Russia in comparison to almost 68 percent of progressive publics (Pew Research Center, 2017). Bots, defined as chunks of computer code that generate messages and replicate themselves (Howard, 2014), now outnumber humans on the Internet (McMillan, 2014). On a worldwide basis, scholars have found that politicians often utilize political bots for malicious campaign propaganda designed to discredit their opponents and inject supportive agendas related to their presidency in order to sway public opinion (Woolley & Howard, 2017). Evidence has been found that injecting false news stories through algorithms, automation, and human curation— known as computational propaganda—have inspired malicious political campaigning in countries such as Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, Poland, Taiwan, Russia, Ukraine, and the United States, to name but a few countries (Woolley & Howard, 2017). Social bots, automated scripts designed not just to automate but interact with humans, are also on the rise on our social networking platforms (Woolley, 2016). Studies have found that as many as 66 percent of tweeted links were made by Twitter bots in 2016 (Wojcik et al., 2018), though other studies in the same year ascribe a more modest role to bots (Meraz, 2018). In a large scale study of 126,000 rumors between 2006 and 2017 on Twitter, Vosoughi, Roy and Aral (2018) found that fake news spread faster and more rapidly on Twitter when carried out by humans and not bots. Irrespective of whether bots or humans are more responsible for spreading scandal on social 61

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platforms, what is apparent is that the interconnected system of mass media and social media, of human and nonhuman agents, makes agenda setting a more interactive, dynamic, and hybrid process. Fake news scandals overran social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter during the 2016 US presidential election (Silverman, 2016a, 2016b). Some of these fake news scandals included the assertion that the pope endorsed Donald Trump, that Hillary Clinton sold weapons to ISIS, and that an FBI suspect in Clinton’s email leak was found dead in a murder-suicide. Immediately after the election, the term “pizzagate” was coined to describe the fake news narrative that a pizzeria in Washington DC was the site for a pedophile ring involving Clinton and Podesta. This fake news scandal led to a North Carolina man firing an assault rifle in the pizzeria as he sought to rescue the child sex slaves he believed were being held at the restaurant (Haag & Salam, 2017). The mass media and its power to set the agenda on true scandals and correct on false ones stands threatened by our current divided partisan landscape, by a broad disdain for the authority, power, and credibility of the mass media among select publics, and by the ready embrace of partisan selective exposure and partisan motivated reasoning to the sacrifice of truth and fact. Our interactive media ecology has now resulted in social media platforms as prime destinations for news consumption and news distribution. In this current environment, the mass media’s ability to set the agenda on scandals—investigating true scandals and diffusing fake scandals—is weakened by the current empowerment that networked publics (human and nonhuman) have in dictating what is truth and what is fiction.

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Scandals and agenda setting Condon, S. (2010). Poll: “Birther” myth persists among Tea Partiers, all Americans. CBS News. Available at https://www.cbsnews.com/news/poll-birther-myth-persists-among-tea-partiers-all-americans/ Crawford, J.T., & Bhatia, A. (2012). Birther nation: Political conservatism is associated with explicit and implicit beliefs that president Barack Obama is foreign. Analysis of Social Issues and Public Policy, 12(1), 364–376. Douthat, R. (2018). Trump hacked the media right before our eyes. The New York Times. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/21/opinion/trump-facebook-cambridge-analytica-media.html Enck-Wazner, D. (2011). Barack Obama, the Tea Party, and the threat of race: On racial neoliberalism and born again racism. Communication, Culture & Critique, 4(1), 23–30. Enli, G. (2017). Twitter as an arena for the authentic outsider: Exploring the social media campaigns of trump and Clinton in the 2016 US presidential election. European Journal of Communication, 32(1), 50–61. Fowler, M. (2008). Obama: No surprise that hard-pressed Pennsylvanians turn bitter. Huffington Post. Available at https://www.huffingtonpost.com/mayhill-fowler/obama-no-surprise-that-ha_b_96188.html Gallup. (2018). American views: Trust, media, and democracy. Knight Foundation. Available at https:// kf-site-production.s3.amazonaws.com/publications/pdfs/000/000/242/original/KnightFoundation_ AmericansViews_Client_Report_010917_Final_Updated.pdf Garrett, K. (2011). Troubling consequences of online political rumoring. Human Communication Research, 37(2), 255–274. Garrett, R.K. & Stroud, N.J. (2014). Partisan paths to exposure diversity: differences in pro- and counterattitudinal news consumption. Journal of Communication, 64(4), 680–701. Garrett, K. & Weeks, B.E. (2017). Epistemic beliefs role in promoting misperceptions and conspiracist ideation. PLOS One. Available at http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal. pone.0184733#pone.0184733.ref005 Gentile, J. (2017). Tugging at the umbilical cord: Birtherism, nativism, and the plotline of Trump’s delivery. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 53. Goldberg, M. (2018). Truth has stopped mattering in the Russia investigation. The New York Times. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/30/opinion/truth-russia-investigation.html Goldman, A. & Rappeport, A. (2016). Emails in Anthony Weiner inquiry jolt Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The New York Times. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/29/us/politics/fbihillary-clinton-email.html Guo, L. (2012). The application of social network analysis in agenda setting research: A methodological exploration. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 56(4), 616–631. Guo, L. & McCombs, M. (2016). The power of information networks: New directions for agenda setting. New York: Routledge. Haag, M. & Salam, M. (2017). Gunman in “pizzagate” shooting is sentenced to 4 years in prison. The New York Times. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/22/us/pizzagate-attack-sentence.html Herb, J. (2018). House republicans release redacted Russia report. CNN. Available at https://www.cnn. com/2018/04/27/politics/house-intelligence-committee-republican-russia-report/index.html Howard, P. (2015). Pax technical: How the Internet of things may set us free or lock us up. New Haven: Yale University Press. Howard, P. (2014). Let’s make candidates pledge not to use bots. Reuters. Available at http://blogs.reuters. com/great-debate/2014/01/02/lets-make-candidates-pledge-not-to-use-bots/ Howell, J. (2012). Not just crazy: An explanation for the resonance of the birther narrative. Communication Monographs, 79(4), 428–447. Leonhardt, D. (2018a). Details on the list of Trump’s racist statements. The New York Times. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/15/opinion/donald-trump-racist-statements.html Leonhardt, D. (2018b). Just say it: Trump is a racist. The New York Times. Available at https://www. nytimes.com/2018/01/12/opinion/trump-racist.html Liebes, T. & Blum-Kulka, S. (2004). It takes two to blow the whistle. American Behavioral Scientist, 47(9), 1153–1170. Manjoo, F. (2017a). The frightful five want to rule entertainment. They are hitting limits. The New York Times. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/11/technology/the-frightful-five-want-torule-entertainment-they-are-hitting-limits.html Manjoo, F. (2017b). Tech’s frightful give: They’ve got us. The New York Times. Available at https://www. nytimes.com/2017/05/10/technology/techs-frightful-five-theyve-got-us.html Marwick. A. & Lewis, R. (2017). Media manipulation and disinformation online. Data & Society. Available at http://www.chinhnghia.com/DataAndSociety_MediaManipulationAndDisinformationOnline.pdf

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6 MEDIATIZATION AND POLITICAL SCANDAL Bingchun Meng

In his book-length treatment of mediated political scandal, Thompson (2000) attributes the contemporary prevalence of scandals to three major factors. First, the growth and consolidation of mass circulation press in the early twentieth century meant that newspapers needed to compete with each other to grab the attention of the readers. Second, the rise of investigative journalism had encouraged journalists to look beyond official sources, in order to uncover the information that government or other parties try to conceal for fear of reputation damage. The third reason Thompson identified is the diffusion of new media and communication technologies – the heightened visibility of politicians increases the risk of previously private activities being exposed in the public domain (pp. 57–59). This provides a good starting point for us to explore the explanatory power of mediatization, which is a concept as well as an analytical perspective, in relation to media scandal. Building upon the pioneering work of Altheide and Snow (1979), scholars of political communication first used mediatization to capture the ways in which media logic seeped into the operation of politics and the calculation of political actors. Some even cautioned that media and their logic have colonized politics (Meyer & Hinchman 2002; Strömbäck 2008). In this day and age when digital communications have become increasingly pervasive and networked, it is all the more pertinent to understand the functioning of what Altheide (2013) calls ‘the ecology of communication’, which is a template for inspecting the interaction between ‘communication, social interaction and institutional orders’ (p. 223). This interaction goes far beyond that between journalism and political scandals; nor should we restrict our inquiry to the context of AngloAmerican liberal democracy. In this chapter, I argue that on the one hand the institutional logic of media organizations and the network logic of communication platforms are crucial to the unfolding of any political scandals. On the other hand, media logic itself is always embedded in a specific political context, thus the mediatization of scandals is a dialectic process that involves the ideological positioning of media outlets. I will first review the current state of the field, with regard to the implications of mediatization in general and that of mediatized scandals in particular. The competition toward commercial gain, political influence and professional prestige drives media outlets to expose and sustain political scandals. This has given rise to scholarly debate on the impact such ongoing process could have on public life in Western liberal democratic societies. On the other hand, as an integral part of contemporary social and political life, mass media 67

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outlets have frequently come under scrutiny themselves, as the transgressor in rather than the disseminator of scandals. For example, the News International phone hacking scandal that erupted in the UK in 2011, which also had wider international ramifications. I then examine how new technologies and the power of digital networks aid the circulation of scandalous stories, and how the recent case of Cambridge Analytica poses new challenges for conceptualizing the network logic. In the last analytical section of the chapter, I further attend to the dialectic relationship between media scandal and politics by problematizing the ideological standpoint of media organizations themselves. As Entman (2012) argues, the ‘study and critique of media and scandal should focus on understanding the system of political communication rather than on news organizations as separate entities charting the course of scandals by themselves’ (p. 6). Recent political events taking place in both quintessential liberal democracies such as the UK and the US, as well as other parts of the world, suggest that the trajectory of scandals is often contingent upon ideological affinity between media and different factions of political elites.

The institutional logic of mediatization As an attempt to highlight the role of media in modern society, the notion of mediatization has been invoked since the 1980s, when for example Altheide and Snow (1979, 1988) called for an ‘analysis of social institutions-transformed-through-media’ (Altheide & Snow 1979, 7), although they use the term ‘media logic’ to refer to the formatting power exerted over how social experience is selected, categorized and presented in mass media. Thompson (1995) observes that the emergence of large media organizations specializing in the production and distribution of symbolic goods has reconfigured the relationship between institutions and between institutions and individuals, which he characterizes as the ‘mediatization of modern culture’. Asp (1986) speaks more specifically about the mediatization of politics, by which he means ‘a political system to a high degree is influenced by and adjusted to the demands of the mass media in their coverage of politics’ (p. 359). Here already there is emergent concern over the negative consequences of mediatization on the functioning of politics. Similarly, in their mapping of ‘the third age’ of political communication, Blumler and Kavanagh (1999) warned against the ‘rush to embrace infotainment and the sway of politics-smearing journalism’ as part of the consequences of the abundance and ubiquity of mediated communication (p. 225). But it was not until the mid-2000s that more conscious efforts were made to institutionalize mediatization as a core concept underpinning research about the multifaceted influences that media have on contemporary cultures and societies (e.g., Couldry & Hepp 2013; Hepp & Couldry 2010; Krotz 2009; Schulz 2004). Jansson (2013) defines mediatization as ‘how other social processes in a broad variety of domain and at different levels become inseparable from and dependent on technological processes and resources of mediation’. He further specifies three sociospatial regimes of dependence: (1) material indispensability and adaptation, (2) premediation of experience, and (3) normalization of social practice, all of which correspond with the perceived, the conceived and the lived spaces (p. 279). In their editorial for the special issue of Communication Theory, Couldry and Hepp identified two theoretical traditions in mediatization research, namely the social constructionist approach that examines ‘communicative construction’ and the institutionalist approach that emphasizes ‘media logic’. But they also pointed out that these two strands had been converging in recent years, with a broader research agenda emerging that goes beyond lamenting the colonization of social life by ‘media logic’. One of the research areas that would benefit greatly from treating mediatization as more of a ‘sensitizing’ rather than a ‘definitive’ concept is the study of media scandals (Jensen 2013). Quoting from American sociologist Herbet Blumer (1954) who made these distinctions in the 68

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1950s, Jensen explains that ‘a definitive concept refers precisely to what is common to a class of objects, by the aid of a clear definition in terms of attributes or fixed bench marks’, while ‘a sensitizing concept gives the user a general sense of reference and guidance in approaching empirical instances’ (p. 7). Scholars coming from the journalism tradition tend to take a definitive approach toward mediatization. Not only do they examine how the technological and the institutional logic of mass media shape the report and the circulation of scandals, they also assess, rather critically, the consequences such pervasive mediated communication could have on politics and public life. There are several key aspects of the arrangements of modern mass media that enable, and often encourage, the exposé of scandals. To start with, scandals make sensational news stories that could attract attention and boost profit. On a competitive media market saturated with a huge variety of symbolic goods, any media organization that can acquire a scoop of a major scandal is poised to reap the financial gain. This line of discussion derives from the sustained critique of infotainment as a result of marketization and commercialization (e.g., Entman 1989; Hackett & Zhao 1997; Jamieson 1993; McChesney 2015; Patterson 1993; Postman 1985; Tumber 1993). It presupposes the normative goal of media functioning as public sphere in liberal democracy and highlights the negative impact of the proliferation of media scandals. Critics argue that in presenting scandals as media spectacles, journalism is adopting the ‘show-biz’ calculation based on battles of images and conflicts of characters. This debases politics by diminishing the deliberation of important policy issues, undermining the trust toward politicians and treating citizens as passive consumers of infotainment content (Mazzoleni & Schulz 1999; Thompson 2000). One of the most disturbing illustrations of the detrimental effect of commercial calculation is the 2011 News of the World phone hacking scandal that took place in the UK, but had much wider international ramifications. Driven by the desire to ‘pull in readers for commercial rather than journalistic reasons’ (Fenton 2012, 4), tabloid newspapers themselves became the culprit in a major media scandal. The investigation over the British newspaper industry’s illegal practices of acquiring confidential personal information through hacking into mobile phones and computers started in the early 2000s. After the conviction in 2006 of the News of the World royal reporter Clive Goodman and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire for hacking into the voicemail of Prince William’s aide, it was widely perceived that the matter had come to an end. But new allegations kept emerging, until The Guardian revealed in 2011 that the News of the World had not only hacked into the voicemail of celebrities, politicians and members of the Royal Family, but also that of a murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler and victims of the 7 July London Underground bombing. This was a key turning point that triggered a strong wave of public outrage, which in turn led to the closing down of the newspaper and the government initiated Leveson Inquiry into the ‘culture, practices, and ethics of the press’ (Leveson, quoted in Tumber 2012, 13). If mediatization entails the pervasiveness of market-based commercial logic, one has many reasons to be concerned with not only journalism’s indulgence in sensationalism and emotionalism, but also the moral transgression committed by journalists themselves in their effort to acquire a competitive edge. The professionalization of journalism, especially the development of investigative journalism, is another factor that has contributed to the rise of media scandals across Western democracies in recent decades (Tumber & Waisbord 2004). For example, Chalaby (2004) uses the case of France to illustrate how the disclosure of political scandals only became common after the late development of investigative journalism in the country in the 1980s. Here again the conception of the journalistic role is very much embedded in the liberal democratic framework that presumes the press’s independence from the government and political parties. Investigative journalists are expected to play the adversarial role of the Fourth Estate to check on politicians’ abuses 69

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of power. The exposure of scandal is therefore considered the highest journalistic achievement (Liebes & Blum-Kulka 2004). In contrast to the focus on commercial logic though, the emphasis on the pursuit of professional prestige, either by individual journalists or by media organizations, naturally leads to a much more positive assessment of the implications of media scandals. From the 2013 US National Security Agency and its international partner’s surveillance scandal, which emanated from the documents leaked by Edward Snowden, to the 2018 Windrush scandal in the UK, which concerns people who arrived from Caribbean countries before 1973 and were wrongly detained, denied legal rights or threatened with deportation by the UK Home Office, investigative journalism does seem to be doing the job of holding power accountable. In seeking conflicts and being fundamentally sceptical toward politicians, mainstream newspapers such as the New York Times and The Guardian seem to fit the profile of what Schudson calls ‘the unlovable press’ (Schudson 2013) that is deemed crucial to democracy. Nonetheless, Entman (2012) argues that as non-strategic actors seeking prestige and profit only, media institutions themselves are not able to sustain major political scandals, which more often than not would involve the strategic act of party operatives, activists, politicians and interest groups in either stoking or derailing the scandal. He attributes the ‘the unfortunate excess of media scandals’ to the interaction between external strategic actors and ‘the typically non-strategic news organizations and citizenry’ (p. 7). One of the most recognized examples of such interaction is the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal that nearly resulted in the US President being removed from office. Thompson (2000) points out that although the scandal dominated the US news for more than a year, in the eyes of ordinary Americans, ‘the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal was an event that had been blown out of proportion by a combination of partisan interests and media hype’ (p. 157). Public opinion research also seems to confirm that the sustained support of Clinton can be explained by the common perception that conservative elites were using the Lewinsky affair as political ammunition (Shah, Watts, Domke, & Fan 2002).

The network logic of mediatization In addition to the commercial logic and the professional logic, a third aspect of mediatization closely related to the construction and dissemination of scandals is the logic of digital networks. In the aftermath of the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal, political communication scholars in the USA reflected on the inadequacy of the social responsibility model in making sense of journalism in a networked digital environment (Williams & Delli Carpini 2000, 2004). The accelerated news cycle requires that journalists across all kinds of platforms continuously report while gathering information, which leads to more mistakes and leaves little time for correction, let alone reflection. Further, on the Internet, ‘with its multiple points of access and more continuous news cycle has increased the opportunities for less mainstream individuals and groups to influence public discourse’ (Williams & Delli Carpini 2000, 79). The emergence of multiple axes of power in the new media environment means the conventional role of mainstream journalism in gatekeeping and agenda setting has collapsed. The sombre tone lamenting the decline of the public sphere in Western liberal democracies often changes into a celebratory one when it comes to assessing the implications of network logic in non-Western contexts. For example in the early 2000s, there was widespread expectation that the Internet would help democratize authoritarian countries like China (see Meng 2010 for more discussion). Only empirically grounded works that carefully unpack ‘the multiple axes of power’ on digital networks would be able to add nuance to debate. Unlike the common belief among some scholars, the outbreak of scandal is not restricted to liberal democracies (Markovits & Silverstein 1988). Chadha (2012) traces the important role of 70

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Twitter in the so-called Radiagate scandal in India. In November 2010, an English language news weekly Open published transcripts of, as well as audio links to, conversations between a leading Indian lobbyist, Niira Radia, and leading Indian journalists. In the conversations, some of India’s best known journalists can be heard offering the lobbyists’ clients scripted interviews and favourable columns, as well as advice on how to place stories in media outlets (p. 171). The week after the tape came to light, there was practically no coverage in Indian mainstream media about it, while there was immediate and strong reaction on Twitter. After trending on Twitter India for six days as the most popular topic, Indian mainstream media finally picked up the story. But Chadha notes the episodic rather than thematic coverage of the scandal in mainstream media that failed to address the deeper structural problem with Indian journalism. She argues that the potentially disruptive digital technologies cannot alter the deep-seated social practice, which remains contingent on the complex interplay of varied ‘structural’ factors and influences (p. 176). Similarly, Toepfl (2011) addresses how ‘Internet scandals’ impact on politics in the semiauthoritarian Russia by comparing two cases of police corruption scandals that erupted in the social media sphere in 2009/2010. He argues that with the help of powerful state-controlled television, Russia’s ruling elites are capable of managing outbursts of public outrage through redirecting the anger towards lower-level officials and foreign, supposedly hostile, powers. In China as well, the unfolding of one of the highest profile political scandals in recent history involved intensive interactions between mainstream and social media (Meng 2016). After the initial announcement made by the state news agency Xinhua on the dismissal of Bo Xilai from the post of Chongqing Party Secretary, major news outlets were largely silent during the 18 months leading up to Bo’s trial. It was social media, especially Weibo, that acted not only as the main source of information for citizens, but more importantly as the discursive battleground of ideological conflicts (Meng 2016). In the age of social media and data-driven political marketing though, the network logic of mediatization goes even beyond enabling the production and circulation of scandals. In March 2018, following the whistle-blowing of a former Cambridge Analytica employee Christopher Wylie, several major news outlets, including The New York Times and The Guardian, reported that the British political consulting firm had acquired a large quantity of Facebook users’ data and used it for designing political marketing campaigns. The revelation that the firm had worked both for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and for the Leave.EU campaign for the UK’s referendum on EU membership caused serious concerns across the Atlantic. The Federal Trade Commission in the USA and the UK’s data watchdog immediately launched investigations (Greenfield 2018). Lawmakers in both countries also summoned Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for questioning. Around ten days after the initial exposé, Zuckerberg took out full-page advertisements in a number of British and American newspapers to apologize for a ‘breach of trust’. Contrary to the earlier expectations that the Internet would bring about a ‘global village’, the Cambridge Analytica scandal reveals the dangers of data-driven political marketing breaking up society. Christopher Wylie offered strikingly candid criticism of the business practices of his former employer during his interview with The Guardian. He commented that after harvesting a huge quantity of Facebook data to figure out the user profile of different demographic groups, Cambridge Analytica was essentially ‘building the cultural weapon to win a psychological warfare’. The company would tailor the political messages and deliver them to the most susceptible groups. Therefore instead of building a shared experience by simultaneously addressing members of the public, data analytics allow firms to ‘whisper down everyone’s ear with different messages’ (Greenfield 2018). If scandal can be defined as ‘a socially constructed event that takes place when 71

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a public figure’s actions are widely interpreted as contravening established moral, political or procedural norms’ (Nyhan, quoted in Entman 2012, 6), a shared understanding of the ‘norms’ and what counts as transgression establishes the baseline of public deliberation. Cambridge Analytica is only one of the most high profile cases so far that represents the ascending trend of targeted political communication based on data analytics. If hyper-customized advertising messages lead to social discrimination and the disempowerment of consumers (Turow 2012), hypercustomized political messages are even more dangerous in breaking up the shared understanding that is crucial to the functioning of democracy. Already we are witnessing Donald Trump’s improbable ability to shake off the burden of numerous accusations and wrongdoings. From various allegations of sexual harassment during the presidential campaign to his steady stream of irresponsible Twitter messages, all of which are transgressions that would cause major trouble for politicians at a time of shared norms, yet none of which seem to bear any political consequence on his presidency. When a society becomes sufficiently polarized, there could be diametrically opposing views of what counts as a scandal.

The political logic of mediatization While specifying the institutional and the technological logic of mediatized scandals provides a good analytical starting point, it does not quite capture the issues at stake in the often-intense struggles over symbolic resources. For the latter we need more of what Blumer calls a ‘sensitizing’ approach that on the one hand highlights the role of media, but on the other hand firmly embeds media in specific political and social contexts. In his effort to advance the ‘social theory of scandal’, Thompson (2000) considers scandal to be ‘struggles over symbolic power in which reputation and trust are at stake’ (p. 262). Here the focus on reputation and trust is premised upon the assumption that class-based ‘ideological politics’ has gradually given way to a ‘politics of trust’ based on specific policy packages offered by political parties. It is in this context that the individual character of political leaders, rather than their class affiliation, becomes susceptible to disclosure by the media of transgression and wrongdoing. Like many other analytical frameworks that are derived from and used to explain media phenomena in a highly stable society, what Thompson failed to acknowledge, based on his study of media scandal in the UK and the USA, is that scandals in some societies could involve intense ideological struggles and that media organizations can become deeply implicated in these struggles. A case in point is the aforementioned Bo Xilai scandal in China that started in March 2012, when Bo was removed from the position of Chongqing Party Secretary, and ended in August 2013, when Bo was found guilty of corruption and sentenced to life imprisonment. This is arguably the most significant political scandal in China. As the son of a prominent Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader, Bo Yibo, Bo Xilai was in the inner circle of China’s top political elite. Prior to his assignment to Chongqing, Bo had been the Mayor of Dalian, Provincial Governor of Liaoning and Minister of Commerce, with a successful political record. There was wide speculation before his dismissal in March 2012 that he would become a member of the Politburo Standing Committee following the 18th Party Congress, which was scheduled to take place later that year. Some have even compared the magnitude of this ‘political earthquake’ with the downfall of Mao’s designated heir Lin Biao in 1971 or the crackdown on the 1989 student movement (Zhao 2012). Elsewhere I have developed a comprehensive analysis of the scandal (Meng 2016). Leading left-wing scholars both inside and outside China have also offered insightful critiques of the case (Lin 2012; Wang 2012; Zhao 2012). There is no space in this chapter to contextualize adequately the Bo Xilai scandal in relation to China’s socialist history as well as contemporary politics. I can only briefly explain 72

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why his political agenda and his leadership style not only brought to the fore the intense ideological struggle between Party factions but also polarized public opinion, with mediatized manifestations of both these phenomena. With regard to the political infighting at the highest level of CCP elites, Bo’s rhetoric and his policy ignited contestation over class politics and China’s revolutionary past. Bo’s social policies emphasized distributive justice (minsheng, which literally translates as ‘livelihood’), which included low-income housing projects, a reformed hukou registration system that eased the migration of rural residents into the cities, and a land exchange mechanism to maximize the usage of farmland (Cui 2012). Not only did Bo emphasize social equality and wealth redistribution, he also tried to revitalize ‘red culture’ by promoting socialist cultural symbols and public service media. Strangely enough, for the first time since the CCP embarked on its course of ‘socialist marketization’, which has been criticized by many on the Left as having a strong neoliberal component (Harvey 2005; Ong 2006; Wang 2009), it was the Chongqing Party Secretary rather than the central government who articulated a more coherent political agenda in which policy and rhetoric were better aligned under socialist rubrics. Needless to say, this posed a severe threat to the central leadership, which had been trying very hard to maintain the monopoly over the appropriation and reinterpretation of revolutionary history in the post-Mao era. Bo Xilai trespassed on a second forbidden zone, which is the Party’s ongoing effort to push aside socialist discourse with non-ideological promises of things like a ‘harmonious society’ and a ‘Chinese dream’ as a strategy to circumvent the contradictions between the Party’s socialist promise and many current capitalist policies. Secondly, media outlets, both domestic and international, which played an important role in framing and narrating the Bo Xilai saga, were far from taking a neutral stand during the whole event. The media coverage of the case was by no means a concerted effort derived from some kind of consensus indicating a sharing of common goals. Before the official announcement of Bo’s expulsion in March 2012, it was the mainstream domestic media that did most reporting on him and his policies in Chongqing. Between early 2012 and his trial in the summer of 2013, the international news media and the Internet played a more prominent role, as domestic news outlets had little choice but to toe the official line after the case became a major political scandal. In August 2013, the unprecedented ‘live webcast’ of Bo’s trial once again turned the Internet into the centre of attention and communication. Despite the ostensible differences in reporting style and details, there were surprisingly consistent threads running across different platforms and these warrant further probing. To a large extent, the different accounts of what Bo Xilai’s Chongqing Model was and the varied assessments of its success (or failure) are themselves closely linked to commentators’ ideological viewpoints. Leftist intellectuals discussed whether the economic and social policies being carried out in Chongqing were attempts to revitalize socialism in China, while mainstream news media predominately paid attention to the crackdown on organized crime, commonly dubbed ‘striking down black’ (dahei), and the ‘singing red’ (changhong) campaign, which promoted revolutionary and nationalist culture. These colourful catchphrases were utilized frequently by both the party organs and the commercial media to characterize the political agenda in Chongqing. By always singling out the ‘singing red’ initiative from other policy initiatives in Chongqing, the mainstream media hollowed out its political significance. Further, when the media coverage did make political references, these were not to the development model that Chongqing had been experimenting with, but to the Cultural Revolution. Rather than linking the ‘singing red’ campaign with the current agenda of reclaiming the revolutionary legacy through prioritizing livelihood (minsheng) and common prosperity (gongfu), headline photos of big groups waving red flags depicted an image of ‘red terror’. The international media were eager for a scoop on the 73

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political drama. For one thing, nuanced discussion of the historical context of Chinese politics does not make good headlines and could very well confuse non-Chinese readers. Scandalous details of corruption, betrayal, murder and spying sell much better and are easily digestible. More importantly, given the Western liberal media’s entrenched attitude toward Chinese socialism, the egalitarian policies and socialist discourse that Bo had been promoting in Chongqing were not something they shared an ideological affinity with. In this chapter, I have tried to explicate how mediatization as both a concept and an analytical perspective could shed light on some of the key political and social dynamics of media scandals. I started with a definitive approach that specified the commercial and the professional logic of mediatization. I looked at both the positive and the negative implications of such logics on the production and dissemination of scandals. Things became less ‘definitive’ though as I moved from the institutional to the network dimension of mediatization, as the power relationships that condition networked digital communication are very much in flux. I used the recent Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal to illustrate the political danger of networked-based, data-driven, political marketing. I further interrogated the limits of mediatization, which is a concept derived from studying political communication in stable Western liberal democracies, in making sense of political scandals that epitomize intense ideological conflicts, using an example from China. I argue that a sensitizing approach to mediatization that avoids a media-centric view and which is attentive to the specific socio-political context is a more productive way forward.

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7 SCANDAL AND NEWS VALUES Brian McNair

Introduction Scandal is as old, one might reasonably speculate, as human communication itself. Oral cultures nurtured scandals as surely as did early scribal cultures. It seems likely – if hard to prove, for obvious reasons – that gossip and rumour have been part of human interaction and social relations from prehistoric times. But as media technology and systems have evolved into the globalised public sphere of news and journalism we now inhabit, so have the reach and impact of scandal. Scandal is now a prominent feature of global news culture, with some scandals dominating news agendas all around the world for significant periods of time. In this chapter I consider the factors which shape the news value of scandal in both democratic and authoritarian societies.

News values Journalism, of which news is a major subgenre, can only ever be a sampling of reality, a selection of the events and processes taking place at any given time in a given society or culture. Journalists and their editors must always make choices about which aspects of reality they will report on and publish as ‘news’, simply because they have neither the resources nor the physical space to report everything. In the days of print, newspapers had a few pages to fill, and no more (much of it taken up by advertising). In the era of the globalised public sphere, and superfast broadband, there is more space, but even that is not enough to allow everything to be reported. For one thing, and at least until AI technology permits otherwise, news is a product of human beings who need rest and salaries. Even for news aggregation platforms such as Google there is a physical, human limit to how much news can be produced by a given outlet at any given time. In addition, given that most news media, for most of history, have been commercial organisations driven by the profit motive, it is crucial for them to publish news which attracts consumers – readers, viewers and listeners, BuzzFeed clickers, Facebook sharers and Twitter retweeters. Even non-profit outlets such as the BBC must follow this logic, since their short term funding and long term survival depends in large part on the visible demonstration of public loyalty to their journalism. So, what gives reality value as news? Galtung and Ruge’s 1965 essay on ‘Structuring and Selecting News’ (reviewed and critiqued in Harcup and O’Neill, 2001) was and remains a 76

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useful starting point in answering that question. Although their work related only to print and broadcast media of the analogue era, and did not foresee the always-on, globalised 24-hour news culture of today, they successfully identified some key elements of what shapes news value. The consumers of news seek out conflict, drama, negativity, deviation from social norms such as crime (the more heinous, the more newsworthy). Good news, as the cliché has it, is no news (or rarely is – we see occasional efforts by well meaning news folk to suggest that maybe, sometimes, news could be more uplifting and positive). The furore which led to the closure of the News Of The World (NOTW) red top tabloid in 2011, because of allegedly invasive reporting techniques including the phone hacking of a young murdered girl, Milly Dowler, often downplayed the fact that NOTW was a hugely popular newspaper at its peak, trading on crime, scandal and deviance in general. Stories such as that of the Milly Dowler murder were precisely the reason why millions of people bought the title over many decades, and why Murdoch’s News Corp was prepared to break laws and basic journalistic ethics to enable their reportage. (Murdoch and his family have survived the phone hacking scandal without damage, indeed they have prospered, largely, and with some justification, on the basis that, really, all they were doing with the NOTW and their other tabloids was giving the people what they wanted.) News values remain more or less constant even as media technology advances and changes the communication environment. From the days of early print media when witch burnings and gruesome executions occupied the front pages, to today’s exposés of serial killers, sex abusers and perverted clerics, ‘problematic reality’ has news value and sells journalism. In this context, scandal is a perennially newsworthy story, as and when the problematic realities of certain individuals and organisations become scandalous. The rest of this chapter explores how scandal emerges, and how its news value is determined in specific cases.

A brief history of scandal A short article of this kind does not allow for detailed analysis of particular scandals, but a few highly newsworthy examples which have become emblematic of the phenomenon would include the case of former UK Liberal Party leader Jeremy Thorpe, a closet gay man once tipped for great things who in the early 1970s commissioned an assassin to kill his lover Norman Scott. A highly praised 2018 BBC drama series tells the story of the Thorpe scandal, which illustrates how scandal is newsworthy to the extent that it involves elite figures, be they politicians, movie stars, supermodels or senior clerics. News values prioritise stories about elites and celebrities, and when these elites behave badly – for example, the case of Harvey Weinstein and other male celebrities implicated in the #MeToo movement – this is almost always news. If news is to a large extent the reportage of problematic reality, scandal is of obvious appeal to editors, journalists and their audiences. In the USA, president Bill Clinton illustrated the nature of scandal in the digital age when in 1998 the Drudge Report, a hitherto unknown online-only publication, exposed his relationship with intern Monica Lewinsky. Prestigious print media outlets knew about the story, but declined to publish it, deferring to analogue era standards of deference towards elite authority which had also protected the presidency of John F. Kennedy. Drudge had no such inhibitions, and the relatively uncensorable nature of the internet allowed him to turn it into a global news story of unprecedented value, which came close to destroying the Clinton presidency. Clinton escaped impeachment, while suffering many globally reported insults to his dignity, but the story defined his presidency and returned to haunt Hilary Clinton when she was contesting Donald Trump for the presidency in 2016. How, it was suggested by Trump supporters, could the former First Lady occupy the moral high ground around Trump’s ‘pussy grabbing’ 77

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and the like when she had so vocally defended her husband’s multiple sexual transgressions back in the 1990s (including attacking his female accusers)? More recently in the United States, rising New York Democrat star Anthony Weiner, whose wife Huma Abedin was a key aide to Hilary Clinton up to and including the duration of her 2016 campaign for president, was revealed to have been sexting explicit images of his genitalia to another woman on Twitter.1 Further revelations emerged in subsequent weeks and months, effectively derailing his career and leading to his resignation from Congress. In 2016, however, at the peak of the contentious US presidential campaign in which Hilary Clinton was under relentless attack from Trump and the alt-right, Weiner was found to have been sexting an underage girl. This story was deeply embarrassing to the Clinton campaign, given that it so closely involved Abedin. In 2017 Weiner was imprisoned for transferring obscene material to a minor.

Scandal: a definition Scandal can be defined as that moment, or series of moments – since one item of potentially scandalous information can easily lead to subsequent ones in a cycle of deepening controversy – when private gossip and rumour about transgression become part of public knowledge and media discourse. People routinely talk about other people’s real or perceived faults, of course, be they family members, friends, work colleagues or neighbours, but only when these conversations become part of the news media and public sphere do they become the subject of public debate and opprobrium – that is, scandalous. As a recent example, we can cite the case of Meghan Markle and her father. The latter sought to cast aspersions on his daughter’s conduct around the time of her marriage to Prince Harry. Many families fall out around the arrangements for a wedding, but the statements of Markle’s father became a running global news story, lasting many months. Who in the Markle family had been invited to the wedding, and who excluded? Who was going to escort the bride down the aisle? Who said what, to whom, and why, and when, and to which media outlets, throughout the actual wedding and beyond? This example shows that it is those who by virtue of their social position have the potential to be of news value can become the subject of mediated scandal. I may be the subject of gossip in my neighbourhood about, let’s say for argument’s sake, loud music played at night, or suspicions of domestic abuse behind closed doors, but I am not going to be the subject of scandalous news coverage in the media if no-one beyond the narrow circle of my neighbourhood is concerned by my possible transgression. My behavior is not newsworthy. Unless an actual crime is committed, which then becomes the subject of routine crime reportage in local or national media – and the more heinous the crime the more extensive the coverage will be, of course – there will probably be no media element to the allegedly transgressive behaviour. And even if a crime is committed and reported in the news, this is not necessarily a scandal. Only if it involves an already newsworthy figure – such as a celebrity like Mel Gibson, when he made anti-Semitic remarks to police – does a transgressive act tend to become scandalous. The scandals around #MeToo concerned behaviours which have been routine in sexual and gender relations forever – arguments about consent, or appropriateness of sexual advance, or abuse of power in the workplace – but they only became scandalous in the global news media when those behaviours were linked to newsworthy figures such as Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey. Reference to #MeToo underlines a second key defining element of scandal – that it is always founded on allegations of moral transgression. Such transgression can be related to the breaching of sexual codes – as in #MeToo, where a series of men (and some women, such as actress Asia 78

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Argento and New York University professor Avital Ronnell) were accused of exploiting others for sexual motivation;2 corruption by governing elites who are exposed as abusing public monies for their private benefit (as in the scandal which followed the Panama Papers; religious clerics who violate their stated oaths, as in the global scandal of child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church. On the latter, the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report of July 2018 which exposed the abuse over decades of literally thousands of children by hundreds of clerics, and the associated cover up by senior Church figures,3 was a recent case of a phenomenon in which priests and more senior clerics have been exposed as abusers of the vulnerable who were placed in their care.4 Notable examples include those of the late Cardinal Keith O’Brien in Scotland – a vocal critic of homosexuality in his day, who turned out to have been abusing young trainee clerics for years before achieving seniority in Scotland and then the global Church hierarchy; Cardinal Phillip Wilson in Australia, who was in August 2018 convicted of covering up paedophiliac abuses by clerics under his regime – and thousands of others, all over the world, prompting Pope Francis to issue an unprecedented letter of apology for ‘atrocities’ to his dwindling flock in August 2018.5 The transgression here was both a violation of what have become common social norms in Western societies – paedophilia is today recognised as unacceptable criminal activity – and, more importantly, moral hypocrisy, given the claims made by Catholicism for its divinely mandated spiritual superiority (and its imposition of celibacy on the priesthood). In many prominent cases of scandal, it is the perception of hypocrisy that generates news value and ultimately proves fatal to the allegedly scandalous. By way of example, in 2015 Australian politics was experiencing one of its most newsworthy scandals of the last few decades – that of Barnaby Joyce, prominent Coalition MP and Deputy Prime Minister at the time when the scandal broke. Joyce exemplifies many of the features of a good scandal, and the reasons for media potency. First, he was a prominent opponent of same sex marriage rights in Australia, declaring himself to be a man of ‘family values’ at a time when Australian same sex couples were lobbying for marriage equality (a referendum overwhelmingly endorsed it in 2017). And indeed, he had then a family to whom he had always expressed loyalty – four children to his first wife, Natalie. His career in politics had been rooted in his family values brand, bolstered by his claim to rural Aussie authenticity. He was also the government figure – Minister of Agriculture at that time – who threatened actors Johnny Depp and Amber Heard with arrest after they smuggled in their toy dogs to a film set on Australia’s Gold Coast in 2015, a stance which drew him global media attention and transformed him into a celebrity beyond his own country. Joyce threatened to have the dogs killed unless they were immediately removed from Australia. As he explained, ‘If we start letting movie stars – even though they’ve been the sexiest man alive twice – to come into our nation [and break laws], then why don’t we just break the laws for everybody? It’s time that Pistol and Boo [Depp’s dogs] buggered off back to the United States’.6 Depp was himself to be the subject of scandal a few months later, accused of domestic violence against Heard; but Joyce clearly relished in the fame his stance had attracted, and his image as a conservative Aussie battler who took no nonsense even from the likes of the movie star Depp contributed substantially to his rise to the position of deputy prime minister of Australia. Alas, as the Depp/Pistol/Boo saga was unfolding, it later transpired, Joyce was having an affair with one of his publicly funded staffers, a woman called Vikki Campion, who then went on to bear his (fifth) child. Joyce also revealed in his 2018 memoir that he had been pursuing women ‘for years’ in Canberra, Australia’s political hub, where he plied his trade as a career politician. His claim to believe in ‘family values’ were dubious, we thus learnt, when set against his actual behaviour. The Joyce case underlines the fact that, in addition to involving a member of some elite group, for a story to become a scandal it should be one of transgression against self-proclaimed 79

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or societally mandated values. Scandal is, in news terms, a narrative about the violation of rules, and when those who break the rules have been vocal advocates of them – as when a conservative ‘family values’ politician is found to have more than one family – the conflict between public stance and private behaviour is particularly newsworthy. The formula for the news value of a scandal can perhaps be summarised thus: elite status + moral transgression + hypocrisy = newsworthiness When the Barnaby Joyce scandal broke in Australia, it was above all the contradiction between his public statements against homosexuality and for ‘family values’ on the one hand, and on the other his private behaviour in breaking up his own family, which generated news value and fuelled the media fire. Without that appearance of moral hypocrisy, or his admitted deceit and lies to his own wife and children when caught out, no-one would have cared who Barnaby Joyce was having sex with in his office after hours. The degree of political scandal generated by an act of moral or other transgression, the case of Joyce confirms, is in large part a function of the gap between public statements and private behaviour which the media are willing or able to expose. JFK got away with serial womanising and sex orgies in the White House, attended often by journalists, because his reputation was well known to insiders and the media chose not to report what was known by journalists to be typical behaviour. Donald Trump was elected despite the many claims of extramarital affairs, tax dodging, draft evasion, racism and the rest, because, well, he never seriously denied any of it. Allegedly, he was a known womaniser from the start, a man who openly mocked disabled people at his public rallies, denounced Mexican migrants as rapists, and thus could not be called out as a hypocrite after 8 November 2016. Those who voted for him knew what they were getting. In the cases of both Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, two US presidents whose campaigns and terms in office were surrounded by accusations of sexual misconduct, their widely known sexual interest in women other than their own wives were frequently newsworthy but prevented scandal from becoming terminal. In August 2018, for example, as his former lawyer Michael Cohen was being convicted for campaign finance violations around payments to Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen MacDougall, Trump freely admitted that he had made the payments from his own personal funds (which would not be an illegal campaign finance transaction). His supporters, many of them interviewed on US media outlets at the end of August 2018, many of them devout Christians, defended this behaviour as merely part of Trump’s political persona – one they admired. ‘He’s only human,’ said one Trump voter interviewed on CNN about the Cohen convictions and hush money payments. The story was newsworthy, for sure, but survivable for a man with Trump’s record and reputation. Similarly, when the then Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was exposed in the global media for organizing Bunga Bunga parties at his villa, involving underaged girls and foreign leaders among others,7 his supporters cared little. He was already known as a serial philanderer, and the fact that some of the women paid to attend the parties were below the legal age of consent in Italy was no great news in that country, and certainly not scandalous enough to remove him from office. Berlusconi’s transgressions, like Trump’s two decades later, were simply discounted by his followers as part of his roguish profile.

The functions of scandal Scandal has an important role to play in human culture. It helps to sell journalism in information markets which are driven by commodity relations and where there is the freedom to report on 80

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the bad behaviour of elites. Scandal thus has value in news terms, but for this value to be realised media organisations must have the freedom to report on elite transgression. Absent the capacity of media organisations to report on, say, Kate Moss snorting cocaine, as reported by the UK’s Daily Mirror on 15 September 2005 – ‘Supermodel Kate Moss snorts line after line’ – there would be no scandal, especially when it concerns political elites. The transgressive behaviour would remain private. In authoritarian societies where there is no or limited freedom of press, elite scandal is rare. In such societies there is no ‘news value’ in anything but what the ruling party, clan or family decrees to be permissible at any given time. As I note below, ruling elites in China have recently allowed media limited scope to cover scandals such as that involving Bo Xilai and his wife around the murder of a British businessman, but only for the purposes of internal power struggles. Coverage of the Panama Papers exposé of Chinese party financial affairs – a much more significant story in terms of how China is governed – was and remains fiercely suppressed. In free media markets on the other hand, sex sells, to use that overworked cliché. But not only sex – drugs, financial corruption, cheating in sport (see the 2018 example of Australian cricketers caught on camera tampering with the ball, or English cricketers allegedly involved in match-fixing activities) – all can be the subject of scandal because they are attractive to media consumers and help sell papers and cable TV subscriptions (or drive clicks to online sites). The online TMZ publishes virtually nothing except scandal, most of it celebrity-based, such as the August 2018 story of #MeToo activist Asia Argento’s alleged sexual abuse of a 17-year-old teenager, Jimmy Bennett, illustrated by intimate photographs and texts. Argento’s case is another example of how perceived hypocrisy drives the news value of a scandal – she had been a leading proponent of the #MeToo movement, so when it emerged that she herself had been implicated in potential sexual misconduct involving a vulnerable underage male, she became headline news. Amanda Foreman’s (1998) book on Georgina, Duchess of Devonshire tells how scandal functioned as a driver of print media in early modern Europe. Georgina was a Princess Diana-like figure, who broke taboos and defied the social conventions of her time. She was wealthy and privileged, but also punished for her transgressions. Her treatment by the eighteenth-century media was commercially motivated, and also establishes the notion that scandal – celebrity scandal, at least (Georgina was not a politician) – is a form of what Mikhail Bakhtin (1984), in his reading of Rabelais, called carnivalesque, a form of cultural ritual in which the downtrodden masses get to gawp at and perhaps even criticise the excesses of their social superiors. If we can see Kate Moss snorting cocaine on the front cover of the Daily Mirror, then maybe her multimillionaire status is not such a bonus? Then again, she wakes up the next day and is still a millionairess, courted by everyone from Richard Branson to Philip Green, while the proles are working for minimum wage at Tesco, reading their tabloids in their ten-minute tea breaks. Who got the best deal? This is a significant part of what scandal is for, in the view of many sociologists of culture: to deflect serious political challenge to capitalist power relations, while giving the illusion of accountability. Medieval villages in Europe hosted festivals in which the wealthy and powerful were mocked by the peasants – the world turned upside down – only for the established order of things to be restored when the feasting was over and the hangovers recovered from. Licensed mockery of the elite remains a key function of media scandal, and is a large part of its value as news to the non-powerful. The carnivalesque function of scandal need not contradict the performance of a more politically significant democratic function – that of enhancing elite accountability, particularly that of political elites (Thompson, 2000). A notable example of the democratic functionality of scandal 81

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would be the work of Woodward and Bernstein in exposing the crimes of the Nixon White House, known thereafter as the Watergate scandal. Nixon’s administration, like Trump’s five decades later, was engaged in multiple nefarious activities designed to acquire and retain political power. In Nixon’s case, these included a break-in at the opposition Democrats’ Watergate hotel campaign offices, followed by a cover-up of the crime which it took Woodward and Bernstein years of investigation and a supportive newspaper proprietor to expose fully. The Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with the Russian state, WikiLeaks and other organisations to hack into Democratic email accounts has a similar profile of possible crime and cover-up, albeit in a very different digital context (Nixon’s people broke into offices; Trump’s backers, including the Russian state, allegedly hacked into electronic archives). The difference between Nixon and Trump, one might suggest, is that the former professed to be ‘clean’ until his resignation and the bitter end of his presidency – ‘I am not a crook,’ he famously declared. Trump, on the other hand, openly called for the Russian state to hack into his campaign opponent’s emails during the 2016 campaign. He was elected with the full knowledge of his supporters that this was his intention and desire, so the potential for damaging scandal in the aftermath was sharply reduced. Everybody knew what kind of person Donald Trump was – the kind who would claim at a campaign rally that he could shoot another person dead on Fifth Avenue and still be elected – and a substantial portion of the American people did indeed elect him. There was no hypocrisy on Trump’s part, rather an overt mockery of those who regarded his transgressions as unacceptable, or a claim that his critics were all engaged in ‘fake news’ (Ball, 2017; D’Ancona, 2017; McNair, 2018).

Political scandal in authoritarian societies As noted above, the existence of mediated scandal implies a media free enough to report elite transgression and to resist attempts at suppression, whether by physical or legal means. Thus, until now, scandal has been a feature of democratic societies and absent from authoritarian regimes. Of course, in countries such as North Korea and Saudi Arabia rumours and gossip about elite transgression will circulate by various means, but they do not tend to become ‘news’ in the public sphere (there are no public spheres in such societies, by definition) or the topic of public debate amongst citizens with democratic rights. Mediated scandal implies a free (or relatively free) information market in which stories of elite transgression will have news value. Recently, however, some authoritarian states have begun to deploy scandal as a weapon in internal power struggles. In 2014 the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which until this moment in its history had traditionally suppressed all potentially scandalous news relating to its own elite group in government, began to unleash negative stories about figures deemed troublesome to the new regime of Xi Jinping. A key example of this approach was the story of Bo Xilai and his wife, Giu. Bo was a powerful regional leader and potential rival to Xi. In 2014, a British investor and associate of Bo Xilai’s wife was murdered in Shanghai by poisoning. Bo Xilai and his wife were implicated in the crime and, to the surprise of many observers of the CCP’s typically totalitarian approach to information, the state-controlled media reported the story with an unprecedented degree of openness.8 As a result, both were prosecuted and given lengthy jail sentences, thus removing a potential threat to Xi Jinping’s exercise of power in China. The case of Bo Xilai and his wife was an example of state-sponsored scandal, limited to the extent that it damaged not the ruling elite as a whole, but elements within it who had fallen out of favour.

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On the other hand, when in 2016 the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) exposed corruption in the CCP’s ruling elite – such as huge sums of money stashed in tax havens overseas by the ‘Red Nobility’ – that was not reported in the Chinese media. CCP leader Xi Jinping’s brother-in-law was exposed by the Panama Papers as: a shareholder in two BVI companies, Wealth Ming International and Best Effect Enterprise [in which he] appeared on the shareholder registers of both companies in September 2009. They both existed for roughly 18 months before being closed in April 2011 and October 2010 respectively. The previous leak of offshore documents revealed Deng owned a 50% stake in the BVI-incorporated Excellence Effort Property Development. Ownership of the remainder of the company has been traced back to two Chinese property tycoons. Deng is married to Xi’s older sister, and together they built a fortune through investments in property and natural resources. In 2012, they were reported to hold stakes in companies with total assets of €325m, and an indirect 18% share in a minerals company worth €2 bn.9 More detail of the scandal included ‘a leaked trove of 11.5m files’ showing that: relatives of at least eight current or former members of China’s top ruling body, the politburo standing committee, possess offshore companies arranged through the law firm Mossack Fonseca. Those named in the leaked database from the firm include Deng Jiagui, the brother-in-law of the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, and Li Xiaolin, the daughter of former premier Li Peng, a Communist party hardliner who became known as the ‘Butcher of Beijing’ for his role in ordering the 1989 military crackdown on Tiananmen protesters. This story, in contrast to that of Bo Xilai and his wife, was not and has not subsequently been the subject of mainstream media coverage in China. Where the scandal around Bo Xilai and his wife was functional in shoring up Xi Jinping’s control of the country, the Panama Papers material was clearly too close to home, exposing as it did the financial excesses of a Party elite proclaiming its moral right to rule indefinitely and without constraint in the name of ‘socialism’. As The Guardian reported, all mention of the Panama Papers stories were banned from being reported in the Chinese state controlled media. The Chinese government also banned ICIJ coverage of Putin’s links to overseas funds: A second directive demanded that an article published on Monday focusing on revelations about the hidden riches of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s inner circle be removed from the homepage of one website.10 For scandal to emerge, and elite transgression to have news value, in short, there must be journalistic freedom to report the bad behaviour in question.

Conclusion The Chinese regime’s traditional suppression of media coverage of elite transgression – as opposed to its cultivation of the Bo Xilai scandal, which was highly convenient to Xi Jinping in his efforts to secure power in advance of a key CCP congress – demonstrates the potential

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democratic function of scandalous information about governing elites. Of course, scandal in this context is strictly limited to what the regime regards as expedient, but control of the digital information environment can be precarious, and attempts to exercise it can backfire. Social media and digital networks provide new channels for the dissemination of scandalous behaviour in the context of authoritarian regimes, and countries such as China are increasingly ‘leaky’ in this regard (McNair, 2016). Journalists can be kidnapped, disappeared, beaten up, poisoned (as in the case of Alexander Litvinenko in the UK), but the world hears about it through the digitally connected channels of the globalised public sphere, and remembers, feeding information back into the authoritarian state. When dictators and their family members and associates are caught out with their hands in the people’s pockets, as is happening in China to an unprecedented extent; as has happened in Russia under Putin and his oligarchs since the fall of the USSR; as happened in Malaysia until very recently under former premier Najib Tun Razak, media exposure is a key mechanism for progressive change. In the democratic world, meanwhile, the Trump administration and its flouting of all hitherto accepted US presidential standards of probity and public decency has pushed the boundaries of what can be considered scandalous beyond anything Bill Clinton, JFK or even Richard Nixon could have foreseen. Trump openly declares that only stupid people pay taxes, mocks disability, abuses women and ethnic minorities, and according to the Steele dossier may well be on tape paying prostitutes in Moscow. He has been accused by a former aide of using the ‘N-word’ on the set of The Apprentice (as of this writing, these were uncorroborated allegations). None of this appears to impact on his electoral base. Which is not to say that scandal is no longer possible with regards to a president (or any other elite figure in the era of Trump), nor newsworthy – merely that those who do not conspicuously claim moral superiority in politics are less likely to be damaged by scandal when caught behaving badly.

Notes 1 See http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-09-26/anthony-weiner-sentenced-to-21-months-in-teensexting-case/8987184. 2 L. Kipnis, ‘What happens when a #MeToo victim like Asia Argento is the accused?’, The Guardian, 24 August 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/24/metoo-victim-asiaargento-jimmy-bennett. 3 Report I of the 40th Statewide Investigating Grand Jury, 27 July 2018. 4 See https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/tribdem.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/ 8/64/86477024-9ffa-11e8-82d3-1795acf52e56/5b733183e8c7d.pdf.pdf. 5 Pope Francis was himself accused of covering up child abusers in an open letter by a senior Catholic cleric, published in late August 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/26/world/europe/popeireland-sexual-abuse-letter-vigano.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage. 6 See https://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2017/06/26/barnaby-joyce-threatened-dipstick-johnnydepp-with-perjury-ove_a_23003315/. 7 N. Pisa, ‘Berlusconi DID sleep with an underage girl at infamous bunga bunga party, guest claims’, Daily Mail, 8 June 2012. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2156373/Berlusconi-slept-underagegirl-infamous-bunga-bunga-party-guest-claims.html. 8 See http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-17673505. 9 J. Garside and D. Pegg, ‘Panama Papers reveal offshore secrets of China’s red nobility’, The Guardian, 6 April 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/06/panama-papers-reveal-offshoresecrets-china-red-nobility-big-business. 10 T. Phillips, ‘All mention of Panama Papers banned from Chinese websites’, The Guardian, 5 April 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/05/all-mention-of-panama-papers-banned-fromchinese-websites.

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References Bakhtin, M. (1984). Rabelais and his world. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ball, J. (2017). Post-truth: How bullshit conquered the world. New York: Biteback Publishing. D’Ancona, M. (2017). Post-truth: The new war on truth and how to fight back. London: Ebury Press. Foreman, A. (1998). Georgina, Duchess of Devonshire. New York: Random House. Harcup, T. and O’Neill, D. (2001). What is news? Galtung and Ruge revisited. Journalism Studies, 2, 261–280. McNair, B. (2016). Communication and political crisis: Media, politics and governance in a globalised public sphere. New York: Peter Lang. McNair, B. (2018). Fake news. London: Routledge. Thompson, J.B. (2000). Political scandal: Power and visibility in the media age. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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8 SELECTING SCANDAL How legacy and social media gatekeep the news Elizabeth Stoycheff

Scandal is hardwired into the news selection process. It affects decision making across individual, routine, organizational, institutional, and social system levels of news production—often distorting the relationship between the severity of political wrongdoing and media attention to it. Journalists, editors, news organizations, and the political system itself have long favored stories that feature prominent individuals engaged in conflict, struggle, or competition. While this type of reporting is often necessary for the functioning of the Fourth Estate, it also may fuel sensational, event-driven coverage that has the propensity to drown out more important thematic issues. There are many forces that influence legacy gatekeepers’ prioritization of scandalous news, and in this chapter I trace the ways in which they present themselves in new and unexpected ways. In so doing, I identify both the pitfalls and value of scandalous coverage, and emphasize the need to weigh controversial information with a journalistic commitment to the public good.

Gatekeeping theory Gatekeeping itself is perhaps one of the least controversial communication theories. It is used to explain which news stories are prioritized and covered—a mechanism even more critical in today’s saturated information environment. Stories that make it past the mainstream media’s gates continue to wield tremendous power: they dictate public opinion (McCombs & Shaw 1972), influence legislation and reform (Tan & Weaver 2009), and serve as a public record that stands in perpetuity. This curation of stories is both systematic yet subjective, reliant on journalists’ hunches and proclivities, newsroom cultures, organizational agendas, advertisers, and political actors’ ideologies (Shoemaker & Vos 2009; Entman 2012). Influences at each of these levels overlap and contribute to a news selection process that favors the antagonistic and the scandalous. To understand better how and why political wrongdoing dominates legacy and new media landscapes, this chapter takes a closer look at how gatekeeping decisions are made. Individual. Journalistic gatekeeping was originally introduced at the individual level, featuring a week-long study of mid-century wire editor Mr. Gates, who relied heavily on his own political preferences in editorial decision making (White 1950). Fast forward to contemporary journalists, where neutrality and fairness still come into conflict with individuals’ predispositions and goals, which, even among the most seasoned professionals, can directly or indirectly affect news judgment (e.g., Craft & Wanta 2004). And it may do so in dramatized ways. 86

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Working in the news industry entails its own unique professional hazards, including routine exposure to humanitarian crises, health concerns, and terrorist attacks—all of which have been found to take a significant toll on journalists’ news judgments by increasing implicit bias toward outgroups and prioritizing negative information in their reporting (Cuillier 2012). As legacy media welcome a new generation of gatekeepers to their ranks, personal characteristics continue to play a determinant role in emergent journalists’ selection processes. Minorities, who are still vastly underrepresented in editorial positions, are more likely to promote news that is “better for the world,” while Caucasian journalists place less value on altruistic stories (Coleman, Lee, Yaschur, Meader & McElroy 2018). In the same study, men, who make well over half of the gatekeeping decisions, highly rank fame-seeking and attaining celebrity status as professional motivations contributing to sensational coverage at the individual level. Routine. While personal biases show that the selection of news can be susceptible to individual preferences, professional routines institutionalize scandalous reporting through values of novelty and conflict. These routines are particularly important because they create uniformity, such that the same biases are reproduced across gatekeepers. Analysis of media coverage consistently shows that gatekeepers prioritize stories that are timely, feature prominent individuals, and have conflict, novelty, and impact many news consumers. One of the most recent examinations of news values in the media notes that negative news and stories that contain surprises, entertainment, and conflict appear most often, while good news and issues with high impact paled in comparison (Harcup & O’Neill 2017). Journalists note that the media they help produce usually favors the “sensational and unexpected” and the “dramatic and thrilling,” which is intended to lead to “an exclusive news story” (Strömbäck, Karlsson & Hopmann 2012). There is even evidence that some gatekeepers insist on either being the first to break a story or not cover it at all (Gans 2004). Journalists are also incentivized for pursuing dramatic stories and are in direct competition with one another to do so. When asked about the nature of one’s professional motivations, one New York Times reporter replied: “the superego, the public service . . . the id and mischief making.” Others’ responses included scoops, landing front-page coverage, and winning awards (Calame 2006). Journalists’ inherent need for validation can lead them to chase high-profile and controversial stories, as does the desire to preserve their own belief systems (Donsbach 2004). At this gate, the most newsworthy stories are those that serve not only the public’s interest but also the journalist’s. For recent examples of how routines contribute to scandal coverage, one needs to look no further than the 2016 presidential election. Throughout the campaign, Donald Trump received more mainstream media coverage than any other candidate (Patterson 2016). The majority of that content was horserace journalism that emphasized polls, crowd numbers, and—more than anything—a provocative stream of statements made from Trump’s personal Twitter account. Trump’s affinity for social media meant that his thoughts and ideas were more accessible than those of his competitors. News routines that encourage reliance on elite sources, coupled with Trump’s prominence and disregard for politics-as-usual, made his stories front-runners day after day. In a longitudinal study that followed Trump’s media strategy, Wells et al. (2016) argue that this very well won him the nomination and, as we know now, the general election. And unlike previous presidents, his post-election coverage has not abated, as newsworthy details of wrongdoing in the Russia investigation and his penchant for disinformation continue to feed journalists’ routines. Organization. While there are many gates in the news selection process, the organizational level is particularly important, as it is responsible for hiring the gatekeepers and determining the scope of their roles (Shoemaker & Vos 2009). Despite different variations of organizational ownership (Raviola 2012), nearly all media entities are sensitive to a financial bottom line, and 87

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many journalists within these organizations have faced ownership pressure to report or kill stories (Price 2003). When news passes through these gates, not all scandal investigations are created equal, and those done well are expensive and time-consuming. ProPublica’s two-year investigation into the dangers of acetaminophen was reported to have cost at least $750,000. This series of stories uncovered the fact that Tylenol sends tens of thousands of Americans to the hospital—or worse—each year, and the company intended to employ political lobbyists to prevent Food and Drug Administration restrictions that would make use of the drug safer. On the opposite end of the ledger are media attempts to employ artificial intelligence to—freely—report the news. The Washington Post’s prolific use of its named bots, Heliograf and Modbot, operate using a template of stock phrases that humans create. The intended purpose: to create site volume that drives advertising traffic. While this cost-cutting technique can contribute to breaking events, election and crime reports, weather and sports updates, it is currently incapable of handling the sophisticated investigative reporting that takes scandal from sensational to socially significant. Social institution. Outside any individual media organization, external influences, like markets and audiences, also shape the news selection process. In the U.S., media is a commercial enterprise, beholden to the needs of not just citizens, but also consumers. And research indicates that news consumers exhibit a strong preference for negative reporting—preferring cynical or adversely framed stories to those that are more positive and reassuring (Trussler & Soroka 2014). This is a result of humans’ evolutionary response to negative information, which is prioritized because it helps preserve self-interest and protect from threats, making consumer appetite yet another driver of scandalous coverage. Meeting demand is now easier than ever via big data and website/mobile analytics. Such tools are particularly popular among large media entities that perceive high levels of competition in the marketplace (Tandoc 2015) and value economic importance (Vu 2013). The use of audience metrics to identify trends in user behavior transforms gatekeeping from a professional craft into a science. One gatekeeper referred to analytic story selection and de-selection—or removing stories—as an addiction for news organizations (Tandoc 2014) that influences nearly every stage of the gatekeeping process: identifying story ideas, drafting headlines, incorporating multimedia elements, story placement, and content distribution. Nadler (2016, p. 2) argues monitoring consumer data has become so entrenched that “the U.S. news industry has undergone a philosophical paradigm shift, moving away from an ideal of professional autonomy and into a ‘postprofessional’ period characterized by an affirmation that consumers’ preferences should drive news production.” Thus, analytics are facilitating a rapid gatekeeping shift from the newsmakers to the news consumers (Vu 2013). Social forces. Despite this partial transfer of responsibility, media gatekeepers continue to view their positions as vital to a functioning democracy—serving as a necessary check on political power. While social institutions include extra-media actors, social forces are more abstract and recognize how a country’s unique culture, norms, and ideologies are also deeply embedded in the production of news (Shoemaker & Vos 2009). Influences at this level were first introduced in Siebert et al.’s (1956) seminal Four Theories of the Press, which Hallin and Mancini (2011) have since stewarded. In countries like the U.S., with weak political parties, the media play an important role in shaping policy decisions, educating the public, and synthesizing issues into a platform (Shoemaker & Vos 2009). Assuming these positions requires maintaining an adversarial relationship with elites, which instills a propensity for uncovering political wrongdoing and scandal at the highest level of influence. Despite an environment saturated with soft news content, most journalists agree that one of their primary responsibilities is to investigate potential wrongdoing and analyze complex problems (Cassidy 2006). 88

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Social media gatekeepers For over 200 years, news professionals in the U.S. held almost exclusive control over the flow of information, but the rise of social media giants coupled with financial pressure to appeal to audiences means that their monopoly is slipping. In 2017, over two-thirds of Americans reported accessing news on social media, up 5 percent from the previous year alone (Shearer & Gottfried 2017). Online platforms now also rival broadcast television as citizens’ regular source of news. Social media opinion leaders, algorithms, and critical masses of users have emerged as a new class of gatekeepers that cull and present information for individual consumption. Although the majority of news shared on social media still originates from legacy news organizations (Dimmick, Powers, Mwangi & Stoycheff 2011; Thorson & Wells 2015), it must pass through a new set of gates, or “curated flows,” that also prioritize scandal at each level of the influence hierarchy. Individual. Facebook and other social media platforms are exclusively focused on the individual consumer, creating a unique opportunity for users to curate information for their friends and followers. While these users may not create news content themselves, they do engage in important gatekeeping functions: seeking out and selecting content from a wider pool of information as well as reframing and synthesizing messages (Thorson & Wells 2015). These individuals are susceptible to the same personal biases in news selection, but they navigate these decisions without a journalist’s professional compass. So how do they determine what’s worthy of dissemination (or “shareworthy”)? Research shows that users have their own value system, which overlaps considerably with traditional news priorities. Like journalists, they do not necessarily select news from sources based on their pre-existing beliefs, suggesting that users do value a diversity of content (Trilling & Schoenbach 2015). However, these emergent gatekeepers overwhelmingly prefer flashy and cultural information, including stories about entertainment, weather, disasters, sports, as well as negative news with a high degree of controversy or conflict (Harcup & O’Neill 2017; Trilling, Tolochko & Burscher 2017). They tend to stop the flow of news about the political system and how it works, as well as economic policies. These two underrepresented genres are particularly important for serving the public interest and contextualizing dramatic events, indicating that social media gatekeepers may spark interesting investigative coverage but are less willing to sustain it. Routine. In aggregate, users’ news selection on social media is routinized through algorithms and trends. Algorithms are database rules that determine content priorities and, like artificial intelligence, they are the new breed of non-human gatekeepers invading the news landscape. However, they are not autonomous actors; organizations create their own secret recipes and instructions that are used to routinize and control the selection process (Thorson & Wells 2015; Caplan & Boyd 2018). Although communication research on the subject is still in its infancy (e.g., Bakshy, Messing & Adamic 2015), there is considerable concern that such precise curating may contribute to unintended echo chambers that confine individuals to a universe of sensational news and disinformation. What we do know is that a diet of incidental news exposure can be beneficial to creating a well-rounded citizenry (Kim, Chen & Gil de Zúñiga 2013), and it’s unclear if and how algorithmic gatekeepers would be able to sustain it. Another feature that routinizes dramatic news selection on social media are “trending” stories. Trends are timely, popular content that appears to users as most-liked or most-read on the platform. This feature prompts the age-old question about whether the judgment of the collective is preferable to that of any one individual. Facebook recently determined that it’s not. Earlier this year, the brand discontinued its trending stories, citing concerns about suppressing political content, spreading disinformation, and even ridicule when “Deez Nuts”—a spoof 89

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presidential candidate—made the list. Other social and legacy media still employ this feature, allowing a critical mass of users to gatekeep their news. Organization. Despite the tremendous amount of information that passes through their gates, most social media platforms refuse to identify as news organizations, avoiding a commitment to the profession’s ethical responsibilities. This is a difficult label to deflect as these companies face mounting pressure about their undeniable influence and obligations to the public interest. Social media gatekeepers reached a tipping point during the 2016 presidential election, when they themselves became the scandal. Facebook and Twitter’s gates malfunctioned— allowing a steady stream of disinformation, foreign propaganda, and antagonistic bots to mislead sections of the American public at an unprecedented rate. Independent research has confirmed that the majority of fake news’s traffic originated from social media (Nelson & Taneja 2018) and disproportionately affected partisan agendas (Vargo, Guo & Amazeen 2017). In short, it was an organizational gatekeeping failure. It represented a conflict of interest between the company’s economic and social responsibilities, in which attempts to expand the user base and solicit advertising revenue promoted bogus controversies that jeopardized information for millions of users (Byers 2017). To control the damage, Facebook has attempted to co-opt some of the same technology that caused the problem—artificial intelligence—to identify and deselect known keywords and sources associated with fictitious accounts. While he may not commit to the business of journalism, CEO Mark Zuckerberg recognizes Facebook’s expansive gatekeeping role: “We don’t write the news that people read on the platform. But at the same time, we also know we do a lot more than just distribute news, and we’re an important part of the public discourse.” Despite this acknowledgment, Facebook has taken a controversial stance in permitting the circulation of knowingly false information on its platform. In a particularly polarizing case, Zuckerberg defended circulating stories that deny the Holocaust, arguing that they do not constitute hate speech and are protected by the site’s terms of use (Hern 2018). This position represents a striking departure from legacy media gatekeepers who, despite their biases toward sensational news, strongly maintain a commitment to distributing accurate information that serves the public interest. Social institution. Because social media are not responsible for creating their own content, news on these platforms is entirely dependent on extra-media institutions, including the production of legacy news and the timing of current events. Nyhan (2015) theorizes that media coverage of scandals is more probable on slow news days, when gatekeepers can devote more resources to them and audience attention is focused. He examined U.S. political scandals across three decades and showed that uncongested news days are a more important determinant in the onset and extent of scandal coverage than the severity of wrongdoing or misconduct. Social forces. Although they are rarely discussed as such, social media are some of the very first cross-national gatekeepers—which must accommodate a vast array of social forces, including cultures and ideologies. The largest platforms, including WhatsApp, Facebook, and Twitter, operate in countries with a wide range of political, social, and cultural influences, which introduce unique opportunities and challenges for exposing political scandal. The ability to share critical information on social media that was not permitted elsewhere was certainly a contributing factor in the early stages of the Arab Spring (Howard & Hussain 2013). It gave rise to optimism that this new gatekeeping channel would be able to bypass strict political constraints in places where criticism was otherwise forbidden. However, this enthusiasm has tempered in recent years (e.g., Mays & Groshek 2017; Stoycheff, Burgess & Martucci 2018) as governments have become savvy at wooing and coercing these gatekeepers. A few countries, like China, Iran, and North Korea, have implemented outright Twitter and Facebook bans, while the others require any social media organizations to cooperate fully with their national laws. This cooperation regularly 90

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includes requests for user data and the removal of content, with Turkey, Mexico, and India ranking among the top requestors (Facebook Transparency Report 2018). Many users will not feel the effects of these system-level gates, but their influences trickle down to impact the other tiers of social media gatekeepers (Shoemaker & Vos 2009).

The value of scandal With so many factors that contribute to story selection above and beyond the actual importance of particular issues, citizens would be naive to trust that the news they encounter is simply a reflection of the nation’s most important problems or a barometer of political wrongdoing (Pingree, Quenette, Tchernev & Dickinson 2013; Stoycheff, Pingree, Peifer & Sui 2017). Instead, it is a result of a carefully curated process that values many of the same characteristics associated with political scandal: controversy, conflict, sensationalism, and high-profile figures. One academic recently quipped that the news we see is more akin to a sports play-by-play than a first draft of history (Pinker 2018). Individuals who fail to acknowledge or understand these gatekeeping biases are more susceptible to media effects—agenda setting in particular (Stoycheff et al. 2017; Pingree, Stoycheff, Sui & Peifer 2018). High trust in gatekeepers allows news consumers to unload the cognitive burden of making decisions about important issues onto media professionals, heeding others’ judgments rather than forming their own. This is especially problematic because media saturation of scandal rarely corresponds to the severity of political wrongdoing (Entman 2012), which can result in inflated trivial problems and suppressed meaningful ones. Take, for example, two scandals that were competing for media attention during the second quarter of 2018. The first was the second longest power outage on record, lasting 200 days in Puerto Rico as a result of mismanagement following Hurricane Maria. The outage affected 80 percent of the population, disproportionately racial and ethnic minorities, and resulted in thousands of deaths. The second was the cancelation of popular sitcom, Roseanne, after the show’s protagonist and named character, Roseanne Barr, tweeted a racial slur. During the peak of both stories, Roseanne’s comments received over 150 percent more media attention than the Puerto Rico story, and unsurprisingly the public favored this news as well (Vernon 2018). While personal racism is certainly an important problem in the United States, it is difficult to justify such lopsided coverage of one individual’s actions over neglect of a structural problem that exacerbates racial inequality across the country. However, both professional and social media gatekeepers face a variety of pressures from internal and external entities to initiate and sustain scandalous news. Entman (2012) even goes so far as to argue that it would be nearly impossible to continue long-term coverage of political wrongdoing without the help of political actors themselves. Reporting political scandal seemingly presents one clear advantage: its ability to disrupt. Follow-up and continuing news on political scandal, in theory, can help maintain a check on elites in power and produce reforms to the political system. News coverage that prioritizes conflict, novelty, and sensationalism can contribute to social deviance, which Shoemaker (1985; see also Shoemaker, Chang & Brendlinger 2016) argues is what gives gatekeepers their power: “Deviant people and events bring about the opportunity for change, [and] publicizing deviance is a prerequisite for controlling the direction and extent of social change” (p. 27). And the publication of deviant or scandalous news has fundamentally shaped civic life in the United States. Stories focused on moral or ethical wrongdoing have highlighted racial injustices through the #BlackLivesMatter social media campaign and exposed a pervasive culture of sexual harassment with #MeToo. However, scandal coverage is easiest and most likely when it does not seek to 91

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undermine or change existing power dynamics (Entman 2012), which often leads to scandal stories that focus on the actions of one or more individuals rather than systemic flaws in mechanisms, processes, and organizations (Kepplinger, Geiss & Siebert 2012). Unearthing individual misdeeds is only a small part of a vibrant media in a democratic society. Gatekeepers are also responsible for providing the public with access to the historical, social, and political contexts necessary for understanding important issues—even if they never appear as trending stories. This requires ensuring that the news that makes it past the gates provides a comprehensive picture of why problems occur and how to resolve them. Gatekeepers should introduce and communicate potential solutions and follow up coverage that explains if and how scandals resolve. Both legacy and emergent gatekeepers are incentivized to report political scandal, but this pressure should be met with a steadfast commitment to thorough investigations that advance the public good.

References Bakshy, E., Messing, S., & Adamic, L.A. (2015). Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook. Science, 348(6239), 1130–1132. Byers, D. (2017). Facebook estimates 126 million people were served content from Russia-linked pages. CNNMoney, October 31. Retrieved from: http://money.cnn.com/2017/10/30/media/russia-facebook126-million-users/index.html Calame, B. (2006). Scoops, impact or glory: What motivates reporters? December 3. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/opinion/03pubed.html Caplan, R. & Boyd, D. (2018). Isomorphism through algorithms: Institutional dependencies in the case of Facebook. Big Data & Society, 1–12. Cassidy, W.P. (2006). Gatekeeping similar for online, print journalists. Newspaper Research Journal, 27(2), 6–23. Coleman, R., Lee, J.Y., Meader, A.P., & McElroy, K. (2018). Why be a journalist? US students’ motivations and role conceptions in the new age of journalism. Journalism, 19(6), 800–819. Craft, S. & Wanta, W. (2004). Women in the newsroom: Influences of female editors and reporters on the news agenda. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 81(1), 124–138. Cuillier, D. (2012). Subconscious gatekeeping: The effect of death thoughts on bias toward outgroups in news writing. Mass Communication & Society, 15, 4–24. Dimmick, J., Powers, A., Mwangi, S. & Stoycheff, E. (2011). The fragmenting mass media marketplace. In W. Lowrey & P.J. Gade (Eds.), Changing the news: The forces shaping journalism in uncertain times. New York: Routledge. Donsbach, W. (2004). Psychology of news decisions: Factors behind journalists’ professional behavior. Journalism, 5(2), 131–157. Entman, R.M. (2012). Scandal and silence: Media responses to presidential misconduct. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Facebook Transparency Report. (2018). Retrieved from: https://transparency.facebook.com Gans, H.J. (2004). Deciding what’s news: A study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek and Time. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Gottfried, J. & Shearer, E. (2017). Americans’ online news use is closing in on TV news use. Pew Research Center, September 7. Retrieved from: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/07/ americans-online-news-use-vs-tv-news-use/ Hallin, D.C. & Mancini, P. (2011). Comparing media systems beyond the Western world. New York: Cambridge University Press. Harcup, T. & O’Neill, D. (2017). What is news? News values revisited (again). Journalism Studies, 18(12), 1470–1488. Hern, A. (2018). Mark Zuckerberg’s remarks on Holocaust denial “irresponsible.” The Guardian, July 19. Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/19/mark-zuckerbergholocaust-denial-facebook-remarks-offensive Howard, P.N. & Hussain, M.M. (2013). Democracy’s fourth wave? Digital media and the Arab Spring. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Selecting scandal Kepplinger, H.M., Geiss, S. & Siebert, S. (2012). Framing scandals: Cognitive and emotional media effects. Journal of Communication, 62, 659–681. Kim, Y., Chen, H-T. & Gil de Zúñiga, H. (2013). Stumbling upon news on the internet: Effects of incidental news exposure and relative entertainment use on political engagement. Computers in Human Behavior, 29, 2607–2614. Mays, K. & Groshek, J. (2017). A time-series, multinational analysis of democratic forecasts and emerging media diffusion, 1994–2014. International Journal of Communication, 11, 429–451. McCombs, M.E. & Shaw, D.L. (1972). The agenda-setting function of the mass media. Public Opinion Quarterly, 36(2), 176–187. Nadler, A. (2016). Making the news popular: Mobilizing U.S. news audiences. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Nelson, J.L. & Taneja, H. (2018). The small, disloyal fake news audience: The role of audience availability in fake news consumption. New Media & Society. Nyhan, B. (2015). Scandal potential: How political context and news congestion affect the president’s vulnerability to media scandal. British Journal of Political Science, 45(2), 435–466. Patterson, T.E. (2016). Pre-primary news coverage of the 2016 Presidential Race: Trump’s rise, Sanders’ emergence, Clinton’s struggle. Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center, June 13. Retrieved from: https://shorensteincenter.org/pre-primary-news-coverage-2016-trump-clinton-sanders/ Pingree, R.J., Quenette, A.M., Tchernev, J.M. & Dickinson, T. (2013). Effects of media criticism on gatekeeping trust and implication for agenda setting. Journal of Communication, 63, 351–372. Pingree, R.J., Stoycheff, E., Sui, M. & Peifer, J.T. (2018). Setting a non-agenda: Effects of a perceived lack of problems in recent news or Twitter. Mass Communication & Society, 21(5), 555–584. Pinker, S. (2018). The media exaggerates negative news. This distortion has consequences. The Guardian, February 17. Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/17/stevenpinker-media-negative-news Price, C.J. (2003). Interfering owners or meddling advertisers: How network television correspondents feel about ownership and advertiser influence on news stories. The Journal of Media Economics, 16(3), 175–188. Raviola, E. (2012). Exploring organizational framings: Journalism and business management in newspaper organizations. Information, Communication & Society, 15(6), 932–958. Shearer, E. & Gottfried, J. (2017). New use across social media platforms. Pew Research Center, September 7. Retrieved from: http://www.journalism.org/2017/09/07/news-use-across-social-mediaplatforms-2017/ Shoemaker, P.J. (1985). All the deviance that’s fit to print: Newsworthiness and social change. Presented at the Annual meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, Memphis, TN. Retrieved from: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED257128.pdf Shoemaker, P.J., Chang, T.-K. & Brendlinger, N. (2016). Deviance as a predictor of newsworthiness: Coverage of international news events in the U.S. media. Annuals of the International Communication, 10(1), 348–365. Shoemaker, P.J. & Vos, T.P. (2009). Gatekeeping theory. New York: Routledge. Siebert, F., Peterson, T.B., Peterson, T. & Schramm, W. (1956). Four theories of the press: The authoritarian, libertarian, social responsibility, and Soviet communist concepts of what the press should be and do. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Stoycheff, E., Burgess, G.S. & Martucci, M.C. (2018). Online censorship and digital surveillance: The relationship between suppression technologies and democratization across countries. Information, Communication & Society, 1–17. Stoycheff, E., Pingree, R.J., Peifer, J., & Sui, M. (2017). Agenda cueing effects of news and social media. Media Psychology, 21(2), 182–201. Strömbäck, J., Karlsson, M. & Hopmann, D.N. (2012). Determinants of news content. Journalism Studies, 13(5–6), 718–728. Tan, Y. & Weaver, D.H. (2009). Local media, public opinion, and state legislative policies: Agenda setting at the state levels. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 14(4), 454–476. Tandoc, E.C. (2014). Is journalism twerking? How web analytics is changing the process of gatekeeping. New Media & Society, 16(4), 559–575. Tandoc, E.C. (2015). Why web analytics click: Factors affecting the ways journalists use audience metrics. Journalism Studies, 16(6), 782–799. Thorson, K. & Wells, C. (2015). Understanding media effects in an era of curated flows. In T.P. Voss & F. Heinderyckx (Eds.), Gatekeeping in transition. New York: Routledge.

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Elizabeth Stoycheff Trilling, D. & Schoenbach, K. (2015). Challenging selective exposure: Do online news users choose sites that match their interests and preferences? Digital Journalism, 3(2), 140–157. Trilling, D., Tolochko, P. & Burscher, B. (2017). From newsworthiness to shareworthiness: How to predict news sharing based on article characteristics. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 94(1), 38–60. Trussler, M. & Soroka, S. (2014). Consumer demand for cynical and negative news frames. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 19(3), 360–379. Vargo, C.J., Guo, L. & Amazeen, M.A. (2017). The agenda-setting power of fake news: A big data analysis of the online media landscape from 2014 to 2016. New Media & Society, 1–22. Vernon, P. (2018). Puerto Rico’s devastation takes a backseat to Roseanne coverage. Columbia Journalism Review, May 31. Retrieved from: https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/puerto-rico-death-coverage.php Vu, H.T. (2013). The online audience as gatekeeper: The influence of reader metrics on news editorial selection. Journalism, 15(8), 1094–1110. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884913504259 Wells, C., Shah, D.V., Pevehouse, J.C., Yang, J. Pelled, A., Boehm, F., Lukito, J., Ghosh, S. & Schmidt, J.L. (2016). How Trump drove coverage to the nomination: Hybrid media campaigning. Political Communication, 33(4), 669–676. White, D.M. (1950). The “gate keeper”: A case study in the selection of news. Journalism Quarterly, 27, 383–396.

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9 SCANDALS AND SOCIAL ACCOUNTABILITY Enrique Peruzzotti

While there is an extensive literature on political scandals, most of it largely concentrates on exposés that are the result of intra-elite fights, that is, of dynamics that are the outcomes of conflicts within the political camp. In contrast, this chapter seeks to highlight a subtype of political scandal that originates in civil society initiatives. The fact that the origin of the exposé is external to the political system makes the dynamics of such scandals more difficult to control by governments than those that are expressions of conflicts within the political field. Scandals prompted by civil society actors have played a major role in Latin America since the last democratizing wave, generating a stream of bottom-up revelations that exposed the illegal and often openly criminal behavior of state agencies. Frequently, those exposés gained the attention and mobilized the support of post-dictatorial societies where a novel social cry for justice and accountability prevailed. In this way, Latin American civil societies have played an active political role in matters of governmental accountability, to the extent that the literature has enlarged the traditional state-centered conceptual framework of governmental accountability to include the notion of social accountability. Social accountability politics refers to civic exposés of governmental wrongdoing that reach public notoriety thanks to the concerted efforts of a wide variety of civic actors such as advocacy NGOs, informal networks of friends of families of victims of human rights violations, and mobilized sectors of the public. The proliferation of social accountability initiatives brought to the fore numerous examples of governmental wrongdoing that resulted in the infringement of basic human rights in a way that mobilized the convictions of significant sectors of society that other types of political scandals could not do. The chapter presents the emergence and workings of social accountability politics in Latin America and analyzes the contribution of the concept to the analysis of political scandals.

Accountability deficits in new democracies Debates on Latin American democratization, particularly in the Southern Cone, took place in a political environment tainted by the legacy of massive human rights violations committed by the military. Between the 1970s and early 1980s, the region witnessed the rise of a new breed of authoritarian regimes that implemented a system of state terrorism against their alleged opponents that included forced disappearances, torture, and other forms of repressive activity. 95

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It is against that background that the third democratizing wave took place on the continent. In this respect, such a particular context set it apart from other democratization experiences in the region. Perhaps the most notorious feature of the last transitions from authoritarian rule to democracy was the growth of concern for the rule of law among important sectors of the citizenry. In light of the recently lived experienced of state terrorism, the question that figured prominently in the public agenda was how to erect constitutional safeguards strong enough to prevent similar episodes of state violence in the future. The “Never again!” slogan become the banner of a continent-wide human rights network that played a significant symbolic and political role by introducing a liberal and republican concern on rights and checks of government in those traumatized societies (Peruzzotti 2002). Academic debates reflected those concerns, arguing for the need of a stronger model of democracy than a purely electoral one. The holding of free and competitive elections, many argued, could no longer be regarded as the exclusive yardstick to evaluate the success of a process of democratization (O´Donnell 1999, 2003; Schedler, Diamond, & Plattner 1999). Democracy should also mean accountable government, that is, the establishment of rule-oflaw-abiding administrations to guarantee the enforcement of citizens’ rights. It is in this context that the quality of democracy approach (QDA) emerges, establishing itself as the dominant subfield of democratization studies. QDA engaged on a critical reading of ongoing processes of institutionalization, focusing on the institutional deficits that many of the newly consolidated regimes exhibited, particularly in the area of governmental oversight. Accountability became the buzzword of democratization studies, structuring the research agenda of QDA. A direct correlation was established between the performance of democratic governments and the strength of institutional checks on power. Guillermo O´Donnell, perhaps the most influential figure of QDA, placed the concept of accountability at the center of democratization literature´s concerns. According to his diagnosis, new democracies were affected by serious accountability deficits: he considered that the geographical spread of electoral politics that resulted from the third wave of democratization had not been followed by a concomitant expansion of rule-of-law institutions (O´Donnell 1999). From his standpoint, the transitions to democracy were not yet over, despite the regular celebration of free and competitive elections: in his view, there was a need for a second transition that would endow those political regimes with an effective system of governmental controls. O´Donnell proposed an analytical scheme to classify accountability mechanisms and organize them along a horizontal/vertical axis. The term “horizontal mechanisms of accountability” referred to the intra-state system of mutual checks and controls that are frequently found in representative types of polyarchy. “Vertical mechanisms” denote instead the intervention of an external accountability agent rooted in society, be it the electorate, organized civil society, or the independent media (O´Donnell 1999, 2003). In his view, many of the transitions from authoritarianism established “delegative democracies,” that is, a peculiar subtype of polyarchy that combined strong vertical electoral mechanisms with a defective structure of horizontal accountability. The outcome of such an arrangement was the establishment of a political scenario where the presidential figure governs unconstrained by the usual checks and balances of representative government. O´Donnell considered that the best antidote to overcome those deficits was the developmental of strong horizontal controls. He consequently argued for the strengthening of rule-of-law institutions in three directions: (1) Prevention of unlawful executive encroachment over the jurisdiction of legislative, judiciary, and other state agencies whose operations are crucial for the proper functioning of the horizontal system of intra-state controls; 96

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(2) Protection of individual civil rights and the autonomy of civil society; (3) Avoiding the capture and colonization of state agencies by unscrupulous groups or public officials. O´Donnell referred to those processes that would result in the strengthening of horizontal accountability mechanisms in terms of a second transition. Unlike the first transition from authoritarianism to democracy, the second one referred to a shift from one subtype (delegative) to another subtype (representative) of polyarchy. He envisioned this second transition as a process that did not require a dramatic restructuring of the constitutional landscape. On the contrary, he considered that from a purely formal perspective the constitutional structure of delegative democracies did not fundamentally differ from those of representative ones: both constitutional designs predicate the need for mutual checks and balances and (in presidential systems) for realizing the principle of separation of powers. From his perspective, what really sets apart delegative from representative polyarchies is the distorting role that “informal institutions” exert upon governmental mechanisms of legal accountability.1 Under delegative democracies, informal institutions overrule the logic and structure of formal constitutional arrangements. To put it in O’Donnell’s words: A non-institutionalized democracy is characterized by the restricted scope, the weaknesses, and the low density of whatever political institutions exist. The place of wellfunctioning institutions is taken by other non-formalized but strongly operative practices—clientelism, patrimonialism, and corruption. (O´Donnell 1999, p. 163) Delegative democracies, he argues, are constantly torn by the contradiction between what constitutional provisions say and what the dynamics of power actually do. This is why for QDA the main issue confronting such sorts of regimes is how to bring to life existing constitutional arrangements; in other words, how to promote the coupling between constitutional precepts and really existing political behaviors. The most pressing challenge that delegative regimes face is how to “activate” the dormant machinery of horizontal accountability, that is, how to force constitutional, legal, and administrative mechanisms that are already in place to live up to their constitutional mission. The dilemma posed by QDA inevitably redirects the focus of attention from the realm of formal institutions to that of society: if the locus of informal institutions is the social realm, perhaps we should pay greater attention to the dynamics that take place within civil society. The latter forces us to expand our understanding of accountability beyond the traditional focus on formal state mechanisms to evaluate the role that informal social practices play in the hampering or promotion of governmental accountability.

Social accountability or the broadening of O´Donnell´s notion of limited government The concept of social accountability was developed as a specification of the accountability framework proposed by O´Donnell: it calls attention to a subset of non-electoral vertical initiatives steaming from civil society and media organizations that gave birth to a novel form of politicization. The politics of social accountability described a universe of civic initiatives whose common denominator was the denunciation of governmental transgressions of the rule of law in two of the areas that troubled O´Donnell (infringement of civil rights and governmental corruption). A main predicament of the social accountability argument was that civil society initiatives 97

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and media exposés were a crucial external leverage that through mobilization and media pressure would force reluctant horizontal agencies to investigate and punish wrongdoers (Peruzzotti and Smulovitz 2006; Smulovitz and Peruzzotti 2000). How does social accountability operate? First, social accountability initiatives expose and denounce wrongdoings. The exposure of specific cases of governmental wrongdoing allows the identification of real victims and victimizers, as well as the scope of the specific damage and harm done. Public denunciations signal the existence of issues in ways the citizenry can relate to, and thereby place specific issues in a wider picture. Second, the framing of those episodes is linked to a broader problem of ineffective institutional checks of governmental authorities. If, as Michelle Bonner argues, discursive frames provide clarity regarding what is deemed appropriate behavior, then the politics of accountability involves a discursive definitional struggle over what constitutes governmental wrongdoing. Bonner refers to this dimension of social accountability politics as “discursive accountability”: in addition to the politics of shaming, she argues, social movements contribute to: the reframing of acts once deemed acceptable, albeit unfortunate, as incidents of wrongdoing. For example, together they can shift the dominant frame for understanding protest policing from law and order to civil rights . . . they create a cognitive environment where it is understood that repressive protest policing is no longer acceptable. (Bonner 2014, p. 26) Calling public attention to an issue may produce changes in the social appreciation of a particular phenomenon, transforming it into an issue of a more general and public interest. Third, there is expansion of the accountability agenda. Once specific acts of governmental wrongdoing become new issues on the public agenda, the number and scope of topics under surveillance increases. The reframing that discursive accountability produces, adds new items to the catalogue of behaviors that authorities might be held accountable for (Bonner 2014, p. 27). Therefore, signaling and exposing illegal behaviors in the public space produce two different sort of outcomes: on the one hand, it sets into motion an informal mechanism of signaling and oversight around specific instances of wrongdoing; on the other hand, the cumulative effects that the repetition of cases have can result in the expansion of the issues under surveillance, adding new areas for which public officials are held responsible. Problems that until recently had not been visible now occupy a prominent role in the media and public sphere thus expanding the scope of conflicts and issues public officials are obliged to answer and inform the public about. Fourth, social accountability initiatives frequently force the activation of horizontal agencies of oversight. The process of activation can take place in a direct or indirect way. A process of indirect activation occurs as a response to public shaming. The public exposé of a case, combined with social mobilization, generates reputational costs on public authorities. The latter might try to minimize them by making (or reversing) decisions in ways that may appear responsive to the perceived public flaws. Those decisions could entail the activation of judicial procedures, the creation of parliamentary investigative commissions, or of policy changes. Instead, a direct activation takes place due to the filling of legal petitions by the claimants of social accountability initiatives. The initiation of legal or administrative proceedings (combined with informal social and media pressure in the public sphere) is likely to make it difficult for courts or other accountability agencies to remain indifferent to social claims (Smulovitz and Peruzzotti 2003). Social accountability was conceived as a challenge to the pernicious role that informal institutions played in reproducing the structure of delegative democracy. It was the belief that those 98

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civic initiatives would serve as a society-wide system of alarms that would be able to detect more efficiently governmental acts of wrongdoing and bring them into the public light. By repeatedly exposing the public to specific instances of wrongdoing, citizens would gain consciousness on how rule-of-law deficits affect the quality of democratic life. The assumption was that social accountability initiatives could be a force strong enough to challenge the logic of delegative democracy: If the public scenario is increasingly populated by social accountability initiatives, the workings of informal institutions will be hampered. If both illegal activities of public officials as well as the complicity of organs of oversight are exposed, the costs of engaging in the type of behaviors that helped reproduce delegative regimes would increasingly rise, making it difficult to uphold the informal structures that fed delegative dynamics, opening the path for the second transition (towards a representative type of polyarchy) to take place. Guillermo O´Donnell himself saw that outcome as a probable one, arguing that the proliferation of a diverse array of social accountability initiatives could trigger a “virtuous cycle” of induction and activation that would gradually shorten the gap that existed between formal and informal institutions: The existence of at least some horizontal agencies that are willing and able to carry out their responsibilities . . . is an important element of social accountability induction . . . But the same holds true in the opposite direction. The existence of certain social accountability demands, especially if they are well organized, continuous, and present in the media, is surely an important source of stimulation for some horizontal agencies to assume their responsibilities. (O´Donnell 2006, p. 339) In this way, the “gymnastics” of social accountability politics would add muscle to the network of horizontal agencies, helping to reduce the gap between formal institutions are informal behaviors that was presented as the defining feature of delegative democracies. Who are behind social accountability initiatives? The concept originally referred to civil society and independent journalism acting in the public sphere.2 The politics of social accountability can be considered as a particular expression of the so-called “politics of influence” of civil society (Cohen and Arato 1995): the organized civic actors and watchdog journalism that seeks to exert indirect influence on government by mobilizing the convictions of the general public on matters of governmental accountability. The denunciation and exposé of different forms of governmental wrongdoing in the public sphere, by promoting a public outcry for justice, would exert pressure on the political system, particularly over the suspected wrongdoers and the officials whose responsibility it is to oversee and eventually punish such sorts of transgression. Social accountability initiatives follow a reactive logic: they are expressions of outrage from sectors of the public not only over concrete acts of governmental wrongdoing but also about the impunity that usually surrounds these acts. For the most part, initiatives are known by the name of the victims (such as the María Soledad or Cabezas case) or by the addition of the suffix “gate” to certain corruption scandals (such as Armsgate). Exposés of specific instances of public wrongdoing are consequently at the heart of social accountability initiatives. By bringing episodes of governmental wrongdoing into the public light, media and social mobilizations show in very concrete ways how accountability deficits affect the workings of democratic institutions and the lives of common citizens. Scandals are the privileged weapon of social accountability politics. Through moral shaming, the actors behind such initiatives seek to challenge the structure of political opportunities that help reproduce the problematic structure of delegative democracies. O´Donnell considered that a key problem of delegative democracies was the alleged inaction of horizontal agencies 99

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when confronting specific acts of illegality by powerful governmental actors, and that such inaction was considered unproblematic due to the predominance of a political culture in which accountability issues were largely ignored. The predominant cognitive frames that one finds in horizontal agencies, the media, and public opinion under delegative democracies are pivotal in reproducing those informal institutions that ensure the reproduction of that sort of regime. Informal institutions are the main target of social accountability initiatives: behaviors that were historically tolerated, ignored, or celebrated were exposed and questioned under circumstances that frequently involved greater public pressure and media scrutiny on accountability matters. Increased awareness of accountability issues eroded the social tolerance that existed towards certain types of behavior and made the usual strategies of inaction unsustainable. If the proliferation of governmental wrongdoing was to a great extent fomented by the inaction displayed by those agencies responsible for the oversight and sanctioning of such behaviors, then the extension of social watchdog initiatives in society will exert direct pressure on those agencies to fulfil their constitutional duties, prompting the activation of investigations, legal procedures, and sanctions. Oversight agencies were subjected to social oversight, making it increasingly impossible for them to reproduce their habitual strategy of “non-activation.” In brief, initiatives of social accountability were perceived as a crucial external force that, through social mobilizations and media exposés, would awaken an otherwise dormant network of intra-state controls.

Social accountability and political scandals What does the concept of social accountability add to the literature on scandals? Is there anything specific to the type of scandal that this sort of politics generates? Before addressing such questions, it is necessary to revisit the original formulation of the concept. When first coined, the term “social accountability” indistinctively included under its conceptual umbrella both media and social exposés as examples of social accountability in its workings (Smulovitz and Peruzzotti 2000). Retrospectively, such a formulation is in need of revision, for experience has shown that media exposés of corruption and denunciations of human rights violations express two very different logics at work, and that those differences can be traced back to the politics of sources (Waisbord 2002, 2006). Scandals regarding sex or official corruption can usually be traced back to power struggles within the political field (Ginsberg and Shefter 1999; Jiménez 1995, 1996; Lowi 1988; Markovits and Silverstein 1988). Those scandals are portrayed as a drama of coverings up and disclosures that fundamentally involve actors that occupy relevant positions within the political field. Scandals are one of the many weapons of a “politics by other means” that insiders employ to confront their rivals either within the administration or in the opposition (Ginsberg and Shefter 1999). Who are the actors behind such disclosures? The “usual suspects” are opposition parties, media insiders, and fundamentally members of government. Political scandals frequently convey a behind-the-scenes logic of power games within members of the political field. While society is not necessarily absent in political scandal dynamics (given that it is an indispensable component of such public drama, for without social outrage there is no scandal), it does play a passive role. Within this framework, society is portrayed as “public opinion”; that is, as an audience with outrage or reprobation it grants the entity of scandal a certain validity of disclosure. Social accountability initiatives introduce a different political logic to the conventional understandings of political scandals. While media exposés were a key element of social accountability initiatives in Latin America, for the most part they differ in one important aspect from political scandal that reflects intra-elite rivalries: they are guided by a bottom-up logic, that is, they are not initiated by a leak to the press on the part of anonymous “whistle-blowers” 100

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but by ordinary citizens. The latter introduce a distinctive feature that sets this type of scandal apart from those that are heavily reliant on official sources. In his analysis of the “politics of sources” in contemporary Latin America, Silvio Waisbord has called attention to the dependency of the region’s media on “off the record” official sources, a dynamic that in his view establishes a perverse trade-off between journalists and informants in which “reporters do not have to reveal their sources and the latter are able to steer coverage” (Waisbord 2002, p. 98). Far from expressing a social logic that seeks to challenge the role of informal institutions, those type of interactions are but an expression of the role that informal institutions play in the reproduction of delegative democracies. While on the surface they appear as instances of democratic accountability, the ultimate beneficiaries of those actions are primarily powerful political insiders and secondarily that select group of journalists that have privileged access to official sources. In a scenario where political scandals are conceived as one of the strategies of the visibility management of political elites, the role of watchdog journalism is reduced to performing as a mouthpiece to specific political interests. As Waisbord eloquently argues: The range of elite confrontations constraints the repertoire of watchdog journalism. The fact that watchdog journalism rarely touches on business malfeasance or social inequalities is not only the result of editorial disinterest in those subjects, but also of newsgathering conventions . . . Exposés also reflect the boundaries of the disputes among powerful actors over turf and interests. Such disputes do not question social inequalities and are focused on individuals rather than institutions. (Waisbord 2002, p. 115) If we otherwise restrict the concept of social accountability to initiatives that are exclusively powered by civil society, the role of political scandals changes. Society-driven exposés add a specific subtype of political scandal: those where the primary sources of information are neither political insiders nor the media but civil society. Social accountability exposés expand the repertoire of watchdog journalism by bringing the voices and claims of grassroots groups into the public sphere. Unlike official corruption scandals, the denunciations that are brought about by social accountability initiatives help expose deep seated social inequalities that result in the uneven distribution of rule-of-law institutions. As O´Donnell argues, rule-of-law deficits are not equally distributed but affect particularly the poor. The acts of governmental wrongdoing that are brought to the fore by social movements refer to the infringements of the civic rights of common citizens in poor communities. Cases of police brutality, for instance, figure prominently in this literature (Bonner 2009a, 2009b, 2014; Denissen 2008). The concept of social accountability adds organized civil society into the analytical framework, calling attention to a subset of political scandals that are powered by a bottom-up logic thanks to the active intervention of organized groups such as social movements and advocacy NGOs. In such a rendering, society is not reduced to an audience whose reactions determine whether a certain disclosure bears the status of a scandal, but is in fact the main protagonist. Human rights scandals are triggered by collective actions on behalf of specific sectors of civil society that resort to the media to gain symbolic representation and legitimize their claims (Porto 2012). For the most part, those scandals follow a similar script: they originate in a crime that mobilizes the primary networks of the victim; generally, family, friends, and neighbors that through mobilization are able to bring other sectors of civil society to their cause (frequently engaging public advocacy NGOs, professional organizations, or trade unions). Through sustained mobilization, they are able to place the case as a prominent topic in the national public 101

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agenda and garner support from the general public that frequently joins them in their claims and mobilizations. From the above description, it becomes clear that the dynamics of civil society promotes scandals which greatly differ from those mostly involved in internal struggles within the political field. If the latter are expressions of horizontal conflicts within the political camp, the former adopt the logic of society versus state/political system. Experience shows that those sorts of scandals are less amenable to elite manipulation, given that the sources of information are not leaks from official sources but rely on autonomous sources in civil society (Peruzzotti 2006; Waisbord 2002). They can also result in the advancement of governmental accountability.

Notes 1 For the concept of informal institution, see Helmke and Levistky (2006). 2 The analysis of the journalism field in Latin America gave rise to some questions that would force a narrowing of the concept to initiatives that are fundamentally spawned from civil society. I will return to this issue below.

References Bonner, Michelle D. (2009a) “State Discourses, Police Violence and Democratization in Argentina” Bulletin of Latin American Research, 28:2, 227–245. Bonner, Michelle D. (2009b) “Media as Social Accountability: The Case of Police Violence in Argentina” International Journal of Press and Politics, 14:3, 269–312. Bonner, Michelle D. (2014) Policing Protest in Argentina and Chile, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Cohen, Jean L. and Andrew Arato (1995) Civil Society and Political Theory, Cambridge: The MIT Press. Denissen, Marieke (2008) Winning Small Battles, Losing the War: Police Violence, the Movimiento del Dolor and Democracy in Post-Authoritarian Argentina, Amsterdam: Rozenberg. Ginsberg, Benjamin and Martin Shefter (1999) Politics by Other Means: Politicians, Prosecutors, and the Press from Watergate to Whitewater, New York and London, W.W. Norton & Company. Jiménez, Fernando (1995) Detrás del Escándalo Político. Opinión pública, dinero y poder en la España del siglo XX, Barcelona: Tusquets Editores. Jiménez, Fernando (1996) “Possibilities and Limits of Political Scandal as a Form of Social Control” Revista Española de Investigaciones Sociológicas, 96, pp. 49–76. Helmke, Gretchen and Steve Levistky, Eds. (2006) Informal Institutions: Lessons from Latin America, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Lowi, Theodore J. (1988) “Foreword” in A. Markovits and M. Silverstein, Eds. The Politics of Scandal: Power and Process in Liberal Democracies, New York and London: Holmes & Meier. Markovits, Andrei and Mark Silverstein (1988) “Introduction: Power and Process in Liberal Democracies” in A. Markovits and M. Silverstein, Eds. The Politics of Scandal: Power and Process in Liberal Democracies, New York and London: Holmes & Meier. O´Donnell, Guillermo (1999) “Horizontal Accountability in New Democracies” in Andreas Schedler, L. Diamond and M. F. Plattner, Eds. The Self-Restraining State: Power and Accountability in New Democracies, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. O´Donnell, Guillermo (2003) “Horizontal Accountability: The Legal Institutionalization of Mistrust” in Scott Mainwaring and Christopher Welna, Eds. Democratic Accountability in Latin America, Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Donnell, Guillermo (2006) “Notes on Various Accountabilities and Their Interrelations” in E. Peruzzotti and C. Smulovitz, Eds. Enforcing the Rule of Law: Social Accountability in the New Latin American Democracies, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Peruzzotti, Enrique (2002) “Towards a New Politics: Citizenship and Rights in Contemporary Argentina” Citizenship Studies 6:1, 77–93. Peruzzotti, Enrique (2006) “Media Scandals and Social Accountability: Assessing the Role of the Senate Scandal in Argentina” in E. Peruzzotti and C. Smulovitz, Eds. Enforcing the Rule of Law: Social Accountability in Latin America, Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press.

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Scandals and social accountability Peruzzotti, Enrique and Catalina Smulovitz, Eds. (2006) Enforcing the Rule of Law: Social Accountability in Latin America, Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press. Porto, Mauro (2012) Media Power and Democratization in Brazil: TV Globo and the Dilemmas of Political Accountability, London: Routledge. Schedler, A., L. Diamond and M. Plattner, Eds. (1999) The Self-Restraining-State: Power and Accountability in New Democracies, Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner. Smulovitz, Catalina and Enrique Peruzzotti (2000) “Societal Accountability in Latin America” Journal of Democracy, 11:4, 147–158. Smulovitz, Catalina and Enrique Peruzzotti (2003) “Societal and Horizontal Controls: Two Cases about a Fruitful Relationship” in Scott Mainwaring and C. Welna, Eds. Democratic Accountability in Latin America, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Waisbord, Silvio (2002) Watchdog Journalism in South America, New York: Columbia University Press. Waisbord, Silvio (2006) “Reading Scandals: Scandals, Media and Citizenship in Argentina” in E. Peruzzotti and C. Smulovitz, Eds. Enforcing the Rule of Law: Social Accountability in Latin America, Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press.

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10 MEDIA FRAMING OF POLITICAL SCANDALS Theoretical framework and empirical evidence Jürgen Maier, Carolin Jansen and Christian von Sikorski Media coverage of political scandals There is evidence that media coverage of political scandals—defined as “intense public communication about a real or imagined defect that is by consensus condemned, and that meets universal indignation or outrage” (Esser & Hartung 2004: 1041)—has increased during the last decades. Several long-term studies across the world indicate that the share of media reports about norm violations of political actors has become larger over time (see, e.g., Allern et al. 2012; Kepplinger 1996; Kumlin & Esaiasson 2012; but see Basinger et al. 2014; Morris & Clawson 2005; Nyblade & Reed 2008 for less clear-cut results). However, the cause for this trend is unclear. Whereas some argue that politicians nowadays get in trouble more often (e.g., Esser 1999), not least because society has become more complex due to differentiation processes as norms may vary in different social systems and sometimes become more strict (see, e.g., the #MeToo movement), increasing the likelihood of transgression (Hondrich 2002), others doubt that norm violations of politicians have become more frequent (see, e.g., Tumber & Waisbord 2004; Waisbord 1994). Instead, they claim that the media is responsible for the observed shift (e.g., Hallin & Mancini 2004, 278). Besides the commercialization of the media, that is an increasing necessity to adjust news production to strict cost–benefit calculations (which in the end means to align the media content to the needs and preferences of the public in order to attract the audience; see Kalb 1998; Thompson 2000; Tumber 2004), the main reason for the increasing media attention to political norm transgressions is seen in changing selection criteria and an altered professional role of journalists (van Dalen, de Vreese & Albæk 2012). In particular, modern journalists consider themselves as Cerberus—controlling politics, but with limited respect and a high level of dominance and cynicism, and setting the political agenda (Brants & van Praag 2006). If they sense there might be a potential political norm transgression, they behave “like sharks in a feeding frenzy” (Sabato 1991, 1). The professional role of journalists today includes the task of framing the news, that is to “shape the interpretation of issues and events” (Kenski 2003, 250). In practice, on the one hand, this means that they develop a “central organizing idea or story line that provides meaning to an unfolding strip of events” and suggest “what the controversy is about, the essence of the issue” (Gamson & Modigliani 1987, 143). On the other hand, by framing information the media pay attention to particular content while ignoring other aspects (Tankard 2001; see also 104

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Entman, 1993); “some things are included in the frame, if we think of it as a picture frame, while other content is cropped out, not included” (Conners 2014, 233). That is, political scandals are not “prepackaged for public consumption” (Allern et al. 2012: 17); rather journalists have to construct and frame a norm transgression as something scandalous (see also Entman 2012; Kepplinger, Geiss & Siebert 2012; Strömbäck 2008). Although political scandals are a frequent event in contemporary politics, surprisingly little work has been done to link framing theory with research on norm violations. To strengthen the tie between these two strands of research, we describe the main idea of framing as well as the core problems of this approach. Furthermore, we provide an overview of the research on media framing of political scandals. After that we suggest an approach on how to assess two general frames often used in scandal coverage: the attack frame and the defense frame. Moreover, we provide an empirical application of our approach with German data. Finally, we sum up our key findings and suggest directions for further research.

Framing theory and its application to scandal research Framing—a core concept to understand the content of mass media and its effects (for introductions see, e.g., de Vreese & Lecheler 2012; Scheufele & Iyengar 2017)—on the one hand describes the process of (verbal or visual) news presentation (“frame-building”) and internal and external factors underlying this process (see, e.g., de Vreese & Lecheler 2012). On the other hand, framing also explains how the news influences knowledge, attitudes, or decision-making as well as the emotional responses of audience members (“frame-setting”; see Scheufele 1999, 115–116). Two general forms of framing—equivalence (Kahneman & Tversky 1984) as well as emphasis (Scheufele & Iyengar 2017, 622)—can be differentiated. Equivalence framing means that an otherwise identical issue is presented in a positive (gain-frame) or negative way (lossframe). Emphasis framing means that certain aspects of an issue are saliently depicted in a communicating text, while other aspects are neglected. As most studies in mass communication and journalism deal with rather complex descriptions of social and/or political scenarios they have usually focused on emphasis frames (e.g., Entman 1993, 2012; Nelson, Clawson & Oxley 1997; Scheufele & Iyengar 2017). However, the specific application of framing in communication research is of limited coherence. The lack of clarification includes both its conceptualization and measurement (Matthes 2009). Although there is a general agreement as to what framing means—in short, an (intentional or unintentional) shaping of the interpretation of social and political issues by emphasizing selected aspects of the discussed topic as important at the expense of other aspects of the same topic—several rivaling definitions of framing are available in the literature due to the interdisciplinary roots of framing research. Furthermore, frames can be identified using an inductive or a deductive approach. By using an inductive approach, frames emerge during the course of analyzing media content. In contrast to this, a deductive approach defines the nature of a frame before it is measured (e.g., de Vreese & Lecheler 2012). Unfortunately, conceptual ambiguities increase the likelihood of operational problems, for example, strong variation in the measurement of frames (e.g., Matthes 2009; Scheufele 1999). The number of frames identified in the literature is immense. Some studies found (few) socalled generic frames (e.g., de Vreese 2002). Generic frames are claimed to describe the general approach of journalists (or journalists of a particular medium, namely a specific news outlet) and how they handle information. For instance, several studies indicate that journalists perceive politics as a strategic game and therefore cover political issues by focusing on who is winning 105

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and who is losing (game framing), the performance of political actors, and their tactics to out do opponents (for a summery see Aalberg, Strömbäck & de Vreese 2011). Other studies concentrating on particular events or topics found dozens of so-called issue-specific frames. As these frames often occur only for the event or the issue under investigation, they are very difficult to compare across time and space (see, e.g., Hertog & McLeod 2001). Finally, framing is often difficult to distinguish from other communication theories. This is particularly true when it comes to media effects. For instance, some argue that second-level agenda setting, that is highlighting attributes of particular topics, is close to what framing does (e.g., McCombs, Shaw & Weaver 1997). In addition, framing and priming are sometimes seen as congruent as both processes end up by making selected information more salient to recipients (e.g., McCombs & Shaw 1993). However, it is important to note that agenda setting, priming, and framing operate on different premises, focus on different cognitive processes, and therefore have to be considered as different theories of communication (Scheufele & Tewksbury 2007). In contrast to agenda setting and priming, framing is about applicability. Framing effects can only occur if information can be integrated in an already existing cognitive schema. Which schema will be activated depends on how the information is presented (Scheufele & Iyengar 2017).

Studies focusing on the use of scandals as a generic frame Framing theory has also been applied to research on political scandals, namely media coverage of political scandals. Studies comparing generic media frames across time and/or countries find that journalists are very eager to report on political scandals. The media’s focus on scandals1— often measured by catchwords indicating whether a media report mentions (accusations of) norm violations in politics, the expression of public anger, or harsh language in political debates (see, e.g., Umbricht & Esser 2016)—is most prevalent in countries with a liberal model of journalism (e.g., the UK, the USA) and countries with a polarized political and media system (e.g., France, Italy). The least frequent use of the scandal frame has been found in countries following a corporatist model of political journalism (e.g., Germany, Switzerland, Scandinavian countries; see Esser & Umbricht 2013; Umbricht & Esser 2016). Whether the scandalization of politics has changed over time is not clear. For the time period between the 1960s and the turn of the century Umbricht & Esser (2014) find that negative coverage of politics has increased in liberal media systems, taken an ambivalent development in polarized media systems, and has not changed very much in systems with a corporate model of political journalism. A more fine-grained analysis of Germany demonstrates that it is important to differentiate between scandalization of political news coverage more generally and the number of individual political scandals in a particular society (von Sikorski 2017). That is, in Germany the number of political scandals has increased over the last couple of decades (Kepplinger, 1996; Kumlin & Esaiasson, 2012). However, no overall trend can be detected for the scandalization of political news coverage in that country. While some years show high levels of scandalization and other years show low levels (Esser 1999), recent data demonstrate that in all countries except Germany scandalization is becoming more popular (Umbricht & Esser 2014, 2016; for similar findings for Sweden see Strömback 2008). Umbricht and Esser (2016; see also Esser 1999) suggest that this development is driven by growing commercialization, tabloidization, and the changing relationship between journalists and politicians. This fits with the observation that tabloid media scandalize politics more often than quality newspapers or public service broadcasters (Strömbäck 2008; but see van Dalen, de Vreese & Albæk 2012). 106

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Studies focusing on the framing of specific scandals Studies analyzing particular scandals have identified numerous frames significant for the understanding of specific media coverage (e.g., Feng, Brewer & Ley 2012; Kenski 2003; Kepplinger et al. 2012; Shah et al. 2002). However, a couple of studies suggest that two types of frames appear more frequently than others. On the one hand, a “guilt frame” claims that the accused politician is guilty (Kepplinger et al. 2012, 662; other scholars use the labels “attack frame” or “anti-government frame”, see Feng, Brewer & Ley 2012; Shah et al. 2002). The relative importance of this frame varies dramatically (from a minimum of 18 percent, see Shah et al. 2002, 357; to a maximum of 84 percent, see Kepplinger et al. 2012, 668). On the other hand, research suggests the existence of so-called “excuse frames” which excuse or defend the alleged norm violation (Kepplinger et al. 2012, 662; other researchers use the labels “response frame” or “progovernment frame”, see Feng, Brewer & Ley 2012; Shah et al. 2002). Whereas Kepplinger and colleagues (2012) find no empirical evidence that scandal coverage includes excuse frames, Shah et al. (2002, 357) assess the share of response frames to be about 4 percent. Interestingly, none of the analyses on political scandals used the full framework developed by Entman (1993) to decide whether a story includes a particular frame. With respect to scandals, Entman (2012, 28) specifies that a frame is used to cover a scandal if “the behavior be defined as a problem impeding or threatening the proper operation of government or society” (problem definition), “the misdeed be clearly attributed to the . . . individual candidate as a causal agent” (causal interpretation), “the misconduct and the responsible leader receive public moral condemnation from legitimate political actors” (moral evaluation), and “a remedy involving sanction against the individual be widely demanded or debated” (treatment recommendation). However, Kepplinger et al. (2012) and Feng et al. (2012) utilized at least some aspects of this framework. Kepplinger et al. (2012, 668) indicate that only a small portion of media reports (4 percent) on political scandals provide recipients with complete frames (also known as explicit frames; see Matthes 2007, 138). The vast majority of media coverage is based on so-called fragmentary frames (also known as implicit frames; see Matthes 2007, 138), that is frames including only some but not all frame elements.

How the media frame scandals: evidence from the plagiarism scandal of the German Secretary of Defense Background On February 16, 2011 the Süddeutsche Zeitung—one of Germany’s leading quality daily newspapers—voiced the suspicion that parts of the doctoral thesis of Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg (a member of the conservative party CSU), at that time German Secretary of Defense, were plagiarized. A few days later, the investigations of the internet platform GuttenPlag Wiki undoubtedly confirmed this suspicion by identifying plagiarism on 94.4 percent of the total 393 pages, or 63.8 percent of the total 10,421 lines of the thesis (GuttenPlag Wiki 2011; Jansen & Maier 2012, 5). Although zu Guttenberg conceded mistakes, he denied plagiarism. However, within only two weeks he had lost his doctoral degree, resigned as Secretary, and stepped down as a member of the national parliament. In November, the prosecution dismissed the charge for a fine of €20,000.

Data In total, we analyzed 261 articles of the five most important nationwide German daily newspapers— BILD, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), Frankfurter Rundschau (FR), Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), 107

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and Die Welt—published between February 16, 2011 and March 1, 2011, that is the day when the SZ started to write about the scandal and the day zu Guttenberg resigned (without Sunday editions). Except for BILD (a tabloid newspaper), all other newspapers are considered to be quality ones. The analysis is based on a full survey of all media reports (regardless of the newspapers’ departments) that (1) mentioned zu Guttenberg by name and (2) had a clear relation to the plagiarism scandal. All contributions with reference to his ministerial work with no mention of the plagiarism scandal were excluded from the analysis. According to data from a sample of German journalists (Donsbach, Wolling & von Blomberg 1996, 348; see also Kepplinger 1998, 45 for politicians and press relation officers), the editorial slant of the FR and the SZ can be described as left or liberal (2.2 and 3.4 respectively on a sevenpoint scale from 1 ‘left’ to 7 ‘right’). In contrast, the editorial slant of the FAZ (5.4), BILD (6.0) and Die Welt (6.2) can be described as right or conservative.

Definition and measurement of media frames Although we agree with the general understanding of media framing as defined by Gamson and Modigliani (1987, 143), we adopt the model of Entman (1993; 2012, 28) to identify frames on the basis of the four frame elements, that is problem definition, causal interpretation, evaluation, and treatment recommendation. Furthermore, we build on studies suggesting that the media often report on scandals in terms of whether an accused actor is guilty or not (see Feng, Brewer & Ley 2012; Kepplinger et al. 2012; Shah et al. 2002). If the media suggest that zu Guttenberg is to blame for his behavior, we call this the use of an “attack frame.” If the media show sympathy for what he did, tries to explain or even to defend him, we label this strategy of coverage “defense frame.” From a methodological point of view, we follow a deductive route to identify media frames (e.g., de Vreese & Lecheler 2012). To assess attack and defense frames we developed a specific set of indicators for each frame element (see Table 10.1). In a first step, we decided for every article whether the coverage Table 10.1  Indicators of the Elements of the Attack and the Defense Frame Frame element

Attack frame

Defense frame

Problem definition

Violation of norms Public issue Personal fault Personality Full personal control Condemnation from own camp Condemnation from opposition Condemnation from other media Condemnation from citizens Support of: general/unspecific actions resignation from office personal punishment defamation a complete solving an apology constitution of committees structural actions

No violation of norms Private issue External circumstances Coincidence Out of personal control Support from own camp Support from opposition Support from other media Support from citizens Refusal of: general/unspecific actions resignation from office personal punishment defamation a complete solving an apology constitution of committees structural actions

Causal interpretation

Moral evaluation

Treatment recommendation

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explicitly referred to these indicators.2 In a second step, we analyzed for each article how many frame elements were addressed. According to Matthes (2007, 138), we distinguish between explicit and implicit frames. Explicit frames referred to all four; implicit frames only to two or three frame elements. If none or only one of the frame elements is mentioned, we argue that an article is not framed. Note that attack and defense frames can appear in the same article.

Results The leading German newspapers framed the scandal to a large degree (see Table 10.2). In nine out of ten newspaper articles, readers were exposed to a particular interpretation of the event. Newspapers often presented only a single perspective—either they attacked or defended zu Guttenberg. Only one-third of the articles presented both frames. Hence, it was very likely that readers were exposed to a biased perspective on the plagiarism scandal. This bias was strongest for liberal newspapers (i.e. FR and SZ) but also for the FAZ. Conservative newspapers covered the scandal with a higher share of unframed articles than liberal newspapers. In addition, Die Welt and BILD more often than other newspapers provided arguments in favor and in disfavor of zu Guttenberg. This difference is significant (p < .05). The plagiarism of zu Guttenberg’s doctoral thesis was viewed much more often through the lens of an attack frame than of a defense frame (see Table 10.3). In 88 percent of the articles, readers were exposed to information denouncing zu Guttenberg. In the majority of these articles the criticism was explicit. In contrast, only three out of ten articles included information exonerating the Secretary of Defense. However, very few articles presented this information explicitly.

Table 10.2  Number of Frames Used by Newspapers (%) Number of frames used

Total

FR

SZ

FAZ

Die Welt

BILD

No frame One frame Both frames N

 10  61  29 261

 4 73 24 55

 7 68 26 93

15 57 28 54

18 42 40 38

10 48 43 21

χ2 = 16.2, df = 8, p = .040

Table 10.3  Use of Implicit and Explicit Attack and Defense Frames by Newspapers (%)

Attack frame Not used Implicit Explicit Defense frame Not used Implicit Explicit N

Total

FR

SZ

FAZ

Die Welt

BILD

12 58 30

4 60 36

7 67 27

17 48 35

18 50 32

33 57 10

69 28 3 261

76 20 4 55

74 25 1 93

70 28 2 54

61 37 3 38

33 52 14 21

Attack frame: χ2= 23.1, df = 8, p = .003, Cramer’s V = .21; defense frame: χ2= 22.3, df = 8, p= .004, Cramer’s V = .21

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The leading German newspapers used attack and defense frames to a very different extent. Almost all articles published by liberal newspapers included an attack frame. In contrast, about one-fifth of the articles appearing in the conservative FAZ and Die Welt and about one-third of the articles published in BILD abstained from attacks on zu Guttenberg. These differences are significant (p < .01). However, only a minority of those articles armed with arguments against zu Guttenberg presented this information in an explicit way. Whereas there is no big difference among the newspapers, BILD again takes the most extreme position in this respect. The same picture—but even more extreme—appears for the use of the defense frame. Between two-thirds and three-quarters of the articles published in FR, SZ, FAZ, and Die Welt lack any coherent presentation of information defending zu Guttenberg. In sharp contrast, two-thirds of the articles that appeared in BILD include this frame (p < .01). If the newspapers decided to present information supporting zu Guttenberg, this usually happened in an implicit way. Only for BILD did we find a larger share of articles explicitly defending zu Guttenberg’s behavior. There is a striking difference between the picture of the plagiarism scandal as conveyed by BILD and that of the other newspapers. Further analyses (not displayed here as tables or figures) indicate that differences are found in three areas. First, the newspapers significantly differ in their problem definition (p < .001 for both attack and defense frames). In particular, whereas all quality newspapers fully acknowledge that plagiarism of a doctoral thesis violates ethical and scientific norms, BILD is ambivalent on this and presents both attack and defense frames. Furthermore, in a majority of articles of the quality press, plagiarism is depicted as a matter of public interest. In contrast, BILD argues significantly more often that this event is a private matter for zu Guttenberg. Second, BILD and the quality press differ on causal attribution (p < .001, for the attack frame only). Whereas the quality press tends to suggest that his misdeed is an indicator of his personality (e.g., dishonesty), BILD defends him against this portrayal. Third, BILD and all the other newspapers disagree on treatment recommendations (p < .001 for the defense frame only). In particular, BILD pleads a case for protecting zu Guttenberg from, for example, personal fines or his dismissal as a member of the government. If we analyze the media framing of the scandal over time, it becomes clear why the resignation of zu Guttenberg was unavoidable (see Figure 10.1). First, there was a considerable amount of coverage over a longer period of time (on average 22 articles per day). Second, except for two days the coverage was in disfavor of zu Guttenberg: the share of articles including an attack frame outscored the share of articles defending him. The second exception is when he claimed that he would refrain from using his academic title. He pointed out that after an examination of his thesis, he came to the conclusion that the manuscript contained several major mistakes (February 23, see ZEIT Online 2011). Third, whereas attacks were usually addressed explicitly, defenses were only implicit. This also includes the rare periods when the defense frame was more prominent than the attack frame. Fourth, zu Guttenberg’s most important media ally, BILD, stopped covering the scandal on February 26.

Conclusion Framing is an important instrument for the media to influence the interpretation and the course of a scandal by presenting specific perspectives on a problem concerning a (claimed) norm violation, who is responsible for it and why, how the (claimed) misconduct should be evaluated, and what treatment(s) might be appropriate to overcome the situation. By shaping the interpretation of a scandal, the media can influence public discourse and citizens’ knowledge, attitudes, and behavior. Furthermore, depending on which position they promote and if this position turns 110

Media framing of political scandals

Art icles including mentioned frame (%)

70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

2/16 (4)

2/17 (18)

2/18 (24)

2/19 (35)

Explicit at tack frame

2/20 (0)

2/21 (20)

2/22 (22)

2/23 (33)

Implicit attack frame

2/24 (27)

2/25 (23)

2/26 (14)

Explicit defense frame

2/27 (0)

2/28 (13)

3/1 (28)

Implicit defense frame

Figure 10.1  Use of Implicit and Explicit Attack and Defense Frames over Time Note: Number of articles in parenthesis. Sunday editions of newspapers not included.

out to be the majority opinion (or at least influential enough), they co-decide about the careers of accused politicians, the electoral success of political parties, and future directions of policy making (see Entman 2012, 37). However, the research on the media framing of political scandals, its causes, and effects is still in its infancy (Joslyn 2003; von Sikorski & Knoll 2019); only a few studies have explored in detail the framing of specific scandals and the dynamics of their media coverage. Therefore, the data presented in this chapter contribute to the sparse literature in this field from an empirical and a methodological point of view. From a methodological perspective, we adopted the full concept for measuring frames suggested by Entman (1993; 2012). Furthermore, based on previous work we were able to assess attack and defense frames. This finding could stimulate further research on the media framing of specific scandals and academic attempts to find a set of frames relevant for scandal coverage in general. From an empirical perspective our results indicate that scandals cause “feeding frenzy” situations (Sabato 1991, 1), not only in the USA but also in countries lacking a culture of negative coverage of politics. In addition, we demonstrated that framing is pervasive in the media coverage of political scandals. The likelihood of being exposed to a specific media interpretation of a scandal is very high. However, in our study, the case was quite different for the readers of the coverage provided by the conservative tabloid newspaper BILD, which attacked zu Guttenberg less and defended him more than any other newspaper. In particular, BILD disagreed with all the other newspapers about the definition of the problem, the causal attribution, and the treatment recommendation. In sum, zu Guttenberg’s coverage in BILD was much more positive than in other newspapers (see also Bachl & Vögele 2013), which is in line with the general positive image evaluation of zu Guttenberg during his career as Secretary General of the CSU and as Federal Secretary (Hemmelmann 2011). 111

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Further research should, on the one hand, try to replicate the approach suggested in our study. It would be very interesting to see whether the combination of Entman’s (1993, 2012) framework and the identification of attacks and defenses as general modes of media framing will hold for other (types of) political scandals. On the other hand, studies on the impact of scandal frames are rare (Joslyn 2003; Kepplinger et al. 2012; von Sikorski 2018a). Like research on the media framing of specific scandals, this strand of research lacks general findings, too, as every study uses different frames. If future research indicates that the patterns of media frames found in this study are of a more general nature, it could be a promising direction for research into effects to assess (a) whether these media frames match the cognitive structures of recipients (i.e., whether citizens also classify information about a political scandal in terms of “attack” and “defense”) and (b) how these media frames influence individual knowledge, attitudes, and behavior. This approach would contribute to the demand to strengthen the link between framebuilding and frame-setting (e.g., de Vreese & Lecheler 2012). Also, it would be useful to extend the analysis of scandal frames to visual content and examine how the news media visually portray political actors and how those visual frames affect recipients’ political attitudes (see von Sikorski, 2018; von Sikorski & Ludwig, 2018). In particular, the finding in our case—attack frames are usually explicit and defense frames predominantly implicit—can have serious consequences for information processing (see Kepplinger, Geiss & Siebert 2012). As scandals hit democracies regularly and—as some studies suggest—in increasingly shorter time intervals, research on the impact of the media coverage of norm violations by political actors is indispensable.

Notes 1 Some studies treat scandals not as an independent frame but as a subdimension of the conflict frame (see, e.g., Esser et al. 2017; Umbricht & Esser 2014). 2 Intercoder reliability (Holsti 1969, 140) was calculated for a random sample of 10 percent of the total sample. Reliability for the indicators of the elements of the attack and the defense frame ranges from 0.80 to 0.88.

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(2018a). The aftermath of political scandals: A meta-analysis. International Journal of Communication, 12, 3109–3133. von Sikorski, C. (2018). The effects of darkness and lightness cues in the visual depiction of political actors involved in scandals: An experimental study. Communication Research Reports, 35(2), pp. 162–171. von Sikorski C., and Knoll, J. (2019). Framing political scandals: Exploring the multimodal effects of isolation cues in scandal news coverage on candidate evaluations and voting intentions. International Journal of Communication, 13, pp. 206–228. von Sikorski, C. and Ludwig, M. (2018). The effects of visual isolation on the perception of scandalized politicians. Communications: European Journal of Communication Research. Advance Online Publication. doi:10.1515/commun-2017-0054 Waisbord, S.R. (1994). Knocking on newsroom doors: Press and political scandals in Argentina. Political Communication, 11(1), pp. 19–34. ZEIT Online (2011). 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11 FAKE NEWS AND SCANDAL Jason Cabañes, C.W. Anderson and Jonathan Corpus Ong

Introduction Can we draw a connection between the academic literature of political scandal and the recent explosion of interest in the use, dissemination, and impact of “fake news” in the public sphere since 2016? As one of us has argued (Boczkowski and Anderson 2017), it is increasingly important to integrate new-fangled intellectual concepts like fake news with more venerable theories and understanding from classic media sociology. In this chapter we attempt such an integration. In the first section we argue that there are four ways we both understand and misunderstand fake news as a research concept. This includes seeing fake news as text rather than visual content; as either “true” or “false” information rather than as facts embedded within narratives; as surface level content rather than being produced within institutional processes; and from a “Western-centric” lens rather than from a comparative context. As we will argue in our conclusion, these foci make connecting empirical work on fake news to larger media theories of visibility and surveillance more difficult. In particular, they make it harder to connect questions of fake news to sociologies of scandal and the public sphere. In the second section, we attempt to address each of these critiques by outlining elements of our research on fake news production in the Philippines, which was selected insofar as it provides a non-European case of a phenomenon the discussion of which is usually confined to the industrialized West and which serves as a launching pad for engaging in larger meta-theoretical reflection at the conclusion of the chapter. In this research, we looked into the belly of the beast, conducting interviews and doing participant observation with the so-called “political trolls” in order to grasp the dynamics of the country’s hierarchical but networked architecture of disinformation. We paid particular attention to how the creative labor within this architecture gave rise to visual images that carried particular narrative and aesthetic components, which aimed to reinforce the public’s feelings of anger and resentment and harness the infectious zeal of political supporters. In the third and final section, the chapter returns to the initial conversation about the media and scandal and discusses how these different frameworks for considering fake news shed light on the relationship between scandal and the media. One final note before we move into the heart of this chapter. There is growing and justified resistance in academia to using the term “fake news” to describe content that deliberately uses the tools and distribution mechanisms of journalism to promote demonstrably false narratives. 115

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Wardle (2017) has convincingly argued that the use of the term collapses multiple distinct types of misinformation (some malicious, some benign) into a single category called “fake news.” Others (Tandoc et. al. 2018) have categorized the diverse and often divergent definitions of fake news that have been deployed in the scholarly literature. Still others contend that the use of “fake news” by the U.S. President Donald J. Trump has transformed the concept into an utterly vacuous one, a concept often used to criticize legitimate accountability journalism and one increasingly deployed by authoritarian leaders of all stripes. We agree in principle with all these criticisms. And yet, in this chapter, we continue to use the term “fake news.” Our decision here is primarily one of authorial strategy. In essence, it is entirely possible to spend thousands of words arguing about the proper definition of “fake news” and spend very little time conducting empirical work about the phenomenon, or thinking more deeply about the ways it has been used in research to date. To avoid definitional parsing, we deploy the term “fake news” here while agreeing entirely with the criticism that its use is problematic. At the very least, accepting the common usage of the term “fake news” allows us to turn more quickly to some of the ways it has been used, and misused, and underused in academic research so far. Thinking about fake news in terms of intellectual misunderstandings or oversights allows us also to connect it with larger theories of scandal, media, and the public sphere.

Four misunderstandings of fake news We argue that there are four ways to understand and misunderstand fake news as a research concept. First, we often think of fake news as words on a page rather than images or other forms of visual content. Second, we often become intellectually trapped between trying to distinguish between journalism as “true” or “false” information, when it might be more productive to think of journalism as facts embedded within narratives. Third, we often think about the content of fake news itself—what it says and what it does to the public—rather than considering the institutional processes by which fake news is produced. Finally, we often fail to consider fake news in a comparative context, which has the added advantage of promoting a highly “Western-centric” notion of the idea of fake news.

Emotional, aesthetic and visual aspects of fake news In recent years, experts in the United Kingdom, Europe, and the United States seem increasingly mystified by the decisions made by voters—decisions that appear to upend expectations about what are the “best” possible political actions, or at least the most rational ones. While not put quite this straightforwardly, journalistic and scholarly explanations for these so-called “irrational political choices” have gone something like this: building on a variety of digital affordances, the information environment that is powering the political public sphere in the West has become overwhelmed by a variety of propagandistic, divisive, and emotionally resonant (but factually untrue) forms of information. The presence of this (mis)information led to particular political outcomes, outcomes in part attributable to the impact of media on individual voters. In the most common version of this story, Facebook (and, to a lesser degree, Twitter) allowed a series of propagandistic and untrue pieces of information to flood its systems and lead people to make the “wrong choice” when the time came to vote for a president or make a choice in a national referendum. More legacy newspapers and media outlets, particularly in the United Kingdom, have also come under fire for “playing the fear card” when it comes to their coverage of important issues. 116

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Bundled into this story are a particular (and interrelated) set of assumptions about the nature of politics, the affordances of digital media, and the manner in which information affects human behavior. There are three problems with these assumptions. First, they rely on a set of theories about what the media “does” to audiences that have been widely debunked in the communications literature. Second, they have a narrow understanding of “the media” that sees that media as made up of relatively unitary pieces of informational content. This understanding ignores the aesthetic content of the media, and indeed relegates the entire concept of visual news media to a second-tier status. Both these problems create a third, which is that we too often talk about the relationship between media and politics in narrow, overly social scientific terms, ignoring the range of other intellectual perspectives that could be brought to bear on these relationships. We have noted that one major perspective missing from the conversation about fake news has been a visual aesthetic perspective, one that draws more on concepts from art history and art appreciation than it does from social science or even from media studies. The major work on the role of visual content in contributing to the fake news phenomenon (e.g. Guy 2017) has largely been exploratory in nature; beyond that, it has largely adopted a behavioralist perspective on fake news, looking at what images “do” to the public and how to identify them as being either fake or true. This, however, is not the only way to think about visuals in journalism. In just the last few years visual communication scholars and social semioticians have become more broadly interested in the aesthetics of news media, specifically with regards to the relationship between imagery, graphics, layout, and writing in a digital context. In particular, Helen Caple, David Machin, and Hartmut Stöckl have offered compelling social semiotic analyses of key visual and multimodal news media genres like, for example, online news galleries, newsbites, and news opening sequences. There is no reason why these perspectives could not be brought to bear on the question of fake news.

Truth, lies and narratives While media and communications scholars have looked primarily at news as information and have built compelling arguments about the poisoning of the public well by fake news, a few sociologists have devoted themselves to understanding the cultural, emotional, and narratival roots of the current “crisis in public communication” (Blumler and Gurevitch 1995). Arlie Hochschild’s work on the “deep story” in Strangers in Their Own Land—the way that the story Tea Party activists in Louisiana told themselves about the current state of American political and economic life influenced their political choices—has been central to this conversation. For Hochschild (2016), the roots of the populist upsurge in politics do not lie in economic distress as much as they lie in a story about economic distress. Conservatives in the United States imagine social life as a line, at the end of which is something called the “American Dream.” Not only has this line slowed to a crawl, in the minds of these Trump supporters, but a variety of minority groups and immigrants have been cutting to the front of the line, aided and abetted by corrupt and swindling politicians. What lies at the root of populism, for Hochschild, is not the deployment of incorrect facts but rather the construction of particular mediated narratives. In terms more familiar to scholars of communication, journalism, and media studies, journalism and news—whether fake or truthful—play a ritualistic role in constructing the everyday lives of citizens, and not simply an informational role. News, in James W. Carey’s terms, can be seen as a dramaturgical exercise. “What is arrayed before the reader is not pure information but a portrayal of the contending forces in the world” (Carey 1985, 16). “Moreover, as readers make their way through the paper, they engage in a continual shift of roles or of dramatic focus.” Fake news, it can be argued, helps establish these terms of dramatic reference and a vision of 117

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the world in which contending forces of good and evil populate a world of conflict, treachery, scandal, and betrayal. While such a ritualistic perspective does not dispense with the difference between “facts” and “lies,” it de-emphasizes the importance of truth as the sole vector along which we ought to analyze fake news and digital propaganda.

Fake news as content, fake news as production Little attention, finally, has been devoted to the means by which fake news is actually made and by which it operates as a form of cultural labor. For instance, a timely BuzzFeed analysis in early November 2016 (Silverman 2016) determined that “fake news” on Facebook generated significantly larger amounts of audience engagement than the top stories of the 19 most popular traditional news organizations combined. The Computational Propaganda Project at the Oxford Internet Institute, which actually began well before the 2016 election, has generated studies about a wide variety of disinformation campaigns in cross-national contexts, beginning with the analysis of “Brexit Bots” on Twitter and later expanding the analysis to include bot activity and propaganda on Facebook, Wikipedia, and elsewhere. These studies are incredibly valuable as well as being methodologically sophisticated; they demonstrate the degree to which misinformation and outright propaganda have colonized the journalistic space and hypothesize a causal connection between the irrationality of our current political discourse and the actions of malevolent information actors (e.g., Bradshaw & Howard 2017; Wooley & Guilbeault 2017). A related 2016 American election study, carried out by the Berkman-Klein Center at Harvard University, looks at the interactions between hundreds of media outlets and the patterns of information circulation that dominated election coverage. The study concludes that, while centrist/liberal media in the United States are now virtually synonymous with legacy media outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN, conservative media space is dominated by a variety of dubious quasi-journalistic actors, particularly Breitbart News. Much like the work on computational propaganda, however, the Berkman study looks at surface-level media interactions and conceives of “news content” as primarily “information” (Farris et. al 2017). More than that, all these studies examine the work that this content does in the world, and the way it affects citizens. Survey-based approaches may also tend to flatten out differences when they draw false equivalences among disinformation actors and content as they manifest in diverse cultural contexts (e.g., Bradshaw & Howard 2017) while technology-centric approaches may fetishize new technologies and overstate their social effects without situating these within broader media environments and historical campaign infrastructures (e.g., Woolley & Guilbeault 2017).

Digital disinformation in the Philippines To demonstrate concretely how these under-explored aspects of fake news might be analyzed as part of a larger analysis of the relationship between fake news and scandal, this section deploys them in discussing the study that two of us carried out on the production of digital disinformation in the Philippines (Ong and Cabañes 2018). This research was conducted from December 2016 to December 2017, in the aftermath of the campaigns for the May 2016 Philippine national elections, which saw the intensification of online political vitriol and toxicity and the rise of controversial politician Rodrigo Duterte to the country’s presidency. To shed light on the worrisome dynamics of digital disinformation in the campaigns and in the early days of the Duterte regime, we conducted in-depth interviews with 20 of those we refer to as disinformation architects who did “political trolling” and produced “fake news” for politicians across 118

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the Philippines’ political spectrum and at both the national and local levels. This included six chief disinformation architects who were elite advertising and PR strategists managing digital disinformation campaigns, five anonymous digital influencers who were aspirational middleclass digital workers operating anonymous accounts that commanded followers of 50,000 and above on Facebook and Twitter, and nine community-level fake account operators who were precarious middle-class digital workers sharing and amplifying core campaign messages in the online communities and Facebook groups they had infiltrated. To supplement these interviews, we also conducted participant observations of over 20 publicly accessible Facebook groups and pages and Twitter accounts supporting various political camps—including those that were explicitly pro- and anti-Duterte—as well as those that had no explicit representation of candidates or political parties, but who claimed to curate “social media news.”

Disinformation as a visual One innovation we proposed for how to conceptualize fake news in research better was for us to approach it not just as a text but also as a visual. Indeed, looking at the visual elements of the materials produced by disinformation architects in the Philippines reveals one of the strategies that underpin their campaigns. Here we refer to the need to translate the technical language of campaign objectives into social media posts that are imbued with authenticity. To do this, the disinformation architects include visuals that weaponize popular vernaculars, or the aesthetic and semiotic resources that predominate and circulate in Filipino popular culture. This kind of digital disinformation production builds on the existing logics and process of political marketing that is premised on the recognition that ordinary citizens have the agency and ability to interpret or even reject persuasive marketing messages handed down from above by political elites (Scammell 2014). As such, it aims to establish a reciprocal relationship between brands and publics that takes seriously their interests, needs, and emotional responses. A crucial part of this relationship is establishing a strong connection with people’s “emotional literacies” (Corner and Pels 2003) or “affective intelligences” (Van Zoonen 2005). These are specific rationalities that guide their engagement with the political sphere that stem from personal experiences and cultural narratives they know and, crucially, feel. A concrete example of how disinformation producers tried to imbue visuals with an aesthetic of authenticity can be seen in memes deployed for digital black ops, a technique used to attack the character of opposing politicians. Take for instance this misogynistic meme that sought to undermine the credibility of Mocha Uson, who is currently an assistant secretary in the Presidential Communications Operations Office. Uson is a favorite target of anti-Duterte campaigns because she has been one of the most visible and most vocal pro-Duterte key opinion leaders online. This particular meme amplified other similar digital disinformation materials that aimed to continually dredge up Uson’s past career as a controversy-seeking sexy star. It shamed her by harping on about conservative Filipino tropes about womanhood by showing provocative images of her and insinuating that she is not “disente” (decent) and so should not be believed. Key to establishing authenticity in this “Mocha meme” was its deliberately amateurish aesthetics. To deflect the fact that this meme comes out of a professionalized disinformation production architecture, it consisted of photographs that were awkwardly cropped, had text fonts with an odd color scheme, and an overall layout that decidedly did not adhere to the rule of thirds. Also important for the meme’s authenticity was the use of images that sought to resonate with the broad public, as they were drawn from popular tropes in Philippine entertainment media. The photograph to its left was of the television and young film superstar Kathryn 119

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Bernardo, who is posited to embody the qualities of the supporters of Duterte’s rival presidential candidate Mar Roxas. What this image referenced in particular was how Bernardo was a wildly popular young celebrity who was acutely aware of how she should act in public because, as she put it, “we have to do our best to become good role models for the youth” (Iglesias 2018). In stark contrast was Mocha Uson’s photograph to the meme’s right, whose indecency is said to capture key qualities of Duterte’s supporters. This image connected especially well with the accusations that in bringing her controversial sexy star persona to her new government job, Uson was trading in so-called political porn—”the immersion in obscenity, the choreographed assault on the real in favor of the fantasy, [and] the repeated appeal to the prurient” (Nery 2018)—and consequently irresponsibly debasing the quality of public discussion. Approaching disinformation materials as a visual is clearly helpful in unpacking how disinformation architects can weaponize aesthetic and semiotic resources. The case of the “Mocha meme,” for instance, crystallized the deployment of authenticity through the popular vernaculars of amateur design and Philippine entertainment media tropes. At the same time, however, the analysis above also points to another dynamic at play. That is, disinformation materials cannot be understood in isolation. The “Mocha meme” was certainly embedded within broader narratives of social drama, such as the value of amateur voices over professional voices in the digital public sphere or of decency over indecency for women in the public eye.

Disinformation and narratives Building on from the point above, we now want to evidence the value of approaching fake news not just as clear-cut “truth” and “lies,” as assertions of facts embedded within social narratives. For this we will mention one of the most notorious digital disinformation campaigns in the aftermath of President Duterte’s victory. Known as the “Ilibing Na” (which roughly translates as “Allow the Burial”) campaign, this was the highly organized push for historical revisionism to sanitize the brutal dictatorship of former President Ferdinand Marcos and, consequently, pave the way for his burial in the “Libingan ng mga Bayani” (Cemetery for Heroes). In the interim between Duterte’s order and the Supreme Court decision and the eventual burial of Marcos, we followed the Facebook and Twitter discussions around the “Ilibing Na” campaign. We observed how the disinformation architects ensured that social media served as an integral platform within a wider political campaign, as it echoed and amplified the revisionist narrative of Marcos as the Philippines’ greatest president and the martial law years as the country’s golden years. This went completely against established historical and literary scholarship that described the dictatorial regime as characterized by, among other horrors, widespread human rights violations and unmitigated government corruption (see De Vera 2016). Moreover, and here we borrow from Hochschild (2016), this narrative aligned very well with the “deep story” held by Duterte and his supporters regarding the viability of an authoritarian regime, as it would get the country to move forward faster. As Duterte himself said, Marcos deserved to be buried “because he was a great president and he was a hero” and, moreover, that the burial would catalyze “national healing.” The children of Marcos also echoed this claim, saying that what the country really needed was to “forgive and move on.” During our research, we saw how online petitions, memes, videos, and articles from websites with unverified content were weaponized to challenge existing narratives about Marcos and bring different frameworks to the burial issue. Crucially, these were also used to attack and silence critics of the burial. One such example was a Facebook post about Vice President Leni Robredo’s opposition to the burial. If Uson was a favorite target of the anti-Duterte camp, so Robredo was always in the firing line of the pro-Duterte camp. This was primarily because she 120

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was the highest government official affiliated with the Liberal Party, which not only touted itself as the opposition party to the Duterte government but was also a key opposition force during the Marcos regime. The Facebook post shared a news video clip of Robredo’s interview with the accompanying caption: “So why does Leni the queen of cheap campaigns disapprove of the burial of Marcos in the Heroes’ Cemetery . . . Watch and learn how crazy and out of her mind Leni is.” The post elicited over 16,000 reactions (likes, hearts, angry reactions), 28,624 shares, and over 7,200 comments, with the video viewed over 1 million times. The deep story carried by the post seemed to have resonated very well with the supporters of Duterte, as many of the comments on the post expressed their support for the revisionist narrative about Marcos, specifically by throwing a disturbing array of expletives at Robredo. They called her a “bitch,” “stupid,” “insane,” told her to “shut up,” and went as far as wishing she would die along with her three daughters. They also expressed resentment towards the Liberal Party, which they characterized as the evil enemy of the Duterte presidency. We subsequently asked the disinformation architects about the toxic and vitriolic commentaries generated by digital disinformation materials like the Facebook post against Robredo. Their response to this was to wash their hands and explain away their responsibility. Unfortunately, the distinct architecture of networked disinformation in the Philippines made it easy for them to do this. It is to this that we next shift our attention.

Disinformation as cultural production The third innovation we proposed above was to conceptualize fake news not just as mere content but as an instantiation of organizational processes and labor relations. Our study on digital disinformation in the Philippines, for instance, took a production studies approach that examined disinformation as a culture of production, which meant listening to the intentions and experiences of fake news producers in their own words and attending to their “creativity within constraints” (Mayer et al. 2009, 2) in light of opaque institutional procedures. This enabled us to develop an account of the disinformation production process that was inherently social, underscoring how the different architects of disinformation drew from institutional knowledge, professional skills, and interpersonal relationships when innovating techniques of political deception. Our production studies approach allowed us to see the different ways in which disinformation architects engaged in moral justifications. They employed various denial strategies that allowed them to claim that their work was not actually “trolling” or “fake news” and that, crucially, enabled them to displace moral responsibility for the consequences of digital disinformation on the heightened toxicity and vitriol of contemporary online political discussions. We observed that workers drew from slightly different cultural scripts when justifying their work based on where they are positioned in the professional hierarchy.. Take the chief disinformation architects, for instance. They saw themselves as taking on the more “professional” work of crafting campaign objectives and messages, especially when compared to the anonymous digital influencers who had to do the “dirty” work of translating their objectives and messages into actual social media content. This allowed them to create some psychological distance from the actual production of digital disinformation materials. Together with this, they did not see digital disinformation as something new, arguing instead that they had used the same advertising and public relations techniques in orchestrating the launch of Facebook business pages, making hashtag campaigns trend worldwide, and building engaged communities for household brands, telecommunications companies, or celebrities. As one of 121

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them put it, “Whether you’re a movie, soft drink, restaurant, or politician, it’s all the same to me. Just give me the brief, I know what to do.” For the anonymous digital influencers, meanwhile, the casual and short-term nature of disinformation projects meant that they could downplay their involvement in it. Because the work was just one project or “sideline” they juggle among others, they could tell themselves that “fake news” does not define their whole identity. One of them explained, “Being a character or a ‘pseudo’ is only very fleeting because you are not the person. You just assume that personality. You trend for a while and then move on.” The other thing is that the digital influencers were adamant in saying that the production of actual fake news and other disinformation content was not their handiwork, but that of unnamed others in the disinformation architecture or of “real supporters” from the grassroots. They said that it is these others who were overly zealous, as they themselves were professional enough not to engage in misogyny, racism, and hate. This justification allowed them to displace perpetually any accountability for the grimier aspects of disinformation production.

Disinformation from the south Finally, we suggest that our understanding of fake news should go beyond “Western-centric” lenses and take a global and comparative approach to disinformation production. Our study on digital disinformation production in the Philippines was certainly inspired by the challenge posed by Paula Chakravartty and Srirupa Roy (2017) to trace the historical antecedents of mediatized populism in particular. We took seriously the importance of thinking through how new social media affordances for political exchange—such as the currently toxic and vitriolic online public spheres in many established democracies—map onto entrenched political systems, class hierarchies, and social dynamics in developing countries like the Philippines, which has deep histories of populist sentiment. Paying attention to the historical context of the Philippines allowed us to understand, for instance, the genesis of the country’s advertising and public relations-led architecture of networked disinformation. This had to do with how national politics in the Philippines has always been characterized by weak political party ideologies and affiliations that are completely overwhelmed by strong personalistic relationships with presidential contenders who are perceived to possess the right image branding (Bionat 1998; Coronel et al. 2004). And the roots of this ran deep, what with Philippine politics having been shaped by a culture of patronage between an oligarchic elite and supporters who establish relationships of dependency and obligation with them. Growing out of a system of patron–client relations established during the Spanish colonial period (1521–1898), the country’s powerful political families and personalities have continued to cultivate clientelistic relationships with their loyal followers (Hedman and Sidel 2000). Looking at the particular digital labor conditions in the Philippines also enabled us to see how the architecture of network disinformation was heavily entrenched in systematized labor and incentive structures that have been normalized in, and even professionalized by, the creative and digital industries. One thing we saw was that the chief disinformation architects sought to exploit the porous boundaries between advertising and public relations and the digital underground. They used their expertise and leadership in the former to gain power and prestige in the latter, thereby establishing themselves as pioneers of a new industry. The other thing we observed was that many of the anonymous digital influencers got dragged into the digital underground because of the precarious work conditions in mainstream media. After compounded experiences of rejection and exploitation at the hands of the media industry, they found themselves seeking financial stability in digital disinformation work. 122

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Using this case study of disinformation in the Philippines as a test upon which to ground grand narratives usually developed and deployed in the West enabled us to see that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to the complex problem of digital disinformation. Global initiatives to address the problem, such as the emerging critical scholarship on the operations of power by global corporations such as Facebook and Google, are of course important (see Sabeel Rahman 2017). At the same time, however, understanding local contexts of disinformation production and the ways that architects of disinformation evade responsibility and entice other workers to join them in the digital underground allows us to craft better bespoke interventions that are suited to specific country contexts. For the Philippines, our suggestions included the following. (1) Addressing the development of a self-regulatory commission that requires disclosure of political consultancies is a step towards encouraging the traceability and accountability of these digital campaigns within the advertisement and PR industry. (2) Create industry sanctions and safety nets that prevent precarious creative workers from slipping into the digital underground.

Conclusion and discussion: fake news and scandal We argued in the opening section of this chapter that de-Westernizing and broadening our understanding of fake news to include issues of narrative, cultural production, and aesthetics can help us better link the fake news phenomenon to larger issues of media sociology, including the role of scandal in the public sphere. In this concluding discussion we mount a brief intervention in order to demonstrate the productivity of this approach. We want to tie the previous case study to larger issues of public space, visibility, and scandal, and in doing so begin a rapprochement between questions of fake news and larger theoretical questions. Media sociologist John Thompson has offered the most robust and theoretically sophisticated analysis of the relationship between the twenty-first-century media system and political scandal (Thompson 2004), focusing on the relationship between scandal and the media’s power to make select individuals visible to the public at large (Thompson 2005). There are two strands to Thompson’s argument, each tying into a different set of assumptions about the nature of communication and the political world. The first strand is grounded in a critique of Michel Foucault and his concept of “panopticonism,” or the notion that society has created an internalized sense of continuous surveillance at the heart of modern subjectivity. With his concept of the panopticon, Thompson argues, Foucault neglects to consider the role of the media and particularly its ability to engineer certain forms of public visibility that are limited to a (relatively) few individuals. Rather than living in a state of continuous visibility, Thompson contends (contra Foucault) the media draws its very power from its ability to make certain people visible at certain times (Thompson 2005, 40–42). One of the forms of media visibility arises via scandal, which is itself related to certain changes in the constitution of politics. Thompson (2013) relates the prevalence of scandal in recent times to the decline of traditional political parties with their stable and class-based patterns of allegiance. The new political models that tend to dominate campaigns use the personal ethics and conduct of individual politicians as a means by which to lure increasingly non-committed voters to their side. One way to do this is via scandal, which simultaneously taints the moral character of politicians and virtually guarantees that this moral character will become the subject of heightened media visibility. Political scandal thus stems from larger changes in both the political and media sphere, with the media possessing increased power to make individuals visible and with politics as a game through which to lure the large number of uncommitted voters to a political side. Thompson’s analysis, one of the few large-scale sociological theories to take the media seriously, is a compelling one that does much to explain the dynamics of modern mediated politics. 123

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We also think that it both illuminates and obscures the role played by “fake news” in the development of media scandals in the digital age. In terms of illumination, we can see from our case study that, even in our hyper-partisan age, moral judgments about candidates for office and politicians in the public sphere still matter. One of the major strategies of disinformation teams in the Philippines, as we have seen, is to impugn the morality of government officials, particularly women. It is an open question as to whether this is a localized phenomenon or a general one, but either way this analysis of the Philippines demonstrates that fake news can thrive in an environment where moral judgments play a major role in political life. Fake news and disinformation can publicly unearth the (usually false) inner lives of candidates, constructing a (false) media narrative that turns government officials into moral reprobates. On the other hand, some part of the conceptual cloudiness of Thompson’s theory in relationship to the fake news phenomenon stems, not from a flaw in the theory, but rather from a media landscape which is dramatically different than it was even a decade ago. For one thing, we think that the Foucauldian notion of the panopticon is more valid now than it was when Foucault proposed it, and certainly more valid than it was when Thompson constructed his theory of media power. The endlessly proliferating world of digital and social media has created a system in which many of the most energized citizens are quite literally “bathing” in the media flow at all times; media is not simply a medium, as Mark Deuze argues, but might be better seen as a media life (Deuze 2012). We can see this from our Philippines case study insofar as disinformation strategies assume an always surveilled, quantified public. Metrics, surveillance, and tracking (Anderson 2013) play a major role in fake news strategies and the flourishing of scandalous fake news. Regardless of the specifics at play in this particular case, we think the fake news concept is in need of an overhaul. In this chapter we have outlined the aspects of the phenomenon we think should be more emphasized in scholarship going forward. We have tried to demonstrate the utility of these revisions in our case study of the role played by disinformation workers in the Philippines. Finally, we have shown how broadening our understanding of fake news takes us out of a linear, media-effects model of communication. Instead, it allows us to discuss disinformation in relationship to more supple sociological theories, including scandal, the public sphere, and personal visibility in media space. Such conceptual creativity is necessary if we are to continue to integrate the dramatic changes of twenty-first-century mediated life with older, and still robust, frameworks for understanding the media’s relationship with society.

Acknowledgments Sections of this paper were supported by the British Council Newton Fund Institutional Links grant 216314572.

References Anderson, C.W. (2013). Rebuilding the News: Metropolitan Journalism in the Digital Age. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Bionat, Marvin. (1998). How to Win (or Lose) in Philippine Elections: The Dynamics of Winning or Losing in Philippine Electoral Contests. Quezon City: Anvil. Blumler, Jay, and Gurevitch, Michael. (1995). The Crisis of Public Communication. New York: Taylor Francis. Boczkowski, Pablo, and Anderson, C.W. (2017). Remaking the News: Essays on the Future of Journalism in the Digital Age. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

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Fake news and scandal Bradshaw, Samantha, and Howard, Philip. (2017). “Troops, Trolls and Troublemakers: A Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation.” Oxford, UK: Project on Computational Propaganda. Carey, James (2009 [1989]) Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. New York and London: Routledge. Chakravartty, Paula, and Roy, Srirupa. (2017). “Mediatized Populisms: Inter-Asian Lineages.” International Journal of Communication 11: 4073–4092. Corner, John, and Pels, Dick (eds.). (2003). Media and the Restyling of Politics: Consumerism, Celebrity and Cynicism. London: Sage. Coronel, Sheila S., Chua, Yvonne T., and de Castro Jr., Isagani. (2004). Cockfight, Horserace, Boxing Match: Why Elections are Covered as Sport. Quezon City: PCIJ. Deuze, Mark. (2012). Media Life. London: Sage. De Vera, Ruel. (2016). The Books of (Martial) Law. http://lifestyle.inquirer.net/64248/the-books-ofmartial-law/ Farris, Rob, Roberts, Hal, Etling, Bruce, Bourassa, Nikki, Zuckerman, Ethan, and Benkler, Yochai. (2017). “Propaganda and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 US Presidential Election.” http://cyber.harvard.edu/publications/2017/08/mediacloud, accessed September 5, 2018. Guy, Hannah. (2017). “Why We Need to Understand Information Through Visuals.” https://firstdraftnews. org/understanding-visual-misinfo/, accessed September 4, 2018. Hedman, Eva-Lotta, and Sidel, John. (2000). Philippine Politics and Society in the Twentieth Century: Colonial Legacies, Post- Colonial Trajectories. London and New York: Routledge. Hochschild, Arlie. (2016). Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. New York: The New Press. Iglesias, Iza. (2018). Real Talk with Kathniel. https://www.manilatimes.net/real-talk-kathniel/382828/ Mayer, V., Caldwell, J. and Banks, M. (2009). “Introduction – Production Studies: Roots and Routes”. In V. Mayer, J. Caldwell and M. Banks (Eds.). Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries. London and New York: Routledge. Nery, John. (2018). Mocha and the Limits of Political Porn. http://opinion.inquirer.net/115182/mochalimits-political-porn Ong, Jonathan, and Cabañes, Jason. (2018). Architects of Networked Disinformation: Behind the Scenes of Troll Accounts and Fake News Production in the Philippines. http://newtontechfordev.com/wp-content/ uploads/2018/02/ARCHITECTS-OF-NETWORKED-DISINFORMATION-FULL-REPORT.pdf Sabeel Rahman, K. (2017). “The New Utilities: Private Power, Social Infrastructure, and the Revival of the Public Utility Concept.” Social Science Research Network. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers. cfm?abstract_id=2986387##, accessed January 12, 2019. Scammell, Margaret. (2014). Consumer Democracy: The Marketing of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Silverman, C. (2016). “This Analysis Shows How Fake Election News Stories Outperformed Real News on Facebook.” BuzzFeed News, November 16, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/ viral-fake-election-news-outperformed-real-news-on-facebook. Accessed January 9, 2019. Tandoc, E., Wei Lim, Z., and Ling, R. (2018). “Defining Fake News: A Typology of Scholarly Definitions.” Digital Journalism 6(2): 137–153. Thompson, John. (2004). The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media. Cambridge: Polity. Thompson, John. (2005). “The New Visibility.” Theory, Culture, Society. 22(6): 31–51. Thompson, John. (2013). Political Scandal: Power and Visibility in the Digital Age. Cambridge: Polity. Van Zoonen, Liesbet. (2005). Entertaining the Citizen: When Politics and Popular Culture Converge. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Wardle, Claire. (2017). “Fake News: It’s Complicated.” https://medium.com/1st-draft/fake-news-itscomplicated-d0f773766c79, accessed September 4, 2018. Woolley, Samuel C., and Guilbeault, Douglas R. (2017). “Computational Propaganda in the United States of America: Manufacturing Consensus Online.” Working Paper 2017.5. Oxford, UK: Project on Computational Propaganda.

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PART II

Political context and media dynamics of scandals

12 NEW NORDIC NOIR Political scandals as drama and media hunts Sigurd Allern and Ester Pollack

A violation of certain societal norms and moral codes can result in political scandal. However, a prerequisite is that the violation ought to be mediated and framed as a scandal through the editorial choice of journalistic angles, source selection, headlines and images. Certain aspects, facts and accusations are highlighted and prioritized, affecting our interpretation of how the story is morally evaluated and the ways in which the causes are understood. Creating a political scandal requires media reports that elicit public critique and reactions. Otherwise, such events would remain in the realm of potential scandals (Entman 2016: 80). In Durkheim-inspired functional scandal theory, norm violations exposed through mediated scandals serve as an opportunity to validate or modify social norms. Politicians are public figures, but also “moral representatives in multiple ways” (Jacobsson & Löfmark 2008: 212). Journalists who expose norm transgressions help to restore and renew the moral order of society (Alexander 1988). They also maintain the norms of public life and the values of political conduct (Ettema and Glasser 1998), compensating the lack of control by other societal institutions. Political scandals can be understood as “litmus tests of societal morality”, signalling long-term changes in society’s moral order (Kantola and Vesa 2013: 304), and functional interpretations generally underline the positive effects of scandal journalism (Brenton 2012). However, as a general perspective, functional theory tends to overlook the fact that alleged norm violations are often contested and that scandal journalism may also have negative societal side effects or outcomes (Kepplinger 2017, 2018). Limited misdemeanours may lead to disproportionate reactions, and even small-scale scandals may have grave personal consequences. Some scandals reveal that even norm transgressions that are quite trivial can trigger dramatic media hunts in which the dominant media adopt the same perspectives, journalistic angle and dramaturgic concept (Kantola and Vesa 2013; Pollack 2015). The media sometimes blows up small deviant actions, while ignoring much greater ones (Entman 2016; Sass and Crosbie 2013). Scandalization can, in the long run, breed certain types of political actors, making it more important to be politically “clean” than to have comprehensive experience (Jenssen and Fladmoe 2012: 69). Scandal journalism can also lead to scandal fatigue as well as “damage support for politicians in general and satisfaction with how representative democracy functions in practice” (Kumlin and Esaiasson 2011: 263). In contrast to functional theories, discursive-communicative theories “do not presuppose any norm consensus or unanimous norm system of the society at the beginning or the end of 129

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a scandal” (Verbalyte 2018: 68). Political scandals are not merely revealed, but are constructed, shown and staged through interactions between journalists, politicians and other actors (Ekström and Johansson 2008: 72). In this chapter, we will, on the basis of recent Nordic research, present data about the incidence, types and consequences of scandals in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden as well as discuss the political and societal effects of scandal journalism. As a start, we will spotlight the way in which mediated political scandals are launched, dramatized and interpreted.

Scandals, news competition and media dramaturgy The media system in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden has been characterized as typical of the North European democratic corporatist model (Hallin and Mancini 2004), characterized by a mass circulated, party-affiliated press, broadcasting as a public service, and the co-existence of press freedoms, journalistic professionalism and the tradition of state intervention in the media sector. Some important elements of this model still exist (such as state-owned public service broadcasting and indirect and direct media support), but two basic changes comprise the fall of the party press and a commercialization of the media market (Allern and Blach Ørsten 2011; Syvertsen et al. 2014). These changes also gradually weakened the old type of political loyalties between political reporters, media pundits and political parties (Allern 2017; Kantola 2012). While party papers would traditionally defend their own party and its leaders – and consensus-oriented public service broadcasters sought to remain neutral or silent – the media climate today is characterized by more numerous media organizations and fierce competition for public attention. For Nordic news media, information on norm violations that can be reported, staged and dramatized as a political scandal is a competitive resource and a strategic, market-related investment in terms of reputation and audience interest. Scandal news is a click-bait for online sites, increases the audience share of television channels, sells papers and attracts attention on social media platforms. Traditionally, popular, “tabloid” newspapers and their web editions have been the ringleaders of scandal processes, favouring political news with a potential for personal angles and dramatization. Characterizing something as a scandal has become commonplace in political rhetoric, and news organizations often try to promote their exclusives as revelations of something scandalous. This has gradually led to a slippery and inflated use of the term “scandal” in public debates. Under the media’s “scandal umbrella”, we find “large-scale corruption revelations, security scandals, sexual harassment, politicians’ minor fiscal evasions, private sex peccadilloes, and examples of ‘scandalous talk’ in television broadcasts” (Pollack et al. 2018). At the same time, scandals also represent symbolic capital, boosting news organizations’ journalistic reputation as guardians of public life, strengthening their democratic legitimacy. Investigations of powerful institutions and public figures play an important part in the professional ideology of journalism. Even small revelations can be used as confirmation of the news media’s will and ability to scrutinize those who are at the top of society. This gives media organizations the possibility to link their market orientation with a higher journalistic intent, making power holders accountable and revealing what some of them would like to remain hidden. In the news cycle of multimedia houses, news reported by one medium immediately becomes disseminated on several platforms: stories can be copied and followed up by other media organizations, tweeted and re-tweeted by readers, leading to a circular dance through the media system. Journalists are the reporters of scandal, but also the interpreters, and even – to varying degrees – the directors, who have the power to keep a scandal story alive, day after day, 130

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sometimes week after week, mobilizing reactions from indignant audiences. When it comes to political scandals, the “pundits of the press” often play an important role as the driving forces during scandals, ultimately privileged in designating villains and victims, acting as both prosecutor and judge. These established and authoritative commentators are the interpreters, picking the winners and losers in the struggle for political survival (Nord, Enli and Stúr 2012). Mediated scandals require contact and cooperation between journalists and sources, and both parts have the ability to take the first initiative. Sometimes, scandal stories originate from whistle-blowers reporting transgressions of norms, regulations or laws. Other times, they originate through leaks from politicians who want to discredit an opponent or internal rival. Scandalization “has long been an instrument in political power struggles” (Jenssen and Fladmoe 2012: 68). These authors sum it up in an analysis of Nordic scandals, using a Machiavellian-inspired perspective. The personalization and individualization of politics has weakened the loyalty inside political parties. When a politician is scandalized, the sources of the media leaks are often members of the same party who see an opportunity to weaken or eliminate a competitor. However, in these cases of instrumental scandalization (Mancini 2018), sometimes based on anonymous sources, the actors are also dependent on editorial priorities and news frames. In practice, professional standards in Nordic scandal journalism vary considerably. In some cases, upon receiving tips or getting wind of rumours, news organizations invest time and money in independent and thorough fact-checking investigations that may lead to revelations of corruption or other serious misdeeds. In other cases, they receive “pre-packed” information, person-oriented scandals served on silver platters, from actors who would like to remain anonymous. The revelations may be based on documented facts, though not necessarily so. Scandals also occur when media organizations are willing to frame accusations or assertions in cases in which facts are disputed and assertions are difficult to verify (Allern and Pollack 2016). The journalistic construction of scandals generally follows a fixed dramaturgic treatment and scandal acceleration (Allern and Pollack 2012: 18–19; Jensen and Fladmoe 2012: 60–66). The first act establishes a media framework for the story, linked to a familiar cultural narrative: the villain or aggressor versus the victim. The scandal trickles down the media hierarchy, commentators elaborate and speculate, and reporters search for additional transgressions. Political opponents and rivals see an opportunity for revenge. The second act makes room for new responses, attempted denials and counter-strategies, sometimes also expressions of sympathy for the person(s) involved. However, for the leading media organizations that originally launched the scandal, there will be a tendency to prioritize items that fit with the dominant scandal frame. If opinion polls show that a majority condemn the norm violations, the politician’s future will be uncertain. In the third and final act comes the solution, either in the form of a dismissal/resignation or a more limited “time-out”, or alternatively, a sinner who is forgiven after explanations and self-criticism.

The increasing incidence of mediated Nordic scandals Two Nordic studies (Allern et al. 2012; Pollack et al. 2018) have mapped and analysed the incidence of national mediated political scandals in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden over several decades.1 The mappings were based on the following operational definition: The case must have been characterized as scandalous and given broad media coverage in at least two leading national media organizations for five days or more.2 131

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This definition excludes most local scandals as well as short-lived media attempts of scandalization lasting a few days. Each scandal is registered once – the year it started. Table 12.1 shows the incidence of mediated national political scandals in four Nordic countries in different time periods. In the decade 1980–1989, political scandals were a relatively marginal phenomenon; the yearly average was one (Norway) or less than one (Finland, Denmark and Sweden). The scandal incidence level remained low over the next decade but increased significantly in all four countries in the first decade after the millennium (2000–2009), more than tripling in Sweden. The incidence of scandals continued to increase in the period 2010–2016. The total number of scandals in the last seven-year period was higher than in the entire decade of 2000–2009. In 2017, in the wake of the #MeToo movement, Sweden and Norway experienced several new political scandals related to sexual harassment. Mediated political scandals have become “the new normal”, a standard feature of political life in Nordic countries (Pollack et al. 2018). Concerning scandal types, the two Nordic studies differentiate between the following six categories. Offence in economic affairs is the largest scandal category – representing more than one-third of the scandals in the Nordic region in the period 1980–2016. Economic scandal is, however, a highly mixed category, both in terms of money and political importance. At one end of the spectrum are political scandals of rather trivial transgressions, at least concerning money and judicial consequences. At the other end, we find large-scale corruption cases, some in the municipal sector, others involving Scandinavian state-owned companies’ investments and expansion in notoriously corrupt regions around the world. Another scandal category is unacceptable personal behaviour, including subtypes such as sex scandals, accusations of rape and sexual harassment and misuse of alcohol or drugs. These personalized scandals, often related to norm violations in the politician’s private life, were few and untypical in the 1980s, but began to gain more prominence in the 1990s. In the years after the millennium, this scandal type became the second largest category, though not in Denmark. The most typical Nordic “sex scandals” today are accusations of rape or sexual harassment, buying sexual services from prostitutes (illegal in Norway and Sweden) or intercourse with minors, actions prohibited by law. In contrast to the UK and the USA, sexual infidelity alone is not enough to lead to mediated scandalization (Pollack et al. 2018). A third category that has gained some interest is talk scandal, defined as an unacceptable utterance that creates headlines and commentary and arouses public anger (Ekström and Johansson 2008). Talk scandals may occur when a politician makes reckless public comments, but may also come about after planned provocations, including through postings on Twitter and other social media platforms. While talk scandals are regular in Finland and Sweden, they have so far been uncommon in Denmark and Norway. During the last decade, racist utterances from politicians Table 12.1  Incidence of National Political Scandals in Four Nordic Countries 1980–2016 Period

Denmark

Finland

Norway

Sweden

All countries

1980–1989 1990–1999 2000–2009 2010–2016 Total

 9  8 20 21 58

 6  8 19 22 55

10  7 17 23 57

 7 10 34 35 86

 32  33  90 101 256

Source: Allern et al. (2012); Pollack et al. (2018)

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representing the nationalist, right-wing populist parties in Finland and Sweden have contributed to these statistics (Herkman 2017; Pollack et al. 2018). The fourth category, abuse of political power, is generally linked to acts that politicians perform in their public role, often at the expense of due process and procedural rules. The fifth scandal type is characterized as a violation of other laws and regulations and mostly includes cases in which politicians seem to be bending the rules and regulations that ordinary voters have to follow. The sixth and final category comprises other types and mixed scandals not covered by the above categories.

The effects and consequences of scandals On the personal level, the consequences of political scandals can be dramatic and negative, not just for the affected politicians, but also for their families (Hammarlin 2015). For example, two Scandinavian political scandal cases have ended in suicide. In 2001, the Danish Broadcasting Corporation revealed that the Danish trade union leader Willy Strube was a perpetrator of embezzlement. After a couple of weeks of intense media coverage, he hanged himself in his home. In 2002, a Norwegian business leader and politician, Tore Tønne, committed suicide after a three-week media hunt concerning allegations of the misuse of public funds and questionable loans (Bjerke 2012: 168). The Swiss psychiatrist Mario Gmür has named and described a medical diagnosis, “media victim syndrome”, to describe distinctive psychiatric symptoms such as anxiety, depression and avoidance observed in patients who have been exposed in media scandals (Gmür 2002: 184). A Norwegian study, based on in-depth interviews with 14 scandalized politicians, revealed that their psychological reactions included strong negative emotions, powerlessness and symptoms of stress such as anxiety, sleep disturbances and loss of energy. They expressed deep feelings of injustice and powerlessness relating to the intensity 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. They felt that it was difficult to publicize their own version of the story or to correct dubious facts. Long-term effects included loss of trust in others and avoidance of public exposure. For some, these experiences had become overwhelming and potentially traumatic, leaving long-lasting psychological wounds (Karlsen and Duckert 2018). Mediated scandals can topple political careers. Since many of the most spectacular scandal cases end in dismissal or resignation, it is a widespread perception that this is the most typical consequence. However, in the 2010–2016 Nordic setting, only one-third of recent scandals have ended in dismissal or resignation. One in five scandals have led to other types of formal reactions (e.g. taking time out, or accepting a suspension for a shorter period), while around half of these scandals had no other consequences besides public critique and debate (Pollack et al. 2018). The rate of resignations was somewhat higher (47 per cent) in the decades 1980–2009 (Allern et al. 2012: 45). One explanation might be an increase in the number of scandals that many regard as trivial, thereby resulting in more limited public condemnation. Moreover, social media platforms have provided politicians with new ways of mobilizing supporters, thereby they are able more effectively to defend themselves. In addition to personal consequences, scandals can influence political processes and have long-term effects on institutions and the political culture, affecting citizens’ trust toward political candidates and political institutions (Von Sikorsky 2018). However, they do not necessarily result in decreased sympathy for the political parties or organizations involved. A study of the voter effects of political scandals in Norway suggested that, on an aggregative level, even major scandals have relatively small and temporary effects on parties. Negative effects are trivial and 133

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temporary (Midtbø 2012). One explanation seems to be voter loyalty. In a study of voters’ attitudes to recent political scandals in Norway, Jenssen (2014) found that sympathizers largely “acquitted” their own party, while scandals relating to parties that they opposed politically and ideologically were viewed more negatively.

Gender and political scandals The female share of scandalized politicians in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden increased from six per cent in the 1980s to 37 per cent in 2000–2009 (Allern et al. 2012). This was close to the average representation of women in Nordic political institutions. In the last period (2010–2016), the proportion dropped slightly; 31 per cent of the scandalized politicians were women. One contributing factor to the somewhat lower share of women has been the rise of right-wing populist parties in Finland and Sweden, where all the scandalized politicians were men. Scandals related to sexual harassment or prostitution are, unsurprisingly, completely male dominated. Talk scandal also has a near-male monopoly. However, there are exceptions. In Sweden in 2015–2016, the media, led by popular tabloids, used “unacceptable utterances” as a basis for repeated attacks against Åsa Romson (the Green Party), the then Minister for the Environment in Stefan Löfven’s centre-left government.3 Concerning dismissals and resignations following scandals, the main pattern seems to be relatively similar for men and women. However, in scandals involving government members, the pattern was different for the period 1980–2016. While one-third of scandalized male ministers resigned, or were dismissed, nearly half of their female counterparts have had to vacate their positions. A much-debated Swedish example were the political consequences of a government scandal in 2006, the topics being unpaid TV licences and the use of “black” (untaxed) labour services. Of the four scandalized politicians, only the two women were made to resign (Jacobsson and Löfmark 2008; Pollack 2015). In 2016, after several party-linked scandals, both spokespersons for the Swedish Green Party experienced critical media campaigns, but while the female spokesperson, Åsa Romson, had to resign both from the party and the government, Gustav Fridolin, the male spokesperson – and Minister of Education in Löfven’s government – succeeded in retaining both his positions. There may also be gender differences relating to the editorial priorities and social construction of scandals. In a doctoral thesis, which examined mediated Swedish scandals,4 Tobias Bromander discussed whether female scandal subjects are treated differently from men in media reports. His conclusion was that scandals involving women tended to be reported over longer periods and with a higher number of articles than those involving male politicians. News about scandalized female politicians also seemed to awaken stronger, negative feelings and discontent than reporting on male-perpetrated scandals (Bromander 2012: 206). Elin Strand Hornnes (2012, 2013) highlights another gender-related question: How do female politicians involved in mediated political scandals defend themselves rhetorically? Her analysis is based on the rhetorical strategies of scandalized politicians in Norway, Sweden and Denmark. One of her conclusions is that female politicians who have learned to act like men in order to gain power and influence in the game of politics are still expected to be more relationoriented, more disposed to feeling guilty and apologetic when faced with scandal. This creates a clear contrast between expectations regarding women’s apologia and the defence strategies female politicians actually use. Another conclusion is that several of these scandals show a pattern of extended female responsibility: scandalized women are not only being held accountable for their own actions they are also responsible for what their husbands, partners or close family might do (Hornnes 2012: 136). 134

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Discussion and conclusion In the introduction to The Politics of Scandal, Markovits and Silverstein (1988: 6) proclaimed that “political scandals can only take place in democracies”. Neckel (2005: 103) takes this reasoning further: “Where there is no scandal, there is strict control of opinions, repression and boredom”. According to functional scandal theory, therefore, scandal is basically a “positive feature of liberal democratic politics”, reinforcing collective values and “ultimately strengthening the system, consistent with Durkheim’s ideas on social cohesion” (Brenton 2012: 816). As Thompson (2000: 93–94) argues, a definition that limits scandal to only one dynamic – the pursuit of power at the expense of process – is overly restrictive. Further, while liberal democracy can be characterized as scandal prone, political scandals do occur in many other regimes, including different authoritarian regimes. In relation to this theoretical discussion, it is interesting to note that in Nordic countries, which are all long-standing liberal democracies, a high incidence of national mediated political scandals is a relatively recent phenomenon. The prevalence of political scandals can, in other words, change substantially over time within the same political system. Several factors may have influenced the increased importance of scandals in Nordic countries after the millennium. One such factor, which was mentioned earlier, is that changes in the media system have altered the channels of political communication, weakened the old system of political loyalties and strengthened commercial news values. Another factor relates to changes in political culture. Voter volatility has increased, and voters are generally more erratic and less faithful to parties and party ideologies. As a consequence of the personification of party politics, individual politicians’ norm violations have gained prominence as a basis for political scandalization (Jenssen 2014). Economic change may also play a role. The liberalization and deregulation of the public sector in all Nordic countries has created opportunities for more private competition, but it has also increased the importance of lobbyism. Over the last few decades, several municipal corruption cases have gradually sullied the old impression of Nordic countries inhabiting a corruption-free zone. Large, state-owned Nordic companies have expanded in many parts of the world, but the other side of the coin is that there have been partnerships with corrupt power holders and various types of bribery. A final noteworthy factor involves changes in the political and cultural climate, often influenced by social movements. One example is the changed and more restrictive attitude towards the use and abuse of alcohol among Nordic politicians and political journalists, a practice that, until the 1980s, seldom led to mediated critique or public reactions. The enhancement of equality between men and women, and a strong feminist movement, have also led to greater awareness of sexual harassment as a societal problem. Is an increased incidence of mediated political scandals good for democracy? A general “yes” or “no” is, in our view, misleading. In some cases, the increased incidence represents important and critical media surveillance of political processes that hold leaders to account. In other mediated scandals, the intensity of the coverage is related to minor moral or legal transgressions that deserve public critique, however, in such cases, person-oriented media hunts replace democratic institutionalized types of correction. In some cases, elected leaders are pressed to resign before those who elected them have had a say in the matter, stepping down because the media dramaturgy threatens the stability of the whole organization. In the long run, this lack of distinction between the important and the trivial may undermine the scrutiny of power holders and thus the democratic importance of scandal reporting. 135

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Notes 1 The development in Iceland is not part of these Nordic studies. However, since 2008, Iceland has experienced several financial and political scandals relating to the international expansion of its banks. 2 For a detailed methodological presentation of the Nordic scandal register and coding, see Pollack et al. 2018. 3 One of her sins was her reference to the 9/11 terrorist attacks as “an accident”, a slip of the tongue she quickly regretted. Another embarrassing error was her placement of Auschwitz in Southern Germany in a radio interview. Media pundits treated the examples as a symbol of the Green Party’s incapacities as a responsible government party. 4 Bromander’s interpretation of political scandal is wider than the definition used in Allern et al. (2012) and Pollack et al. (2018) and includes critical news reports about politicians over a shorter period of time (three days) than that used in the Nordic study.

References Alexander, J. C. (1988). Culture and political crisis: “Watergate” and Durkheimian sociology. In J. C. Alexander, ed., Durkheimian sociology: cultural studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 187–224. Allern, S. (2017). The role of the media in Scandinavian politics. In P. Nedergaard and A. Wivel, eds., The Routledge handbook of Scandinavian politics. London: Routledge, pp. 174–186. Allern, S. and Blach-Ørsten, M. (2011). The news media as a political institution: A Scandinavian perspective. Journalism Studies, 12(1), pp. 92–105. Allern, S., Kantola, A., Pollack, E. and Blach-Ørsten, M. (2012). Increased scandalization: Nordic political scandals 1980–2010. In S. Allern and E. Pollack, eds., Scandalous! The mediated construction of political scandals in four Nordic countries. Gothenburg: Nordicom, pp. 29–50. Allern, S. and Pollack, E. (2012). Mediated scandals. In S. Allern and E. Pollack, eds., Scandalous! The mediated construction of political scandals in four Nordic countries. Gothenburg: Nordicom, pp. 9–28. Allern, S. and Pollack, E. (2016). Nordic political scandals – frequency, types and consequences. In M. Ludwig, T. Schierl and C. von Sikorski, eds., Mediated scandals: Gründe, Genese und Folgeeffekte von medialer Skandalberichtererstattung. Köln: Herbert von Halem Verlag, pp. 146–163. Bjerke, P. (2012). Media victims and media morals. In S. Allern and E. Pollack, eds., Scandalous! The mediated construction of political scandals in four Nordic countries. Gothenburg: Nordicom, pp. 165–179. Brenton, S. (2012). Scandals as a positive feature of liberal democratic politics: A Durkheimian perspective. Comparative Sociology, 11(6), pp. 815–844. DOI: 10.1163/15691330-12341247. Bromander, T. (2012). Politiska skandaler! Behandlas kvinnor och män olika i massmedia? [Political scandals! Are women and men treated differently in the mass media?]. Linneaeus University Dissertations nr. 107/2012. Linnaeus University Press. Ekström, M. and Johansson, B. (2008). Talk scandals. Media Culture & Society, 30(1), pp. 61–79. Entman, R. (2016). Scandal and silence in the American political system. In M. Ludwig, T. Schierl and C. von Sikorski, eds., Mediated scandals: Gründe, Genese und Folgeeffekte von medialer Skandalberichtererstattung. Köln: Herbert von Halem Verlag, pp. 77–99. Ettema, J. S. and Glasser, T. L. (1998). Custodians of Conscience: Investigative Journalism and Public Virtue. New York: Columbia University Press. Gmür, G. (2002). Der öffentlige Mensch. Medienstars and Medienopfer [The public man: Media stars and media victims]. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. Hallin, D. C. and Mancini, P. (2004). Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hammarlin, M.-M. (2015). I stormens öga [In the eye of the storm]. Båstad: Hammarlin Förlag. Herkman, J. (2017). Old patterns on new clothes? Populism and political scandals in the Nordic countries. Acta Sociologica. DOI: 10.1177/0001699317737816. Hornnes, E. S. (2012). When women have to apologize: Female apologia and political scandals. In S. Allern and E. Pollack, eds., Scandalous! The mediated construction of political scandals in four Nordic countries. Gothenburg: Nordicom, pp. 133–149. Hornnes, E. S. (2013). Når kvinner må si unnskyld. . . Medierte skandaler, kvinnelige politikere og retoriske forsvarsstrategier [When women have to apologize. . . Mediated scandals, female politicians and rhetorical defence strategies]. PhD dissertation, University of Oslo. Jacobsson, K. and Löfmark, E. (2008) A sociology of scandal and moral transgression. The Swedish “Nannygate” scandal. Acta Sociologica, 51(3), pp. 203–216. DOI: 10.1177/0001699308094166.

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New Nordic noir Jenssen, A. T. (2014). Medierte politiske skandaler: Sårbare politikere – usårbare partier? [Mediated political scandals: Vulnerable politicians – invulnerable parties?] Norsk Medietidsskrift, 21(2), pp. 100–116. Jenssen, A. T. and Fladmoe, H. (2012). Ten commandments for the scandalization of political opponents. In S. Allern and E. Pollack, eds., Scandalous! The mediated construction of political scandals in four Nordic countries. Nordicom: Göteborg, pp. 51–71. Kantola, A. (2012). Warriors for democracy: Scandal as a strategic ritual of journalism. In S. Allern and E. Pollack, eds., Scandalous! The mediated construction of political scandals in four Nordic countries. Gothenburg: Nordicom, pp. 73–85. Kantola, A. and Vesa, J. (2013). Mediated scandals as social dramas: Transforming the moral order in Finland. Acta Sociologica, 56(4), pp. 295–308. DOI: 10.1177/0001699313477872. Karlsen, K. E. and Duckert, F. (2018). Powerful and powerless: Psychological reactions of Norwegian politicians exposed in media scandals. International Journal of Communication, 12, pp. 3134–3152. Kepplinger, H. M. (2017). Die Mechanismen der Skandalisierung. Warum man den Medien gerade dann nich vertrauen kann, wenn es darauf ankommt [Mechanism of scandals: Why you can’t trust the media when you need them the most] (4th ed.). Reinbek: Lau Verlag. Kepplinger, H. M. (2018). Hidden traps: An essay on scandals. International Journal of Communication, 12, pp. 3153–3166. Kumlin, S. and Esaiasson, P. (2011). Scandal fatigue? Scandal elections and satisfaction with democracy in Western Europe 1977–2007. British Journal of Political Science, 42, pp. 263–282. DOI: 10.1017/ S000712341100024X. Mancini, P. (2018). “Assassination campaigns”: Corruption scandals and news media instrumentalization. International Journal of Communication, 12, pp. 3067–3086. Markovits A. S. and Silverstein, M. (1988). Introduction. In A. S. Markovits and M. Silverstein, (eds.) The politics of scandal: Power and progress in liberal democracies. New York/London: Holmes & Meier, pp. 1–12. Midtbø, T. (2012). Do mediated political scandals affect party popularity in Norway? In S. Allern and E. Pollack, eds., Scandalous! The mediated construction of political scandals in four Nordic countries. Gothenburg: Nordicom, pp. 151–163. Neckel, S. (2005). Political scandals: An analytical framework. Comparative Sociology, 4, pp. 101–114. Nord, L., Enli, G. and Stúr, E. (2012). Pundits and political scandals. In S. Allern and E. Pollack, eds., Scandalous! The mediated construction of political scandals in four Nordic countries. Gothenburg: Nordicom, pp. 87–102. Pollack, E. (2015). Personalized scandalization: Sensationalising trivial conflicts? In M. F. Eskjær, S. Hjarvard and M. Mortensen, eds., The dynamics of mediatized conflict. New York: Peter Lang, pp. 93–110. Pollack, E., Allern, S., Kantola, A. and Blach Ørsten, M. (2018). The new normal: Scandal as a standard feature of political life in the Nordic countries. International Journal of Communication, 12, pp. 3087–3108. Sass J. and Crosbie, T. (2013). Democracy and scandal: A research agenda. Comparative Sociology, 12, pp. 851–862. Syvertsen, T., Enli, G., Mjøs, O. and Moe, H. (2014). The Media Welfare State: Nordic Media in the Digital Era. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Thompson, J. B. (2000). Political scandal: Power and visibility in the media age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Verbalyte, M. (2018). Deconstruction of the emotional logic of political scandal. In A. Haller, M. Henrik and M. Kraus, eds., Scandology: An interdisciplinary field. Köln: Herbert von Halem Verlag, pp. 62–87. Von Sikorski, C. (2018). The aftermath of political scandals: A meta-analysis. International Journal of Communications, 12, pp. 3109–3133.

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13 POLITICAL SCANDAL AND KOMPROMAT Manufactured outrage from Russia Sarah Oates Authoritarian states manufacture and amplify scandal as an effective political weapon in the twenty-first century. Authoritarian leaders are able not only to use state-controlled media systems, but now are able to leverage many aspects of the way in which news is spread in the global online sphere to harvest significant political capital from both real and manufactured scandals. In many ways, authoritarian regimes are pioneering the more modern approach of perverting the democratic role of the media to inform even before widespread ‘fake news’ started to appear more recently in the West. This chapter will present a model of politicized scandal in authoritarian media systems. In analysing the origin, design and deployment of political scandal in authoritarian regimes such as Russia, we can understand how both controlled and free media can become weaponized against domestic and foreign targets. This will show how authoritarian regimes have adapted to changing media tastes and formats, particularly in the way in which Russian-style kompromat (Russian for “compromising material”) is moulded into an alluring form of infotainment and pseudo-facts that serve as highly effective weapons against political opponents. In this chapter, I will discuss how the authoritarian use of political scandal parallels aspects of the use of scandal by leaders in democratic systems, particularly by President Donald Trump and his Republican supporters. Through an understanding of the role of scandal in non-free states, we can assess the threat of politicized scandal to democracy in general. While the concept of scandal is defined throughout this volume, for the purposes of this chapter it is useful to consider that ‘scandal’ does not have an absolute definition. ‘Scandal’ refers to something that is considered morally or legally wrong. However, what is morally or legally wrong is contingent on factors such as the country in which the scandal takes place, the general climate of tolerance, religious values, as well as individual beliefs. For example, reporting that a politician is a homosexual would not be considered ‘scandalous’ by the general public in the United States, but it would likely be in Russia, where there is little public acceptance of homosexuality. In addition, the concept of scandal can also refer separately to the public outrage, divorced from the moral or legal implications, of any particular act. It is the ability to divorce the reality of what happened from a public outcry that creates a powerful propaganda opportunity for authoritarian leaders. In this way, they can harness the politics of outrage through specific media tactics without having to rely on facts. Through the political use of scandals, authoritarian leaders can humiliate and disempower political enemies with manufactured outrage. 138

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Why media systems matter The same way in which scandal is contingent on different legal and moral codes, the media itself does not play the same role in varying countries. In considering the role of scandal in authoritarian regimes, it is important to reflect on the role of the media in non-free states. In authoritarian states, the media is an explicit tool of the rulers. As described by Siebert, Peterson and Schramm (1963), the authoritarian model of the press means that the media should ‘support and advance the policies of the government in power that this government can achieve its objectives’ (p. 18), with the media in the role of propagandists in the service of authoritarian leaders. The authoritarian model of the media is not entirely useful in that Siebert et al. perceived this model as a system with privately owned media controlled by a system of elites who were loyal to the authoritarian regime. In the case of Russia, there are significant echoes of the Soviet system (Siebert et al. 1963; Oates 2007) in that key media outlets such as major television networks are either directly or indirectly owned by the state. In fact, state-owned media typically play a critical role in setting the media agenda and supporting regimes in non-free states. In the Soviet system, media were simply another government department and there was no private or commercial media. Understanding the role of media in non-free states is important because democratic media systems are relatively rare: Freedom House (2017a) estimates that only 13 per cent of the world’s population enjoys a free press that works in the service of the citizen and democratic values in general. Freedom House notes that media systems are disempowered through legal, political and economic means for most of the world’s citizens. Rather than serving as a watchdog on power or a voice for the people, media in many countries serve as mouthpieces for the leaders and government repression. At the same time as using these traditional ways of repressing freedom of speech, many authoritarian leaders have found ways to proactively use scandal as a way of both engaging attention and attacking opponents. Russia serves as a key example of this. The country has seen a steady decline of media freedom over recent decades, using tactics ranging from forced ownership changes in media outlets, violence against journalists, a legal system used to punish those who publish news not sanctioned by the Kremlin, and a lack of journalistic professionalism in general (Oates 2013; Freedom House 2017a). The use of politicized scandal in Russian politics flourishes in this system and adds a very useful element to the toolkit of media in the service of repression.

History of politicized scandal in Russia The use of the Putin regime of politicized scandal is unsurprising as the synergistic relationship between scandal and politics has deep roots in the Soviet history of contemporary Russia. In the Soviet model of the media, it was the duty of the media to promote and preserve the Communist Party at the expense of anything or anyone else (Siebert et al. 1963; Oates 2007). Throughout the Soviet period (1917–1991), both those who challenged the Soviet system and those who had fallen out of favour due to power struggles within the Communist Party were subjected to public vilification in the mass media (McNair 1991). During the Great Purges under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin (who ruled from 1922 to 1952), millions of citizens were accused of disloyalty to the state, executed or imprisoned in work camps (Wheatcroft 1999). Part of the ‘Great Terror’, as it came to be known, was the accusation of crimes and denunciation of more prominent individuals in the mass media, typically through staged ‘show’ trials that were extensively covered in the media. As all media were owned by the state, there were no outlets to challenge the regime’s propaganda. 139

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While the use of the mass media as a weapon by the Soviet state against the citizens was well established, significant changes occurred in the media at the end of the Soviet regime (McNair 1991; Mickiewicz 1997). The last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, decreed a policy of ‘glasnost’ or transparency in the media, requiring that journalists report more widely on the issues and problems in society. Freed from their stultifying role as the mouthpiece of the Communist Party, the media rapidly began to cover scandals both old and new (Mickiewicz 1997; Oates 2006). One of the most popular stories to signal the end of the Communist news narrative was an exposé in the central party paper Pravda (Truth) that revealed how party officials had access to superior goods and services not available to most Soviet citizens (Conine 1986). Other stories went into deeper and darker secrets, ranging from an exposé of how Russian soldiers had shot Polish officers and buried them in an unmarked grave in the Katyn Forest in World War II1 to how the Soviet system had used mental hospitals as a way to imprison and terrorize dissidents. In the glasnost period from 1986 to the collapse of the Soviet system in 1991, scandal was focused on the crimes of the Communist Party. Freed from repressive censorship and fear of reprisal, the Soviet media entered an age of intense interest that came from journalists and citizens alike, with new stories that unlocked past secrets being published at a furious rate. By the end of the glasnost period, there was immense competition from various media outlets to promote different narratives, resulting in a range of approaches and stories for the public. The state lost control of the narrative and the media, to the point that when the Communist Party attempted to regain control of the country and the main television station, journalists defied the armed soldiers and managed to transmit messages of rebellion to the citizens. The Communist Party was thrown out of power, the Soviet Union was disbanded, and 15 new countries were established, with Russia as the largest and most powerful successor state. The first years of the new Russian state, in which Boris Yeltsin served as president, are a clear example of how media can be powerful in either maintaining or ultimately challenging authoritarian power, yet struggle with the task of state-building in challenging economic conditions. The collapse of the Soviet state, a lack of viable transition plans, as well as massive corruption left the Russian economy in ruins. Within the course of a few years, the euphoria at the end of the Soviet regime turned for the Russian public into deep distrust of the new government, particularly given that the economic collapse had led to hyperinflation, widespread unemployment and deep poverty – all three conditions which had been unknown in the Soviet era. Much of the media, even the state-run media, became deeply critical of the Yeltsin administration. It was clear that any Soviet notion of the media as a tool of enlightenment was failing, particularly after the Russian pro-government party lost badly in the first free parliamentary elections (Oates 2006). The relationship between Yeltsin and the Russian parliament deteriorated so badly that the president disbanded the legislature by force, with around 200 people dying in bloody street clashes in Moscow in 1993. The government soon turned to the authoritarian model again, finding ways to control the media through a range of tactics. At the same time, the Russians were able to improve on the Soviet system by finding a way to use the media proactively to attack its enemies (Oates 2006). This politicized use of the media was becoming apparent particularly through political television talk shows (Oates 2006). While standard news on state-run Russian television channels showed clear evidence of pro-state bias (European Institute for the Media 2000a, 2000b; Oates 2006), political news shows introduced and popularized the Russian style of kompromat. Short for “compromising material” in Russian, kompromat is the combination of news with blackmail. It can range from hints or allegations, but generally it includes at least some sort of evidence (often faked at least to a degree) that can embrace elements such as images, videos or legal documentation. Sex or pornography is often an element of the most popular kind of kompromat. 140

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It is not the same as ‘fake news’, although it can share the elements of plausibility combined with titillation. It trades on the sensationalization of news that is augmented by scandalous details. While it typically incorporates dramatic elements such as sex and crime that can be found in popular dramas, at the same time the idea that this is ‘news’ elevates the interest and credibility of the story. Kompromat is an alluring combination of alleged facts, spicy details and a facade of actual news that is particularly compelling to the viewer or reader. One of its best features is that the story doesn’t have to hold up in the face of scrutiny. First, it is unlikely that a Russian media outlet will challenge a Kremlin-friendly piece of kompromat that is published or broadcast via another outlet. Second, even if the victim can make a case against the allegations, it is difficult to escape the miasma of the scandal once it is reported. Thus, kompromat is a flexible and useful information weapon for the state. There is evidence that Vladimir Putin was involved in one of the first major uses of kompromat in the Russian regime. Yeltsin’s administration (1991–1999) was marked by a steadily deteriorating relationship with the media. Despite the ability to control state-run media outlets, Yeltsin’s political capital from leading the 1991 break with the Communist Party eroded rapidly in his time as president. While the Yeltsin administration successfully manipulated the media to ensure critical support for his election and that of the pro-government party (Oates 2006), one of Yeltsin’s most significant challenges was from powerful Russian prosecutor Yuri Skuratov. Skuratov claimed to have detailed and damning evidence of how top Russian officials were siphoning off money to put into foreign bank accounts. When Yeltsin could not convince the Russian parliament to fire Skuratov, a man who appeared to be the prosecutor was shown having sex with two prostitutes on television (Ioffe 2017). This created a sensation and Skuratov was forced to resign. Putin, as head of the Russian security services (formerly the KGB), would likely have been involved in this operation (ibid.). Indeed, Putin appeared on Russian TV to claim that the tape was authentic (ibid.). The Skuratov affair established many key elements of contemporary Russian kompromat. In a good kompromat operation, Russian media organizations work in tandem with the Kremlin to find ways that are both appealing and effective for discrediting a target. This worked very efficiently to help rid Yeltsin of a dangerous enemy, although the evidence held by Skuratov was no doubt much more important in journalistic terms than a murky video of someone allegedly having sex. However, it was enough to derail a significant threat to the regime. It was a lesson that Putin learnt well.

Putin and politicized scandal Russia has become steadily less free since Putin was appointed president in 1999 (Oates 2013; Freedom House 2017b). Putin has gone on to win four presidential elections, most recently in March 2018, and enjoys a relatively high popularity rating.2 It is unsurprising that there is little viable opposition to Putin, in that his administration has systematically attacked, destroyed or co-opted any viable political opponents. His regime has been marked by excessive corruption, erosion of citizen rights and military incursions into neighbouring countries, including the seizure of Crimea in 2014 and the backing of separatists in the civil war in Eastern Ukraine. From the Skuratov affair in 1999, kompromat has been a consistent feature of the Russian media sphere. The Kremlin used corruption kompromat against Moscow Mayor and former Kremlin ally Yuri Luzhkov when he made a bid for presidential power in 1999. Through a popular political affairs show, there were features on Luzhkov’s suspiciously fabulous wealth for a public servant, demonstrating that he was stealing money from the state. These televised reports featured picture montages of Luzhkov, his racing stables, his lavish mansion on the outskirts of 141

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Moscow, and documentation that flashed too quickly on the screen to be examined in depth (see Oates 2006). Luzhkov eventually withdrew his challenge to presidential power (although there have been significant suspicions and reporting in later years about corruption involving him and his current wife; see Harding 2010). The Luzhkov kompromat did not rely on sex videos (either staged or real) but much Russian kompromat does. In 2010, videos of Russian opposition journalists and politicians who had been filmed separately having sex with the same Russian woman were leaked online. The men had been invited to the woman’s home, where the cameras were in place. In 2016, an opposition political party was damaged when a video emerged of a married party leader having sex with an aide. In this case, the recording was made by a planted camera in a home unknown to either party. It’s particularly chilling that they were recorded in a private home as opposed to being lured to a ‘honey pot’ location (Ormiston 2016). In other evidence that the Kremlin has calculated new ways to ‘up the ante’ in kompromat, several opponents of the regime found themselves facing charges after child pornography was found on their computers. They believe the material was planted by Russian hackers (Higgins 2016). This happened not only to people in Russia, but to those living in the United Kingdom and Lithuania who have opposed the Russian regime. That is not to say that the politicized scandal at the heart of kompromat is always successful, particularly when it is clumsy or aimed at those with their own media voice. In 2012, a media outlet published a picture of Kremlin opponent Alexei Navalny allegedly posing with exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky.3 A caption with the picture suggested that forces outside Russia were funding opposition efforts. Navalny then produced the original photo, showing he was actually standing with a different man. Russians, who share a twin love of Photoshop and the absurd, were soon creating and sharing their own doctored images online of Navalny with individuals ranging from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Adolf Hitler to an extraterrestrial.4 Despite its occasional failures, kompromat is beautifully flexible. If a story isn’t playing well or if there is too much credible pushback, the perpetrators simply move on without apology or correction. The original story disappears, but it leaves confusion and unease in the minds of the audience. In a broader sense, the politicized scandal found in kompromat has both specific and general utility for an authoritarian regime. In a practical and immediate sense, it is a useful tool to rob those who would challenge the oligarchs for power by making them the objects of ridicule or, at least, making people feel a sense of doubt about them through vague claims or sex-tape set-ups. At the same time, politicized scandal undermines trust in both the political system and the mass media. If you can erode trust in both of these key democratic institutions, it is easier for authoritarian leaders to rule through manipulation and corruption.

The export of kompromat In 2016, US intelligence officials warned Donald Trump that there were rumours that Russian operatives had gathered compromising material on the future president when he had visited Moscow in 2013 for the Miss Universe pageant (Miller, Nakashima, and DeYoung 2017). Given the widespread surveillance the Kremlin has arranged on even relatively low level political figures, it would be unsurprising if they had attempted a ‘honey pot’ trap with Trump. Honey traps are slang for using attractive sexual partners (typically, but not exclusively, women for men) to lure people into having sex in places with video surveillance. Even without a specific plan for any of the footage, this would be seen as a useful asset by the Kremlin. The more salacious, the better. The Kremlin has denied that it sought to gather compromising information on Trump during his visits to Russia, as it has denied involvement in the email hacks of the Democratic 142

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National Committee (with much less credibility in the former case). But a high-profile businessman such as Trump would be a standard target for such an operation5 and Kremlin denials are also standard. The revelations around the US campaign highlight kompromat’s move from a domestic to an international tool for authoritarian regimes such as Russia and is part of that country’s expanding global information war, which has focused on news manipulation and disinformation. These efforts have been deployed to counter criticism of Russia over international events. For example, the Russian media tried to find ways to blame Ukraine for the destruction of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, when evidence clearly pointed to Russian military involvement in the downing of the flight and the deaths of all 298 people aboard (Oates 2014). There is clear evidence, too, that Russia is trying to influence the media in other countries. For example, a 2017 study documented how Russian operatives had attempted to sway Swedish affairs through media manipulation, including forgeries and disinformation (Kragh and Åsberg 2017). The Russian government funds a large-scale international broadcast operation in foreign countries, including RT television in English.6

Towards a model of politicized scandal The question at issue is whether kompromat can be understood as a prototype of politicized scandal in a way that makes it useful in terms of understanding the role of scandal in the media more generally. This discussion has demonstrated the key elements of kompromat: 1 It is aimed at discrediting an individual (and by extension an institution such as a political party); 2 The ‘evidence’ is typically visual and often in the form that the target would find embarrassing or even degrading; 3 It mixes news and entertainment, presented in a style that leverages the attention-grabbing nature of entertainment but provides a veneer of authority in a news format; 4 It demonstrates the weaponization of media that eventually discredits and disempowers the democratic role of the media to provide citizens with unbiased information and serve as a watchdog on the state. All of this allows for the politicization of scandal. The coverage of scandal is – and should be – an important part of the democratic function of the mass media. However, kompromat has two specific elements that conflict with the democratic function of the press. First, it tends to be manufactured, if not by filming people clandestinely, by combining or distorting information in such a way as to create an impression of wrongdoing (or, at the very least, not subjecting themselves to the same scrutiny, such as corrupt leaders accusing others of corruption by using kompromat). At the same time, it subverts the democratic function of the media by using it as a tool for the elites rather than in the service of informing the masses. If we understand kompromat in a generalized way, we start to see pervasive parallels between the Putin regime and the Trump administration’s attempted use of the mass media. This was immediately apparent when the White House insisted, despite clear photographic evidence to the contrary, that Trump’s inauguration was attended by more people than Obama’s first inauguration (Frostenson 2017). Trump personally (both through his Twitter account and speeches) has lied and failed to respect the value of the media in a democracy (Kessler, Rizzo and Kelly 2018). While he, more than the White House itself, has dabbled in character assassination through his Twitter account, two years into his administration there is little sign the White House has been fabricating dossiers on political enemies in the same way as the Kremlin. 143

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However, popular media outlets that are allied with Trump, from InfoWars to Fox News, have been presenting biased and selective information about those who challenged Trump in a way that parallels the Kremlin’s use of kompromat. At the same time, Trump has employed politicized scandal himself. His false claim in 2016 that a former Miss Universe, with whom he was having a public feud, had made a sex tape was a classic example of kompromat (DelReal and Wagner 2018). For many years, Trump spearheaded a campaign to convince the public that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. In the tradition of kompromat, Trump constantly claimed to have material that proved the president was lying about his birthplace (Johnson 2016). He never produced any and simply dropped the lie during the election campaign by stating another blatant lie that Hillary Clinton had started the birther movement. When challenged, Trump has a tendency to attack the questioner rather than answer the question. That leaves journalists trying to fill in the gaps, but it also means coverage of his outrageous comments draws attention away from critical reporting on him or his lack of policy specifics. By impugning individuals, Trump has been able to dominate the news cycle in both the primary and general-election campaigns, shifting focus from his weaknesses by attacking others. This demonstrates the power of politicizing scandal in a democratic media system. Studies of the election coverage show that this tactic disadvantaged Democratic contender Hilary Clinton, herself a victim of kompromat from a Russian-organized hack of the Democratic Party email system (Ryan, Nakashima and DeYoung 2016). Kompromat or politicized scandal is not only a tool in authoritarian political and media systems such as Russia. As the Trump campaign and administration demonstrate, politicized scandal can be a powerful weapon in democratic systems too. Trump has been able to use a free media system to perpetuate half-truths and lies about his political opponents. He is supported by some legacy media outlets, such as Fox News, but the ability to perpetuate his own brand of kompromat is a symptom of significant challenges to a democratic media system in the internet age. The flow of both attention and revenue to the online sphere has left traditional media outlets struggling to fund proper journalism. At the same time, rumour, infotainment and kompromat has proven to be more resilient than balanced news stories for many Americans in the digital sphere. In this way, we see politicized scandal as a dangerous element in the current Western media system. Kompromat is a powerful tool that highlights some of the challenges for US politicians, media and citizens in the current media age.

Conclusions With roots in the Soviet system, Russians have developed and deployed politicized scandal in the form of kompromat, which is a useful and flexible tool that augments the state’s tight control of the mass media. It allows the Kremlin to make targeted attacks on specific enemies with popular and alluring stories. It is difficult, if not impossible, for the victims to recover their reputations and challenge the authoritarian leaders. At the same time, the constant perversion of the mass media from informing the public to serving the needs of corrupt elites means that journalism itself is under threat. People may enjoy the titillating stories, but the constant half-truths and lies means that there is an inevitable erosion of trust in the media as a reliable purveyor of information. Without a free and trusted media, democracy is impossible. Thus, the use of politicized scandal is a powerful tool for disempowering the media and disenfranchising the citizens, while still maintaining power for a small circle of elites. The experience of kompromat and politicized scandal in Russia is an important lesson for the United States. Trump and his administration also have shown contempt for the ideals of 144

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journalism, ready to use the media to project a message of their own choosing and lie constantly to attack political rivals. Trump lies with complete impunity – The Washington Post documented 3,001 false or misleading statements made by Trump by 1 May 2018 (Kessler, Rizzo and Kelly 2018). He is by no means the first American president to fail to tell the truth, but he is the first to lie on a scale that would suggest he is embracing an authoritarian model of the media rather than a liberal one. Given the parallels between Putin and Trump’s use of the media as a political weapon to manufacture outrage, it is likely that shades of kompromat and political scandal will threaten US media freedom as it has Russian media freedom over the years. It is also a warning to journalists not to fall into the trap of covering scandals, instead of the news.

Notes 1 BBC News, ‘Russia to release massacre files’, 16 December 2004, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ europe/4102967.stm (accessed 17 May 2018). 2 The Russian public opinion organization, the Levada Center, found Putin had an 82 per cent approval rating in April 2018; see http://www.levada.ru/en/. The Levada Center is considered to be relatively independent from Kremlin influence. 3 Berezovsky was a powerful Russian oligarch, who eventually was forced into exile in the United Kingdom and was found hanged in 2013. 4 ‘Russia protest leader Alexei Navalny is target of fake photo smear’, The Guardian, 9 January 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jan/09/russian-navalny-fake-photo-smear (accessed 17 May 2018). 5 David Filipov and Andrew Roth, ‘Kremlin denies reports it collected salacious intelligence on presidentelect’, The Washington Post, 12 January 2017, retrieved from LexisNexis (accessed 17 May 2018). 6 The United States also has propaganda outlets in foreign countries, including Russian-language television targeted at Russian citizens. However, US law prohibits its foreign broadcast information from using the same tactics of disinformation as used by RT and other Russian English-language propaganda. Nor can the US public diplomacy outlets such as Radio Liberty or Current Time (Nastoyashchee Vremya) TV be distributed as a regular ‘news’ channel as RT can be in the Western system.

References Conine, Ernest. 1986. Soviet Privileged Class is Under Fire: Perks of Party Elite Confront Gorbachev With Dilemma. Los Angeles Times, 17 March, http://articles.latimes.com/1986-03-17/local/me-22368_1_ soviet-union (accessed 17 May 2018). DelReal, Jose A. and John Wagner. 2018. Trump under Fire for Sending Nasty Tweets about ‘Disgusting’ ex-Miss Universe. 30 September, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ politics/2016/09/30/85064282-8727-11e6-92c2-14b64f3d453f_story.html?utm_term=.a33f52dfe4d7 (accessed 17 May 2018). European Institute for the Media. 2000a. Monitoring the Media Coverage of the December 1999 Parliamentary Elections in Russia. Final Report. Dusseldorf: European Institute for the Media, http://www.mediapolitics.com/eim-reports accessed 8 February 2019. European Institute for the Media. 2000b. Monitoring the Media Coverage of the March 2000 Presidential Elections in Russia. Final Report. Dusseldorf: European Institute for the Media, http://www.mediapolitics.com/eim-reports accessed 8 February 2019. Freedom House. 2017a. Freedom of the Press 2017: Press Freedom’s Dark Horizon. New York: Freedom House, https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/FOTP_2017_booklet_FINAL_April28.pdf (accessed 17 May 2018). Freedom House. 2017b. Russia. In Freedom House, (Eds.), Freedom of the Press 2017. New York: Freedom House. Frostenson, Sarah. 2017. A Crowd Scientist Says Trump’s Inauguration Attendance Was Average. Vox, 24 January, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/24/14354036/crowds-presidentialinaugurations-trump-average (accessed 17 May 2018).

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Sarah Oates Harding, Luke. 2010. WikiLeaks Cables: Moscow Mayor Presided over ‘Pyramid of Corruption’. The Guardian, 1 December, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/01/wikileaks-cables-moscowmayor-corruption (accessed 17 May 2018). Higgins, Andrew. 2016. Foes of Russia say Child Pornography Is Planted to Ruin Them. The New York Times, 9 December, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/world/europe/vladimir-putin-russiafake-news-hacking-cybersecurity.html?_r=0 (accessed 17 May 2018). Ioffe, Julia. 2017. How State-Sponsored Blackmail Works in Russia. The Atlantic, 11 January, https:// www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/01/kompromat-trump-dossier/512891/ (accessed 17 May 2018). Johnson, Jenna. 2016. Trump Admits Obama Was Born in the U.S., but Falsely, The Washington Post, 16 September, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/09/16/trump-admitsobama-was-born-in-u-s-but-falsely-blames-clinton-for-starting-rumors/ (accessed 17 May 2018). Kessler, Glenn, Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly. 2018. President Trump Has Made 3,001 False or Misleading Claims so far. The Washington Post, 1 May, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ fact-checker/wp/2018/05/01/president-trump-has-made-3001-false-or-misleading-claimsso-far/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.91007ac5f441 (accessed 17 May 2018). Kragh, Martin and Sebastian Åsberg. 2017. Russia’s Strategy for Influence through Public Diplomacy and Active Measures: The Swedish Case. Journal of Strategic Studies 40(6): 773–816. McNair, Brian. 1991. Glasnost, Perestroika, and the Soviet Media. London: Routledge. Mickiewicz, Ellen. 1997. Changing Channels: Television and the Struggle for Power in Russia. New York: Oxford University Press. Miller, Greg, Ellen Nakashima and Karen DeYoung. 2017. Decision to Brief Trump on Allegations Brought a Secret and Unsubstantiated Dossier into the Public Domain. The Washington Post, 11 January, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/decision-to-brief-trump-on-allegationsbrought-a-secret-and-unsubstantiated-dossier-into-the-public-domain/2017/01/11/275a3a6c-d830-1 1e6-b8b2-cb5164beba6b_story.html?utm_term=.5c10b429dc36 (accessed 17 May 2018). Oates, Sarah. 2006. Television, Democracy and Elections in Russia. London: RoutledgeCurzon. Oates, Sarah. 2007. The Neo-Soviet Model of the Media. Europe-Asia Studies 59(8): 1279–1297. Oates, Sarah. 2013. Revolution Stalled: The Political Limits of the Internet in the Post-Soviet Sphere. New York: Oxford University Press. Oates, Sarah. 2014. Russian State Narrative in the Digital Age: Rewired Propaganda in Russian Television News Framing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. Paper presented at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C., August. Ormiston, Susan. 2016. Sex Tape Scandal Was Work of Putin, Says Russian Political Activist Exposed in Video. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 9 April, http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/russian-sextape-1.3526425 (accessed 17 May 2018). Siebert, Fredrick S., Theodore Peterson and Wilbur Schramm. 1963. Four Theories of the Press: The Authoritarian, Libertarian, Social Responsibility, and Soviet Communist Concepts of What the Press Should Be and Do. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Ryan, Missy, Ellen Nakashima and Karen DeYoung. 2016. Obama Administration Announces Measure to Punish Russia for 2016 Election Interference. The Washington Post, 29 December, https://www. washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/obama-administration-announces-measures-to-punishrussia-for-2016-election-interference/2016/12/29/311db9d6-cdde-11e6-a87f-b917067331bb_story. html?utm_term=.1e188c1d8290 (accessed 17 May 2018). Wheatcroft, Stephen G. 1999. Victims of Stalinism and the Soviet Secret Police: The Comparability and Reliability of the Archival Data. Not the Last Word. Europe-Asia Studies 51(2): 315–345.

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14 RIGHT-WING POPULISM, MEDIA AND POLITICAL SCANDAL Juha Herkman and Janne Matikainen

Introduction By sending out short, provocative messages, Donald Trump has successfully exploited social media, especially Twitter, and set journalistic news media agendas. In many Western European countries, right-wing populist politicians have bypassed mainstream media by making similarly provocative statements, which can be and are termed ‘scandalous’. Even if the intersection of right-wing populism and political scandals has been eye-catching, particularly in the twenty-firstcentury’s liberal democracies, scandalogy has paid only little attention to the issue, remaining more focused on traditional forms of political scandal, such as the sex, power and financial scandals defined in Thompson’s (2000, 120–123) seminal work. In this chapter we discuss how radical right-wing populist movements have become entangled in and exploited political scandals in their communication. The focus here is on European and American liberal democracies in which nativist right-wing populist parties or politicians have gained remarkable success in elections and politics during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These parties and politicians have emphasized nationalist approaches and created several public scandals by explicitly attacking immigrants, refugees and other minorities with comments and behaviour that denigrates and marginalizes them. The relationship between right-wing populism and the media is complex but the turn towards a so-called ‘hybrid media system’ (Chadwick 2013) – in which traditional news media is linked in multiple ways to online and social media – makes the situation even more complicated. As political scandals are always ‘mediated events’ (Thompson 2000, 60–61), understanding the different logics behind politics and the media in this hybrid environment is essential if we are to understand the pattern of scandals connected to right-wing populism in the twenty-first century.

Scandalogy and right-wing populism The connection between scandals and populism has been reported by several scholars, some even arguing that the creation of a scandal is one of the key communication strategies used by right-wing populists, who intentionally provoke to gain increased and significant media attention in liberal news environments that are generally hostile to their perspectives and opinions. Thus, they make their underdog position a typical communication strategy (e.g. Stewart et al. 147

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2003, 230–232; Mazzoleni 2008, 55–57; Wodak 2015, 19–20). Ruth Wodak (2013, 32–33) has called this the ‘right-wing populist perpetuum mobile’, that is the continuation of public sensations, provocations and scandals through which populist actors try to manipulate the public sphere to set agendas and gain attention from news media. Donald Trump fits into this model as do European right-wing populist leaders, such as Jörg Haider and Geert Wilders (see Wodak 2013; 2015). Furthermore, populist actors exploit political scandals linked to established political players to argue that the political elite is corrupt and thus no better than them (e.g. Stanyer et al. 2017). Even if scandalous provocations have been inherently linked to right-wing populist communication, actual scandalogy as well as populism studies have paid little attention to these affairs. Scandals seem to be a side path in populism studies, which tend to focus on the overall dimensions of scandalous populist communication (e.g. Aalberg et al. 2017) or style (Moffitt 2017) – or on more precise themes, such as populist discursive or rhetoric strategies in various communication forums (e.g. Sakki & Pettersson 2016; Hatakka et  al. 2017). However, not many empirical analyses focus on the specific political scandals linked to right-wing populist actors. An exception is Wodak (2013; 2015), who has studied the discursive strategies used by Jörg Haider (1950–2008), the leader of Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), and those of other European populist right-wing movements that have exploited political scandals in their twenty-first-century campaigns. In addition, Herkman (2017) has analysed political scandals linked to Danish, Swedish and Finnish right-wing populist parties. Herkman and Matikainen (2016) also studied the role of social media in a Finnish political scandal caused by an MP of the populist Finns Party in 2015. At least two explanations can be found for this lack of research. First, the sensationalist and scandalous dimension of right-wing populism is so obvious that it is taken for granted rather than seen as a genuine research subject. Scandals linked to right-wing populist actors are therefore not seen as an interesting empirical research topic. Populism studies have instead concentrated on political scientific rather than sociological or communication approaches, thus directing research towards political systems, party politics and ideological studies – which reduces interest in topics like scandals. Second, scandalogy has traditionally concentrated on ‘serious’ political scandals connected to key political power-holders, such as presidents, prime ministers or other decision makers, with the focus being on power, financial and sex scandals that have removed power-holders from their positions. Generally, right-wing populist actors have not attained such positions, and scandals linked to them derive from their own provocations rather than revelations made by journalists or other political players. There are also differences that obviously derive from political contexts and media systems. In the Anglo-American context, a liberal media and a two-party electoral system have made political scandals historically more common than, for example, in North and Central European ‘democratic-corporatist’ countries with strong traditions of public service broadcasting and consensual multi-party decision making (cf. Hallin & Mancini 2004). This may direct scandal analyses in the Anglo-American context more towards ground-breaking political scandals than to populist sensations, which are considered rather normal in political life (cf. Thompson 2000; Garrard & Newell 2006; Entman 2012). In the Nordic countries political scandals are a quite recent phenomenon, becoming common only in the late twentieth century due to the increasing commercialization and liberalization of the news media – in which the media has more eagerly than before ‘scandalized’ politics (Allern & Pollack 2012). Allern and others (2012) compared political scandals in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland between the 1970s and the 2000s and discovered that the norm transgressions behind the scandals have turned from the misuse of power and finances towards unacceptable talk or 148

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behaviour during the 2000s. The tendency was even accelerated in the early 2010s (Allern & Pollack 2016). Herkman (2018) indicated that the obvious reason for the change was the increase in scandals linked to the region’s domestic right-wing populist parties, especially in Finland and Sweden, when they enjoyed remarkable success in that decade’s general elections, therefore becoming more established players in their political fields. The provocative statements of the populist politicians were – during that time – scandalized more widely than before. Since many of these scandals derive from inappropriate statements, they can be linked to the idea of ‘talk scandals’ formulated by Ekström and Johansson (2008). However, Herkman (2018) has argued that, despite many similarities, scandals linked to right-wing populist parties often differ from ordinary talk scandals because they originate not from the media’s active role but from the intentional provocations of populist actors themselves. Secondly, scandals linked to right-wing populists can also be caused by unacceptable behaviour, such as making Nazi gestures, and not just by provocative talk. Thirdly, the risk of the legal consequences in scandals linked to right-wing populism is common but almost non-existent in talk scandals. Therefore, Herkman (2018) defines these affairs as ‘neo-populist scandals’ – a type of scandal especially common in the twenty-first-century’s Northern and Central European liberal democracies and often created by successful right-wing populist movements. A typical neo-populist scandal originates from the unacceptable talk or behaviour of a rightwing populist politician who intentionally insults immigrants or other minorities, often via social media forums. Liberal mainstream media and politicians scandalize the event but the supporters of the populist politician create a social media ‘counter-cycle’ in which they accuse political and media elites of conducting a witch-hunt (see Jenssen & Fladmoe 2012). Since most liberal democracies forbid demagogy and hate speech against ethnic, religious or sexual minorities by law, the scandal may result in legal repercussions or facing sanctions. However, the political consequences of a scandal will differ, based on the status of the politician in question. If the populist right-wing movement or politician is in the break-through phase, the scandal may increase their popularity, because their supporters believe that a media hunt represents the viewpoints of a corrupt elite and their excessive liberal opinions. However, if the movement or its politicians have achieved an established position, which is reminiscent of more mainstream political players, the political consequences of the scandal become more serious. Even if populist actors intentionally provoke an incident, large-scale public scandals are not necessarily what they aim for and they might genuinely arise by accident. Thus, the intentional communication strategy of the ‘right-wing populist perpetuum mobile’ (Wodak 2013, 32) does not always lie behind these scandals – errors or a lack of consideration are equally likely. This is especially true in cases when a populist actor has gained an established position in the political field yet becomes embroiled in a public scandal because of unacceptable talk or behaviour. As Wodak (2013, 29) has indicated, populist actors cannot continue with their populist rhetoric after achieving significant positions of power in multi-party democracies in which they have to collaborate with other political parties. In addition, in neo-populist scandals other political actors need to be active in the scandalizing processes and support the media, which cannot usually sustain a scandal alone (cf. Entman 2012).

Right-wing populism and the media logic Populism has been called ‘chameleonic’ and ‘vague’ as a term and is hard to define because it has been linked to very different ideologies and movements – be they right-wing or left-wing, democratic or authoritarian, urban or agrarian (Canovan 1999; Taggart 2000). However, key features are repeated in almost all definitions of populism, namely the central position of ‘the people’ in 149

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its political understanding. There is also usually an antagonistic divide between ‘the people’ and other groups within the population, for example, ‘the elites’, minorities or non-native inhabitants (see e.g. Mudde 2004; Canovan 2005; Jagers & Walgrave 2006). The antagonistic and confrontational mode of populism has commonly been defined either as a style (Moffitt 2017), discourse (Wodak 2015) or ideology (Mudde & Kaltwasser 2017). Here the focus is on radical right-wing populism, in which the antagonism is based on ‘nativist ideology’ that positions non-native persons, ideas and cultures as a threat to the homogeneous nation state (Mudde 2007, 19). Thus, right-wing populism is often exclusive and hostile towards non-native people, languages and cultures, which are attacked by the ‘extreme right’. However, the difference between the two is that populism works in the frame of representative democracy and does not necessarily aim – at least explicitly – towards the revolutionary restructuring of society (Mudde 2007; Rydgren 2010; Wodak 2015). Therefore, right-wing populism can be seen as a more legitimate and mainstream form of nativism and nationalism than that of extreme movements. Ever since freedom of speech and the civic control of political representation have been seen as essential dimensions of liberal democracy, journalistic news media have formed a constitutive element in them (Hanitzsch & Wahl-Jorgensen 2009). Therefore, it is not a surprise that rightwing populist politicians and movements also antagonize and attack established news media with provocative statements in which they often associate them with a ‘corrupt elite’. It is this very tension between right-wing populism and liberal news media that generates the public scandals linked to populist politicians and movements in liberal democracies. This makes it essential to consider the relationship between populism and the media regarding political scandals. Even if there is obvious tension between right-wing populist agendas and liberal news media, some scholars have remarked that populism fits well with the commercial and journalistic logic of the media which is termed ‘media populism’ (e.g. Mazzoleni 2008; Krämer 2014). The commercial logic of media populism derives from an increasing pressure to produce popular, personalized, moralistic, emotional and antagonistic media content – even on political issues – that encourages populist and scandalous public provocations. A background idea in media populism is that the so-called tabloid media favours media populism more eagerly than the quality media does (Mazzoleni 2003, 8; 2014, 50; Krämer 2014, 50). However, empirical research has indicated no clear link between media type and media populism, instead contextual differences between various political and media systems are stressed (e.g. Bos et al. 2010; Akkerman 2011; Mazzoleni 2014, 50–51). In addition to commercial media logic, the very ‘watchdog’ idea of news journalism may also emphasize media populism in the sense that it spurs journalists to control power elites and therefore holds the attitude of an anti-establishment free press (Esser et al. 2017). This civic society function implies that journalism should identify with the interests of the ‘common people’ rather than those of the elites. Thus, when combined with commercial pressure, the core ideas of journalism may – without consciously intending to – support the populist antagonism between ‘forgotten people’ and corrupt elites. Certainly, Donald Trump’s provocative and scandalous statements and tweets have been of commercial benefit to US news media, which – after a long period of decreasing audience and productivity rates – has raised sales and interest among audiences and advertisers through their reports and commentaries on Trump (Borchers 2016).

Social media logic and populist scandals The emergence of social media has offered a new environment for populist communication and therefore formed an essential dimension in the relationship between populism and media. 150

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The term ‘social media’ refers to Web services whose form and content are, for the most part, produced by users. Theoretically, the definition of social media encompasses three characteristics (Bechmann & Lomborg 2012, 767). First, communication is de-institutionalized and decentralized despite the centralized ownership of social media services. Second, content is user-based, and therefore the central concept of social media is ‘user-generated content’. Third, communication among social media users is interactive and networked. All these characteristics combine to create the so-called ‘attention economy’ of the Internet, making social media an intrinsic platform for today’s political communication and populism as well (see Engesser et al. 2017a, 1285). Social media has therefore extended the research of political communication from elite to non-elite actors, especially focusing on three aspects of the Internet and social media (Engesser et al. 2017a, 1284). First, the role of online challengers is stressed. Second, the Internet as an alternative media is investigated. Third, the ways in which the Internet and social media establish counterpublics is analysed. All three aspects help us to understand how social media enables non-elite counteractivity, mostly against established political actors and institutions as well as against legacy media. The most significant factor of social media is that it is not regulated by media institutions or journalistic gatekeepers. Therefore, social media allow the publication of more personal, sensationalistic and extreme content than legacy media. Furthermore, social media does not serve just the new arena for political communication, it also represents all of the new media logic, which can be called ‘social media logic’. In their synthesis, van Dijck and Poell (2013) emphasize popularity and connectivity as key features of social media logic. Social media platforms have been purposefully designed to promote popularity through the use of likes, shares and contacts. However, popularity and connectivity are also a very fruitful way for right-wing populist communication, which often promotes close connections between people through the distribution of short and provocative content on relatively unmoderated communication formats (Krämer 2017). When populists urge the bypassing of legacy media, they can, according to Engesser et al. (2017b), exploit social media in five ways: by emphasizing the sovereignty of the people, by advocating for the people, by attacking the elites, by ostracizing others, and by invoking the heartland, which refers to the idealized conception of the community. The analysis of the Twitter and Facebook posts in four countries showed that all these five elements appeared across the posts and tweets, although the elements were generally isolated (ibid.). The main conclusion was that populist communication in social media was fragmented. The practical explanation for this is found in Twitter’s character limitation (previously 140, now 280) and social media’s general tendency towards brief messages. Fragmented communication can also be linked to the populist style and its aim to produce and distribute comprehensible messages. However, the relationship between populism and social media looks different when different platforms are considered. It seems, for example, that Facebook serves as a more suitable forum for populist communication than Twitter (Ernst et al. 2017). In most cases, Twitter is clearly a more professional or ‘elite’ media than Facebook. Correspondingly, Facebook is more communal than Twitter and therefore helps to construct communities by populist means. In addition, various discussion groups are important platforms for populist communication. However, regarding the use of different social media platforms for populist communication, differences between countries emerge. For example, Twitter in the context of the USA has changed to become more populist due to how president Trump uses it, and the same can be said from the Twitter use of Latin American populist presidents (see Waisbord & Amado 2017). The rapid dissemination of social media communications is also a critical factor in scandals. Many scandals connected to right-wing populist movements begin on social media (see Herkman 2018). After a populist provocation posted on social media, news media react and publish news 151

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and commentaries on the issue as soon as possible. These news stories cause more discussion and posts on social media, after which the news media publish more news about the scandal and the often fierce debates on social media. This forms ‘the scandal cycle’ and shows the interdependence of news media and social media in political scandals (see Jenssen & Fladmoe 2012). An example from Finland illustrates the role and the interaction between social media platforms in scandals linked to right-wing populist movements (Herkman & Matikainen 2016). In 2015, an MP of the populist right-wing Finns Party published a Facebook update in which he used the same kind of militant and nationalist rhetoric against multiculturalism that Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Behring Breivik had used. Social media sites became essential players in the scandal, since the whole scandal derived from the MP’s Facebook updates and the affair was actively commented on and constructed via various social media sites. Within social media platforms, Twitter seemed to serve as a forum for liberal views criticizing the MP, whereas discussion forums provided arenas for both liberal and conservative (nativist, right-wing populist) voices. Significantly, the news media also played a crucial role in the scandal by echoing the debate. Hence, it is necessary to examine the relationship between the news media and social media in scandals linked to right-wing populist movements. In political scandals linked to right-wing populism the interplay between traditional and social media and especially between news media and social media logics is relevant. Scandals can arise from social media, but without the help of news media they cannot become societally significant. Thus, the news media and social media participate in scandal construction and their relationship can be said to be symbiotic. Hence, both social media and news media feed off and inspire each other during a scandal (cf. Rogstad 2016). The construction of that relationship between traditional news media and social media has been called a hybrid media system because older and new media logics compete with but also complement each other (Chadwick 2013, 207). The interdependence between the old and new media logics is obvious, but it is also asymmetrical. Due to this, the influence of traditional news media and social media always depends on the type of scandal and its context.

Conclusions There seems to be a common pattern in political scandals linked to right-wing populist movements in Western liberal democracies. When these movements are in their ‘insurgent phase’ (Stewart et al. 2003, 219–224), they commonly exploit scandals to gain media attention, but after becoming more established political players they try to avoid public scandals more than they previously did. Toned-down rhetoric and a more considerate political style are parts of the mainstreaming process of these parties. However, the general political atmosphere may also change such that right-wing populism is seen as more mainstream or normalized than before, meaning fewer confrontations between the news media and those making populist statements, therefore fewer serious political scandals concerning populist actors arise. This seems to be true in Denmark, for example, where the nativist Danish People’s Party has had quite an established position for almost the whole of the twenty-first century as an assistant party to conservative minority governments and has not been scandalized as eagerly or as regularly as right-wing populist parties in other Nordic countries (Herkman 2018). There are also huge country-specific differences in the implications of the scandals linked to right-wing populist actors. For example, Donald Trump seems to be quite self-sufficient – despite the constant scandalizations of the US news media, since he has succeeded in maintaining the populist antagonism between himself as a representative of ‘the forgotten people’ and the news media as a representative of ‘the power elite’ through his tweets – even when occupying 152

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the presidency of the USA. However, this might be because of the fact that the populist style has become an essential dimension within Anglo-American politics in recent decades and the neo-populist scandals linked to Trump have yet to shake his image as a reality television host. If more traditional scandals appear, revealing true political power or economic misuses, Trump’s position may be threatened. Another aspect of populism may also explain its relative tolerance of public scandals, namely its chameleonic nature (see Taggart 2000). As populism is not tied to any specific ideology, populist actors can successfully change their enemies if necessary. For example, the Hungarian Fidesz Party (Hungarian Civic Alliance) has changed the target of its antagonistic statements from internal political enemies to the European Union and immigrants during the course of the twenty-first century so far, and through those turns has reached majority rule, allowing Fidesz to strengthen its power by making constitutional and legal reforms and by controlling media institutions. Therefore, it seems that, even if public scandals may serve as one control mechanism against the authoritarian tendencies of right-wing populism, more institutional ‘checks and balances’ will be crucial if the potential imbalances that such populism creates for liberal democracy are to be resisted (Mudde & Kaltwasser 2012, 20–21). Since populism and political scandals are always context-laden, more empirical research is needed to explore the relationship between right-wing populism and political scandals in various liberal democracies. It would also be interesting to study the issue in Latin America, for example, where politics and media systems are quite different to those in North and Central European democracies and where populist leaders commonly employ social media, especially Twitter, as a way to attack their critics – just as Trump does (see Waisbord & Amado 2017). Hence, there is currently an open field for studying political scandals linked to different populisms in different contexts.

References Aalberg, T., Esser, F., Reinemann, C., Strömbäck, J. & de Vreese, C. H., eds. (2017). Populist political communication in Europe. New York: Routledge. Akkerman, T. (2011). Friend or foe? Right-wing populism and the popular press in Britain and the Netherlands. Journalism, 12(8), 931–945. Allern, S. & Pollack, E. (2012). Mediated scandals. In: S. Allern & E. Pollack, eds., Scandalous! The mediated construction of political scandals in four Nordic countries. Gothenburg: Nordicom, 9–28. Allern, S. & Pollack, E. (2016). Nordic political scandals: Frequency, type and consequences. In: M. Ludwig, T. Schierl & C. Von Sikorski, eds., Mediated scandals. Köln: Halem, 146–163. Allern, S., Kantola, A., Pollack, E. & Blach-Ørsten, M. (2012). Increased scandalization: Nordic political scandals 1980–2010. In: S. Allern & E. Pollack, eds., Scandalous! The mediated construction of political scandals in four Nordic countries. Gothenburg: Nordicom, 29–50. Bechmann, A. & Lomborg, S. (2012). Mapping actor roles in social media: Different perspectives on value creation in theories of user participation. New Media & Society, 15(5), 765–781. Borchers, C. (2016). Yes, Donald Trump has been good for the media business. The Washington Post, 25 October. Bos, L., Brug, W. van der & Vreese, C. de. (2010). Media coverage of right-wing populist leaders. Communications, 35(2), 141–163. Canovan, M. (1999). Trust the people! Populism and the two faces of democracy. Political Studies XLVII, 2–16. Canovan, M. (2005). The people. Cambridge: Polity Press. Chadwick, A. (2013). The hybrid media system: Politics and power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dijck, J. van & Poell, T. (2013). Understanding social media logic. Media and Communication, 1(1), 2–14. Ekström, M. & Johansson, B. (2008). Talk scandals. Media, Culture and Society, 30(1), 61–79. Engesser, S., Fawzi, N. & Larsson, A. O. (2017a). Populist online communication: Introduction to the special issue. Information, Communication and Society, 20(9), 1279–1292.

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Juha Herkman and Janne Matikainen Engesser, S., Ernst, N., Esser, F. & Büchel, F. (2017b). Populism and social media: How politicians spread fragmented ideology. Information, Communication and Society, 20(8), 1109–1126. Entman, R. (2012). Scandal and silence: Media responses to presidential misconduct. Cambridge: Polity Press. Ernst, N., Engesser, S., Büchel, F., Blassnig, S. & Esser, F. (2017). Extreme parties and populism: An analysis of Facebook and Twitter across six countries. Information, Communication and Society, 20(9), 1347–1364. Esser, F., Stepinska, A. & Hopmann, D. N. (2017). Populism and the media: Cross-national findings and perspectives. In: T. Aalberg, F. Esser, C. Reinemann, J. Strömbäck & C. H. de Vreese, eds., Populist political communication in Europe. New York: Routledge, 365–380. Garrard, J. & Newell, J. L., eds. (2006). Scandals in past and contemporary politics. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hallin, D. C. & Mancini, P. (2004). Comparing media systems: Three models of media and politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hanitzsch, T. & Wahl-Jorgensen, K. (2009). The handbook of journalism studies. New York: Routledge. Hatakka, N., Niemi, M. K. & Välimäki, M. (2017). Confrontational yet submissive: Calculated ambivalence and populist parties’ strategies of responding to racism accusations in the media. Discourse and Society, 28(3), 262–280. Herkman, J. (2018). Old patterns on new clothes? Populism and political scandals in the Nordic countries. Acta Sociologica, 61(4), 341–355. Herkman, J. & Matikainen, M. (2016). Neo-populist scandal and social media: The Finnish Olli Immonen affair. In: C. Demirhan & D. Cakir-Demirhan, eds., Political scandal, corruption, and legitimacy in the age of social media. Pennsylvania: IGI Global, 1–24. Jagers, J. & Walgrave, S. (2006). Populism as political communication style: An empirical study of political parties’ discourse in Belgium. European Journal of Political Research, 46(3), 319–345. Jenssen, A. T. & Fladmoe, A. (2012). Ten commandments for the scandalization of political opponents. In: S. Allern & E. Pollack, eds., Scandalous! The mediated construction of political scandals in four Nordic countries. Gothenburg: Nordicom, 51–71. Krämer, B. (2014). Media populism: A conceptual clarification and some theses on its effects. Communication Theory, 24(1), 42–60. Krämer, B. (2017). Populist online practices: The function of the Internet in right-wing populism. Information, Communication and Society, 20(9), 1293–1309. Mazzoleni, G. (2003). The media and the growth of neo-populism in contemporary democracies. In: G. Mazzoleni, J. Stewart & B. Horsfield, eds., The media and neo-populism: A contemporary comparative analysis. Westport: Praeger, 1–20. Mazzoleni, G. (2008). Populism and the media. In: D. Albertazzi & D. McDonnell, eds., Twenty-first century populism: The spectre of Western European democracy. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 49–64. Mazzoleni, G. (2014). Mediatization and political populism. In: F. Esser & J. Strömbäck, eds., Mediatization of politics: Understanding the transformation of Western democracies. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 42–56. Moffitt, B. (2017). The global rise of populism: Performance, political style, and representation. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Mudde, C. (2004). The populist zeitgeist. Government and Opposition, 39(4), 542–563. Mudde, C. (2007). Populist radical right parties in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mudde, C. & Kaltwasser, C. R. (2012). Populism and (liberal) democracy: A framework for analysis. In: C. Mudde & C. R. Kaltwasser, eds., Populism in Europe and the Americas: Threat or corrective for democracy? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1–26. Mudde, C. & Kaltwasser, C. R. (2017). Populism: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rogstad, I. (2016). Is Twitter just rehashing? Intermedia agenda setting between Twitter and mainstream media. Journal of Information Technology and Politics, 13(2), 142–158. Rydgren, J. (2010). Radical right-wing populism in Denmark and Sweden: Explaining party system change and stability. The SAIS Review of International Affairs, 30(1), 57–71. Sakki, I. & Pettersson, K. (2016). Discursive construction of otherness in populist radical right political blogs. European Journal of Social Psychology, 46(2), 156–170. Stanyer, J., Salgado, S. & Strömbäck, J. (2017). Populist actors as communicators or political actors as populist communicators: Cross-national findings and perspectives. In: T. Aalberg, F. Esser, C. Reinemann, J. Strömbäck & C. H. de Vreese, eds., Populist political communication in Europe. New York: Routledge, 353–364.

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Right-wing populism Stewart, J., Mazzoleni, G. & Horsfield, B. (2003). Conclusion: Power to the media managers. In: G. Mazzoleni, J. Stewart & B. Horsfield, eds., The media and neo-populism: A contemporary comparative analysis. Westport: Praeger, 217–236. Taggart, P. (2000). Populism. Buckingham: Open University Press. Thompson, J. B. (2000). Political scandal: Power and visibility in the media age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Waisbord, S. & Amado, A. (2017). Populist communication by digital means: Presidential Twitter in Latin America. Information, Communication and Society, 20(9), 1330–1346. Wodak, R. (2013). Anything Goes! The Haiderization of Europe. In: R. Wodak, M. Khosravinik & B. Mral, eds., Right-wing populism in Europe: Politics and discourse. London: Bloomsbury, 23–37. Wodak, R. (2015). The politics of fear: What populist right-wing discourses mean London: Sage.

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15 CORRUPTION SCANDALS AND THE MEDIA SYSTEM Paolo Mancini

Corruption largely feeds scandals. Numbers in this regard do not exist, but there is no doubt that many, if not most, mediated scandals involve corruption, at least those scandals that have relevance for debate in the public arena. However, there is a bias regarding how these scandals are discussed by the social scientific community. Indeed, almost all the existing literature on the matter focuses on Western, liberal democracies (Thompson 2000; Canel & Sanders 2006; Allern & Pollack 2012; Entman, 2012). In particular, scandals that involve public figures have frequently been the subject of these studies. Specific cases have been analyzed and more theoretically oriented interpretations suggested, always taking into account the social and political realities of those countries that have long adopted the structures and procedures of what is usually defined as liberal democracy, even if relevant differences exist among these countries. In liberal democracies news media are supposed to play a major role in controlling and uncovering unlawful behavior that contrasts with shared expectations in these countries (Tumber & Waisbord 2004). But these countries represent, as Curran and Park have written, a “tiny handful”: “it has become routine for universalistic observations about the media to be advanced in English language books on the basis of evidence derived from a tiny handful of countries” (2000, 3). What scholars observe and discuss in these countries rarely applies to other parts of the world where scandals represent completely different matters. This is particularly the case for corruption scandals, which are the focus of this chapter. Just as “journalism does not grow up in a vacuum” (Mancini 2018, 4), scandals too are largely dependent on the social and political conditions within which they develop. The surrounding context defines what a scandal is, why and how an illegal or unfair behavior is transformed into a theme of public debate, how and why it is brought to light, and how it develops. Some years ago a collection of essays that appeared in American Behavioral Scientist (Tumber & Waisbord 2004) demonstrated that scandals mostly depend on a plurality of legal and ethical parameters that are deeply inserted within the local culture and on the forms and traditions of the political struggle in place in each country. This is especially true for corruption scandals because they are usually directly connected with the political system and with the public decision-making process. As Canel and Sanders have written, scandals represent a “useful entry point in to the exploration of political culture” (2006, 5). Robert Entman, with his influential “Scandal and Silence,” argues the same point, noting that the eruption and the development of scandals rarely depend on the importance and severity of either illegal or unfair behavior. Rather, “whether 156

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scandals erupt, spread and persist depends far more on the skill of the partisan competitors and on the norms and the incentives governing news production than on the degree and nature of the official’s offense” (Entman 2012, 7). This is also the thesis of John Thompson who writes, “while scandal has become an endemic feature of contemporary political culture, the conditions under which scandals occur and the ways in which they unfold do, of course, vary considerably from one context to another” (Thompson 2000, 116). Moreover, the definition of what a scandal is and why it erupts largely depend on the structure and mode of operation of the media system and on its relationship with the political system. Scandals may constitute a means to study the media system and the political system at the same time because they are closely intertwined, and what takes place within one produces consequences on the other and very often originates within the other. In the following pages, several factors will be discussed that contribute to the definition of scandal. In particular, I will focus on the reasons why a scandal erupts and why it is brought to light by the news media. Different types of scandals exist. These types are not only related to the matter on which they focus (sex scandals, financial scandals, power scandals) and the seriousness of the violation committed. A possible typology of scandals (here I refer in particular to corruption scandals) may be proposed that is derived essentially from the specific reasons and the goals that motivate reporters to cover an instance of social behavior with public relevance that breaks the expectations diffused in a given society. I will outline three types of media scandals and the reasons as to why they erupt and will discuss how they relate to different media and political systems. I propose distinguishing between market-driven corruption scandals, “custodians of conscience” corruption scandals, and politically oriented corruption scandals. There is no doubt that each of these types does not exist in isolation; they are always mixed together. In a way, departing from the proposed typology, a “pure” type of scandal does not exist; rather, it is possible to talk of “prevalence.” Some corruption scandals respond mainly to a competitive logic that combines with professional pressures included within the watchdog ideals of professional journalism. In contrast, other scandals are mostly motivated by political reasons while also paying attention to market competition. The “custodians of conscience” media scandals usually also respond to a market-driven logic. Often, what establishes the “prevalence” of one type over the others are contextual factors that address the development of a specific professionalism in journalism and that set the framework of relations with other social systems, especially with politics.

Market-driven corruption scandals Uncovering a public figure who is accused of “abuse of entrusted power for private gain” (Transparency International 2009), as in the widely accepted definition of corruption, represents a good occasion for media market competition. Market-driven corruption scandals are frequently observed by scholars. Almost all books and articles that have been written on scandals focus on examples taken from countries where the news media are driven by a market logic and where, as Thompson writes, “scandal sells” (2000, 32). Scandals are excellent opportunities to attract readers’ attention, and the assumption that “scandal sells” represents a sort of “constitutive law” for professional journalism. Reporters tend to act as “scandal hunters” and are aware that major stories about illegal, unfair, and often unexpected behaviors can help to sell more copies of a newspaper. This is the assumption that primarily moves news gathering in the “tiny handful of countries” to which Curran and Park refer. Indeed, in most of the liberal democracies of Western Europe and North America and in a few other countries (Australia and New Zealand, for example), the news media are inserted 157

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within a competitive market where the exclusive news story, the “scoop,” is considered a good occasion to score a winning goal in the market competition. Very often, the scoop is embodied in the discovery of a scandalous behavior. The call by Entman for more “calibration” in the coverage of scandals (Entman 2012) is largely due to the fact that the news media, in the expectation that “scandal sells,” exacerbate the tone of the story, the language they use, and, frequently, the gravity of the violation committed with regard to expected standards of ethical and socially responsible behavior. Exotic and strange details are exaggerated, and the focus of the story is often placed on the single figure who committed the infraction, his habits, and his private life. To increase the appeal of the story, corruption is personalized and taken out of the surrounding context and directly referred to the single figure involved (Tumber and Waisbord 2004). Market-driven scandals feature media systems that are organized along competitive logic with sufficient autonomy from external influences, particularly of a political nature. The state plays a very minor role both as regulator and funder. In most cases, media outlets are the property of either single individuals or corporations that derive their profits essentially from the media products themselves and therefore are particularly interested in the largest circulation of their news stories. Entrepreneurship is a driving logic in economics, society at large, and in the media too. Because of this and because of the small place of politics in news coverage, in many cases, market-driven scandals do not imply the infringement of the rules that “govern the exercise of political power” (Thompson 2000, 91), rather, they focus on sex and adultery as these matters are supposed to attract the attention of news media consumers. Therefore, very often these scandals imply the invasion of the spheres of privacy and intimacy. Obviously, they are very common in the tabloid press, but the elite press as well may devote attention to these scandals if they involve public figures in the field of politics or business. Many cases may be labeled under this typology in countries around the world. There are many cases in the United States: Donna Rice and Gary Hart, Gennifer Flowers and Bill Clinton, the infidelities of George W. Bush. In their book, Maria Jose Canel and Karen Sanders discuss three cases of British sexual misdemeanors: David Mellor, Tim Yeo, and Piers Merchant (Canel and Sanders 2006). Many other examples are listed in the already mentioned two volumes of American Behavioral Scientist that appeared in 2004. At the same time, as has already been stressed, market-driven media systems feature a high level of journalistic professionalism and autonomy from other social systems and are aimed at making profit, very often independently from political alliances. Within this context, there exists space for the assumed ethical principles of the profession to direct reporters’ choices. Traditionally, the watchdog function is one of the major assumptions of the profession in the so-called liberal models of journalism, which mix together business logic, separation from other social powers, and professionalism (Hallin & Mancini 2004). The investigation and the discovery of unfair behaviors when they are performed by public figures represent an important part of the watchdog function and one of the legitimizing elements of the profession. As Herbert Altschull writes in his textbook on journalism in the USA, the liberal ideal of journalism states that “the media must be used as agencies of social control” (Altschull 1995, XIX). Indeed, market-driven corruption scandals and custodians of conscience corruption scandals are often interrelated. In part, this overlapping confirms what was already noted by Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm in their seminal work “Four Theories of the Press” (1956): in specific situations and at specific times, it may happen, such as in the case of market-driven corruption scandals, that commercial pressures prevail over other aims of the profession. In this case the discovery of scandals is essentially perceived and used as a means to increase the circulation of the news rather than in response to the ethical principles of the profession. 158

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If and when market-driven logic prevails, scandals are exacerbated and dramatized. Very often, as already said, the focus of the coverage shifts from underlining the social and ethical consequences of the unfair behavior to more appealing details of the personal figures involved, stressing those possibly exotic and even obsessive aspects of the event that convinced Robert Entman to call for more “calibration.”. Former Prime Minister of Italy and media mogul Silvio Berlusconi and his assumed affair with the underage Ruby is a scandal that largely follows the market logic while simultaneously responding to the ideals of watchdog journalism, being driven at the same time by political reasons. This was a corruption scandal in which Berlusconi forced the police to free the underage girl who was arrested after a theft, but, also because of its appeal, the entire story evolved around their sex affair.

“Custodians of conscience” media scandals I adopt the definition “custodians of conscience” media scandals from the title of one of the most well-known and important texts on investigative journalism, “Custodians of Conscience: Investigative Journalism and Public Virtue” (Ettema & Glasser 1998). In the authors’ words, journalism has “the possibility to enhance virtue in the conduct of public affairs” (ibid., 7). This phrase summarizes decades of discussions and statements that followed the appearance of the “social responsibility theory of journalism” (Siebert, Peterson & Schramm 1956). Beyond contributing to selling copies of the newspaper, journalism is charged with responsibilities to the community within which it acts. Investigating all cases that break “virtue in the conduct of public affairs” is a major goal of journalism. Scandals, especially corruption scandals, represent infringements of public virtue, and journalists have the responsibility to bring these cases to light. Many of the previously discussed scandals have been revealed not only to “sell copy” but also because they offer journalism the opportunity to perform some of the most important ideals of the profession. In particular, with regard to corruption scandals, the news media are expected to play a double function: a tangible one, for example investigating, reporting, and controlling specific cases of corruption; and an intangible one, for example reinforcing a shared sense of common interest and good (Stapenhurst 2000). Both functions enhance public virtue. The former is more immediate and may produce direct consequences like the punishment of the guilty, whereas the latter may produce positive effects over a longer period. Specific aspects of society at large and more specific arrangements of the media system allow and foster this type of scandal. The surrounding political culture of the country is undoubtedly an important element. Journalism is facilitated in investigating possible unfair behaviors when acting within societies that feature a high level of rational legal authority, such as is possible to observe in the democratic-corporatist model of journalism. Indeed, the infringement of rules may appear more dramatic and persecuted when it occurs within a framework of rules that have universal validity and fair application. In other words, “custodians of conscience” scandals occur within societies that feature universalism rather than particularism and where moral standards are not susceptible to clientelistic interpretations. These are more “cohesive” societies with a low level of political polarization where the solution of social problems is often left in the hands of what Bourdieu (1990) would call neutral “expert systems,” such as journalism or other specialized institutions such as medical doctors and health organizations (Cornia et al. 2015). This is particularly the case for Northern European countries. Within such a context, journalists are encouraged to embody and defend an idea of general interest that is widely shared within the community and that contrasts with particular interests. Professional journalism itself develops within a framework of consensual, ethical rules that 159

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identifies and distinguishes it from others and from other social organizations. “Custodians of conscience” media scandals are possible if professional journalism is clearly separated from other external powers, not just from the government, and if business and political interests have a limited power to address the choices of reporters. As mentioned above, in many cases “custodians of conscience” corruption scandals combine with “market-driven scandals.” This is another case of what I define as the “prevalence” of one type of scandal over another. It is possible to assume that in certain social contexts the ideals of a watchdog profession are more relevant than the needs of market competition with regard to the choices of the reporters. It is not easy to identify which of the two prevails. It is possible to assume that “custodians of conscience” media scandals prevail where the level of rational legal authority is higher and where civil society more easily embodies attitudes aimed at the general interest. This occurs in more cohesive societies with lower levels of political polarization and division and where professionalism prevails over the exigencies of the market or, at least, is not a passive victim of the market. Indeed, in these contexts, journalism is characterized by a high sense of the profession and its duties in the face of the entire society, not just of its own readers. In any case, free market competition is needed to ensure sufficient margins of autonomy to reporters. The story that the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph broke in 2009 on the expenses of Members of Parliament (MPs) and that erupted in a large scandal that forced the Speaker of the House of Commons and some MPs to resign and others not to run again (few were arrested) is a good example of this mixture of “custodians of conscience” ideals and pressures from the market. There is no doubt that the story about the unlawful use of the money allotted to MPs was brought to light in the spirit of competition with other British papers.1 At the same time, it also responded to a logic of control over the behavior of public officials (Winnet & Rayner 2009). Throughout the story, journalists acted as spokespeople of British citizens with continuous reference to public opinion and its possible reactions while they simultaneously pursued the aims of market competition (Mancini 2016). The US Pentagon Papers and the Watergate cases embody the logic of “custodians of conscience” at its best, even if there is no doubt that they also responded to market competition pressures. In his book A Good Life, Ben Bradley, the editor of The Washington Post which brought to light both scandals, clearly recognizes this double valence. Telling the story of the Pentagon Papers scandal and how the Post obtained the secret papers from Daniel Ellsberg and discussing the doubts and problems that the publication of the papers could raise, he writes, “Getting beaten on a story is bad enough, but waiting to get beaten on a story is unbearable” (Bradley 1995, 310). At the same time, with regard to the Watergate story, he proudly recognizes the important function of public service that The Washington Post performed and its award of the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

Politically oriented corruption scandals Politically oriented corruption scandals represent a very different matter. First, they are rare, but they do exist, within the liberal and the democratic corporatist models of journalism, but they are more common within the polarized pluralist model of journalism and other models that may present similar features. In other words they mostly occur outside the previously discussed “tiny handful of countries.” Politically oriented corruption scandals respond to a main logic: they are instrumentally covered by the press essentially to attack possible competitors in the field of politics or in the field of business. The best example of this type of scandal is embodied by the Russian word kompromat, which Alena Ledeneva, author of the book How Russia Really Works, defines this way: “the word 160

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Kompromat has no direct equivalent in English. Its literal translation—compromising material— refers to discrete information that can be collected, stored, traded or used strategically across all domains: political, electoral, legal, professional, judicial, media or business” (Ledeneva 2006, 58; see also Oates in Chapter 13). “Blackmail” is another word that is used in Central Eastern European countries to refer to scandalous news that is expressly diffused to destroy the reputation of adversaries. In most cases, the development of politically oriented corruption scandals is directly dependent on the owners of the news media outlets who have specific interests to be defended in politics or business. Through the news media, they foster their own interests or the interests of close allies: for them, corruption scandals represent a good occasion to intervene in the decision making process and to attack possible or actual competitors. Politically oriented scandals do not respond to the ideals of the so-called liberal model of journalism, and they do not play a relevant role in fair and detached watchdog journalism. The statement “free press is bad news for corruption,” which summarizes very well the role that a free press may play in the face of corruption scandals (Brunetti & Weder 2003), does not work in this case. On the contrary, the press provides a poor service to the entire society, increasing its confusion and uncertainty and conveying the idea that corruption is almost inevitable because it is so frequent and diffused with regard to leading public figures. The very origin of these scandals is almost always dubious. In many cases, they derive from investigations conducted by reporters following leaks from dubious and undisclosed sources (very often this happens in the other two types of corruption scandals as well). Often these sources are agents of the secret service, which obviously produces even more confusion. The instrumental use of these scandals lies in the way the scandal is narrated, in the language that is used, and in the aspects and the frames that address the entire story and that aim to achieve the often secret objectives of news stories. Politically oriented corruption scandals have little to do with the ethics of a detached professionalism. Nevertheless, they may also respond to objectives of market competition. Indeed, if the reason for news stories on unfair and illegal behaviors is usually to be found within the structure of the political and business struggle, these stories may help to “sell copy.” Market competition may play a role even if the major reason is found elsewhere. Indeed, as Colin Sparks has written with reference to the situation in post-Communist countries, the news media represent a sort of “political capital” to be used for a plurality of goals, not just to make money (Sparks 2000). These scandals fit perfectly with Thompson’s idea of a politics of trust. With the weakening of ideological ties between citizens and party organizations and with the increasing personalization of political life that he observes in the Western world, “people become more concerned with the characters of individuals” (Thompson 2000, 112) and with their reputations. Scandals become a sort of “credibility test,” and in many cases, they are used to undermine and destroy the reputations of political competitors (Tumber & Waisbord 2004). These conditions are much more developed in countries outside the Western world. Indeed, the contextual conditions that produce politically oriented corruption scandals are very different from the ones we have discussed in the previous types of scandals. First, very often, these scandals are produced within media systems that are not fully independent and feature a high level of partisanship in connection with both political organizations and/or large corporations and industries. In many cases news media do not produce sufficient profits and therefore become the property of single figures or corporations with interests outside the world of the media. They invest money in these enterprises to be used as instruments to affect the decision-making process and to ensure a voice in the public arena. A good example comes from Eastern European countries. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, many publishing industries in Western Europe 161

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invested in these countries. However, after several years, they found that the investment was not as profitable as expected, and pressures from governments and political and business actors were so prevalent that they found it preferable to retreat and sell their local enterprises to the vested interests that had spurred their retreat. Vaclav Stetka concludes an interesting paper on this retreat by referring to the words of foreign investor Bodo Hombach, CEO of the German WAZ Media Group, who made such a retreat, confirming the previous discussion: “oligarchs in the Balkans are buying newspapers and magazines ever more often to exert political influence and not to win money” (Stetka & Ornebring 2013, 441). Mediated scandals represent a good instrument to exert such influence. Politically oriented media scandals can be observed in countries where investigative journalism is weak or is instrumentally addressed (Stetka & Ornebring 2013). These countries feature a low level of rational legal authority where particularism prevails over universalism. Through their news outlets, for example, politicians and businessmen aim to defend and foster their particular interests. Journalists too do not share a unique professional identity characterized by a recognized framework of ethical and professional rules. They are either an active part of the political and business struggle or victims of the pressures deriving from press owners and other actors. A perfect example of politically oriented media scandals is the one that involved Silvio Berlusconi, his newspaper (in fact, the property of Silvio Berlusconi’s brother) Il Giornale, and his initial ally and later competitor Gianfranco Fini. When the scandal erupted, Gianfranco Fini was Chairman of the Italian House of Deputies and, until a few months earlier, a close ally of Silvio Berlusconi. Their alliance progressively came to an end. At that point, the Berlusconiowned newspaper Il Giornale, after receiving an undisclosed leak, began to attack Gianfranco Fini, who was also the head of the party Alleanza Nazionale, with the accusation of having sold for a very low price to the brother of his girlfriend a beautiful villa in Monte Carlo that was the property of the party. This case involves all the ingredients of a politically oriented scandal: an undisclosed leak; a political figure, Silvio Berlusconi, who was also the owner of a newspaper (and, as is well known, a large media corporation); and the instrumental use of a scandal to attack the reputation of a political actor who was becoming a possible competitor of the owner of the newspaper (Gerli, Mazzoni & Mincigrucci 2018). Political instrumentalization may also drive scandals that are inserted within the competitive logic or even the “custodians of conscience” logic. The recent case in the USA that involved Hillary Clinton and her use of a private email address was widely covered by the news media, but there is no doubt that it had a politically oriented slant and was used by her competitor Donald Trump during the 2016 election campaign. The competitive logic of the French mass media system has leaned toward particularistic aims on several occasions, particularly in the case of Minister Pasqua, a Gaulliste Minister, who was attacked by the center left Le Monde for a corruption scandal, whereas the rightest Le Figaro presented scandals involving the leftist Guerini (Mancini et al. 2016). In other words, situations that are characterized by market logic, strong professional autonomy, and the ethics of journalists are not immune to the risk of instrumentalization. Scandals, mostly corruption scandals, are a tricky matter; their origins are often unclear and undisclosed. Their development is often subject to undue dramatization and exaggeration that, as Entman (2012) states, require accurate calibration. A unique and universal interpretation of how and why scandals erupt and develop is not possible because they are strictly dependent on the surrounding context, mostly the political context, and on the structure and mode of operation of the media system. The aims that motivate reporters to cover scandals may be different and often contrasting; and it is not rare for them to 162

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combine. They can respond to a commercial logic, they may be inserted within the dominant professional ideals of the so-called liberal model of journalism, and, in many cases, they become instruments of the political and business struggle. Specific features of the media system address the different types of corruption scandals that I have outlined: market driven corruption scandals may be observed in media systems deeply influenced by commercial logic and a high level of autonomy from other social powers and the state in particular. Reporters are characterized by a professionalism that nevertheless is often influenced by an extreme commercialization which undermines the application of correct journalistic standards. “Custodians of conscience” corruption scandals rely on shared principles of watchdog journalism that is mostly applied to control power holders. It is possible to observe such a coverage of corruption in the democratic corporatist model of professional journalism: reporters are detached from other social powers acting within cohesive societies where rational legal authority prevails over particular interests. State press subsidies ensure the possibility for minority news outlets to perform without restrictions on their function of control. Investigative journalism is deeply rooted within these media systems. Politically oriented corruption scandals are linked to the prevalence of particularism over general interest, to a low level of professionalism in journalism, and to a context characterized by high political polarization and therefore rooted links between news media and different interests in society. A logic of media instrumentalization is diffused which favors coverage of corruption scandals deeply affected by particular interests.

Note 1 An unknown whistle-blower provided the disk with all the data regarding MPs’ expenses.

References Allern, S. & Pollack, E. (Eds.) (2012). Scandalous: The Mediated Construction of Political Scandals in Four Nordic Countries. Gothenburg: Nordicom. Altschull, H. (1995). Agents of Power: The Media and Public Policy. White Plans: Longmann. Bourdieu, P. (1990). The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity. Bradley, B. (1995). A Good Life: Newspapering and other Adventures. New York: Simon & Schuster. Brunetti, A. & Weder, B. (2003). A free press is bad news for corruption. Journal of Public Economics, 87(7–8), 1801–1824. Canel, M. J. & Sanders, K. (2006). Morality Tales: Political Scandals and Journalism in Britain and Spain in the 1990s. Creskill: Hampton Press. Cornia A., Ghersetti, M., Manini, P. & Oden, T. (2015). The partisan, the technocrats and the watchdogs: Domestication in media coverage of the swine flu pandemic in 2009. Journalism Studies, 17(8), 1030–1050. Curran, J. & Park, M. J. (eds.). (2000). De-Westernizing Media Studies. London and New York: Routledge. Entman, R. (2012). Scandal and Silence: Media Responses to Presidential Misconduct. Cambridge: Polity Press. Ettema, J. & Glasser, T. (1998). Custodians of Conscience: Investigative Journalism and Public Virtue. New York: Columbia University Press. Gerli, M., Mazzoni, M. & Mincigrucci, R. (2018). Constraints and limitations of investigative journalism in Hungary, Italy, Latvia and Romania. European Journal of Communication, 33(1), 22–37. Hallin, D. & Mancini, P. (2004). Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ledeneva, A. (2006). How Russia Really Works. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Mancini, P. (2016). The duck house and the green underwear: How members of Parliament spend their allowance. A study of different interpretations of “unethical” behavior. Paper presented at the ANTICORRP seminar, Athens, May.

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Paolo Mancini Mancini, P. (2018). Introduction. European Journal of Communication, 33(1), 3–6. Mancini, P., Mazzoni, M., Cornia, A. & Marchetti, R. (2016). Representations of corruption in the British, French and Italian press: Audience segmentation and the lack of unanimously shared indignation. The International Journal of Press Politics, 22(1), 67–92. Siebert, F., Peterson, T. & Schramm, W. (1956). Four Theories of the Press. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Sparks, C. (2000). Media theory after the fall of European communism: Why the old models from East and West won’t do anymore. In J. Curran &– M. J. Park (Eds.), De-westernizing Media Studies (pp. 35–50). London: Routledge. Stapenhurst, R. (2000). The Media’s Role in Curbing Corruption. Washington DC: World Bank Institute. Stetka, V. & Ornebring, H. (2013). Investigative journalism in Central and Eastern Europe: Autonomy, business models, and democratic roles. The International Journal of Press Politics, 18(4), 413–445. Thompson, J. (2000). Political Scandals: Power and Visibility in the Media Age. Cambridge: Polity. Transparency International. (2009). The Anti-Corruption Plain Language Guide. Berlin: Transparency International. Tumber, H. & Waisbord, S. (2004). Introduction. American Behavioral Scientist, 47(8), 1031–1039. Winnett, R. & Rayner, G. (2009). No Expenses Spared. London: Transworld Publishers.

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16 SOCIAL MEDIA AND SCANDAL Gina Masullo Chen

In the autumn of 2017, American actor Alyssa Milano urged women to share their own experiences of sexual abuse by writing “MeToo” on social media to show the ubiquity of the problem after rampant allegations of sexual assault and harassment were made against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein (Codrea-Rado 2017). The idea of “me too” had started a decade earlier when Tarana Burke launched a non-profit and a movement to help victims of harassment (Garcia 2017). But it was with the potent power of social media that #MeToo – with the hashtag used to connect topics online – gained the kind of widespread traction the digital age provides. Women began sharing their stories. Men were shocked at how many of their friends had experienced abuse. The news media paid attention to abuse in a way it perhaps had never done before. The hashtag fomented online intimate publics (Berlant 2011), or virtual spaces of being political together, among women and male allies in one of the most cogent examples of hashtag activism, which is activism that grows out of online engagement (Chen, Pain and Zhang 2018; Williams 2015). The #MeToo movement also exemplified a fundamental shift in how the media and society more broadly understands and defines scandals that involve sexual misconduct. Social media blurred the lines between public and private so much that they created a public discourse where literally no private sphere exists (Juntunen and Valiverronen 2010; Mandell and Chen 2016a). As a result, the previously private missteps of politicians, celebrities and even the average person can become public at lightning speed, unknown in any prior age.  This chapter critically reviews the scholarly literature on how social media have changed the way the news media cover scandal – particularly sexual scandals – and how the news audience consumes these stories. This chapter captures today’s particular cultural moment where technology creates a ‘new digital space for malfeasance and indiscretion’ with the power to send these tales of misdeeds ricocheting around the globe in record time (Mandell and Chen 2016a, 210). I begin by defining scandal and situating it within the lens of the theory of the public sphere (Habermas 1991). Then I provide a brief history of sexual scandals and how they have been covered historically, as well as why that has changed in the digital age. I conclude with suggestions for what these changes mean for the future of how the press covers scandalous news and how the public consumes it.

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What makes a scandal? Scandal originally referred to the conduct of those in religious orders who did something to shame their faith, but it has morphed into a more general transgression that violates values or norms of a particular society (Thompson 2000). Scandal requires some type of concealment of the bad behaviour that ultimately becomes public, tainting reputations and exposing the person to disapproval (Thompson 2000). Scandals usually involve people with societal power, such as politicians, sports heroes or celebrities, who often attempt a ‘come back’ or return to grace after the scandal (Apostolidis 2011). As a result, examining scandal provides a riveting lesson in how power operates, changes and flows through society. It is important to note that corruption and scandal are interrelated but distinct. Scandal must be publicized, while corruption may remain unexposed (Waisbord 1994). Sex scandals, in particular, are assumed to be ‘tales of private transgressions’, but they are actually ‘institutional pathologies’ (Gamson 2001, 185). Scandals, sociologist Joshua Gamson (2001) notes, reveal decay in institutions, such as politics, entertainment or religion, and not merely private mistakes. Scandal scholar Hinda Mandell (2012) goes one step further, arguing that scandal itself is a social institution: scandals ‘become both a hegemonic tool to reinforce social norms and the means by which the general public can hold (temporary) power – in the form of negative public opinion’ (206). Therefore, media coverage of scandal gives the public the power to hold the scandal against the person who perpetrated it. When the scandal involves a politician, it must violate due process, defined as the ‘legally binding rules and procedures that govern the exercise of political power’ (Thompson 2000, 91). In other words, political scandals shred the bond between constituent and politician, raising questions about whether the person should be trusted in official duties because of a private failing (Mandell 2017). Thus, scandal becomes a ‘device for social control’ of non-normative behaviour (Juntunen and Valiverronen 2010, 819). Political scandals are tied to accountability and ‘bring out the duality that underlies political life: the gap between what is said and what things are, between idealized politics and down-and-dirty politics, between the norms that are publicly legitimated and upheld and actual behaviour’ (Tumber and Waisbord 2004b, 1036–1037). Scandal, in a sense, becomes the lens through which the public judges the celebrity, entertainer or politician individually but also how it reasserts what is normative in society. What the news media considers a scandal has varied markedly over the decades and by country. In the United States of America, for example, coverage of political sexual scandals was predominant in the late 1700s and through the early 1900s (Summers 2000). Personal morality was considered an essential element of public service, and the partisan press revealed sexual flaws as political weapons. Journalists ferreted out titillating breaches of personal virtue and linked them to public legitimacy, but by the early twentieth century these types of stories had all but disappeared from public life in the USA (Summers 2000). The switch came as the press became less partisan and more focused on objective reporting that eschewed the privacy invasion that coverage of sexual scandals required. US President John F. Kennedy’s legendary womanizing got barely a nod from the press of the 1960s. Similarly, an analysis of 2,600 news stories about the US Congress from 1990 to 1998 showed coverage of political scandals was rare (Morris and Clawson 2005). Soon afterward, the tide turned again. US President Bill Clinton’s impropriety with an intern, which surfaced in 1998, garnered a rash of media coverage, as the line between serious news and entertainment began to meld (Williams and Delli Carpini 2004). Journalists shifted to a more investigative approach (Sanders and Canel 2006; Tumber and Waisbord 2004b). Similarly, scandal coverage became more frequent in the United Kingdom, starting in the 1990s during the administrations of John Major and later Tony Blair (Tumber 2004). Part of the shift 166

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was due to the proliferation of always-on cable news and the Internet, which was in its infancy at the time (Williams and Delli Carpini 2004). The media tried to justify its coverage by insisting that political sexual scandals were of grave national concern because they violated the public trust. At the same time, the ‘personalization of politics’, where politicians hired strategists to manage and inflate their images (Tumber 2004), played into a narrative that made private peccadillos a matter of public interest. If politicians were trying to sell themselves based on their brand, anything that tainted it, even a personal scandal, becomes a liability to that brand. Historically, media coverage was a vital aspect of scandal. Without the coverage, the scandal remains unexposed or at least not widely known. Press coverage turned a scandal into a news event (Tumber and Waisbord 2004b). The media also exerted a role in deciding which scandals to cover and which to ignore. For example, a study of six members of the US House of Representatives embroiled in a financial scandal linked to a Washington, DC, lobbyist during the 2006 elections found that local media outlets focused coverage on those representatives with competitive election bids, not those in non-competitive races (Fogarty 2013). The sense was that scandal was less newsworthy, somehow, if the politician did not have to retain his seat, because a scandal becomes important only if it relates to electoral politics.

Arrival of social media The ubiquity of social media and text messaging changed all that. It shifted the ‘calculus of the conversation regarding news’ (Mandell and Chen 2016a, 210) and created more ways for those in the public eye to fail and more ways for the public to find out about the failing. The ability to send illicit messages and pictures almost instantly – sexting – proved the undoing for public figures as disparate as Finland’s Minister for Foreign Affairs Ikka Kanerva (Isotalus and Almonkari 2014; Juntunen and Valiverronen 2010) and New York Congressman Anthony Weiner (Gamson 2016). The technology provided a convenient new tool for what thousands of public figures had done before: exposing their most base instincts. For example, Kanerva was compelled to resign when it was revealed he had sent many, many suggestive text messages to a female erotic dancer, drawing massive media coverage in Finland and triggering discussions about distrust of government (Isotalus and Almonkari 2014). Journalists justified the stories in the Finnish case because the tawdry details could affect his image and how he conducted his professional duties (Juntunen and Valiverronen 2010). Weiner resigned his seat in 2011 after his sexting scandal, but he acknowledged two years later, while a candidate for New York City mayor, that he had shared a new set of pictures of his genitals online (Mandell and Chen 2016b). Eventually, Weiner’s sexting predilection involved teenage girls, and he ended up being sentenced to 21 months in prison in 2017 (Weiser 2017). American professional golfer Tiger Woods’s scandal began as many had in previous decades with a tabloid news story claiming he had multiple affairs (Apostolidis 2011), but the scandal was heightened when some of the women released text messages allegedly between them and Woods that detailed scandalous sex talk (Gamson 2016). The new technology adapted easily into the ‘existing sex scandal narratives’ (Gamson 2016, 78), but this same technology also enabled the public, hungry for tantalizing news, to find out about these dalliances more quickly than ever before. Social media allowed the news audience into what sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas called a ‘repoliticized social sphere’ (1991, 142) where the lines between public and private were blurred (Chen, Pain and Fadnis 2016). Communication scholar Zizi Papacharissi (2010) asserts that the digital space has collapsed the boundaries between public and private, so a public sphere can no longer really even exist. Rather, everything is public, unless something is concealed. 167

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As Habermas (1991, 152) wrote years before this shift occurred: ‘The intimate sphere once the very centre of the private sphere, moved to the periphery to the extent that the private sphere itself became deprivatized’. Thus, this public digital space enables politicians, celebrities and other public figures to commit sex scandals, such as affairs, within the glare of the public limelight. It also allows them to bare their souls (or over-share) publicly on social media, much as the general public does. For example, Mark Sanford, a former American governor, groused about his ex-wife on Facebook after their marriage failed due to his infidelity. This elicited both supporting comments and diatribes from his constituents, one of whom notably told him: ‘Just quit talking about it’ (Chen et al. 2016, 137). Social media made scandals hyper-public, meaning the audience could learn about them through news reports and watch or listen to every salacious detail unfold right before their eyes. Even those who are not public figures were no longer safe from the coverage of scandal. For example, in New Zealand in 2015, about 50 patrons at a local tavern recorded a couple having sex in an adjacent building, and the videos and photos they shared quickly went viral on Facebook and YouTube (Kuehn 2016). The resulting story topped the news for days, suggesting a new era of ‘mediated voyeurism’ (Calvert 2000, 23) – the consumption of private moments for public disclosure – that leaves few out of its gaze. Thus, the earlier linear process where the news media exposed a scandal, and then the public consumed it, has been upended. Some scandals originated with disclosures by the public through social media, and then the press covered that exposure, widening the audience for the scandal. In other cases, the public and the media revealed the scandal almost simultaneously, and the press coverage and the social media virality of the story fed off each other in a symbiotic relationship. Frequently, of course, the press still revealed the scandal, but the public then transformed it into a bigger news event by sharing and retweeting the tale. Then the media covered that public response to the story, reigniting interest in it again. Therefore, the press still plays a role in scandal (Toepfl 2011), which can reverberate outside the lens of a traditional media gatekeeping function (Williams and Delli Carpini 2004) as the general public shares it online. For example, the world learned that real estate mogul Donald Trump, who later became the US president, had bragged about grabbing women by their genitals and trying to conquer sexually married women when The Washington Post and later other outlets released an audiotape and video clip of him saying these things (Benoit 2017; Harp 2018). But it was social media that gave the story a life of its own. The same scenario was played out with another of Trump’s scandals: claims that he paid off porn star Stormy Daniels to remain quiet about their affair soon after his wife, Melania, gave birth to their son (Reinhard and Kuznia 2018). The story broke through traditional media, but social media produced an onslaught of public conversation and pictorial memes – ‘socially constructed public discourses’ (Shifman 2014, 8) – that made the tale resonate with the larger public and stay salient as other news competed for attention. Media attention to scandal stories has been notably short-lived in the past (Tumber and Waisbord 2004a), but social media galvanizes the public, leading the press to cover the outrage, reinvigorating attention to the scandal and prolonging the newsworthiness of the story. The #MeToo movement offers another compelling example of this change in the way the press covers scandal in the age of social media. It was early October 2017 when The New York Times published a story detailing decades of allegations of sexual harassment and abuse against Weinstein, whose power in Hollywood was legendary (BBC 2018). Accusations included that Weinstein promised to advance female employees’ careers in return for sexual favours. Weinstein at first apologized for any pain he caused but disputed the allegations and threatened to sue the Times. Weinstein, who was involved in popular films such as The King’s Speech and 168

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Pulp Fiction, was fired from his movie and television studio and removed from the board of his company as allegations of abuse continued to surface (Barnes 2017). The Weinstein case sparked a national conversation in the United States about sexual assault and led to accusations against more than 100 others, including journalist and television host Charlie Rose and comedianturned-politician Al Franken (Cooney 2018). The scandals ended careers and brought a slew of firings, suspensions and resignations. CBS News and the Public Broadcasting Service fired Rose, accused of groping women and walking around naked in their presence (Koblin and Grynbaum 2017). Franken, facing allegations of groping and improper advances from at least six women, resigned his US Senate seat (Stolberg, Alcindor and Fandos 2017). In almost all the cases, the allegations were years or even decades old, but the women had been afraid to come forward, fearing they would not be believed or that making an accusation would hurt their careers. Social media and the #MeToo movement emboldened them. They were no longer lone women making accusations against men in power. They were part of a chorus of voices that understood and supported their pain. Berlant’s (2011) concept of ‘intimate publics’ is helpful here for understanding the power of social media to foster this cohesion among strangers around a common issue. Social media allows a topic, like sexual assault, to gain currency with the public. Hashtags are a particularly potent tool for people to find others who are talking about the issue online, providing a means for them to gather together with one voice (Chen et al. 2018; Williams 2015). Though these people may not know each other offline, and perhaps never will, their shared sense of being political together (Berlant 2011) unites them. Papacharissi’s (2015) idea of ‘affective publics’ is akin to intimate publics, as it also explains how people mobilize online through a shared belief or interest. In the case of #MeToo, the online outcry against sexual harassment and assault shifted the news conversation from focusing only on the scandals themselves and instead to reporting on the larger societal issues of misogyny, disempowerment of women and overuse of power by men. The public could become more involved in the story, as they shared their own experiences of sexual misconduct, rape or other forms of abuse by using the hashtag. In summary, the coverage of scandal has metamorphosed in today’s digital age. Previously, coverage had shifted from a focus on private failings as a sign of public unworthiness to personal impropriety as a sign of public distrust. The social media age has amplified that shift and made it easier, and quicker, for the media and the public to share news of scandal. Today’s media is no longer the gatekeeper of scandal news. As political communication scholars Bruce A. Williams and Michael X. Delli Carpini (2004) warned more than a decade ago, the distinction between news and entertainment news is no longer just porous, it has blended. The line between public and private has shifted so much that is possible to argue quite persuasively that a private sphere really no longer exists. The media still has a role to play in scandal and is still often the original source for scandalous news. But the public also can turn a private misdeed into a public event, eliciting media coverage that heightens the scandal. The social media age has given those in positions of power, and even the general public, more tools to commit misdeeds. People can commit sexual scandals, for example, without meeting face to face with their victims through sexting or social media. Gamson (2016, 78) argues that ‘sex scandals have entered an era in which surveillance is increasingly pervasive, virtual sex has become technologically accessible, and the revelation of a “private” life has become a commonplace form of entertainment’. I agree. In some ways, it is surprising that anything is scandalous today because almost nothing cannot be discovered. Yet, scandal news continues to follow the predictable narratives of days gone by: first comes concealment, then revelation, violation of norms, public disapproval and, ultimately, an attempt to restore one’s name (Thompson 2000). But the process of this narrative is not always as linear as it was in the past. With the public and 169

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the media both able to publicize, scandal coverage turns into more of a loop, where public interest or disclosure feeds news attention and news attention fuels public interest. Many scandals still have a relatively short shelf life in the public consciousness, as they did in the past (Tumber and Waisbord 2004a), but others can remain on the news agenda longer, sparked by public outcry through hashtags on social media. Today, as in the past, not every misdeed becomes a scandal, but those that do take on lives of their own.

What this means for the future This shift in how scandals are covered and how the public consumes them does not only change the news stories about scintillating topics. It alters the very definition of news and affects how those in the public eye, from politicians to celebrities, are viewed in society. Consider US Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who left a woman to die after he fled the scene of a car crash in 1969 (Cos 2016). Kennedy faced public outrage at his actions, and he gave a televised speech to explain and defend his actions. Yet he was able to continue his public life, serving as a senator for nearly 50 years until his death in 2009. As Cos (2016, 49) argues, it is ‘impossible to imagine [Kennedy’s case] would unfold in a similar manner in today’s social media-driven world’. While human beings have always been ‘hardwired to survey their environment and to prefer news about deviant or otherwise threatening events’ (Shoemaker 1996), social media today allow public outcry over dozens of allegations of sexual assault to facilitate real action against the perpetrators and reaffirm that scandals violate social norms. Even though many allegations were years or decades old, politicians, journalists and other public figures could not hide from the accusations in the shining glare of public opinion. Yet, even though social media has enabled the public to reveal scandals and indicate strongly their disapproval in ways never before imagined, there is also evidence that scandals must be increasingly deviant to gain public and media attention. Contrast John Edwards, the 2008 US presidential hopeful whose campaign ended after the revelation of his affair while his wife was battling cancer (Mandell 2017), with Weiner, whose political career remained viable after two high-profile sexting scandals. Weiner was only really undone in 2016 when his sexting involved minors (Gamson 2016). One could compare details of their foibles and suggest an affair while one’s wife is ill is worse than sexting, until it involved minors. One could also argue that the bar for what makes a scandal has been raised at the same time that the digital age allows the public to find out more and more about those in the public eye. In today’s world almost everything is public, so even the most private indiscretion may surface, so the public gets a barrage of scandal news that zips across the Internet on a daily basis. In this world, perhaps, only the most deviant of scandals stand out, as ‘technology – and its misuse – may desensitize us, making us less alarmed when confronted with damaging facts about another person’ (Mandell and Chen 2016a, 211). Society may be entering a phase of hyper-deviance for scandals, meaning a scandal will not arouse public enmity unless it violates social norms in a particularly atrocious way. For example, Roy Moore refused to leave his campaign for a US Senate seat despite multiple allegations of sexual abuse and child molestation (Burns and Martin 2017), suggesting that he felt he still had a chance despite these rampant scandals. The fact that he ended up losing, despite the support of President Trump, may indicate the public viewed his scandal as more deviant than he did. But it is likely than in an earlier era Moore would have had no choice but to drop out of the race when the accusations surfaced. The repeated scandals that plague Trump also illustrate this phase of hyper-deviance. There was the release of his lascivious words on videotape shortly before the November 2016 election (Benoit 2017; Harp 2018). Also, there was the ongoing scandal over his alleged affair with a porn star (Reinhard and Kunzia 2018) plus accusations of 170

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sexual misconduct by nearly 20 women (Saslow 2018) and, perhaps the mother of all scandals, multiple investigations into whether he conspired with Russia to win the presidency (Blake 2018). While Trump’s approval rating, currently at 41 percent,1 has lagged compared to other recent US presidents, these scandals have not damaged his presidency on a par with how other politicians’ relatively minor scandals both in the United States and other countries have. This may just be the particular cultural moment that has enveloped the United States during the administration of Trump, who rose to power on a populist message. Or it may be part of an even larger shift in scandal news where the public becomes over-saturated with scandal and ceases to pay as much attention as they may have in past years. Or it may be that in today’s digital era a scandal must be accompanied by intense public outcry online, as in the #MeToo movement, or it loses its punch. Regardless of which scenario is the true, however, it is clear that social media have changed forever how the news media and the public understand and define scandal. Gone are the days when a politician, celebrity, athlete, journalist or other public figure could escape scrutiny when their actions violate how society thinks they should behave. Social media allow the public to be a gatekeeper of scandal because the average person can reveal scandalous actions, and the press will cover that disclosure. Or even if the news media reveals the scandal, the public will dictate which scandals really matter to them by how they respond to them online.

Note 1 US President Donald Trump’s approval rating was assessed at 1:27 p.m. on 12 January 2019 at FiveThirtyEight, an online data journalism site that analyzes data from multiple polls; see https://projects. fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/.

References Apostolidis, P. (2011) ‘Sex scandals, racial domination and the systemic correlation of power-modalities in Foucault’, Journal of Political Power, 4(2), 179–198. Barnes, B. (2017) ‘Harvey Weinstein, fired Oct. 8, resigns from company’s board’, The New York Times, 17 October. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/17/business/media/harvey-weinsteinsexual-harassment.html BBC (2018) ‘Harvey Weinstein timeline: How the scandal unfolded’, BBC News, 12 February. Available at http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-41594672 Benoit, W. (2017) ‘Image repair on the Donald Trump “Access Hollywood” video: “Grab them by the p*ssy”’, Communication Studies, 68(3), 243–259. Berlant, L. (2011) Cruel optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Blake, A. (2018) ‘Trump’s lawyer’s call for end to Russia probe is all about the investigation’s aftermath – or firing Mueller’, The Washington Post, 17 March. Available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ the-fix/wp/2018/03/17/trump-lawyers-call-to-end-the-russia-probe-is-all-about-the-investigationsaftermath-or-firing-mueller/?utm_term=.f91b79128aac Burns, A., and Martin, N. (2017) ‘Once a long shot, Democrat Doug Jones wins Alabama senate race’, The New York Times, 12 December. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/12/us/politics/ alabama-senate-race-winner.html Calvert, C. (2000) Voyeur nation: Media, privacy, and peering in modern culture. New York: Westview Press. Chen, G.M., Pain, P. and Fadnis, D. (2016) ‘Over-sharing in a political sex scandal’ in H. Mandell and G.M. Chen (eds.), Scandal in a digital age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 131–144. Chen, G.M., Pain, P. and Zhang, J. (2018) ‘#NastyWomen: Reclaiming the Twitterverse from misogyny’ in J.R. Vickery and T. Everbach (eds.), Mediating misogyny: Gender, technology & harassment. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 371–388. Codrea-Rado, A. (2017) ‘#MeToo floods social media with stories of harassment and assault’, The New York Times, 16 October. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/16/technology/metootwitter-facebook.html

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Gina Masullo Chen Cooney, S. (2018). ‘Here are all the public figures who’ve been accused of sexual misconduct after Harvey Weinstein’, Time.com, 26 January. Available at http://time.com/5015204/harvey-weinstein-scandal/ Cos, G. (2016) ‘Chappaquiddick revisited: Scandal and the modern-mediated apologia’, in H. Mandell and G.M. Chen (eds.), Scandal in a digital age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 41–51. Fogarty, B.J. (2013) ‘Scandals, news coverage, and the 2006 Congressional Elections’, Political Communication, 30, 419–433. Gamson, J. (2001) ‘Normal sins: Sex scandal narratives as institutional morality tales’, Social Problems, 48, 185–205. Gamson, J. (2016) ‘Scandal in the age of sexting’ in H. Mandell and G.M. Chen (eds.), Scandal in a digital age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 77–95. Garcia, S.E. (2017) ‘The woman who created #MeToo long before hashtags’, The New York Times, 20 October. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/20/us/me-too-movement-tarana-burke.html Habermas, J. (1991) The structural transformation of the public sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Harp, D. (2018) ‘Misogyny in the 2016 U.S. presidential election’ in J.R. Vickery and T. Everbach (eds.), Mediating misogyny: Gender, technology & harassment. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 189–207. Isotalus, P. and Almonkari, M. (2014) ‘Political scandal tests trust in politicians: The case of the Finnish minister who resigned because of his text messages’, NORDICOM Review, 35, 3–16. Juntunen, L. and Valiverronen, E. (2010) ‘Politics of sexting’, Journalism Studies, 11, 817–831. Koblin, J. and Grynbaum, M.M. (2017) ‘Charlie Rose fired by CBS and PBS after harassment allegations’, The New York Times, 21 November. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/21/business/ media/charlie-rose-fired-cbs.html?mtrref=www.google.com Kuehn, K.M. (2016) ‘An “office sex romp” and the economic motivations of mediated voyeurism’, in H. Mandell and G.M. Chen (eds.), Scandal in a digital age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 119–130. Mandell, H. (2012) ‘Political wives and scandal: Reading agency in silence at press conferences’, Catalan Journal of Communication & Cultural Studies, 4, 203–220. Mandell, H. (2017) Sex scandals, gender, and power in contemporary American politics. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Mandell, H. and Chen, G.M. (2016a) Scandal in a digital age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mandell, H. and Chen, G.M. (2016b) ‘Scandal-suffering politicians, scorned wives and salacious news: Examining public response to the scandal press conference’, Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture, 7(1), 85–98. Morris, J.S. and Clawson, R.A. (2005) ‘Media coverage of Congress in the 1990s: Scandals, personalities, and the prevalence of policy and process’, Political Communication, 22, 297–313. Papacharissi, Z. (2010) A private sphere: Democracy in a digital area. Malden, MA: Polity. Papacharissi, Z. (2015) Affective publics. New York: Oxford University Press. Reinhard, B. and Kunzia, R. (2018) ‘Stormy Daniels friend describes listening in on her calls with Trump’, The New York Times, 13 March. Available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/stormydaniels-friend-describes-listening-in-on-her-phone-calls-with-trump/2018/03/13/ff004956-26af11e8-ab19-06a445a08c94_story.html?utm_term=.bb9b5867d51c Sanders, K. and Canel, M.J. (2006) ‘A scribbling tribe: Reporting political scandal in Britain and Spain’, Journalism, 7, 453–476. Saslow, E. (2018) ‘Is anyone listening?’ The Washington Post, 19 February. Available at https://www. washingtonpost.com/news/national/wp/2018/02/19/feature/trump-accuser-keeps-telling-her-storyhoping-someone-will-finally-listen/?utm_term=.6c640e7e2295 Shifman, L. (2014) Memes in digital culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Shoemaker, P.J. (1996) ‘Hardwired for news: Using biological and cultural evolution to explain the surveillance function’, Journal of Communication, 46(2), 32–47. Stolberg, S.G., Alcindor, Y., and Fandos, N. (2017) ‘Al Franken to resign from senate amid harassment allegations’, The New York Times, 7 December. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/07/ us/politics/al-franken-senate-sexual-harassment.html Summers, J.H. (2000) ‘What happened to sex scandals? Politics and peccadilloes, Jefferson to Kennedy’, The Journal of American History, 87, 825–854. Thompson, J.B. (2000) Political scandal: Power and visibility in the media age. New York: Polity. Toepfl, F. (2011) ‘Managing public outrage: Power, scandal, and new media in contemporary Russia’, New Media & Society, 13, 1301–1319. Tumber, H. (2004) ‘Scandal and media in the United Kingdom: From Major to Blair’, American Behavioral Scientist, 47, 1122–1137.

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17 THE SHIFTING BOUNDARIES OF ELITE AND TABLOID MEDIA IN POLITICAL SEX SCANDALS Esa Väliverronen and Laura Juntunen Intimate revelations of politicians’ private lives have become a recurring feature of political journalism across advanced industrial democracies since the 1990s. Since the Clinton–Lewinsky case, political sex scandals have become a global phenomenon, although national differences in conceptions of private and public still seem to exist. In this chapter, we concentrate on political sex scandals, which are typically revelations of extra-marital affairs and unwanted intrusions into areas of personal domain that politicians want to remain private. Often these include information that might damage a politician’s reputation and career. The focus is on the dynamics between different media in the revelation of political sex scandals. We argue that such scandals, although justified in the name of the public interest, have the effect of softening the professional boundaries between different types of media outlets and creating greater coherence in the field. At the same time, professional norms serve as boundary markers (Singer 2015) as the hierarchy of genres is being renegotiated and the borders between “hard” and “soft” forms of journalism are being redrawn.

National differences in exposure Research from different countries have pointed at the trend of an increased proclivity of certain media to intrude into the private lives of politicians. However, the intimization process is uneven and by no means universal: politicians’ personal lives receive publicity in most countries but to different extents. For example, Castells (2004) has noted that, when it comes to the reporting of extra-marital sex lives, the USA stands at one extreme in its lack of reverence, with continental European democracies at the other, and the UK somewhere in between. Stanyer (2013, 160) confirms that there has been a marked divergence from the 1990s onwards in how much the media are willing to intrude into the private lives of politicians and in the extent to which revelations about politicians’ sexual relations and orientation flood the public sphere in different countries.1 Based on a comparison of seven countries in 1990–2009, the non-consensual exposure of politicians’ infidelity was largely a phenomenon of the USA, and to some extent the UK, but almost absent in the studied continental European countries (France, Germany, Italy, and Spain). 174

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Traditionally, politicians’ sexual misdemeanors have been very much a taboo in many European countries. For example, in France, politicians have enjoyed strong privacy protection and the extra-marital affairs of leading politicians have been public secrets, unlikely to cause much turmoil. In Germany, too, there has been a tacit agreement that journalists do not disclose private details about politicians’ marriage problems, extra-marital affairs, and sexual inclinations (Esser and Hartung 2004, 1064–1065). However, the zone of privacy around politicians is said to be shrinking also in those countries where they have traditionally enjoyed greater privacy protection. Authors have remarked on the personalized nature of political communication in Italy (Campus 2010), Germany (Holtz-Bacha 2004; Neckel 2005), and France (Kuhn 2004; 2007), although intimization has never gained as intrusive a dynamic as in the USA, where even unsubstantiated rumors about politicians’ extra-marital affairs routinely make it to the news (Sabato et al. 2000, 71), or in the UK, where intrusions into the private lives of politicians have been normalized in the tabloid press since the 1990s (Deacon 2004). So why have sex scandals attracted more public attention in some countries than in others? International research suggests that the occurrence or absence of political sex scandals is not attributable to mono-causal explanations, but rather the outcome of a combination of different political, legal, media-related, and sociocultural conditions (see Thompson 2000, 147–148; Stanyer 2013, 100). Part of the reason lies in differences in political culture and legislation. According to Stanyer (2013, 78), politically related conditions include, for example, greater emphasis on character and the growing legal control of political life. These factors have been apparent particularly in the USA. Also, the levels of press-party parallelism in the different countries might help explain the differing cultures. The presence or absence of legal protection for politicians’ privacy also plays an important role. Intrusions are reportedly more likely in countries where the boundaries of the private have no legal recognition. For example, France and Germany provide public figures with a high degree of legal privacy protection, while the UK, for instance, has no specific law against invasions of privacy (Frost 2000, 125). Although the USA does have a privacy law, it excludes politicians from essential parts of it and the US courts tend to accept the media’s definition of newsworthiness (Christians et al. 2005, 106; see also Esser and Hartung 2004, 1064). Another factor that needs to be considered is the ethical consensus on the appropriateness of exposure, often expressed in the professional codes of conduct (Stanyer 2013, 83–88). In some journalistic cultures, particularly in Europe, private is separated from public in matters of sex and, thus, intrusions into politicians’ private lives are considered amongst media professionals not just potentially illegal but also ethically inappropriate unless there is a strong public-interest motive. In Finland, used as an exemplary case in this chapter, both the constitution and criminal law provide protection for privacy. However, the law says that the dissemination of information about a person’s private life is permitted if and to the extent that this is necessary for the balanced treatment of a matter of social interest. The “Guidelines for Journalists” state that particularly sensitive matters about a person’s private life “may only be published with the consent of the person in question, or if such matters are of considerable public interest.” This has subsequently been complemented with a three-tiered classification of degrees of privacy protection depending on the amount of power wielded by the person: the more power they have, the less privacy protection is provided.2 The media-related conditions include commercial pressures and the tabloidization of the media. The tabloid media, with a focus on celebrities’ personal lives, are more likely to intrude 175

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into politicians’ private lives than other types of media (Stanyer & Wring 2004) and thus intimization is more of a feature in countries where there is a strong celebrity tabloid media and more competition between such media outlets—most notably in the USA and the UK. Finally, it has been suggested in previous research that different social norms might be a possible explanation for the absence or presence of political sex scandals. In some socio-cultural conditions, infidelity is seen as a private matter, while in others it is considered something of a public interest. Also, in some societies disapproval of infidelity has been interpreted as being more entrenched, while in others attitudes towards extra-marital affairs are more relaxed. According to Stanyer’s (2013, 91–94) findings, the high levels of exposure are best explained by the combination of large tabloid presences and what he calls “a weak privacy culture,” that is a lack of legal privacy protection for political elites and a weak consensus on privacy amongst journalists. In addition, the social conservative agenda of the Christian right seems to explain the high levels of publicized infidelity in the USA, while the strong presence of intensely adversarial politically aligned press plays a role in the UK (see also Downey and Stanyer 2013).

The Finnish case: the symbiosis of news media, tabloids, and gossip magazines Previous research has pointed to the role of “critical events” in marking a point of change (Stanyer 2013, 22–23; see also Splichal & Garrison 2000; Summers 2007). The Clinton– Lewinsky scandal is a good example of such an event. US journalists used to be less willing than their British counterparts to publish allegations of sexual affairs for a good deal of the twentieth century, but this has changed considerably during the last decades (e.g. Tumber 2004, 1125–1126; Summer 2007). Similar junctures can be found in other countries too. In Finland, there are two high-level sex scandals that marked a change in conventions in the journalistic orientation towards politicians’ private lives, destroying the gentleman’s agreement that previously marked political reporting. The first case revolved around sex allegations concerning Finnish Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen in 2005–2009. The second case was a text messaging scandal, which led to the resignation of Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ilkka Kanerva, in 2008 (Juntunen & Väliverronen 2010). The intimate life of politicians was long a taboo subject in Finnish journalism and, before the twenty-first century, virtually all political scandals in Finland had to do with the exercise of political and economic power. A comparative study shows that political sex scandals began to emerge also in other Nordic countries in the early 2000s, though concerning less high-profile politicians than in Finland (Allern & Pollack 2012). Prime Minister (PM) Vanhanen’s private life first attracted widespread media notice in spring 2005 following his announcement that he was divorcing his wife. Speculation over a highranking politician’s extra-marital affairs was something never before seen in Finnish political journalism. In the following years, the gossip magazines and tabloids run several unadulterated scandal stories involving the PM’s private life. The media circus reached its zenith with the announcement by the PM’s former lady friend that she was going to write a book about her affair with the PM. Initially the PM’s Bride was intended as a compilation of intimate text messages sent by the PM, but these plans were soon dropped, no doubt for fear of legal sanctions. Soon the PM’s private life seemed to evolve into a media phenomenon in its own right, receiving routine coverage in the media, including news media. By the time of the book launch attentions began to turn back in on the mass media’s collective response to the phenomenon they themselves had created.

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Journalists had several different types of arguments to justify the publication of details about the PM’s private life. Firstly, they felt it necessary to ask whether and how the PM’s divorce and revelations about his intimate life affected the performance of his duties. Secondly, they raised the question of how the revelations would affect his political image as well as his reliability and credibility as a politician while he had specifically promoted himself as a staunch advocate of family values. Thirdly, the reporting on Vanhanen’s private life was justified by reference to the potential political implications of the scandal. It was thought that the revelations about his marital status and sex life might well influence the vote of party members, particularly the more conservative camp, and that it might even have an effect on the political fight between parties. Previous research has shown that the alleged or apparent hypocrisy of a politician is often considered by journalists as legitimate justification for privacy intrusions. Actions in politicians’ personal lives are inevitably compared to their previous public pronouncements and disjunctures between the personal domain and public life, which often generate claims of hypocrisy (see Thompson 2000; Stanyer 2013, 166). Therefore, the media are more eager to expose extramarital dalliances of those politicians that have espoused family values in public but failed to live up to those standards in their personal lives. The scandal around the Foreign Minister Kanerva—a well-known ladies’ man—burst out in Spring 2008 when he was caught with his phone down after sending a couple of hundred text messages to an erotic dancer. Some of the messages were subsequently published by the popular gossip magazine Hymy that squeezed out every drop of the story, keeping it hanging for weeks while carefully weighing the legal risks of publishing before finally releasing the messages. At the peak of the scandal, the country’s biggest news media also reported on the case daily, repeating what had already been said several times over. In Kanerva’s case, the main arguments against him were the loss of credibility and the fact that he had first told (white) lies when he was asked about the text messages. This was also not the first time that the Foreign Minister was in the headlines because of his sexting, as he had already been publicly accused twice before for bombarding women with texts. Consequently, Kanerva, who had earlier promised to clean up his act, was sacked from the Cabinet. This was the first time that a Finnish politician was forced to resign over a scandal in his private life. In both cases, the revelations pushed the politician’s career on a downhill slide. PM Vanhanen continued doggedly in his office and as a chair of the Centre Party for a couple of years before temporarily withdrawing from daily politics. In 2015 he was re-elected to the Parliament and in 2018 he joined the presidential elections as the Centre Party’s candidate, which resulted in a flop. Kanerva has continued in the parliament and politics but with a less public profile. The old sins came back to haunt him in early 2018 when, contrary to expectations, he was not elected as the President of the Finnish Parliament. According to various interpreters, this was because the elections coincided with the Me Too campaign. International research shows that the political consequences of sexual revelations vary. Unlike many other countries, in the UK scandals tend to have immediate political consequences, and over the years a number of ministers have been forced to resign over tabloid allegations of sexual misconduct (Tumber 2004, 1128). In the USA, between 1970 and 2009 over half of the elected officials continued in their posts after the exposure of their extra-marital affairs. Of those that resigned, only about 10 percent left politics altogether (Stanyer 2013, 163). Also, studies of public opinion show that sexual infidelity is not necessarily punished by the voters. For example, the Lewinsky scandal did not seem to have a significant effect on Clinton’s popularity (Lawrence & Bennet 2001).

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From symbiosis to softening boundaries The above-described Finnish scandals serve as examples of the changes sweeping the media landscape. Most allegations started their life in the gossip papers or in the tabloid press and then trickled through to the news media. We argue that sex scandals have the tendency to nourish a tacit symbiosis between different media. First, relations grew closer between the gossip press and afternoon papers as they competed for new revelations. At this point, most news media outlets opted to keep a safe distance from these sensations and scandals, addressing them after a suitable time lag but still with some reluctance. Gossip magazines were never quoted directly. Later, the revelations made their way via the afternoon papers into the news media, and the differences across the media field were all but wiped out. The more widely the scandal spread throughout the field, the easier it became for the traditional news media to deal with the subject, as they could always justify their involvement by saying everyone else was discussing it as well. Once the news media got going, they started to make ever more intimate revelations about politicians’ private lives. Williams and Delli Carpini (2004, 1227) have, among others, pointed out that a juicy sex scandal is liable to cross media boundaries. Tumber (2004), for his part, notes that a full-blown public scandal requires the involvement of the whole media field; even though sensational media play a key role in stirring up the initial furore, it is only when the rest of the field join in that a true scandal is created. At the same time, the traditional news media are increasingly following the tabloid press news agenda which leads to a prevalence of tabloid entertainment values and a disregard for the traditional principles of reporting (Tumber 2004, 1124–1125). Although the peccadilloes may come to public attention through a myriad of media outlets and via different media genres, the tabloid or boulevard press is often at the forefront of the coverage. In this symbiotic relationship, the news media need a gossip press to do the “dirty work,” to dig up the sleaze that is the stuff of scandals. While the quality media want to maintain their separation from the sensational press, at the same time gossip magazines continue to provide an increasing supply of interesting storylines of current interest. While using these stories and the same ways of framing them, other media very rarely call into question the practices of the sensationalist press, such as cash payments for new revelations, even though they firmly dissociate themselves from such practices. We argue that, apart from stirring up debate about the boundary line between the private and public, scandals also have the effect of softening the boundaries between different media and creating greater coherence in the media field (see also Juntunen & Väliverronen 2010). In the face of outside criticism, the media has stood united. In particular, attempts by some politicians to criticize it for moral bankruptcy were unanimously rejected by appealing to freedom of speech. The concepts of infotainment, sensationalism, soft news, and tabloidization have been widely used in describing or explaining the shifting boundaries in journalism. Even though the term “tabloidization” has mainly been used as a generic catchword rather than an analytical tool in communications research (Gripsrud 2000), it certainly has application in the analysis of sex scandals as it helps to explain and interpret the trickling down of subjects and story framings from the tabloid press and sensation magazines to news journalism. According to Otto et al. (2017, 145), the process of tabloidization is characterized by “spillovers of values from the popular to the traditional news media.” Tabloidization is composed of three dimensions: changes in content (e.g. from political to human interest), changes in form (e.g. towards shorter stories), and changes in the mode of address (e.g. in style and tone towards 178

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“street-talk”) (ibid.; see also Esser 1999). Thus, tabloidization brings together the dissemination of topics, forms, and styles. Tabloid journalism is mainly interested in topics related to celebrities and their private lives, entertainment, and sports. The stories are typically framed as scandals, revelations about someone’s private life, and unfolding narratives. The softening of boundaries is connected to the stiffening competition among different media that has brought about a convergence of media contents and forced media organizations to keep a closer eye on one another. Usually a key difference between sensationalist tabloid media and quality media has been precisely the way they deal with private life: the private has traditionally been the realm of gossip magazines, whereas news journalism has focused on the public. But these boundaries are now being blurred and the stories circulating in the different media are increasingly all the same. The general trend towards increasing entertainment in the media has presented a challenge for traditional news media, which has to explain the rationale and reasons for this trend both to their audiences and to the journalistic profession itself. Whereas tabloidization is generally associated with concerns of declining quality, in political sex scandals social importance and people’s curiosity shake hands, making them a legitimate subject for any media. As the wall that used to protect politicians’ private life was beginning to crumble, the Finnish journalists were adamant that this marked a change for the better. Traditionally, there has been a close identity between politicians and political journalists in Finland, but these relations were now cooling down. The new generation of journalists especially were openly questioning the customary ways of political news reporting, keen on getting the message across that political journalism was finally baring its teeth. As for the task of monitoring and controlling the exercise of power, it is symptomatic, however, that the individually oriented scandal approach rarely leads to the identification or questioning of the true underlying problem, such as unhealthy structural dependencies in politics.

The normalization of sex scandals Within the past 20 years, scandals surrounding the private lives of politicians have become a somewhat permanent feature of political news around the Western world. What then are the consequences of increased exposure of intimate affairs for politics and political journalism? In the absence of up-to-date comparative research, it is hard to say exactly how the amount and magnitude of political sex scandals have evolved within the past ten years. On one hand, it seems that in a global news environment national differences have to some extent diminished in the sense that the struggle over privacy is now increasingly transnational. As news flows across borders at ever-increasing speeds and volumes, so also the peccadilloes of top politicians are often recycled into global news. Oehlkers (2000) calls this an “international media echo”. The Internet and new media landscape have also eroded public figures’ ability to control the flow of personal information because the privacy laws do not stretch beyond state borders. On the other hand, national differences seem to persist in the extent of exposure. While the Wikipedia3 listing of federal sex scandals in the USA shows continuous growth, in many European countries they have been largely absent in recent years. Also, few of the major sex scandals of the 2010s have involved high-level politicians—Silvio Berlusconi and Nicholas Sarkozy being the most notable exceptions. In sum, what we are looking at is not necessarily an inevitable progression towards greater intimization of political journalism; and there are signs of opposite tendencies as well. An interesting question is what the implications of the intimization of political journalism and the shifting of boundaries between different media are for journalism as a profession. 179

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As pointed out by Sjøvaag (2015, 101), the boundary between hard and soft news is the dividing line that separates one of the strongest dichotomies in news production, reflecting “the hierarchy that separates the higher and lower forms of journalistic genres, professional practices, ethical issues, and journalism’s potential socio-democratic impact.” The hierarchy of genres help to reproduce the norms and ideologies of the field that protects journalism from outside threats. While hard news helps to maintain authority in the field, soft news can be interpreted as potentially damaging to the professional ideal (ibid., 101–109). For traditional news media, the key defense for privacy intrusions in political journalism has been that the exposures are in the public interest (Morrison and Svennevig 2007; Juntunen & Väliverronen 2010), while reporting politicians’ extra-marital sex lives for their own sake has not been considered justified. The primary reason for why political journalists have been generally reluctant to seek out sex stories is their self-conception as professionals (Tumber 2004). When the so-called prestige media first began to see extra-marital lives of politicians as legitimate news stories, the intrusions were often justified by saying that when distancing itself from politicians, political journalism was, in fact, playing out its role as the Fourth Estate better. However, the public interest argument has perhaps started to lose its explanatory power in the eyes of the profession, as routine coverage of extra-marital dalliances has also become more commonplace in news journalism. If parts of the media are now re-adopting a more reticent attitude towards covering politicians’ private lives, as the lack of recent sex scandals in Finland and elsewhere suggests, this may also concern having to face fierce outside criticism. In the UK, where the amount of political sex scandals is much higher than elsewhere in Europe, the intrusive tactics of the tabloid press have prompted massive public criticism and wide-scale debate on press standards in recent years. The News of the World phone-hacking scandal and the inquiry into it led not only to the closure of the paper but also to the closure of the Press Complaints Commission and there were also promises of further regulatory reform. Whether or not this marked a decline in the exposure of the sex lives of politicians, remains to be seen (cf. Stanyer 2013, 159, and 167). On the other hand, it will be interesting to see whether the global Me Too movement, that has encouraged women in all sectors to speak out against men who have sexually harassed and abused them, will bring along new cases involving politicians. Thus far, the British Defence Secretary Michael Fallon resigned from his post because of sexual harassment allegations. The European Parliament has also been shaken by a sexism problem that has been rampant for years. In their interview study on public attitudes in the USA, Wojdynski and Riffe (2011, 218) found “a public with increasingly accepting views of media coverage of politicians’ private lives” comparing results from 2001 and 2009. When comparing the importance and public acceptance of different public revelations from financial impropriety to substance abuse and sexual infidelity, the last one was considered to be least important. Yet, 55 percent of the respondents agreed that media should cover issues when “the leader has had an extramarital affair with someone of the opposite sex” (ibid., 215) while 35 percent disagreed. Wojdynski and Riffe (220) conclude that although philandering was considered less newsworthy, “it may also be true that coverage of extramarital affairs has become common enough to render it tiresome.” It seems that, as revelations about politicians’ private lives have become more commonplace and a part of everyday media life, the outbursts often come and go without major importance or political consequences. In fact, it can be argued that, along with their normalization, the threshold of a major political sex scandal is probably now higher than it was in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The US President Donald Trump is a good example of a politician who is seemingly immune to any kind of scandal, despite the wealth of potentially scandalous events in his past. 180

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The boundaries in journalism are not static but move over time (e.g. Carlson 2015) and, thus, both the borders of the public and private in journalism and the positions on the continuum between the serious and the tabloid are negotiable.

Notes 1 As defined by Stanyer (2013, 14–15, 152), “intimization is a revelatory process which involves the publicizing of information and imagery from what we might ordinarily understand as a politician’s personal life.” It is a process whereby values from the private sphere are transferred to the public sphere (Van Zoonen 1991, 223). As alternatives to intimization, researchers have used other close-by concepts, such as “personalization,” “celebrization,” or even “privatization” (for a discussion and critique of these concepts see Stanyer 2013, 7–12). 2 Group A comprises influential decision-makers in politics, administration, and business. Group B includes famous figures in contemporary history who are frequently in the public eye, for instance in the field of culture and entertainment. Finally, Group C consists of ordinary citizens. 3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_federal_political_sex_scandals_in_the_United_States

References Allern, S. and Pollack, E. (2012) (Eds.). Scandalous! The Mediated Construction of Political Scandals in Four Nordic Countries. Gothenberg: Nordicom. Campus, D. (2010). “The Mediatization and Personalization of Politics in Italy and France: The Cases of Berlusconi and Sarkozy”. International Journal of Press Politics, 15 (2), pp. 219–235. Carlson, M. (2015). “Introduction: The Many Boundaries of Journalism”, In Matt Carlson & Seth Lewis (Eds.), Boundaries of Journalism: Professionalism, Practices and Participation ( pp. 1–18). London: Routledge. Castells, M. (2004). The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol. 2: The Power of Identity (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell. Christians, C., Rotzoll, K., Fackler, M., Brittain McKee, B. and Woods, R. (2005). Media Ethics: Cases and Moral Reasoning, 7th ed. Boston: Pearson. Deacon, D. (2004). “Politicians, Privacy and Media Intrusion in Britain”, Parliamentary Affairs, 57(1), pp. 9–23. Downey, J. and Stanyer, J. (2013). “Exposing Politicians’ Peccadilloes in Comparative Context: Explaining the Frequency of Political Sex Scandals in Eight Democracies Using Fuzzy Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis”. Political Communication, 30 (3), pp. 495–509. Esser, F. (1999). “Tabloidization of News: A Comparative Analysis of Anglo-American and German Press Journalism.” European Journal of Communication, 14(3), pp. 291–324. Esser. F. and Hartung, U. (2004). “Nazis, Pollution and No Sex: Political Scandals as a Reflection of Political Culture in Germany”, American Behavioral Scientist 47(8), pp. 1040–1071. Frost, C. (2000). Media Ethics and Self-regulation. Singapore: Longman. Gripsrud, J. (2000). “Tabloidisation, Popular Journalism, and Democracy”, In Colin Sparks and John Tulloch (Eds.), Tabloid Tales: Global Debates over Media Standards. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 285–300. Holtz-Bacha, C. (2004). “Germany: How the Private Life of Politicians Got into the Media”, Parliamentary Affairs 57(1), pp. 41–52. Juntunen, L. and Väliverronen. E. (2010). “Politics of Sexting: Re-negotiating the Boundaries of Private and Public in Political Journalism”. Journalism Studies 11 (6), pp. 817–831. Kuhn, R. (2004). “‘Vive La Différance’? The Mediation of Politicians’ Public Images and Private Lives in France”, Parliamentary Affairs 57(1), pp. 24–40. Kuhn, R. (2007). “The Public and the Private in Contemporary French Politics”, French Cultural Studies, 18 (2), pp. 185–200. Lawrence, R.G. and Bennett, W. (2001). “Rethinking Media Politics and Public Opinion: Reactions to the Clinton-Lewinsky Scandal.” Political Science Quarterly, 116(3), pp. 425–446. Morrison, D.E. and Svennevig, M. (2007). “The Defence of Public Interest and Intrusion of Privacy: Journalists and the Public.” Journalism, 8(1), pp. 44–65. Neckel, S. (2005). “Political Scandals: An Analytical Framework”, Comparative Sociology, 4 (1–2), pp. 101–114.

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Esa Väliverronen and Laura Juntunen Oehlkers, P.W. (2000). “Mediating News: The International Media Echo and Symbolic International Relations”, In A. Malek and A.P. Kavoori (Eds.) The Global Dynamics of News: Studies in International News Coverage and News Agenda. Stamford, CT: Ablex. Otto, L., Glogger, I. and Boukes, M. (2017). “The Softening of Journalistic Political Communication: A Comprehensive Framework Model of Sensationalism, Soft News, Infotainment, and Tabloidization”. Communication Theory, 27(2), pp. 136–155. Singer, B. (2015). “Out of Bounds: Professional Norms as Boundary Markers”, In Matt Carlson & Seth Lewis (Eds.), Boundaries of Journalism: Professionalism, Practices and Participation (pp. 21–36). London: Routledge. Sjøvaag, H. (2015). “Hard News/Soft News: The Hierarchy of Genres and the Boundaries of the Profession”, In Matt Carlson & Seth Lewis (Eds.), Boundaries of Journalism: Professionalism, Practices and Participation (pp. 101–117). London: Routledge. Splichal, S. and Garrison, B. (2000). “Covering Public Officials: Gender and Privacy Issue Differences.” Journal of Mass Media Ethics, 15(3), pp. 167–179. Stanyer, J. (2013). Intimate Politics. Cambridge: Polity Press. Stanyer, J. and Wring, D. (2004). “Public Images, Private Lives: An Introduction”, Parliamentary Affairs, 57(1), pp. 1–8. Summers, J.H. (2007). “What Happened to Sex Scandals? Politics and Peccadilloes, Jefferson to Kennedy”, In N. Negrine and J. Stanyer (Eds.) The Political Communication Reader. London: Routledge. Thompson, J. (2000). Political Scandal: Power and Visibility in the Media Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Tumber, H. (2004). “Scandal and Media in the United Kingdom: From Major to Blair”, American Behavioral Scientist, 47(8), pp. 1122–1137. Van Zoonen, L. (1991). “A Tyranny of Intimacy? Women, Feminity and Television News”, In P. Dahlgren & C. Sparks (Eds.), Communication and Citizenship: Journalism and the Public Sphere. London: Routledge. Williams, B. and Delli Carpini, M. (2004). “Monica and Bill All the Time and Everywhere: The Collapse of Gatekeeping and Agenda Setting in the New Media Environment”, American Behavioral Scientist, 47(9), pp. 1208–1230. Wojdynski, B. and Riffe, D. (2011). “What Kind of Media, and When? Public Opinion about Press Coverage of Politicians’ Private Lives”. Journal of Mass Media Ethics, 26 (3), pp. 206–223.

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18 TALK SCANDALS The power of mediated talk Mats Ekström and Bengt Johansson

Political reputation and power have become increasingly dependent on mediated visibility. They can be used to gain and withhold political power, but this undoubtedly represents a doubleedged sword. Political scandals are perhaps the most significant example of how visibility can damage reputation and symbolic power, and a ceaseless stream of disclosures of norm transgressions and public outrage related to politicians’ actions seems to exist. The mediated political scandal is not only about disclosure, but also dramatization, storytelling, and attraction. It fits perfectly into a news and media culture in which the offering of what is sensational, shocking, and abnormal constitutes a fundamental strategy to attract and fascinate presumptive audiences. We developed the concept of talk scandal to understand the role that talk, in its various forms, plays in the origin and development of political scandals (Ekström & Johansson 2008). Talk is central in mediated politics, whether in politicians’ performances in different interactional settings (such as interviews and debates), in argumentation, and in the enactment of styles and public persona. In news discourse, the utterances of different actors are displayed and contextualized in the frequent use of quotes and soundbites. In this chapter we summarize and discuss our main arguments related to talk scandals, refer to some recent studies in which the concept has been applied, and critically discuss the implications of some fundamental transformations in mediated politics.

The centrality of talk in the dramatization of political scandals Transgressive utterances can be a scandal in themselves (see below), but mediated talk is also used by news media organizations in different ways during a scandal. In the construction of political scandals, the media contributes to the establishment of moral codes and the border line between what is deemed acceptable and not. Naturally, the media cannot construct a moral standard from nothing; it must be anchored in common values. However, in their reporting, the media use various techniques to establish the standard assumed to be transgressed. One way to objectify moral standards is by allowing people to speak. Scandals typically contain quoted voices from (above all) the public, as well as from other politicians who in various ways state that the behavior of the person in question is morally reprehensible. Media scandals are in part built using these statements. With well-chosen discursive techniques, public discontent is staged as a central element in establishing a media scandal (cf. Thompson 2000). 183

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The role of the media in a political scandal is not only to disclose transgressive acts; it is also to display and stage the act and its various reactions, and to keep the story alive day after day. Media talk plays an important role here. Quotes and soundbites are used to reconstruct and display norm transgression, even if the original scandalous action is not recorded. Statements and reactions from the accused politician also constitute an important element in the dramatization of a political scandal. Interviews are performed, and the politician’s statements are quoted, which can be more or less successful in terms of crisis management. Central to the political scandal’s narrative is the confession. The confession can be in the form of an apology, but also as justifications and explanations of how the person in question experienced what happened. Contrasts between heated critical attacks and emotional stories with the potential to draw sympathy are often part of the dramatization. Even after the transgression has been displayed in the media, much can be done to criticize and ridicule further the politician’s behavior. A particular way to achieve this is to dig in the archives and find other statements from the politician that show the bizarreness and inconsistency of his or her behavior. In connection with political scandals, the media is also filled with comments from all possible directions, including superiors, colleagues, those who stand in opposition to the person in question, family, and friends. These comments permit discussion not only of the scandal’s moral content but also its concrete effects. One of the most common questions discussed in the media is whether or not the politician should be allowed to retain his or her post, or instead be forced to resign. Comments from various actors help to keep a scandal alive, twisting the knife yet again.

Talk as a scandal in itself Mediated talk is not only a central part of the staging and dramatization of various political scandals. Transgressive talk can also develop into a scandal in itself. This is the case when politicians make scandalous and unacceptable utterances that generate significant public outrage with severe consequences for the reputation of the politician. Talk scandals represent a new step in the mediatization of scandals. They are not only communicated and dramatized in the media, but also in most cases originate in the media. There are not even necessarily original actions outside the media, and the disclosure of back-stage actions is therefore no longer a prerequisite for political scandals to occur. Two basic types of talk scandals can be identified. In the first order-talk scandal, the talk itself constitutes the scandal, and the scandal’s origin and core consist of speech events performed in the media. Second-order talk scandals relate to what Thompson (2000) calls second-order transgressions during scandals. This is the case when in interviews, politicians, for example, make statements related to the original scandal, which creates a new norm transgression. It could be intentional lies, an attempt to hide the truth, or trivialization or statements that reveal the ignorance of the person in question. The media’s attention is typically transferred from the original event to speech acts that arise as part of the course of events. We will now focus on what we define as first-order talk scandals, the ways in which they relate to traditional categorizations of political scandals, and the different types we have observed. As with other scandals, at the core of a talk scandal is an action that constitutes a transgression of norms, rules, or moral codes. This is not to suggest that all controversial statements by politicians, and small mistakes and gaffes in public discourse, are considered talk scandals. As is true of other scandals, public criticism and a serious threat of reputation are required. The basic difference between various types of scandal is related to which type of actions are in question and which norms are transgressed. To clarify this point, in Table 18.1 we have integrated talk scandals into a revised version of a figure developed by Thompson (2000). Talk scandals originate 184

Talk scandals Table 18.1  Types of Scandals

Type of action Codes transgressed Likelihood of legal infringement

Talk scandal

Sexual scandal

Financial scandal

Power scandal

Speech Discursive Low

Sexual acts Sexual Variable

Financial acts Financial Moderate to high

Political acts Political High

Source: Ekström & Johansson (2008: 64)

in speech acts—that is, utterances and talk—and discursive norms and codes that are transgressed. The central question pertains to what people in a certain position are allowed to say and how they should behave in public talk and discourse. Just as politicians can transgress norms related to private morality, the financial sphere, and as powerholders, they can also transgress norms concerning how one should behave in the public sphere. Another important difference between talk scandals and other types of scandal is that the risk of legal consequences in the former case is virtually nonexistent. Talk scandals thus highlight how a politician’s reputation and career can be seriously threatened without the risk of any legal consequences. We identify five different types of talk scandals (Ekström & Johansson 2008). The first is the disclosure of observed back-stage utterances. This type is closest to the traditional definition of a scandal. It is constituted by a collapse between the front and back regions, which many scholars understand as the core of a scandal. A poorly chosen utterance is made in the back region, and information regarding what was said leaks to the front region, where the media reveal the utterances. The second is the accidental collapse of back and front-stage utterances. This type originates in norm-transgressing utterances that are committed without the knowledge that the action is being documented (such as with a cellphone or similar recording device). The person in question makes a statement, believing him or herself to be back-stage; the statement is not intended to be public, but it is made public because a recording device happens to be present. When the utterance is displayed in the media, it can be contextualized as a statement of principle, independent of its back-stage context. Here, accidental collapse refers to the fact that the recording/ filming (which means that the utterance is saved and can be played live) has not been planned by the documenting actor. The third is produced/purposive collapse of back-stage and front-stage utterances. This type is the result of the journalist’s effort to find or even produce a talk scandal. It is legitimized by the same type of logic as undercover investigative journalism. Using a hidden camera or microphone, the journalists try to find proof of concealed truths, of opinions that politicians would not dare express in public but that are uttered when they believe they are not heard or seen in the media. The first three types of talk scandals thus deal with different forms of breakdown between front-stage and back-stage actions. The next two types are distinguished from these in that the events have already occurred in the media limelight from the beginning. Transgression of norms in the public sphere is a particular type of first-order talk scandal that occurs when politicians (or others) transgress norms and codes regarding how one should behave in public. Politicians appear in various interactional settings in the media. Debates, interviews, press conferences, and talk shows include norms that can potentially be broken. In a debate, passionate argument and hostile speech acts can be completely within the bounds of what is acceptable and expected. There are limits, however, and a transgression of these creates a breeding ground for a talk scandal. The last type is unsuccessful utterances in journalistic interviews. The interview gives journalism access to a repertoire of strategies for pressing people in positions of power, holding them accountable and placing them in problematic communicative situations (Clayman & Heritage 185

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2002; Ekström & Fitzgerald 2014). It is against this backdrop that we consider unsuccessful utterances produced in journalistic interviews a specific type of talk scandal. Politicians who are interviewed on an almost daily basis run a considerable risk of making a statement at some point that is not only less than successful—a blunder—but that can also form the breeding ground for a talk scandal. The extent of this risk is related partly to journalists’ ability to ask pressing and difficult questions, but also to the relationships that develop between journalists and politicians (see Ekström & Tolson 2017). The concept of talk scandals was founded in relation to Thompson’s seminal work The Political Scandal (2000) and the way he describes the characteristics and dynamics of such scandals. Over the years a number of researchers have used the concept to describe and analyze political scandals. Examples of talk scandals have been analyzed in different national contexts (Allern & Pollack 2012). Talk scandals have been related to research on topics such as apologetic speech (Kampf 2009; 2011), the life cycles of soundbites (Lee 2012), resistance to (and restoration of) media routines (Gollmitzer 2015), the ways in which candidates are scandalized during election campaigns (Trottier 2017), as well as scandals connected to contemporary right-wing populism (Herkman 2017; Patrona 2019).

Talk scandals and the transformations of mediated politics In recent years, we have seen many examples of scandalous utterances of political leaders circulated in the media. Among the most well-known are Donald Trump’s lewd and sexist talk about women, recorded back-stage and published during the presidential election campaign of 2016. The talk was defended by Trump as “locker room talk.” The latest example (as we write) is the so-called Windrush generation scandal in the United Kingdom, where the Home Secretary Amber Rudd resigned due to allegations of lying when being questioned by the Home Affairs Select Committee. Talk has not become less central in mediated political scandal; quite the contrary. However, the structural conditions and dynamics of talk scandals seem to be undergoing change. In the original analysis (Ekström and Johansson 2008), we explained the dynamics of talk scandals in relation to three fundamental conditions: the transgression of norms, the mediation of political performances, and the power and methods of journalism. Although we acknowledged the diversity of norms in political cultures—what might be considered a scandalous transgression in one context might be less remarkable in another—we assumed relative stability in the norms of conduct in public political discourse. In recent years, political populism has, however, contributed to a destabilization of political culture and discourse in several Western democracies, with implications for the performance of political styles and the politics of trust (Ekström & Morton 2017; Moffitt 2016; Muller 2016). Regarding the mediation of politics, our theory of talk scandals was developed prior to the recent growth of social media; Facebook and Twitter had only recently been launched. The theory relies on the communicative structures of traditional legacy mass media. Social media has radically changed the dynamics of public discourse and the way in which politics is communicated. The magnitude of the production, circulation, and recontextualization of utterances has increased, and the boundaries of back stage and front stage have been reformulated, in some contexts almost collapsed. Finally, we (similar to other scholars analyzing political scandals) assumed and demonstrated the decisive power of journalism in the disclosure, production, framing, and dramatization of political scandals. A precondition is that professional journalism is in control of the (mass) media, claiming to represent the public, being a mediator between politicians and citizens, and a storyteller upon which politicians in their public performances are heavily dependent. The power of journalism has definitely not been 186

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eroded. However, at the same time as the trust in journalism is challenged in many contexts, digital media provide the infrastructure for a more efficient bypassing of journalism in political communication. In the following section we discuss these transformations and their implications for our understanding of political talk scandals.

The negotiation and destabilization of norms and moral values The violation of norms and moral values forms the core of political scandals. As Verbalyte (2018: 68) notes, theorizing scandals as discursive phenomena, constructed and negotiated in mediated performances and dramatization, means that we do not “presuppose any norm consensus or unanimous norm system of the society at the beginning or the end of the scandal.” There are examples of clear-cut transgressions revealed in the media, in which immediate political resignation represents the only reasonable solution. More often, however, the violation of norms and moral values are negotiated in the media: in journalists’ framing of news stories, political performances, and reactions from the people. Such examples are most relevant for analyzing if we are interested in the preconditions and dynamics of mediated political scandals. Thus, we should also investigate those potential scandals that do not generate strong, homogeneous, emotional reactions in the media, nor becoming politically damaging (cf. Entman 2012). This applies not least to talk scandals. The differences between gaffes that disappear without political consequences and more serious violations of discursive norms are anything but unambiguous. Moreover, as will be illustrated, “bad manner” in the form of controversial and provocative utterances can also be strategically produced by politicians in order not only to attract public attention (Haller, Michael & Kraus 2018), but also to claim political trust in performing nonestablishment identities, as a form of populist appeal to the people (Ekström & Morton 2017; Moffitt 2016). The norms and moral standards that must exist for a political scandal to emerge or for a transgression to be a transgression are shaped by processes at different levels and times. First, there exist standards related to the history of national political cultures and democratic systems. Second, as illustrated in contemporary populist challenges to the political establishment in several countries, norms and standards in particular political contexts can also be contested and destabilized. Finally, the media and news reporters have a critical role in what Ettema and Glasser (1998: 71), in their study of investigative reporting, describe as “moral work,” “the crafting of public morality,” and the representing and objectifying of evaluative standards (cf. Lee 2012). Let us present a concrete example to illustrate the dynamics of scandalous political talk in the context of populist challenging of the political establishment and the related destabilization of the norms of conduct. In the UK, the European Parliament election of 2014, the general election of 2015, and the ‘Brexit’ referendum of 2016 represented great successes for Nigel Farage and The United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). In the mediated election campaigns, Farage claimed an exclusive representation of “the people” as a combination of performed ordinariness (visiting traditional British pubs, chatting with people in colloquial language) and anti-establishment and anti-immigration rhetoric. He harshly and frequently criticized what he described as “the political class” or “the political elite,” and most importantly his articulated frankness marked a stark contrast to his rivals’ more polished and sophisticated political language. As is the case with other populist politicians, Farage has also enacted forms of “bad manner” as a flexible resource in the construction of a public persona which claims social capital and political trust as an outsider of the political establishment (Ekström & Morton 2017; Moffitt 2016; Serazio 2016). For example, in a speech at the European Union Parliament in Strasbourg 187

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(April 5, 2017) during the Brexit negotiations, Farage referred to the demands on the UK and addressed the Parliament in a series of negative attributions: “You have shown yourself . . . to be vindictive, to be nasty. All I can say thank goodness we are leaving. You are behaving like the mafia.” This resulted in a reprimand from the Chairman of the Parliament, explicitly stating that the language used by Farage was unacceptable in the Parliament. Farage responded provocatively by rephrasing his words: “I do understand sir . . . I do understand your sensitivity. I change it to gangsters” (see Ekström, Patrona & Thornborrow 2018). We are not suggesting that Farage’s performance altered the general norms of conduct in the EU Parliament. Rather, it represented a strategic challenge to the norms of conduct in the performance of a populist style, which contributed to a destabilization of the political culture. In some cases Farage’s utterances in the media resulted in news reporting with particular ingredients of a typical talk scandal. In an interview on LBC radio (May 16, 2014), Farage remarked that most people would be concerned if a group of Romanians moved in next door. This utterance received significant media attention. It was described as racist, and was strongly criticized by the leaders of other political parties. Farage was forced to defend himself and to explain his point in a series of interviews with different media. In the end, he claimed to regret what he had said, or at least how he had phrased his opinion. Contrary to the “bad manner” illustrated above, in this case Farage clearly did not respond to criticism by upholding the controversial way of talking and acting in public. In this context, his position in relation to broader moral values was more carefully balanced. To what extent did his remark about Romanians affect his political reputation and public support? One thing is for sure, it did not hamper his great success in the elections. So was this just a minor slip of the tongue that was not particularly important in terms of moral values? No, this is not the conclusion we draw. Quite the contrary. Farage’s utterance was potentially scandalous as a transgression of moral values. This is clearly indicated in extensive media reporting, the articulation of criticism, and the “moral work” of the news journalists in the framing of interviews and news stories, as well as in the strategies of Farage and his party to handle the potential scandal (e.g., the party published an advertisement in the newspapers to explain his words). In news headlines his utterance was described as racist and he was additionally held to account in rather aggressive interviews (Ekström & Tolson 2017). This is an example from an interview in a news report by the BBC (May 19, 2014). The questions in the example were preceded by a sequence discussing what Farage had actually said in the radio interview. Journalist: Would it be acceptable to say if Jamaicans moved next door people should be concerned? Politician: No J: Nigerians? P: No. J: Irish? P: No there is – no there is – J: Signs in the window that say no blacks or Irish here? P: Can we – can we just have an honest appraisal to what has happened to post-communist Romania all right? In the context of the news report, the repetitive questions pushed Farage into admitting (via framing the answers towards the negative) that he accepts groups other than Romanians and 188

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thus ultimately could be accused of racism. The fourth question includes clear references to racist policies. In response to this question, Farage changes his way of answering. He includes the journalist with “we,” shifts the agenda by proposing an honest appraisal and more substantive way of talking about the real problems related to Romania and immigration, in comparison to the face-threatening questioning performed by the journalist. The example thus illustrates how the moral implications of Farage’s utterance were negotiated in the media. Voices from the public have a central role in mediated scandals, not least as representations of the moral standards in relation to which potentially scandalous actions are evaluated. In the news reporting of Farage’s utterance, including by the BBC and other media, the opinions and attitudes of the public were quite frequently presented. However, they were in no way unambiguously condemnatory. While some vox populi described Farage as racist, the voices of UKIP supporters were actually more common. UKIP supporters were framed as unconcerned about the accusations, arguing instead that he is not racist at all, but rather a politician who knows what the English people want. In several reports Farage was presented as being in cheerful and friendly conversations with people on the street (Ekström & Tolson 2017). In the context of the political opinions in the UK at the time, as well as the moral work of the news media (as only briefly illustrated here), Farage’s potentially scandalous talk did not develop into a talk scandal that seriously threatened his reputation. In other contexts, racist utterances by politicians representing right-wing populist parties, whether originally articulated through social media, on the street (recorded by mobile phone), or provoked by journalists using a hidden camera, have resulted in talk scandals which forced the politicians to resign (Allern et al. 2012; Ekström & Johansson 2008; Herkman 2017). Political scandals are potentially destabilizing phenomena in the political system, with concrete effects in the form of resignations, fluctuations in opinions and party support, and longterm effects on citizens’ trust in politicians and the political system. However, the destabilization of the political culture and changing norms and values are also contextual factors with implications for the dynamics of (in this case) potential talk scandals.

The mediation of political performances In explaining political scandals, Thompson (2000) has emphasized the technologies and cultures of communication that shape the forms of mediated visibility. In recent years, many scholars have highlighted how political communication has changed due to the advancement of social media (Broersma & Graham 2015; Bruns et al. 2015; Enli 2017; Klinger & Svensson 2015). As for the dynamics of political scandals in general and talk scandals in particular, at least three aspects should be considered. First, even if the 24/7 news cycle has enabled scandals to spread more quickly and to a wider audience, this has increased even more rapidly in a world of social media (Burkenhardt 2018; Chen & Mandell 2016). Unsuccessful utterances are posted, tweeted, and re-tweeted at unprecedented speed. This has rendered crisis management for scandalized politicians more difficult in that the range and effect of the scandal is more difficult to foresee and must be dealt with instantly. On the other hand, social media has become a resource for scandalized politicians and his or her supporters in questioning the scandal frame and using crisis management strategies more effectively (Boin et al. 2017). Another aspect is the accessibility of potential scandals. Social media has blurred or perhaps even collapsed the distinction between back and front regions. There are numerous examples of scandals whereby politicians are disclosed as having posted inappropriate comments or using an alias on social media. One example is from the Swedish election campaign of 2014, in which 189

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the tabloid Expressen revealed xenophobic utterances by politicians of the Sweden Democrats. The politicians had used fake identities on social media network sites to make comments about immigrants such as “Muslims = the cancer of Mother Earth.” The disclosure of these comments on social media was allocated extensive media coverage, and a number of candidates had to resign from the candidatures and even leave the party (cf. Herkman 2017). The blurred distinctions might also explain why politicians are making comments in their own name, perceiving them as private without understanding the risk of them turning public. For example, the private and public distinction collapsed in the media reporting of the former South Carolina governor Mark Sandford’s complaints about his ex-wife on Facebook (Chen et al. 2016). Finally, frequent scandalous utterances are produced and circulated in social media settings where there is no disclosure of back-stage utterances. Politicians’ use of open social networks such as Twitter and Instagram creates potential talk scandals on its own. President Trump’s use of Twitter both as a candidate and president is of course the most well-known example. Many of his tweets have caused public outrage, such as his accusations of Mexicans being “Druggies, drug dealers, rapists and killers,” calling the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un “Little Rocket Man,” or his criticism and nicknaming of television hosts Mika Brzezinski (“Low I.Q. Crazy”) and Joe Scarborough (“Psycho”). Analysis of how such utterances and repertoires of strategic performances in social media affect political reputation and credibility (and political culture more generally) is beyond the scope of this chapter.

The power and methods of journalism The power of journalism in disclosing, framing, and dramatizing political scandals is essential in scandal research (Allern & Pollack 2012; Burkenhardt 2018; Ekström & Johansson 2008; Entman 2012; Tumber & Waisboard 2004). In particular, the rise of critical investigative reporting as a part of a journalistic culture is emphasized as an important factor in explaining the significant role that political scandals play in contemporary society (Thompson 2000; Tumber & Waisbord 2004). It has been suggested that the rise of social media has diminished the power of journalism in general, including in relation to political scandals (Broersma & Graham 2015; Burkenhardt 2018; Johansson & Odén 2017). Social media has made it possible for scandals to erupt without journalism being involved. Posts and tweets can be disclosed and staged as scandalous without coverage in legacy media. Both first-order and second-order (talk) scandals have been revealed on social media (Chen & Mandell 2016). Journalism no longer enjoys the unique privilege of disclosing and staging scandals, and therefore directing contestation. Even the public’s response no longer remains within the control of journalism and the traditional mass media. However, this shift does not mean that journalism is without power in scandals. In most cases, the legacy media seems to be needed to confirm the status of the transgression and to evaluate the reactions made on social media. The function of journalism in political scandals is in some cases to transfer them into an arena for the evaluation and determination of the magnitude of their accusations of norm transgressions that have already been displayed via social media. In a fragmented media system, the magnitude of a political scandal is dependent on the extent to which different news media report on the action and share the moral work in framing the action as a norm transgression. Wrongdoings and unsuccessful utterances that are not mentioned via more than one news show, newspaper, or magazine are no longer likely to develop into a fullblown scandal. The action must be represented as scandalous in the entire news system to create a substantial problem for the politician. 190

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Another aspect of the changing media system is that accusations can be contested and questioned in so-called alternative news media and social media. In such contexts, scandalized politicians are offered a friendly and supportive platform, and they can also give voice to other perspectives or even launch counterattacks on legacy media reporting during the scandal. To sum up, journalism has to some extent lost its authority in reporting scandals, but it remains an important player in disclosing, staging, and dramatizing them. Nevertheless, more actors and arenas such as social media now exist where scandals can occur and develop. The public discourse of contemporary politics is still to a large extent dominated by the authority of journalism (Carlson 2017), and scandals on social media seem to be quite significantly dependent upon legacy media for their recognition and verification as being of societal importance.

Concluding remarks The concept of talk scandal was invented to account for the centrality of talk in the performance of politics and in the diverse practices of journalism and media discourse. Since then the relevance of the concept is evident in the frequent occurrence of scandals pertaining to transgressive talk in various national contexts, as well as in the number of studies in which the concept has been applied. However, as we have discussed in this chapter, a reexamination is needed with respect to the fundamental conditions shaping the dynamics and characteristics of talk scandals in contemporary mediated politics. Significant transformations have been discussed with respect to the norms of the political culture, media technologies and forms of communication, and the role of journalism. How talk scandals are shaped by and most importantly contribute to the shaping of such structural features remains in need of theorization and empirical investigation, preferably via systematic comparative studies. We propose two overall topics to be kept in mind in future research: first, the negotiation of norms of conduct and moral values in the performance and contextualization of scandalous utterances in various political and cultural contexts and media settings; second, how mechanisms of mediated politics seem to shape the simultaneous increase, magnitude, devaluation, and fatigue of scandalous talk in contemporary society.

References Allern, Sigurd, Kantola, Anu, Pollack, Ester & Blach-Ørsten, Mark (2012). Increased Scandalization: Nordic Political Scandals 1980–2010. In Sigurd Allern & Ester Pollack (eds.), Mediated Scandals: Scandalous! The Mediated Construction of Political Scandals in Four Nordic countries (pp. 29–50). Göteborg: Nordicom, University of Gothenburg. Allern, Sigurd & Pollack, Ester (eds.) (2012). Mediated Scandals: Scandalous! The Mediated Construction of Political Scandals in Four Nordic countries. Göteborg: Nordicom, University of Gothenburg. Boin, Arjen, t’Hart, Paul, Stern, Erik & Sundelius, Bengt (2017). The Politics of Crisis Management: Public Leadership Under Pressure. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Broersma, Mark & Graham, Todd (2015). Tipping the Balance of Power: Social Media and the Transformation of Political Journalism. In Axel Bruns, Eli Skogerbø, Christian Christensen, Anders Olof Larsson & Gunn Enli (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics (pp. 89–103). London: Routledge. Bruns, Axel, Skogerbø, Eli, Christensen, Christian, Larsson, Anders, Olof & Enli, Gunn (eds.) (2015). The Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics. London: Routledge. Burkenhardt, Stephan (2018). Scandals in the Network Society. In André Haller, Henrik Michael & Martin Kraus (eds.) Scandalogy: An Interdisciplinary Field (pp. 18–44). Köln: Herbert von Halen Verlag. Carlson, Matt (2017). Journalistic Authority. New York: Columbia University Press. Chen, Gina Masullo & Mandell, Hinda (2016). Conclusion: Predicting a New Scandal Environment in the Twenty-First Century. In Hinda Mandell & Gina Masullo Chen (eds.), Scandal in a Digital Age (pp. 209–216). Rochester, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Mats Ekström and Bengt Johansson Chen, Gina Masullo, Pain, Paromita & Fadnis, Deepa (2016). Over-Sharing in a Political Sex Scandal. In Hinda Mandell & Gina Masullo Chen (eds.), Scandal in a Digital Age (pp. 181–144). Rochester, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Clayman, Steve & Heritage, John (2002). The News Interview. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ekström, Mats & Fitzgerald, Richard (2014). Groundhog Day: Extended Repetitions in Political News Interviews. Journalism Studies 15: 82–97. Ekström, Mats & Johansson, Bengt (2008). Talk Scandals. Media, Culture & Society 30(1): 61–79. Ekström, Mats & Morton, Andrew (2017). The Performances of Right-wing Populism: Populist Discourse, Embodied Styles and Forms of News Reporting. In Mats Ekström & Julie Firmstone (eds.), The Mediated Politics of Europe: A Comparative Study of Discourse (pp. 289–318). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Ekström, Mats, Patrona, Marianna & Thornborrow, Joanna (2018). Populist Style in Mediated Political Performance. Palgrave Communication, 4(83), https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-018-0132-6. Ekström, Mats & Tolson, Andrew (2017). Political Interviews: Pushing the Boundaries of Neutralism. In Mats Ekström & Julie Firmstone (eds.), The Mediated Politics of Europe: A Comparative Study of Discourse (pp. 123–150). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Enli, Gunn (2017). Twitter as Arena for the Authentic Outsider: Exploring the Social Media Campaigns of Trump and Clinton in the 2016 US Presidential Election. European Journal of Communication, 32(1) 50–61. Entman, Robert (2012). Scandal and Silence. Cambridge: Polity Press. Ettema, James S, & Glasser, Theodore L. (1998). Custodians of Conscience: Investigative Journalism and Public Virtue. New York: Columbia University Press. Gollmitzer, Mirjam (2015). Theorizing Adversarial Guests: The Resistance to (and Restoration of) Media Routines. Communications, 40(1): 21–41. Haller, André, Michael, Henrik & Kraus, Martin (eds.) (2018). Scandalogy: An Interdisciplinary Field (pp. 18–44). Köln: Herbert von Halen Verlag. Herkman, Juha (2017). Old Patterns on News Clothes? Populism and Political Scandals in the Nordic Countries. Acta Sociologica. DOI:10.1177/0001699317737816 Johansson, Bengt & Odén, Tomas (2017). Struggling for the Upper Hand: News Sources and Crisis Communication in a Digital Media Environment. Journalism Studies. DOI: 10.1080/1461670X. 2017.1279980 Kampf, Zohar (2009). Public (Non-) Apologies: The Discourse of Minimizing Responsibility. Journal of Pragmatics, 41: 2257–2270. Kampf, Zohar (2011). Journalists as Actors in Social Dramas of Apology. Journalism, 12(1) 71–87. Klinger, Ulrike & Svensson, Jakob (2015). The Emergence of Network Media Logic in Political Communication: A Theoretical Approach. New Media & Society, 17(8): 1241–1257. Lee, Francis L.F. (2012). The Life Cycle of Iconic Sound Bites: Politicians’ Transgressive Utterances in Media Discourses. Media, Culture & Society, 34(3) 343–358. Moffitt, Benjamin (2016). The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Muller, Jan Werner (2016). What is Populism? Pennsylvania : University of Pennsylvania Press. Patrona, Marianna (2019). The Talk Scandal as Mediatized Event and Communicative Resources in Farright Populist Talk. Discourse, Context & Media, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2018.11.004 Serazio, Michael (2016). Encoding the Paranoid Style in American Politics: “Anti-Establishment” Discourse and Power in Contemporary Spin. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 33: 181–194. Thompson, John B. (2000). The Political Scandal: Power and Visibility in the Media Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Trottier, Daniel (2017). Scandal Mining: Political Nobodies and Remediated Visibility. Media, Culture & Society. DOI: 10.1177/0163443717734408 Tumber, Howard & Waisbord, Silvio R. (2004). Introduction: Political Scandals and Media across Democracies, Volume 1 and 2. American Behavioral Scientist 47(8, 9). Verbalyte, Monika (2018). Deconstruction of the Emotional Logic of Political Scandal. In André Haller, Henrik Michael & Martin Kraus (eds.) Scandalogy: An Interdisciplinary field (pp. 62–87). Köln: Herbert von Halen Verlag.

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19 LEGAL CONTEXTS IN REPORTING SCANDAL IN THE UNITED STATES, THE UNITED KINGDOM AND RUSSIA Lyombe Eko Scandals are context-specific media and public reactions, sometimes bordering on outrage, to legal offenses and moral shortcomings across a wide spectrum of political, social, cultural, business, financial, economic, media, and especially sexual spheres. The word “scandal” has a religious, metaphorical origin. The Latin word, scandalum, is derived from the Greek word, scandalon, which means “an obstacle” or “stumbling block.” Scandals cover moral and legal failings ranging from political corruption and abuse of power to illegal sexual harassment and unlawful sexual gratification. Though scandals were originally righteous indignation, or outrage at religious and moral offenses, in modern societies they represent public outrage at legal offenses or ethical breaches across a broad spectrum of human activity. Some scandals are the result of legal offenses to be sure, but most are expressions of opprobrium at moral shortcomings. Scandals are as old as humankind. They often involve matters that have a public dimension, involve the public interest, speak to the character of political leaders, and therefore attract media coverage. It is usually this coverage that elicits public outrage. The Watergate bugging scandal that engulfed the Nixon administration and the Clinton/Monica Lewinsky sex scandal were media and public reactions to alleged legal and moral offenses in the domains of politics and sexual morality (Dershowitz 1998). The parameters of specific regimes of freedom of speech and expression determine how the media report scandals. The premise of this chapter is that there are multiple legal contexts for reporting scandals. The actual leeway on reporting depends on the level of editorial independence that specific media law systems allow the press. In some jurisdictions, the law categorizes certain types of legal and moral offenses as “outrageous” or scandalous. For centuries, French law recognized the vague and overbroad offenses of “outrage aux bonnes mœurs et à l’ordre publique” (affront to public decency or morality). In the 1990s, that vague, moralistic language criminalizing crimes against public decency and morality was replaced by the equally vague, moralistic statement “violations of human dignity.” This new standard is applicable to the production and distribution of violent pornography that scandalizes the public. Nevertheless, the French media use the world “scandale” to describe public controversies involving individual, political, and corporate malfeasance (AFP 2018). In this chapter, scandals are conceptualized as reactive phenomena triggered by media selection, construction, and re-presentation, in real space and cyberspace, of real or perceived violations of established legal, moral, professional, social, and political norms in specific jurisdictions. 193

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The aim of this chapter is to describe and explain the legal parameters of media reporting of scandals in the USA, the UK, and Russia. The parameters of specific regimes of freedom of speech and expression determine how the media report scandals. The premise is that each country has a context-specific politico-cultural geography of freedom of expression whose “contextual matrixes,” to borrow the expression of Legrand (2003, 261), shape its conceptualization and reporting of scandals. I first present editorial independence, the theoretical framework within which the subject of scandals is approached. Editorial independence is the legal right granted to media in democratic societies to report controversial happenings and events within specific legal parameters. I then present an analysis of the legal parameters of reporting scandals in the USA, the UK, and Russia. What are the legal contexts and parameters of reporting “slander” in the USA, the UK, and Russia? The idea is that the word “scandal” is a plural concept. There is a wide spectrum of politico-cultural geographies of scandal. What might be scandalous in one country might elicit no more than a collective political yawn in another. The three countries were chosen because they are contrasting exemplars of the regulation, journalistic conceptualization, and reporting of scandals.

Theoretical perspective: editorial independence and scandals This study was carried out within the theoretical framework of editorial independence, a political, cultural, and legal norm that shapes the reporting of scandals. Editorial independence or autonomy is the idea that in democratic societies, editors and publishers have the constitutional right to decide freely and independently what to publish and what not to publish. The principle of editorial independence essentially puts editors in charge of the gatekeeping function of their media outlets. Bourdieu (1994) suggests that journalism is a competitive “structured and structuring” field (un champ) with multiple iterations. Journalism has acquired certain settled rights and privileges through “the autonomy of the field and its capacity to resist mundane demands” (1994, 6). One such right is to practice “eclectic neutrality” in news selection (ibid.). Karppinen & Moe (2016, 105) define media independence as “independence . . . from state control, market forces or mainstream conventions.” American law has the most extensive expression of the right of editorial independence under the First Amendment (Miami Herald v. Tornillo, 1974, p. 258). Under this legal doctrine, editors and editorial boards have the right to publish without fear or favor material that meets their professional norms and serves the public interest. Editors and editorial boards are gatekeepers who make value judgments on what to publish and what not to publish, taking into account the pressures of the journalistic field, as well as the political, cultural, social, moral, legal, ethical, and economic realities of their societies. The UK also has a robust regime of editorial independence under national laws and Article 10 jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights. The last jurisdiction we will analyze is Russia. Though the Russian Constitution protects freedom of expression, in reality the press is highly constrained. Hundreds of journalists have been killed for challenging the system or exposing corruption (Shleinov 2007; Roudakova 2009).

Historical legal context of reporting scandal in the USA The characters of American presidents have always been a very important element of American political culture (Sheehy 1988, 12). This is especially pronounced in the era of President Trump, who has been shrouded in scandals. This kind of emphasis on the character of the president of the USA and questions about his fitness for office are not unprecedented. A good number of 194

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presidents have caused scandals because they failed to live up to expected standards of morality. John and Edward Kennedy had their scandals, and President Nixon had the Watergate bugging scandal. This emphasis on character is grounded in American religion, which de Tocqueville (1862) observed was the fundamental philosophical underpinning of American democracy. The religious tradition that undergirds America’s emphasis on the upright character of its leaders is Puritanism, which originated in seventeenth-century England as a religious and political reform movement within the established Church of England. The Puritans emphasized the religious discipline and strict moral rectitude of their leaders (Emerson 1968, 44). Political or religious leaders who failed to live up to expected Biblical standards scandalized the community. This Puritan emphasis on character and fitness for public office is now a fundamental norm in American politics. This phenomenon of political character examination has been amplified by the Internet and its associated networked social media. The first president of the Internet era to undergo microscopic political and religious examination over allegations of sexual misbehavior and political malfeasance was Bill Clinton (Dershowitz 1998; Eko 2000). Moral rectitude has become a fundamental hurdle that all appointees to federal judgeships and the U.S. Supreme Court must clear before they are confirmed. The slightest whiff of sexual misconduct is enough to trigger a full-blown political scandal. This was the case with judge Brett Kavanaugh, whom President Trump nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court and who was accused of an attempted rape that allegedly occurred 36 years earlier when he was in high school. The testimony of the accuser and the accused turned out to be a media circus.

The American media and scandals In the USA, the media are also conceptualized as the Fourth Estate, watchdogs of the public interest. They are assigned the task of denouncing individual, collective, and corporate predatory activities, as well governmental abuse of power. This is the so-called “checking function” that makes the media enforcers of the legal, ethical, and moral norms of society (Middleton, Lee & Stewart 2017, 31). In addition to their checking function, the media are considered the writers of the rough draft of history. As such, they are often the public platforms on which spectacles of scandals are exposed and played out. The broad right of freedom of speech and of the press guaranteed under the exceptional First Amendment spawned a brand of journalism in the nineteenth century that was noted for “muckraking,” rabble-rousing, and scandal-mongering. De Tocqueville (1862) described the typical American journalist of the 1830s as a scandal-monger. This was his reaction to the partisan journalism in vogue at that time. After American journalism had gone through a highly partisan phase (1801–1860), it went into a “yellow” sensational phase (1892–1914). Sensationalism, scandal-mongering, and muckraking were so prevalent that two eminent jurists, Warren and Brandeis (1890), proclaimed that the Biblical prophecy about the public proclamation of private matters had come true: “What is whispered in the closet will be proclaimed from the housetops.” Warren and Brandeis (1890, 195) called for urgent legal recognition of a right of privacy. The proposal ultimately led to the emergence of the law of privacy in the USA.

Legal justifications for reporting scandal The Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments to the American Constitution) is described as a negative charter of expressive liberties, which enumerates what the government is not permitted to do that might eviscerate the rights of citizens (Jackson v. Byrne, 1984, p. 1446). Under the negative logic of the First Amendment, Congress—and by extension federal, state, and local governments—are barred from interfering with the mass media and Internet content. 195

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All attempts by the government to censor speech before it has been uttered or published are illegal (New York Times v. United States, 1971). This First Amendment ideological edifice is underpinned by an ancient theory of free speech, namely, faith that good ideas will ultimately prevail over bad ones if the government assumes a viewpoint-neutral regulatory posture and refrains from discriminating against speech on the basis of its content in spaces of public discourse, such that the ultimate result is a free, uninhibited exchange of ideas—and scandals. An important First Amendment principle that justifies reporting scandals is newsworthiness. This concept has been defined as “the public’s right to know” (Restatement (2d) of Torts, 1977). Public scrutiny of public officials in the USA is premised on the assumption that the actions of these officials are newsworthy. This principle requires that the private and public activities of all public officials and candidates for public office be scrutinized in the public interest. The notion of “public interest” is very broad. It includes “anything that might touch on an official’s fitness for office” (Monitor Patriot v. Roy, 1971). Thus, any matter that might scandalize any section of the public is a relevant subject of investigative journalistic interest. The principle of “fitness for office” is well established in American jurisprudence. As early as 1908, a court held that “a candidate for office must surrender to public scrutiny and discussion so much of his private character as affects his fitness for office” (Coleman v. Maclean, 1908). The Supreme Court of the United States has also held that society’s interest in public officials is not limited to the formal discharge of their official duties. The Court ruled that the public’s interest in public officials extends to “anything which might touch on that official’s fitness for office . . . Few personal attributes are more germane to fitness for office than dishonesty, malfeasance, or improper motivation, even though these characteristics may also affect the official’s private character” (Garrison v. Louisiana, 1964, p. 77). These decisions were made in the contexts of scandals involving public officials or candidates for public office, who attempted to use the law to protect their private lives from media scrutiny. The Puritan ethos of the necessity of uprightness of character in public servants, newsworthiness, and the right to know have evolved into a robust First Amendment politico-cultural context that has shaped the reporting of scandal in the USA. The Supreme Court of the United States has analogized faith in the salubrious effects of free and open social discourse to a “marketplace of ideas” (U.S. v. Abrams, 1919) characterized by a laissez-faire free flow of ideas, information, and discourse (Eko 2001). The USA is essentially a marketplace of political scandal. Schauer (2005, 47) suggests that it has a “radically nonjudgmental First Amendment,” and that, due to its commitment to robust public debate, “the harm of unpublished truth about public officials and public figures is far greater than the harm of unsanctioned falsity” (ibid., 40). The question then is whether there is a First Amendment right to scandalize and to report scandal. The answer is affirmative. In Hustler Magazine v. Falwell (1988, p. 56), the Supreme Court of the United States essentially stated that there is a First Amendment right to scandalize: “the fact that society may find speech offensive is not a sufficient reason for suppressing it. Indeed, if it is the speaker’s opinion that gives offense, that consequence is a reason for according it constitutional protection.” In Terminiello v. Chicago (1949, p. 1) the Court held that “a function of free speech under our system is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger.” Under the First Amendment architecture of freedom of speech, the speech rights of the speaker—and this includes speakers of the legally unrecognized category of speech that is popularly known as “hate speech”—almost always trump the feelings of the listener, if the speech does not incite imminent violence. It is immaterial whether the listener is scandalized or not. It is within this First Amendment framework that scandals are reported in the USA. 196

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The context of journalistic reporting of scandal in the UK In recent years the UK has witnessed a number of media scandals that have put the spotlight on its cultural geography of freedom of expression, rule of law, and media ethics. Under the British system, the press is conceptualized as “a Fourth Estate,” a counter-power equivalent to the Fourth Estate that had emerged in France at the onset of the French Revolution of 1789 (Carlyle 1837). This metaphor conceptualized the media as a watchdog of the public interest against governmental, corporate, and individual excesses. Historically, the Government and the Church controlled the press in order to prevent publication of what was classified as “seditious or heretical works.” The common law offence of criminal and seditious libel were punishable in the eighteenth century (Leveson 2012, 58). In the nineteenth, “scandalous,” sex-themed, printed material that associated Church leaders with immorality, or commented on social mores, was regulated under the laws of obscenity. Under nineteenth-century British law, for printed matter to be declared “obscene,” courts had to decide “whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall” (Regina v. Hicklin, 1868). Furthermore, to be judged scandalous and criminalized, the printed matter had to be of a nature to “suggest to the minds of the young of either sex, or even to persons of more advanced years, thoughts of a most impure and libidinous character” (ibid.). The law classified obscenity as “scandalous” in the religious sense of the word. This meant that the material would be tantamount to a moral stumbling block that had potential to deprave the unsophisticated lower classes. Nevertheless, the British press has a historic tradition of freedom of expression and editorial autonomy aimed at checking the powerful. Furthermore, the principle of editorial independence, a traditional journalistic value, has recently been officially recognized and strengthened in the Defamation Act 2013, which is applicable in England and Wales. This piece of legislation reinforced the media’s right of freedom of expression by recognizing defenses of “substantial truth,” “honest opinion,” and “privileged statements” (concerning publication on a matter of public interest). In making a determination whether the statement complained of is in the public interest, “the court must make such allowance for editorial judgement as it considers appropriate” (Defamation Act 2013). The modern British popular press is famous for being the purveyor of scandal and sensational journalism. Due to its reputation as the cradle of the “world’s most flamboyant and sensationalist tabloids” with their legendary gossip columns, frontal nudity, and other excesses (Fridriksson 2004), the British print media have a tradition of voluntary self-regulation through organizations like the Newspaper Proprietors Association, the National Union of Journalists, the Society of Editors, the Press Complaints Commission, the Independent Press Standards Organisation, and the News Media Association (News Media Association 2017). Though the British broadcast media are not subject to content-based regulations, they are required “not to offend good taste” (Fridriksson 2004). This vague and elastic concept covers everything from profane and vulgar language to indecent, sex-themed speech. Furthermore, as a result of increasing multiculturalism in the UK, and the emergence of a number of controversies involving a clash between freedom of expression and demands for respect for different religious traditions, the common law offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel were decriminalized in England and Wales in 2008.

The News of the World phone hacking scandal The illegal and unethical actions of a British newspaper, the News of the World, led to the Leveson Inquiry that reexamined the legal and ethical foundations of British journalism. In effect, a 197

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number of interconnected media scandals that involved unlawful interceptions of communications, telephone, and voicemail hacking, allegations of improper payments from journalists to police officers, alleged computer hacking at the News of the World, and perversions of justice led to Metropolitan police investigations—code named Operation Weeting—that ran from 2011 to 2012 (Sedghi 2012). This whole saga was triggered by the conviction in 2007 of News of the World royal editor Clive Goodman and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire of illegal interception of communications and interception of voicemail messages. This journalistic scandal turned the spotlight on the British media and the context of the journalistic reporting of scandals in the UK. In the wake of this scandal, the British Prime Minister David Cameron appointed Law Lord Leveson to inquire into the “culture, practices and ethics of the press.” His report surveyed the history of the freedom of the press in the UK and restated its place in the democratic culture of the country and the wider European context. The report observed that the press “acts as a brake on the abuse of power by public officials. It facilitates the exposure of errors in the governance and administration of justice of the country” (Leveson 2012, 57). However, it also observed that while “the press must also be ‘active’, professional and inquiring” (ibid. 56), it must operate within the framework of the rule of law: In a modern democracy that abides by the rule of law, press freedom can never mean a press which sits outside, above and beyond, or in disregard of, the law. Respect for the law is the common framework within which the press, as an important commercial sector, is enabled to flourish, to preserve and enjoy its freedoms, and to make its unique contribution to a democratic society. (ibid. 65–66) The media in the UK are also subject to Article 10 (freedom of expression) of the European Court of Human Rights, which enforces the provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights, and has developed a dynamic body of case law that is enlarging the scope of freedom of expression in continental Europe. The Leveson Inquiry reiterated the fact that the European Court of Human Rights has recognized the role of the media as a “public watchdog” (ibid. 60) and that Article 10, which has been incorporated into British law, expressly acknowledges that freedom of expression generally, including freedom of press expression, may be restricted where necessary to protect the legitimate aims of a democracy. The court has recognised that freedom of expression may need to be restricted in the interests of national security and public morality, as well as individual rights to privacy and peaceful enjoyment of property. (ibid. 61) Thus, in reporting scandals, the press in the UK has to be aware that its freedom is not unlimited or even absolute. In evaluating media performance in the context of reportage on scandals, courts will seek to strike a balance between the freedoms guaranteed under national law and international instruments, and “the restrictions necessarily placed on that freedom in a democratic society” (Leveson 2014, 61).

The legal context of reporting scandal in Russia Russia is a jurisdiction that conceptualizes the relationship between the citizen and the state differently from what obtains in Western liberal democratic countries. In Russia, there is a “tendency 198

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toward authoritarian leadership, a strong preference for state interests over individual rights, and a corresponding priority of material well-being over democratization” (Hinteregger & Heinrich 2004, 14). In this system, scandals are regulated within the framework of the constitutionally guaranteed right of freedom of expression as balanced with the interest of the state in maintaining control of the instrumentalities of communication and in the interest of national security, public peace, tranquility, and morality. In Russia the main bone of contention in matters of freedom of speech and expression is the tension between the right of the citizen speaker and the interpretations of that speaker’s speech by government officials, representatives of the all-powerful state. Russia has an authoritarian tradition that goes back to the Tsarist Regime of the nineteenth century. That system continued under the Soviet Communist System and the post-Soviet Russian Federation. Furthermore, the government and the Soviet Communist Party had a peculiar relationship with the mass media, a partnership that Thomas Wolfe describes as “government by journalism” (Wolfe 2005, 143). In this system, journalists carried out extra-publication activities. They threatened to investigate or investigated complaints, grievances, and even claims of corruption, scandals, abuse of power and privilege, and resolved them informally, often without publishing the findings of their journalistic investigations (Roudakova 2009). The system was set up to stifle outrage and scandal. The post-Soviet journalistic system is marked by economic flux and political–economic alliances between journalists and private sponsors (politicians and entrepreneurs) desirous of promoting private economic and political agendas. This has led to a “deprofessionalization” of journalism and a loss of journalistic autonomy (ibid., 419). Furthermore, there is a certain degree of uncertainty with respect to law, policy, journalistic ethics, and the boundaries between newsmaking, political activism, publicity, and advertisements (ibid., 423). Additionally, this professional unraveling of Russian journalism has both been aided by, and taken advantage of, the regime of Vladimir Putin (Shevtsova 2004). Censorship has been reintroduced on certain topics in state-owned and some privately owned media outlets. There is no room for watchdog journalism and scandal reporting in this system (Schleinov 2007; Roudakova 2010). In an article entitled “Journalism as Prostitution: Understanding Russia’s Reaction to Anna Politkovskaya’s Murder,” Roudakova (2010) suggested that the murder of journalists and political dissidents in Russia does not give rise to public outrage and never become scandals due to the role that journalism played as a bedfellow of the Soviet Communist regime and the neoauthoritarian, post-Soviet regime of Putin. Russian journalist, Roman Schleinov (2007, 13), suggests that Russia is essentially scandal proof: Russian state officials do not resign after press revelations have directly implicated them in criminal cases . . . assassinations of journalists do not bring thousands out onto the streets or provoke questions of the authorities . . . [who] are effectively unaccountable to the public . . . and tend to interpret journalistic criticism as open hostility . . . Unpleasant reports will not be widely disseminated since central TV channels are entirely under state control . . . investigation agencies and the office of the public prosecutor are not independent . . . courts are subservient and parliament is saturated with members of the presidential party. Even the publication of documents from criminal cases in which the head of state’s name has appeared will not bring repercussions. Thus, under Putin, the media do not have the editorial independence to report economic and political scandals without fear of violent reprisals. The system effectively takes away the human and journalistic right to be scandalized. Despite the fact that Russia is a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights, it has not transposed Article 10 of the European Court of Human Rights into its domestic law. 199

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Government control of the Internet and online media The context of reporting scandal online is also very restricted. According to the OpenNet Initiative of Harvard University, “the Russian government actively competes in Russian cyberspace employing second- and third-generation strategies as a means to shape the national information space and promote pro-government political messages and strategies” (Russia 2010). A few years after the Internet was available across the whole world, the Russian Duma (Parliament) granted the Federal Security Bureau (FSB) statutory authority to require all Russian communication service providers to install—at their nodes and servers, and at their own expense—an interface known by its Russian acronym, “SORM,” (System of Operative Investigative Activities). This interface consists of hardware and software that route all incoming and out-going Internet traffic on the .ru (Russian) country domain through FSB facilities for the purposes of information security and law enforcement (Rohozinski 2000). In 2000, the Minister of Information Technology and Communications of the Russian Federation issued “Order No. 130 Concerning the Introduction of Technical Means to Ensure Investigative Activities (SORM) in Telephones, Mobile phones, Wireless Communication and Radio paging Networks” (Ministry of Communication 2000). In the same year, President Putin amended the law instituting SORM-2 to increase to seven, the number of governmental agencies that could have access to information gathered by the system. These agencies include the Federal Tax Police, the Interior Ministry Police, the Federal Protective Service, as well as the border patrol and customs branches of the FSB. As soon as these mass surveillance systems went operational, Russian human rights groups claimed that the country was a police state. Journalistic reporting in this surveillance culture can be dangerous. Despite these complaints, the Russian Supreme Court held that the SORM mass surveillance system did not violate the Constitution of the Russian Federation (Judgment of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation 2000).

Conclusion This chapter has shown that media coverage of the problem of scandals, like coverage of all happenings, takes place within the framework of specific politico-cultural geographies and parameters of freedom of speech and expression. Each regime has its context-specific conceptualization and interpretation of the rule of law, human rights, freedom of expression, matters of public concern, governmental interests, and journalistic editorial independence. Different regimes of freedom of expression shape different iterations of the journalistic paradigm and their conceptualizations and reportage of scandals.

References AFP (2018). Bras de fer judiciaire autour de l’anticancéreux Thiotépa (Judicial Tussle over the Anticancer Drug Thiotépa). Le Quotidien du Medicin (France). March 14. https://www.lequotidiendumedecin.fr/ actualites/article/2018/03/14/bras-de-fer-judiciaire-autour-de-lanticancereux-thiotepa_856028# Bourdieu, P. (1994). L’emprise du journalisme (Pressures on Journalism) Actes de la Recherches en Sciences Sociales, 101(1), 3–9. Carlyle, T. (1837). The French Revolution: A History. London: Chapman and Hall. Coleman v. Maclean 78 Kan. 711 (1908). Dershowitz, A. (1998). Sexual McCarthyism: Clinton, Starr, & the Emerging Constitutional Crisis. New York: Basic Books. Eko, L. (2000). The Law of Privacy in the United States and France: One President’s Impeachable Offense is Another’s Invasion of Privacy, Communications and the Law, 22(1) 15–18.

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Legal contexts in reporting scandal Eko, L. (2001). Many Spiders, One Worldwide Web: Towards a Typology of Internet Regulation, Communication Law and Policy, 6(3), 445–484, DOI: 10.1207/S15326926CLP0603_02 Emerson, E. (1968). English Puritanism from John Hooper to John Milton. Durham, NC, Duke University Press. Fridriksson L. (2004). Western Europe. In Arnold de Beer and John Merrill (eds.), Global Journalism: Topical Issues and Media Systems (pp. 181–211). Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Garrison v. Louisiana, 379 U.S. 74, 77 (1964). Hinteregger, Gerald and Heinrich, Hans-Georg (2004). Summary of Major Findings. In Gerald Hinteregger and Hans-Georg Heinrich (eds.), Russia, Continuity and Change (pp. 13–18). New York: Springer. Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46 (1988). Jackson v. Byrne 738 F.2d 1443, 1446 (7th cir. 1984). Judgment of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation (2000). 25 September, Zakonodatelstvo i practica sredstv massovoy informazii, # 10, 2000 Karppinen, Kari & Moe, Hallvard (2016). What We Talk about When We Talk about “Media Independence”, Javnost: The Public, 23(2), 105–119, DOI: 10.1080/13183222.2016.1162986 Legrand, Pierre (2003). The Same and the Different. In Pierre Legrand and Roderick Munday (eds.), Comparative Legal Studies: Traditions and Transitions (pp. 240–311). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, Leveson, L. J. (2012). The Leveson Inquiry: Culture, Practices and Ethics of the Press. London: The Stationery Office. Miami Herald v. Tornillo (1974). 418 U.S. 241. Middleton, K., Lee, W. & Stewart, D. (2017). The Law of Public Communication (9th ed.). New York: Routledge. Ministry of Communication and Informatization of the Russian Federation, Decree No. 130, Zakonodatelstvo i practica sredstv massovoy informazii # 10 (2000). Monitor Patriot Co. v. Roy, 401 U.S. 265 (1971). News Media Association (2017). Key Issues for the News Media Industry. http://www.newsmediauk. org/Current-Topics New York Times v. U.S., 403 U.S. 713 (1971). Regina v. Hicklin, 3 Q.B. 360 (1868). Restatement (Second) of Torts § 652A, 652B, 652C, 652D, 652E (1977). Philadelphia, PA: American Law Institute. Rohozinski, R. (2000). How the Internet Did Not Transform Russia, Current History, 99(639), 334–338. Roudakova, N. (2009). Journalism as “Prostitution”: Understanding Russia’s Reaction to Anna Polit­ kovskaya’s Murder. Political Communication 26(4), 421–429. Russia (2010). OpenNet Initiative, Harvard University. https://opennet.net/research/profiles/russia Schauer, Frederick (2005). The Exceptional First Amendment. In Michael Ignatieff (Ed.) American Exceptionalism and Human Rights (pp. 29–56). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sedghi, Ami (2012). Operation Weeting: Arrests and Charges Timeline. The Guardian, November 2. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/nov/02/operation-weeting-arrests-charges-timeline. Sheehy G. (1988). Character: America’s Search for Leadership. New York: Morrow. Shevtsova, L. (2004). Evolution of Vladimir Putin’s Political Regime. In Gerald Hinteregger and HansGeorg Heinrich (eds.), Russia, Continuity and Change (pp. 19–30). New York: Springer. Shleinov, R. (2007). Rules of the Game, Index on Censorship 36(2), 6–14. DOI: 10.1080/03064220701332794 Terminiello v. Chicago, 337 U.S. 1 (1949). De Tocqueville, Alexis (1862). De la démocracie en Amérique (Vol. I) (Democracy in America), H. Reeve, trans. New York: J.H.G. Langley. (Original work published 1835.) U.S. v. Abrams, 250 U.S. 616 (1919). Warren, E. and Brandeis, L. (1890). The Right of Privacy, Harvard Law Review, 4(5), 193–220. Wolfe, T. (2005). Governing Soviet Journalism: The Press and the Socialist Person after Stalin. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

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20 UNREPORTED SCANDALS The power of personality and legal bluster Judith Townend

In the summer of 2018, a twentieth-century scandal recaptured the British public’s imagination, prompted by a new television dramatisation of events that took place 40 years earlier. The BBC mini-series, and the book on which it was based, portrayed the political downfall of Jeremy Thorpe, leader of the Liberal Party from 1967 to 1976, who was prosecuted and acquitted of the gravest charge ever brought against an active Member of Parliament: conspiracy to murder. The BBC also used the opportunity to air, for the first time, a Panorama documentary made in 1979 about the scandal. This investigation, updated with new material, questioned the protection of Thorpe by ‘powerful political forces’ before and after the trial. The ‘protection’ included not only members of government and police, but also the media: why were the mass media reticent to report allegations in the early stages of the scandal? Why did the BBC decide not to air its documentary contemporaneously? Why did ITV, which had prepared its own programme to broadcast post-trial, also refuse to air its account and lock away all its copies and source material (Crick 2018)? One explanation lies in English law, part of the so-called ‘chilling effect’ in which the media are deterred from reporting stories for fear of legal action.1 Richard Ingrams, former editor of Private Eye, has described how Thorpe threatened ‘the big stick’ of criminal libel against the media (Naughtie 2018). The threat was not empty. Following a story published by Private Eye prior to his arrest and prosecution, Thorpe is reported to have issued a libel writ and referred the matter to the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Attorney General on grounds of contempt of court (Macqueen 2011, 82). It is also alleged that Thorpe considered threatening his former lover Norman Scott with defamation action (Preston 2016, 10). Onerous defamation laws cannot, however, provide a full explanation. As an article in the New York Times contemporaneous with Thorpe’s trial observed, many powerful and high profile gay men (at a time when homosexuality was illegal) maintained privacy of their sexual orientation and activity partly because of ‘stringent libel laws’ but also because of the deference of the British police to the upper classes: British newspapers and the police ‘intruded very little upon this world’ at the time (Apple 1978). This interpretation suggests it was the combination of both legal and social factors that deterred such reporting. When the Thorpe affair is considered alongside other ‘unreported’ events in other high profile scandals, it is clear that legal factors do not alone explain why journalists and the media avoid the publication of particular facts concerning the dishonest, abusive and corrupt behaviour of 202

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high profile individuals. Their social and political relationships must also be considered: some of these individuals have been generous charitable donors and even described as ‘national treasures’. They have powerful charisma and extensive personal networks, which have secured them favourable column and screen space. These protagonists of scandal wield social power with the assistance of the British media, and this power helps protect them from being exposed. The sociology of media can be drawn upon to understand the way in which scandal is reported (or unreported), but theoretical explanations of newsgathering decisions have often overlooked the specific characteristics and relevance of the law and legal threats.2 Benson (2010, 619) suggests that while ‘forces shaping news production are often intertwined and inter-related’, a ‘simple lumping together of factors’ would limit insight into national news systems. In his view, it is important to isolate and test variables, such as the effect of libel (2010, 621). What follows is a preliminary effort to identify common features in two UK case studies, which can help us understand the media’s role in reporting scandal more generally.

Case study one: Jimmy Savile It is ‘chilling’ in a different sense that Jimmy Savile, the popular and eccentric British television and radio presenter awarded both an OBE and knighthood, did not face prosecution for widespread sexual crimes during his lifetime. Although it is too late to prove any allegation against him in a court of law, it is accepted in official accounts that he was ‘one of the UK’s most prolific known sexual predators’ with a level of formally recorded criminal allegations thought to be ‘unprecedented in the UK’ (Gray and Watt 2013, 24). Various reviews conducted posthumously show that numerous allegations were reported against him before his death but that he escaped full police investigation and scrutiny by other relevant institutions – including the national media. The evidence, assessed with the benefit of hindsight, shows that Savile deployed an audacious and manipulative strategy of hiding in plain sight until his death in 2011; astonishingly, it was successful. The media played a part in his non-exposure by first creating a persona behind which he was able to hide, and second, by not reporting critical allegations. As the television critic Sam Wollaston observes, numerous institutions, including the press, were duped: Somehow – incredibly, appallingly – Savile used his celebrity and his influence, his connections, his charity work, his instinct for vulnerability and choice of victims, the times he operated in, his eccentricity, that bloody cigar – to put up a thick smoke screen, and get away with it until after his death. (Wollaston 2016)

Case study two: Lance Armstrong The Lance Armstrong doping scandal provides a relevant example to compare and contrast. Like Savile, the American cyclist Armstrong had a strong media personality and reputation for extensive charitable work, which helped suppress allegations of doping activity in cycling races, to which he later admitted. Despite the radically different nature of the allegations in each case study, it is not the first time the comparison has been made. Armstrong and Savile were ‘brothers of sorts’, according to Simon Kuper, writing in the Financial Times in 2012. In his analysis, ‘each man’s story illuminates the other’s’ (2012). In the sections that follow, examples from each case study are used in a discussion of the common factors that facilitate the non-reporting of a potential scandal. 203

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National treasures Readers of the satirical magazine Private Eye will be familiar with journalists’ tendency to bestow ‘national treasure’ status on high profile figures, for particular sporting or cultural achievements coupled with apparent public approval. When Savile died, this unofficial honour was awarded by numerous media outlets for his extensive charity work and unconventional personality: ‘tributes poured in for national treasure Sir Jimmy Savile’, according to the Sunday Mirror; while the Sunday People reported that a national treasure had been ‘lost’ (Marsh 2013). Lance Armstrong had a similarly favourable profile in the media owing to cycling triumphs and his charity work, notably setting up the Lance Armstrong Foundation which provides support to those suffering from cancer. He received glowing endorsement from the British and American media: the ‘onetime “Golden Boy of American Cycling”’ (Forde and Diamond 2005). The revered status of these men was not without a darker edge: for Savile, there were hints of allegations of child abuse (alluded to briefly, but not fully explored in Louis Theroux’s documentary on Savile aired in 2000, for example); and for Armstrong, speculation that he had blood doped and used performance enhancing drugs. But such rumours were overshadowed by overwhelmingly positive coverage of their perceived achievements in their respective professional fields and for their charitable deeds. When they did eventually and unequivocally fall out of favour, the national treasure and golden boy monikers were repeated again in the media, to describe how they had been previously perceived and publicised.

Libel threats Despite what is now revealed to be extensive evidence supporting allegations of wrongdoing in both cases, Savile and Armstrong received minimal negative attention for many years, before the final exposés that led to their falls from grace. The treasure and golden status may have partially cushioned them, but they were also protected through the spectre of the law, and their deep pockets. Both used libel law to threaten their accusers. The researching of ‘unreported’ stories and libel presents a problem: it is often difficult to collect hard evidence of reported threats against journalists, and to ascertain claims of threats against the media and other individuals. However, documents released during the aftermath of the Savile scandal did provide such hard evidence, such as the transcript of a Surrey Police interview with Savile at Stoke Mandeville Hospital conducted in 2009 – an exchange later assessed by the HM Inspectorate of Constabulary to be ‘Savile-led rather than police-led’ (HMIC 2013, 27). The transcript recorded Savile’s boast that he threatened legal action to deter newspapers from publishing allegations of sexual abuse. Outlining his ‘policy’ towards allegations, Savile described how he had previously reached settlements out of court with five newspapers (Surrey Police 2009, 3). Savile then appears to threaten similar legal action on the basis of the allegations in the interview, that he has a ‘policy’ which will ‘swing into action’ in the face of allegations. Tellingly, he explains that he has never actually sued, ‘because they all run away and say “shush pay him up”’ (ibid., 4). He describes how he previously settled cases for £200,000 and that he is ‘known in the trade as Litigiousness’ and ‘willing to pull people into court straight away, no messing, thank you . . . if you’re Litigiousness, people get quite nervous actually’ (ibid., 5). Whilst Savile’s claims can be understood as baseless bluster with the benefit of hindsight, it is a chilling passage in which the celebrity claims to own the hospital in which he is being interviewed and that he can normally ‘brush [allegations by women] away like midges’, and appears to be indirectly threatening the police as well as his accusers, suggesting that the interviewing officers will be needed in court as witnesses. The documents expose a bald – and bizarrely 204

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successful – attempt to deter the police’s investigation with grandiose statements about his selfperceived legal and social power. Whether or not the Surrey police found these threats credible (the interviewing officers were criticised by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary for not challenging Savile’s various assertions during the ‘ineffective’ interview; HMIC 2013, 27), the case was referred to the Crown Prosecution Service, which advised there was insufficient evidence to charge (Surrey Police n.d.). A fear of Savile’s propensity for libel threats is also noted elsewhere. The former Sunday Mirror editor Paul Connew has described how the newspaper did not pursue allegations made by two victims in 1994 for fear of a libel suit. According to a report in the Press Gazette, Connew blamed a lack of resources at the post-Maxwell Mirror and the fear of a ‘starstruck’ jury at any libel trial (Turvill 2013a). In an interview with the Associated Press, Connew described how the victims were worried about the prospect of giving evidence in any potential trial: ‘One of them said memorably: “Who’s going to believe us in the witness box against Jimmy Savile? He’s friends with Prince Charles, Princess Diana . . . He’s been blessed by the pope”’ (Satter 2012). Similarly, the late tabloid editor Brian Hitchen partially blamed the lack of reporting (he said he had known of allegations for 45 years) on Britain’s libel laws that ‘too often help make those like Savile untouchable’ (2012). Although Hitchen did not expand this point, it is likely his view is based on two factors: the high cost of defending a claim and the structure of English libel law, in which the defendant rather than the claimant bears the burden of proof. To rely on a defence of truth, they must prove that the allegations are substantially true, deemed by critics of English libel law to be unfairly burdensome on defendants. Whether Savile would have been successful in the libel courts was never tested because he settled the complaints before it reached that stage. Often critics discuss deterrence in general terms rather than give specific examples of how libel has deterred investigation of a particular story; here, however, Connew directly connects an editorial decision and a fear of potential libel action. More starkly, there is evidence of Savile’s ill-informed bluster on police record and his claim to have settled with five newspapers. If, as seems likely, he shared his ‘policy’ with journalists as well as police officers, it is probable they would have been scared of running stories. What is less explicable, however, is why they ran such sycophantic and glowing coverage in its place, and why they did not cover the story for over a year after his death, when the threat of libel action was removed. Lance Armstrong also turned to libel in an attempt to deter reporting into allegations of doping. In the English courts he successfully sued the Sunday Times in legal action reported to have cost the paper £1 million (O’Carroll 2013). While the case never reached full trial, following two High Court decisions and a Court of Appeal ruling, the Sunday Times decided to try and settle the case. With a high level of meaning set by the court – that the Sunday Times was accusing Armstrong of being a cheat and a liar – the publication reportedly decided it could not risk a full trial: ‘it did not believe the evidence it had, although strong, was enough to satisfy a jury that Armstrong was a cheat’ (O’Carroll 2013). An initial effort to reach an out of court settlement failed, but a deal was later negotiated by the paper’s then managing editor in the UK while Armstrong’s lawyer was visiting on a golf trip. The evidence of Armstrong’s threats can be found in media reports; he was said to be winning 10–0 in lawsuits, for example (USA Today 2006). Whereas the details of Savile’s settlements remain unclear, the details of Armstrong’s case against the Sunday Times is well-reported and documented online. Furthermore, Armstrong has publicly commented on his legal tactics, following his admission of doping. Asked about his litigiousness during his confessional interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2012, he admitted he didn’t even know how many people he had sued over allegations of doping. Discussing his treatment of the masseuse Emma O’Reilly, who he admitted he had bullied following her claims about his use of the drug cortisone, he said: 205

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‘I don’t feel good. I was just on the attack. The territory was being threatened. The team was being threatened. I was on the attack’ (BBC Sport 2013a). The evidence suggests that Armstrong’s tactics worked: the Sunday Times’ journalist David Walsh was unable to find a publisher for his LA Confidential book3 in the UK and national titles avoided the story. Even the story that the Sunday Times was sued over was not a full extract from the book, according to The Guardian’s extensive report of the litigation (O’Carroll 2013). Like Savile, Armstrong used legal threats to deter journalists from pursuing a legitimate public interest story. Unlike Savile, he has since admitted to wrongdoing on public television. He also told Oprah Winfrey he would be willing to apologise to Walsh (BBC Sport 2013b).

The media blind eye There are differences in the media treatment of Savile and Armstrong. While both individuals received favourable coverage in the UK press, the Armstrong allegations were better reported and more publicly acknowledged in the media, albeit it in a very limited way, in Walsh’s book, co-written with the French journalist Pierre Ballester and published in France, and, separately, by another Sunday Times’ journalist, Paul Kimmage. However, the rumours about Savile ‘liking little girls’ were merely hinted at by the journalist Lynn Barber in 1990 (Barber 2012), Simon Hattenstone (2000) and the filmmaker Louis Theroux in 2000 (‘When Louis Met . . . Jimmy’ 2000). Orla Barry, a journalist who did follow up on the exchange in the Theroux documentary – in which Savile admits he uses the ‘I don’t like children’ line to dispel rumours that he is a paedophile – was reportedly ‘taken aback to discover that more journalists had not put the question to [Savile] . . . given the prominence of the rumours when he was alive’ (Horan 2012). Notwithstanding the differences, both men enjoyed immunity from effective media scrutiny, and the evidence above indicates that both Armstrong and Savile considered libel a key weapon in their armouries. But can libel fully explain the reluctance to cover the story? In the Savile case, how can one account for the glowing endorsements given by the press in place of hardhitting allegations? Robertson has suggested that allegations about Jimmy Savile and the politician Cyril Smith ‘could only surface after their deaths’ because of libel law (2013), but that does not explain the year-long gap between Savile’s death and the eventual airing of the allegations in full on ITV’s Exposure programme in autumn 2012. The BBC has been heavily criticised for its decision to abandon a posthumous investigation by its Newsnight programme (which led to the Pollard Review, discussed below). In an interview with the Press Gazette, Walsh described how there was no hope for coverage of the Armstrong doping allegations following the Sunday Times litigation in 2004. He singled out the BBC as ‘particularly poor’. Walsh described how fear of losing access to sources influenced fellow cycling journalists’ reluctance to pursue the story. Walsh was not allowed to travel with them ‘because they thought it might anger Team Armstrong – and because “we need his quotes, we need his favour”’ (Pugh 2012). This, as with the Savile case, points to extra-legal and social reasons for avoiding the allegations, although risk of losing access to the source could not explain media reluctance to pursue the Savile story after his death. As The Guardian journalist Michael White describes, ‘the tabs [tabloid newspapers] routinely spike stories on grounds of taste and judgment as well as legal concerns’ (White 2012). Beyond this, there is a question of audience. Walsh describes how an American photo-journalist, James Startt, helped put him in touch with a source, after sensing ‘there wasn’t an appetite in his own country for the story’ (Walsh 2012). What were the most plausible explanations for the Savile silence? As already noted, libel does not explain why the allegations were not pursued after he died, or the reasons for Fleet Street’s lack of interest in the story. BBC Panorama journalist Shelley Jofre suggests that ‘a lot of the 206

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newspapers have questions to answer about that [long period of non-reporting] because everybody claims to have known’ (Turvill 2013b). Roy Greenslade sets out the puzzle succinctly: The BBC’s current problem [in explaining its abandonment of the story] is that it appears to have shelved the screening of a Newsnight investigation when it did have very firm evidence and, given that Savile was dead, it could not have resulted in a libel action. (Greenslade 2012) This problem is at the heart of the Pollard Review dealing with the BBC’s non-coverage of Jimmy Savile allegations, although the investigator Nick Pollard argues ‘the most worrying aspect of the Jimmy Savile story for the BBC was not the decision to drop the story itself. It was the complete inability to deal with the events that followed’ (Pollard 2012, 22, para. 4). His report shows evidence of conflicting views about the reasons for the abandonment of the programme. In emails to a friend, Newsnight journalist Liz MacKean suggested that conflicting tribute programming explained her editor Peter Rippon’s reluctance to run the investigation by making ‘impossible editorial demands’, having initially commissioned it (ibid., 86, para. 142). Rippon firmly denied MacKean’s account, however, claiming that he was challenging the story as part of the editorial process. Further, he could not recall the detail of a conversation in which MacKean claimed he played down the severity of the allegations that were being investigated (ibid., para. 144). Rippon admits he may have been guilty of ‘self-censorship’ (ibid., 31, para. 45) but clearly disagrees with MacKean as to why the investigation was not broadcast. Pollard acknowledges the conflicting versions of events between the two journalists, which are ‘difficult to resolve’ (ibid., 86, para. 146). He suggests that Rippon was trying to cross an editorial threshold in order to run the story, although finds that he ‘did make at least some of the comments (or, at least, comments similar to them) that Ms MacKean reports in her e-mails to friends’ (ibid., 87, paras 147–148). For MacKean’s colleague Meirion Jones, there was little ‘journalistic’ logic for Rippon’s decision and ‘that it could only have been motivated by pressure caused by the Christmas tribute programmes’ (ibid., 91, para. 168). Pollard found no evidence of this and did not agree; in his final findings, he states that no ‘inappropriate managerial pressure or consideration’ influenced the editorial decision of Mr Rippon not to run the Savile story although he allows that the ‘decision was clearly influenced by [Rippon’s] two managers’ (ibid., 95, para. 11). The Pollard report highlights the multitude of competing factors influencing a single editorial decision to shelve a programme. Detailed examination of available evidence produces various and conflicting accounts from the parties involved; this coupled with a lack of evidence, makes it difficult to identify the reasons for an ‘editorial’ or ‘journalistic’ decision to avoid a particular topic.4 How to make sense of these conflicting accounts, then? Editorial decisions are subject to a complex web of competing factors, of which libel is just one. The incontrovertible evidence of Savile and Armstrong’s threats and pursuit of libel action suggests that libel played a significant role in deterring both investigation and publication of allegations, but the collective non-reporting of the story was subject to a number of other influences as well, including the high social status of both individuals, which, ironically, the media had helped create through sycophantic and unchallenging coverage.

The lone reporter There is a final comparison to draw between the sustained non-reporting of the Savile and Armstrong allegations before the scandals broke: the role of the lone reporter (Tumber 2013). While there were several journalists working on these stories, it is the dogged work of a select 207

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few individuals that eventually brought the full details to light. Walsh is the obvious candidate in the Armstrong doping case. In the Savile case, Liz MacKean, Meirion Jones and Mark Williams Thomas, a former police detective and specialist in child abuse, all investigated allegations, with the latter decamping to ITV when it became obvious the BBC was not going to broadcast the story on Newsnight (see Keogh 2013). It was Miles Goslett, however, who pursued the story of the BBC’s abandonment of the investigation, and whose report in the magazine The Oldie was the first substantial report of the editorial fallout. Goslett’s experience provides the final conundrum of this case study. Upon discovering that the BBC had shelved the report, and free of libel concerns (Savile was dead), he tried to pitch the story to Fleet Street editors. He assumed the story would ‘sail into any newspaper’ (Goslett 2012). Over two weeks he contacted six national news desks. None was interested. Among the reasons he was given were: ‘bad taste’ so soon after his death; it would not be worth pursuing Savile if the police had not during his lifetime; that the story was ‘best avoided’ for the time being. What was the significance of the timing? Goslett introduces a new deterrence factor: the Leveson Inquiry and the risk of his recommending statutory regulation. According to Goslett, one senior executive ‘admitted that because his editor was about to appear in front of Lord Leveson’s [sic] inquiry into press ethics, then at its height, it would be unwise to run the piece’. This does not feel a wholly satisfactory explanation, however. There was no social, regulatory or legal retribution for The Oldie and yet the national newspapers continued to ignore the story. This surprised Goslett, who told the Press Gazette that save a follow up piece by the Telegraph the facts revealed by The Oldie still did not entice the rest of the British Press. ‘What seemed utterly bizarre to me was that nobody really went digging after that,’ he said (Turvill 2013a). Then, in October 2012, when ITV made its dramatic exposé, the story really exploded, dominating front pages for weeks on end. Leveson had not yet reported his findings, so why did Fleet Street suddenly wake up at this point? The newspapers may have felt protected by the evidence of the ITV documentary, but they showed far greater inclination to go after the story, devoting front pages and extensive inside and online coverage to the scandal. As Goslett remarked, television is ‘hugely powerful’ for bringing an issue to attention and bringing new sources forward (Turvill 2013a). Although Goslett appears convinced by the Leveson reason, he still seems a little bewildered by his difficulty in pitching the story prior to the ITV documentary: ‘I have suggested that Leveson might have had something to do with it – and I can’t really imagine what else it could have been’ (Turvill 2013a). Another difficulty with Goslett’s explanation is that the newspapers did go after the type of stories that would be very likely to catch Lord Justice Leveson’s attention while the Inquiry was ongoing.5 Perhaps fear of Leveson’s critical eye influenced some news desk editors’ decisions regarding the Savile story, but two factors played a greater role: first, a tendency for herd-like behaviour dissuaded them to run the story when they knew another broadcaster had run shy (and if they had previously run with an angle focussing on the BBC’s abandonment of the story rather than the actual allegations of abuse, it would be difficult to justify why they were also stepping around the edge of the story and had failed to report it in the past); and second, the social reverence given to Savile in their own national treasure tributes.

Conclusion This chapter has examined the influences on editorial decisions not to report allegations in the earlier stages of what become high profile scandals. Law and legal threats cannot be blamed alone, and when cited as a reason must be scrutinised as much as the available evidence allows. Too often, academic and media accounts repeat anecdotal evidence about the ‘chilling’ role of 208

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the law without considering the evidence in detail. A more plausible and nuanced explanation is that personality and ‘national treasure’ or ‘golden’ status provide an immunity for individuals, which is further bolstered by their legal bluster and reputation for litigiousness. Examination of the evidence suggests that a range of competing factors influenced the BBC’s and other media decisions to avoid allegations relating to Lance Armstrong’s doping in the Tour de France races and, in a distinct but analytically comparable case, allegations of sexual abuse made against the late television presenter Jimmy Savile. Both these cases had a number of characteristics that led to a mass media omertà, eventually broken only by a few individual reporters. At a particular point, the evidence for the allegations and public interest in each case was so strong the story could no longer be ignored, despite the social and legal power of both Savile and Armstrong. Other historical and future cases may benefit from similar analytical treatment, such as the Thorpe Affair with which this chapter opened. While in this chapter I have attempted to avoid a ‘simple lumping together of factors’ to explain reporting patterns (Benson 2010, 619), the reasons for persistent non-reporting are not easy to identify or isolate and the cases highlight the complex interplay between legal and social factors in deterring journalistic investigation and publication. At a particular stage, there is a tipping point in the life of a set of facts, which transforms or activates them into national and global news, with legal and social inhibitions disregarded (cf. Anderson 2010, 290). How that transformation occurs remains a difficult point of analysis, but it is one that should be attempted as part of an academic and media endeavour to hold power, including celebrities and media personalities, to account.

Acknowledgement With thanks to my former doctoral supervisor, Professor Howard Tumber, for prompting me to consider the case studies of Savile and Armstrong; edited extracts of my PhD thesis, completed in 2014, are reproduced here.

Notes 1 A detailed definition and exploration of the ‘chilling effect’ concept is offered by J.Townend in ‘Freedom of Expression and the Chilling Effect’, in H. Tumber and S. Waisbord, eds., The Routledge Companion to Media and Human Rights (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 78–82. 2 An exploration of the literature is offered in J. Townend, ‘Defamation, Privacy and the “Chill”: A Sociolegal Study of the Relationship between Media Law and Journalistic Practice in England and Wales, 2008–13’, Doctoral thesis, City, University of London, 2014). 3 Published as LA Confidentiel in France. 4 Pollard notes that, in interviews, Jones ‘drew a significant distinction between the story being dropped for “editorial reasons” and “journalistic reasons”. The former simply meant that a decision had been taken by the editor. The latter suggested that there was some journalistic logic to the decision’ (Pollard, 2012, 91 para. 168). 5 For example, they printed aggressive stories about the actor Hugh Grant, who appeared as witness at the Inquiry and sent photographers to the house of the mother of his child in November 2012 (see Grant 2011, 6, para. 21).

References Anderson, C.W., 2010. Journalistic Networks and the Diffusion of Local News: The Brief, Happy News Life of the ‘Francisville Four’. Political Communication 27(3), pp. 289–309. Apple Jr, R.W., 1978. The Rise and Fall of Jeremy Thorpe. The New York Times [online] 3 December. https://www.nytimes.com/1978/12/03/archives/the-rise-and-fall-of-jeremy-thorpe-thorpe.html [Accessed 3 September 2018].

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Judith Townend Barber, L., 2012. Lynn Barber: I Was Nervous When I Told Jimmy Savile, ‘People Say You Like Little Girls’. Independent.co.uk [online] 2 October. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/ tv/features/lynn-barber-i-was-nervous-when-i-told-jimmy-savile-people-say-you-like-littlegirls-8193169.html [Accessed 3 September 2018]. BBC Sport, 2013a. Lance Armstrong and Oprah Winfrey: Interview Transcript. BBC [online] 18 January. http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/cycling/21065539 [Accessed 3 September 2018]. BBC Sport, 2013b. Lance & Oprah: Part Two Transcript. BBC [online] 19 January. http://www.bbc. co.uk/sport/0/cycling/21087586 [Accessed 3 September 2018]. Benson, R., 2010. Comparative News Media Systems: New Directions in Research. In S. Allan, ed., The Routledge Companion to News and Journalism (pp. 614–626). London: Routledge, p. 614. Crick, M., 2018. Tweet, @michaellcrick. https://twitter.com/michaellcrick/status/1003658103727034368 ?lang=en [Accessed 3 July 2018]. Forde, M. and Diamond, B., 2005. One More Hill to Climb. The New York Post, 1 May, p. 56. Goslett, M., 2012. Leveson and Jimmy Savile. The Spectator. http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/ 8743711/leveson-and-jimmy-savile/ [Accessed 3 September 2018]. Grant, H., 2011. Supplemental Witness Statement of Hugh Grant. http://webarchive.nationalarchives. gov.uk/20140122145147/http://www.levesoninquiry.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/ Supplemental-Witness-Statement-of-Hugh-Grant.pdf [Accessed 3 September 2018]. Gray, D. and Watt, P., 2013. Giving Victims a Voice: Joint Report into Sexual Allegations Made against Jimmy Savile. MPS/NSPCC. https://www.nspcc.org.uk/globalassets/documents/research-reports/yewtreereport-giving-victims-voice-jimmy-savile.pdf [Accessed 14 January 2019]. Greenslade, R., 2012. Roy Greenslade: Shelving of Newsnight’s Jimmy Savile Exposé Has Left BBC with Questions to Answer. London Evening Standard [online] 10 October. http://www.standard.co.uk/business/ media/roy-greenslade-shelving-of-newsnights-jimmy-savile-expos-has-left-bbc-with-questions-toanswer-8205243.html [Accessed 3 September 2018]. Hattenstone, S., 2000. In Bed with Jimmy. The Guardian, 11 April, p .6. Hitchen, B., 2012. The Disgusted Captain Who Threw Jimmy Savile off a Cruise Ship. Express.co.uk [online] 4 October. http://www.express.co.uk/expressyourself/349976/The-disgusted-captain-whothrew-Jimmy-Savile-off-a-cruise-ship [Accessed 3 September 2018]. HMIC, 2013. ‘Mistakes Were Made.’ HMIC’s Review into Allegations and Intelligence Material Concerning Jimmy Savile between 1964 and 2012. https://www.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/hmicfrs/media/review-intoallegations-and-intelligence-material-concerning-jimmy-savile.pdf [Accessed 14 January 2019]. Horan, N., 2012. I Don’t Know Why Nobody Took Him on Sooner – Barry. Independent.ie [online] 14 October. http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/i-dont-know-why-nobody-took-him-on-soonerbarry-28818829.html [Accessed 3 September 2018]. Keogh, K., 2013. Birmingham Lecturer Mark Williams-Thomas on How He Unmasked Jimmy Savile as a Paedophile. Birmingham Mail [online] 12 January. http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/localnews/birmingham-lecturer-mark-williams-thomas-on-how-819458 [Accessed 3 September 2018]. Kuper, S., 2012. The Dazzling Power of Armstrong and Savile. Financial Times [online] 22 October. http:// www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6d1a0be8-1c6b-11e2-a63b-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2zMiJufaf [Accessed 3 September 2018]. Macqueen, A., 2011. Private Eye: The First 50 Years. London: Private Eye Productions Limited. Marsh, D., 2013. How to Become a National Treasure. The Guardian [online] 26 July. http://www. theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2013/jul/26/mind-your-language-national-treasure [Accessed 3 September 2018]. Naughtie, J., 2018. Sex, Lies and Privilege: James Naughtie Recalls Jeremy Thorpe’s Sensational Trial. Radio Times. https://www.radiotimes.com/news/tv/2018-06-03/sex-lies-and-privilege-the-real-lifecase-of-jeremy-thorpe-a-very-english-scandal/ [Accessed 3 July 2018]. O’Carroll, L., 2013. How UK Libel Laws Undermined Sunday Times in Lance Armstrong Article Case. Guardian.co.uk [online] 22 January. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/jan/22/uk-libel-lawssunday-times-lance-armstrong [Accessed 3 September 2018]. Pollard, N., 2012. The Pollard Review: Report. London: BBC Trust. http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/ assets/files/pdf/our_work/pollard_review/pollard_review.pdf [Accessed 3 September 2018]. Preston, John, 2016. A Very English Scandal: Sex, Lies and a Murder Plot at the Heart of the Establishment. Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition. Pugh, A., 2012. David Walsh: ‘It Was Obvious to Me Lance Armstrong Was Doping’. Press Gazette [online] 11 October. http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/david-walsh-it-was-obvious-me-lance-armstrong-wasdoping [Accessed 3 September 2018].

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Unreported scandals Robertson, G., 2013. We Can Have a Free Press and Justice Too. Standpoint [online] January. http:// standpointmag.co.uk/node/4798/full [Accessed 3 September 2018]. Satter, R., 2012. Jimmy Savile: How Could Allegations Go Unnoticed? Associated Press [online] 27 October. https://www.yahoo.com/news/jimmy-savile-could-allegations-unnoticed-053638630.html [Accessed 3 September 2018]. Surrey Police, 2009. Jimmy Savile Interview – Operation Ornament: Part 2. https://www.surrey.police.uk/ media/3262/about_us_foi_jimmy_savile_interview_part_2.pdf [Accessed 3 September 2018]. Surrey Police, n.d. Statement Regarding Surrey Police’s Investigation into Jimmy Savile. [online] surrey.police. uk. Webpage no longer available [Accessed 3 July 2014]. Tumber, H., 2013. Abuse, Dope, and Charities: Armstrong and Savile, a Failure of Journalism. International Communication Association presentation, London, 20 June 2013. Turvill, W., 2013a. Savile Story Dropped by Sunday Mirror because Paper Could Not Afford to Lose Libel Battle. Press Gazette [online] 15 July.http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/savile-story-dropped-sundaymirror-because-paper-could-not-afford-lose-libel-battle [Accessed 3 September 2018]. Turvill, W., 2013b. Panorama Reporter Shelley Jofre: Newspapers Have Questions to Answer over Savile Silence. Press Gazette [online] 15 April. http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/panorama-reporter-shelleyjofre-newspapers-have-questions-answer-over-savile-silence [Accessed 3 September 2018]. USA Today, 2006. Armstrong Drops Defamation Lawsuits in France. usatoday30.usatoday.com [online] 7 June. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/cycling/2006-07-06-armstrong-lawsuit-dropped_x.htm [Accessed 3 September 2018]. Walsh, D., 2012. Lance, the Lies and Me. The Sunday Times Magazine [online] 4 November. https://www. thetimes.co.uk/article/lance-the-lies-and-me-9brplfd62mk [Accessed 3 September 2018]. White, M., 2012. Jimmy Savile: Why Didn’t the Tough Tabloids Nail Him? The Guardian [online] 9 October. http://www.theguardian.com/media/blog/2012/oct/09/jimmy-savile-tabloids-bbc-allegations [Accessed 3 September 2018]. Wollaston, S., 2016. Louis Theroux: Savile Review – from Awkward to Seriously Uncomfortable . . . and Extraordinary. The Guardian [online] 2 October. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/ oct/02/louis-theroux-savile-review-awkward-creepy-uncomfortable-extraordinary [Accessed 3 September 2018].

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PART III

Scandals and journalistic practices

21 SCANDALS AND FREEDOM OF INFORMATION David Cuillier

Sunlight, the best disinfectant Problems exposed are problems solved. Freedom of information laws throughout the world serve a critical role in helping journalists, nongovernmental organizations, and citizens expose government corruption and hold powerful institutions accountable. Every day, official records bring to light through sunshine laws scandals of significant importance for society: • Heather Brooke, a journalism professor at City, University of London, acquired records through England’s Freedom of Information law to help expose the Members of Parliament expense scandal in 2009, revealing widespread abuse of public funds, including purchases of a duck house, adult films, jellied eels, and moat cleaning (MPs’ Expenses 2009; Kelso 2009). • Documents obtained through the U.S. Freedom of Information Act showed that the United States government deliberately skewed information to suggest falsely that North Vietnamese ships had attacked U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964, justifying escalation of the Vietnam War (Shane 2005). • ProPublica used public record laws to reveal that at least 165 nursing home residents from 2011 to 2014 were hospitalized or died in the United States because of the improper use of a popular blood thinner (Ornstein 2015). • Journalists wielded public record laws in 2014 to unravel the details of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email and home server to conduct public business as secretary of state, which later became a campaign albatross in her presidential election bid against Donald Trump, perhaps even costing her the presidency (Gillum and Bridis 2015; Leopold 2015). Regardless of the implications, scandals exposed through freedom of information laws number in the thousands and serve as a critical tool for investigative journalism in open democracies (News Media for Open Government 2018; National Security Archive 2018). Nations continue to adopt freedom of information laws in the name of good governance, and journalism schools routinely instruct their students on the law and practice of acquiring public records. Government officials extol the virtues of transparency. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis probably expressed it best: “Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and 215

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industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman” (Brandeis 1914, 92). For the purposes of this chapter, freedom of information laws are defined broadly as any type of law that guarantees citizens the right to find out about their government. Transparency laws share much in common across levels of government and internationally, including the presumption that all recorded materials held or created by government agencies are open for anyone to look at unless a specific law would enable an agency to keep it secret. Public record and open meeting laws provide for exemptions—justifications that agencies can use to deny requesters, such as for national security or personal privacy. And transparency laws typically spell out the process for acquiring information, such as how fast an agency must respond, how much it can charge for copies, and penalties, if any, for noncompliance. These laws empower everyone to get a glimpse at how government is operating, sometimes leading to the exposure of scandals and corruption, or better, providing an incentive for government officials to conduct themselves appropriately to avoid scandals. After all, what child is going to sneak a cookie from the jar while a parent is watching? The following pages will examine the benefits and limitations of public record laws on exposing scandals. The chapter also lays out the growing body of research exploring whether sunshine laws actually improve institutional accountability and society, or merely give people the false appearance of citizen oversight. The role of journalists in using freedom of information laws to expose scandals is discussed, as well as current threats to transparency. Finally, the chapter offers new opportunities for bolstering the public’s right to know in the twenty-first century.

Dawn of sunshine Freedom of information laws are relatively new in human history, emerging from the Enlightenment era as common folk throughout the Western world began questioning the absolute power of kings. Sweden and Finland, in the distant past combined as one country, adopted the world’s first national right-to-know law in 1766 (Ortenhed and Wennberg 2017). Since then more than 120 nations have followed suit, most of those in just the past 20 years (Global Right to Information Rating 2018). North American colonialists, upon a successful revolt, valued the need for citizens to maintain control over the governments they created; yet nowhere did they include in the U.S. Constitution an explicit “right to know.” They even met in secret to draft their documents. The closest inkling to a public records law from the Founding Fathers came in the form of a brief phrase in Article I, Section 5, of the U.S. Constitution that required that “Each House shall keep a Journal of its Proceedings, and from time to time publish the same, excepting such Parts as may in their Judgment require Secrecy.” A start, but hardly a strong tool for citizens to expose corruption and scandals. Just because the Founding Fathers did not enact a freedom of information law, however, did not mean they eschewed transparency. After all, they expressed in the Declaration of Independence their concerns with the king of England’s excessive secrecy and bureaucratic bullying: “[The king] has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measure.” From the beginning of the young nation, disagreement would emerge between those advocating secrecy and those espousing the right to know, particularly between the president and Congress (Halstuk 2002). Over time, freedom of information in the United States evolved through common law, court cases, and statutes, based on the general premise that if people are to govern themselves, then they ought to know what is going on (Martin and Lanosga 2010). Democratic theory 216

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suggests that First Amendment protections of speech, press, petition, and assembly serve as a check on the abuse of power by public officials, and that citizens should be informed so as to govern adequately (Blasi 1977). As a result, Congress enacted various laws through the centuries to require the printing and dissemination of government information for citizens, including the formation of federal depository libraries in 1895 (Quinn 2003). One of the first known references to “the right to know” came from Kent Cooper, executive director of The Associated Press in a public speech in 1945: “The citizen is entitled to have access to news, fully and accurately presented,” he said. “There cannot be political freedom in one country, or in the world, without respect for ‘the right to know’” (New York Times January 23, 1945). Secrecy during World War II continued into the Cold War, and as a result journalists like Cooper pushed back, eventually convincing Congress in 1966 to pass the Freedom of Information Act, an amendment to the Administrative Procedure Act (Foerstel 1999; Martin 2008; Lemov 2011). Since then, public record laws proliferated through the United States. Amendments to the FOIA roughly every 10 years included mandates to post information online (Electronic Freedom of Information Act Amendments of 1996) and penalties for agencies that miss response deadlines (FOIA Improvement Act of 2016). Congress enacted the Clery Act (1990) to require universities to report crime on campus. Open meeting laws, or “sunshine laws,” were passed at the state and federal levels to ensure governing bodies conducted business in public and Congress passed regulations to require a variety of industries to report safety information for consumers (Lemov 2011). The relationship between freedom of information laws and scandals have become symbiotic – the laws expose scandals and scandals lead to new or improved transparency laws (Worthy 2017). The 1970s Watergate scandal, for example, led to the broad passage of state public record and campaign finance disclosure laws. “Perhaps Nixon’s most significant legacy has been to provoke a national cynicism toward public officials that, until then, was unknown,” wrote long-time transparency advocate Mitchell Pearlman (2010, 47). He continues: As a result of Watergate, landmark campaign financing and ethics laws were enacted to reduce the changes of similar abuses of power. And new, stronger Freedom of Information laws were passed by legislatures across the country to help guarantee that the people could learn what their government agencies were doing. Let’s hope we don’t forget the Nixon legacy. These laws expanded beyond the United States as other countries began adopting their own freedom of information acts for a variety of reasons. India’s law emerged from the bottom up, as citizens demanded better government services, while other countries’ laws, such as China’s, were implemented top down (Florini 2007). Some laws were spawned from political party competition (Berliner and Erlich 2015), and others to make their countries appear more attractive to foreign investors (Relly and Sabharwal 2009; Darch and Underwood 2010). By 2019, more than 120 nations had adopted right to information laws (Global Right to Information Rating 2018). Further, dozens of nations have incorporated the right to know into their constitutions, and some governing bodies, such as the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, have ruled the right to information as a basic human right, similar to the right to clean water and to be free of torture (Reyes v. Chile 2006).

Effects on society So, clearly, freedom of information is a lofty principle, tied to the ideals of democracy and the people’s “right to know.” But do these laws actually help mitigate corruption and expose 217

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scandals, ultimately leading to better government and better societies? The short answer is “Yes. Mostly.” At minimum, research indicates that transparency laws do little harm to society. One study found that about a third of registered sex offenders in a Florida county reported that their identities and addresses released through public records because of the disclosure-oriented Megan’s Law led to dire events, such as harassment, property damage, and loss of jobs (Levenson and Cotter 2005), but on the other hand the disclosure positively pressured them to avoid relapse. Some skeptics have claimed that freedom of information laws crush the government under expensive mountains of paperwork with little to show (Scalia 1982). Yet, the cost to administer the FOIA in the United States is just 0.011 percent of agency budgets (Wagner 2017). Some research indicates that implementation of freedom of information laws leads to increased perceptions of corruption in government, most notably in nations with a free press (Costa 2013). In other words, once the laws go into effect journalists acquire records, expose scandals, and then the public perceives more corruption in their governments. However, over time this perception diminishes as citizens get accustomed to the scandals and as corruption is minimized by transparency (Vadlamannati and Cooray 2017). Indeed, hundreds of studies suggest societal benefits directly linked to transparency laws, including reduction of drinking water health violations (Bennear and Olmstead 2008), decreased consumer complaints through disclosure of restaurant food safety inspections (Almanza, Ismail, and Mills 2002), greater confidence in the U.S. Social Security system through release of expected benefits statements (Cook, Jacobs, and Kim 2010), and increased general levels of transparency and accountability (Worthy 2010). Cucciniello, Porumbescu and Grimmelikhuijsen (2017) reviewed 187 studies published between 1990 and 2015 in public administration journals regarding government transparency to find that freedom of information is effective at increasing public participation in government, improving financial management, and reducing corruption. In addition to improved money management and reduced corruption (Lyrio, Lunkes, and Taliani 2018), other benefits of transparency include enhanced electoral accountability, according to a review of 38 studies published between 1991 and 2015 (de Renzio and Wehner 2017). A preponderance of research indicates that freedom of information laws result in better government and better societies, no doubt from the threat of scandal exposure, most often from journalists.

Watchdogs with bite Journalists rely on freedom of information laws to expose government corruption on the public’s behalf. Momentum grew in the 1960s and 1970s through more aggressive reporting and increased skepticism (Schudson 2015). Investigative reporters are a relatively small lot and shrinking by the year in the United States (Houston 2010; Lanosga, Willnat, Weaver, and Houston 2015). Overall, journalists comprise just 2–14 percent of all U.S. FOIA requesters, depending on the agency and study (Frequent Filers 2006; Kwoka 2016; Silver 2016). Business interests typically comprise about two-thirds of requesters, with citizens and non-profits filing the rest. But while journalists might not be the most common users of FOI laws, they pack a big punch. Gerry Lanosga and Jason Martin (2018) examined 757 award entry forms submitted to the Investigative Reporters and Editors contest from 1979 through 2007, noting how the stories were “triggered” from source tips, examining public records, editor assignment, or other methods. They also noted stories that used public records and made specific mention to public record laws, and whether the resulting scandal led to an official investigation, arrest, firing, resignation, new laws, or other action. 218

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They found that government wrongdoing, or scandals, were the focus of half the stories, and problems with the private sector comprised 30 percent. About half the stories came from enterprise work, and tips accounted for 35 percent. Public records were used in 90.6 percent of the stories, 41.7 percent specifically mentioned using public record laws to obtain them, and a third mentioned use of government data. The use of records increased during the five decades, from 7.8 percent in the 1970s to 65.3 percent in the current decade. About 70 percent resulted in substantive change or action, such as new laws, official investigations, arrests, or resignations. Also, stories that mentioned use of public record laws were more likely to produce positive results. Records-based investigative reporting has demonstrated definitive benefits on government efficiency, whether through exposing scandals and corruption, or simply pressuring officials to stay on their best behavior. When newspapers close, for example, local government pays more in borrowing costs because of increased inefficiencies (Gao, Lee, and Murphy 2018). The shuttering of The Cincinnati Post in 2007 resulted in fewer candidates running for municipal offices, incumbents more likely to win re-election, and lower voter turnout (Schulhofer-Wohl and Garrido 2009). Reporting of scandals that is dramatic, convincing, and with clear evidence, such as government documents, are more likely to affect public attitudes and effect positive change (Protess et al. 1987). From a pure dollars and cents perspective, document-based investigative reporting pays significant dividends for society. James T. Hamilton, an economics and communication researcher at Stanford University, calculated that one investigative reporting series by the Raleigh News & Observer, which exposed a scandalous probation system and relied on dozens of different documents acquired through FOI laws, yielded $62.1 million in societal benefit from the $216,500 spent by the newspaper, or about $287 in benefits for every dollar spent (Hamilton 2016). Scandals exposed in the media through public record laws have a greater chance of effecting change when tied to external audits or when involving other government officials (Grimmelikhuijsen and Snijders 2016). While investigative reporting struggles in the United States due to economic decay of the legacy media, it is growing in strength around the world (Chalaby 2004; Rasmussen 2014) and still has the opportunity for rebounding through innovation and philanthropy (Houston 2010). Ultimately, investigative journalism, which relies on freedom of information laws, exposes scandals in government, business, and other institutions, making for a better world.

Threats to transparency While scandals exposed by journalists through freedom of information laws lead to better government, forces are pushing back. Once sunshine laws are enacted they are prone to whittling and degradation over time, often by institutions wishing to avoid scandals and the limelight. For example, an examination of U.S. congressional testimony over the past 60 years indicates that business interests played a key role in shaping the law by decreasing public access to information (Relly and Schwalbe 2016). The U.S. FOIA law, seen as a model for many nations, is rated just 69th in the world in its strength of provisions (Global Right to Information Rating 2019). That is worse than the FOIA laws in Rwanda (ranked 64th), Russia (43rd), the United Kingdom (42nd), Kyrgyzstan (39th), and Mexico (2nd). The country with the strongest FOIA law in the world? Afghanistan. The United States’ law has not kept pace with the rest of the world. It resembles a 1966 Ford Mustang—a classic and laudable vehicle for its time—but a 2019 Hyundai Sonata has better mileage, safety features, sound system, reliability, and performance. 219

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The written words of a law, however, do not necessarily translate directly into performance. Despite its textual strength, for example, Mexico’s freedom of information act implementation has had significant problems, according to an analysis by Bookman and Guerrero Amparan (2009). “A transparency law, however well-conceived, is not a panacea,” they wrote. “It rises and falls with the general health of the state. Freedom of information reaches no further than the political will that imbues it.” Penalties are weak in most freedom of information laws, and rarely enforced (Stewart 2010). Arbitrary fees, sometimes in the thousands or millions of dollars, might be charged for copies, search time, or even for attorneys to black out passages (Lee 2016). While strong laws are important, they mean little without buy-in from those administering them. Transparency works best when the principals outline the benefits, respond meaningfully, support the concept, and have the ability to incentivize openness (Williamson and Eisen 2016). Transparency implementation can even vary by community and culture (Grimmelikhuijsen et al. 2013). For example, one study in Florida indicated that the more gender and ethnic diversity in a community the more transparent its government and easier it is to access information (Armstrong 2008). Some research indicates that existence of freedom of information laws might actually harm the public’s ability to acquire government information. That’s what Lindita Camaj (2015) found when she interviewed journalists in Kosovo, Albania, and Montenegro. After the countries adopted freedom of information laws, journalists reported access to more information but complained of run-arounds, delays, and excuses for secrecy. Before the law, officials had to make a reasonable argument to withhold a document. After the law, officials had a legal peg to hang their secrecy on. Transparency laws can unintentionally result in “perverse effects,” such as civil servants engaging in strategic behavior to appear open but not actually improve services (Williamson and Eisen 2016). The adversarial process can amplify suspicion, antagonism, and resentment between officials and journalists (Worthy 2010). As a result, governments faced with legislated openness often hunker down and defend themselves. Informal methods of resistance include changes in record keeping, decline in candor, manipulation of records, failure to create records, centralizing information control, under-resourcing FOI offices, and restructuring government services through privatization (Roberts 2006). What emerges is a doctrine of resistance. In the end, effectiveness of freedom of information laws often rests with the people administering, enforcing, and using them (Fung, Graham and Weil 2007).

Opportunities for openness Despite the increasing challenges in building better governments and societies through greater transparency, the future for sunshine laws is bright. Nations throughout the world are adopting freedom of information laws at a quick pace, and old laws are continuously reinvigorated. But we need to think beyond the U.S. FOIA model statute, perhaps scrapping it altogether and starting over (Stewart and Davis 2016; Pozen 2017). Current statutes, with their beg–deny–sue structure, might not be the best avenue for improving government openness. Long-term, radical transformation is needed. Many countries—not including the United States or the United Kingdom—have enshrined the right to know in their constitutions, and it is time for all nations to declare it a fundamental human right. Political divisiveness and growth of authoritarianism in the United States and elsewhere are likely to actually help transparency legislation. Information is power, and those in power want to keep it and those without power want it. Pushback against President Donald Trump’s 220

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anti-media rhetoric has bolstered journalism and open-government advocacy groups in the United States through increased fundraising and membership. Pearlman (2010) reminds us to remember Nixon and the positive outcomes of scandal. National scandals under any presidential administration are likely to lead to calls for more openness, transparency, and accountability. Increased crackdowns on information by government also result in documents emerging through other venues (Hobbs and Roberts 2018). Leakers and whistle-blowers get busy. Records find themselves posted on Wikileaks. People find other ways to get information out through social media. Try to squeeze a balloon and the air pops out another place. Any attempt by anti-democratic regimes to inhibit freedom of information will backfire in the long run. Journalism organizations will continue to use freedom of information laws, even with fewer staff and resources. The decline of investigative reporters has been supplanted by others who acquire public records through freedom of information laws to expose scandals and hold government accountable. Special-interest nonprofit organizations are picking up the slack, submitting FOIA requests, litigating, and then providing the documents to journalists (Powers 2018). Even average citizens are doing their part. An analysis of more than one million public records requests in Mexico from 2003 to 2015 indicated that about two-thirds of the records requested had a public accountability purpose (Berliner, Bagozzi, and Palmer-Rubin 2018). Citizens care about their communities and are using freedom of information laws not just for their own personal gain but for holding government accountable. More academic research in transparency will identify better practices for administering freedom of information laws for maximum public benefit. Additional empirical studies are needed, particularly experimental, to identify what laws are most effective and the repercussions for society. Standardized record-keeping and valid measures of transparency performance will help compare transparency across communities and nations. And, of course, enhanced technology is empowering proactive disclosure of information by governments, saving time for requesters and agency personnel. Information systems one day will allow data to be posted immediately to electronic public sites, automatically redacting information that should remain private. Eventually it will be deemed a failure if someone needs to submit a freedom of information request for government documents because it should be available proactively for free and easily searchable and retrieved. Ultimately, we will likely always need freedom of information laws in some form for the citizenry to hold government accountable. The natural tendency of bureaucracy is secrecy, and only laws supported by the public and those who administer them will fend off darkness and ignorance. Freedom of information mechanisms will remain critical tools for journalists and citizens to expose corruption and scandals, therefore improving governance and making society better.

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22 TRANSNATIONAL INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM AND SCANDAL Michael Bromley

The traditional ‘watchdog’ role of journalism in promoting democratic accountability through investigation and exposure as a function of freedom of expression has been, at one and the same time, facilitated and challenged by a global proliferation of accessible data and their easy transfer made possible chiefly by the use of digitised information and communication technologies (ICTs). This has fostered transnational cooperation among investigative journalists in order both to enhance their capacity to manage more readily available large volumes of data, and to provide effective counters to (hold to account) the extended power of institutions and individuals that operate across borders. Arguably, there was little which was novel, both as activities and in creating scandals, in money laundering, tax evasion, environmental degradation, trafficking, crime or political corruption – or that they crossed national boundaries. What did change, however, was their global scale and their digitally enhanced speed and reach. Investigative journalists responded not by abandoning their established modes of operation but by augmenting them and pooling resources. The global growth from the mid-1990s of Freedom of Information and more latterly Right to Information legislation coincided with an increase in uptake of digital ICTs, providing investigative journalists with access to masses of both open and via leaks private data, helping them to pursue the same inquiries, often simultaneously, in many countries, and allowing them to establish and track transnational connections. Nevertheless, the ability of the mainstream media to support such investigations waned as they were themselves either incorporated into global entities (many of which had creative tax arrangements and close political affiliations) or struggled to stay in business (Sambrook 2018a: 1). At the same time, journalists, and in particular investigative journalists, have been confronted by increasingly hostile environments, often created by governments and politicians even in European countries such as Bulgaria, Turkey and Austria (Reporters without Borders 2018a; 2018b). In China the number of investigative journalists declined by 57.5 per cent between 2011 and 2017 (Anon 2018). Organisations such as the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), formed in 1997, and the Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN), founded in 2003, stepped in to foster and coordinate cooperative transnational investigations. This was exemplified by the global exposure under the auspices of the ICIJ of a series of tax evasions involving politicians, corporates, banks, celebrities and criminals through what became known as the Luxembourg Leaks (2014), the Swiss Leaks (2015), the Panama Papers (2016) and the Paradise Papers (2017).

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What the ICIJ called ‘the secrets of the global élite’ were laid bare. It remains a moot point, however, as to how many publics were scandalised by such revelations. On the one hand, Iceland’s prime minister, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, resigned ‘amid mounting public outrage that his family had sheltered money offshore’, and the Pakistani prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, was removed from office by the country’s Supreme Court (and later banned from politics for life) for concealing his offshore assets, as revealed by publication of the Panama Papers (Henley 2016). On the other hand, Gunnlaugsson was swiftly re-elected to Iceland’s parliament (Jónsson 2017), having been replaced as prime minister by another politician named in the leak of papers (Taylor 2017). Moreover, that the names of the US President Donald Trump and the British Prime Minister David Cameron appeared in the papers seemed to have no noticeable effect on their political careers (Cuthbertson 2017; Stone 2016). By 2019, The Guardian newspaper, one of 90 collaborators in the Paradise Papers investigation, could report only that the case had led to ‘new or expanded criminal investigations in Switzerland and Argentina and accelerated the process of reform in the European Union’. On the other hand, one of the journalists, Pelin Ünker, had been imprisoned in Turkey on charges of ‘defamation and insult’ for writing about the offshore finances of the country’s former prime minister as part of the investigation (Borger 2019). As Ettema and Glasser (1998: 2–4) have argued, investigative journalists may identify ‘the public moral meaning’ of events or circumstances, and ‘can issue a compelling call for public moral indignation’, but ultimately it is the public which has to act to recognise and then redress any scandal.

The foundations of transnational investigative journalism Traditionally, investigative journalism worked on local, regional and national levels within nation-states. As such, many investigations had significant impact only within the single nation (Castillo 2018; Jensen 2002). Consequently, they often remain unknown outside the country of origin, an example being the 1970s Poulson Affair, investigated by the Bradford Telegraph and Argus newspaper, which despite being labelled ‘Britain’s most notorious corruption scandal’ (Anon 2009), is viewed chiefly as a defining case solely within urban Britain in the second half of the twentieth century (Jones 2012). In larger countries, such as India, some activities exposed by investigative journalism attained significant notice only at the level of the sub-national state (Pal 2017). Within this context, investigative journalists have both access to the (sub-)national polity and the capacity to provoke (sub-)national legislative change. In the nineteenth century, W. T. Stead, who has been called ‘Britain’s first investigative journalist’ (Robinson 2012) and whose investigation into child prostitution led to the introduction of the Criminal Law Amendment Act in 1885, went so far as to claim that he practised a form of ‘government by journalism’ (Stead 1886). Such investigative journalism focused on cases within nation-states and drawing them to the attention of their publics. Individual scandals publicised as a result of journalistic investigation may have piqued a wider, global interest, but that a number (among them the Watergate, Iran-Contra and Abu Ghraib scandals) did so largely reflected the global importance of the USA and, to a lesser extent, other countries in the global North. Even where a case had a truly global dimension, such as the sale and use of the drug thalidomide which caused journalists to gather evidence from Australia, Kenya, Sweden and the USA as well as the UK, it was more often than not associated with a single (national) journalistic effort, in this instance that of the London Sunday Times newspaper (Knightley 1997). Investigative journalists did cooperate transnationally before the digital era. The US-based organisation Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) sought from its foundation in 1975 to provide opportunities for ‘journalists throughout the world . . . [to] help each other by sharing 226

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story ideas, newsgathering techniques and news sources’. In 2002 IRE introduced a special citation for an international entry into its awards, bestowed annually from 1979, although it was discontinued in 2005. Since 1984, journalists have been recognised by IRE, although not always with an award, in Australia, Austria, Bosnia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Georgia, Hong Kong, Mexico, New Zealand, Serbia, South Korea, Sweden, the UK and Ukraine. However, it was only in the twenty-first century that transnational investigations began to feature in the awards. Thereafter, they appeared quite regularly with the ICIJ being cited seven times in ten years. IRE has also acknowledged the work of both the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCR) and the European Investigative Collaboration network (EIC). OCCR began supporting collaborative reporting in Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America in 2006 and has involved 150 journalists in 30 countries. By 2017 it claimed 60 transnational investigations a year. EIC, founded by the German news magazine Der Spiegel with media partners in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Romania, Serbia and Spain, made an investigation into the terror attacks in Paris in 2015, its first joint venture. In 2011, six newspapers from the largest EU countries – the UK, France, Spain, Italy, Poland and Germany – formed the Europa alliance ‘to investigate the European predicament’. Such initiatives were not confined to Europe. The African Network of Centers for Investigative Journalism (ANCIJ), established in 2014, is a collaboration of ten newsrooms, and the Norbert Zongo Cell for Investigative Journalism in West Africa was formed in 2015 with an original 18 members. Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ) started in Jordan in 2005 and operates across nine Middle Eastern countries (Coronel 2016). In Asia, collaboration among individual titles seemed to be more common (Dhyatmika 2017).1 Nevertheless, Chavarong Limpattamapanee of the Bangkok daily newspaper Thai Rath argued that ‘the future of investigative journalism in Asia must lie in cross-country cooperation’ (Anon 2014). In 2017 GIJN reported that it had reached 155 groups in 68 countries; by 2016, 144 offline stories had been generated in 13 languages, and 350 online stories authored by 96 journalists from 29 counties (Hume and Abbott 2017: 9). Leon Willems, director of the Netherlands-based Free Press Unlimited, argued that where journalism adhered to its ‘myopic’ national focus it was ‘dying’ as a practice (Hume and Abbott 2017: 11). All the same, US investigations, mostly into domestic issues, continued to dominate the IRE awards up to 2017 (the latest available). Even within the European Union (EU) – ‘by far the best integrated transnational political zone in the world’ (Hafez 2011: 492) – Schlesinger (2008: 87) noted that ‘traditional print journalism centred on Europe has not easily transcended national boundaries’. Furthermore, ‘the rise in transnational investigative journalism’ did not mean that scandals ‘easily spread across national boundaries as perceptions of norm violations still vary substantially’ (Meyer 2009: 1058). Where collaboration in investigative journalism did occur it was more likely to be intra-national (Anon 2018; Lewis 2018: 7–10; Sambrook 2018b: 33). Or investigations were internationalised, chiefly through coordinated or uncoordinated publication of either the original or additional material in more than one country (see Investigative Reporting Project Italy 2018); for example, the 1980s arms-for-hostages deal brokered by US president Ronald Reagan – ‘the biggest presidential scandal since Watergate’ (Brown and Vincent 1995: 69) – was first made public by the Lebanese weekly Ash-Shiraa, and then taken up, hesitantly at first, by investigative journalists in the US press, including the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and the New York Times which amplified it (Brown and Vincent 1995: 70; Hersh 2018: 264). Ash-Shiraa ‘broke the story but the [New York] Times made it a world headline’ (Byrne 2014). In 2017 Poynter listed 56 collaborative investigative reporting projects of which only nine were transnational (Kramer 2017). Furthermore, investigative journalists have customarily eschewed forms of collaboration with other, national bases of political, economic and social power: transnationalism may have exacerbated this tendency 227

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by encouraging adversarialism in investigative journalism in non- and emerging democracies, putting it at odds with governments and their associates (de Burgh 2008: 91). Because of investigative journalism’s close association with liberal democracy, its adversarialist and public service orientation and its basis in a developed professionalism among journalists, it has tended to be prevalent in what have been categorised as the North Atlantic countries (the USA, the UK, Ireland, Canada and, by extension, Australia and New Zealand) and, to a lesser extent, Northern and Central Europe (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland) (Bromley 2017: 220; Hallin and Mancini 2004: 233). By comparison, it has been less well established in countries where journalism is less independent of state and political structures, such as France (Hallin and Mancini 2004: 122), although the French daily Le Monde played a leading role in the Swiss Papers case. Transnational investigative journalism displays origins, therefore, in the liberal democracies of the global North. GIJN, OCCR and ICIJ are all based in the USA (with varying degrees of operational devolution to other countries). Major philanthropic sponsors include American (Open Society Foundations, Skoll, Ford, MacArthur and Logan foundations), Dutch (Adessium Foundation), Belgian (Pascal Decroos Fundation), Swiss (Oak Foundation), British (Sigrid Rausing Trust) and Australian donors. Government funding has been provided by, among others, the US State Department and USAid, the European Union and the Danish, Norwegian, Belgian Flemish, Swedish and Swiss governments (Hume and Abbott 2017: 5, 13, 16–20; Sullivan 2013: 27). This patronage can be viewed as a way of promoting liberal democratic values through transnational investigative initiatives in non-democratic and transitioning countries (Kaplan 2013: 11; Statsministeriet 2003) including professionalising journalists (Kaplan 2013: 44). It has also led to anxieties about the hybridisation of journalism – a ‘blurring of roles’ of journalists and others, such as NGOs, with specific different interests (Koch 2018: 65–69).

Transnational investigative journalism in the twenty-first century Since the turn of the century a transnational investigative journalism landscape has evolved which is multi-faceted and multi-layered and in which mainstream media and professional journalists work with not-for-profits, NGOs, philanthropic funds, activists, online portals, projects, centres, platforms, units, independent journalists, citizens and production companies, some creating content, others providing funding and various forms of capacity-building from training to open databases. This web of overlapping networked alliances share resources, engage in advocacy, provide support, establish presence (commonly online) and offer security against hostility to investigative journalism (Hume and Abbott 2017: 11, 14). This has seen a shift from competitiveness (among journalists to ‘scoop’ other journalists; among media to maximise audience share) to forms of mutuality facilitated by third-party organisations affording an infrastructure of intermediaries, hubs and umbrella associations (Alfter 2018: 48; Sambrook 2018b: 33–34). Whether this is truly innovative, or born out of necessity as reporting the world becomes more complex, difficult and expensive, or no more than a transitory fad remains a moot point (Kayser-Bril 2018: 61–62). Nevertheless, it is widely seen as effective. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) concluded that ‘international consortiums of investigative journalists are an example of international cooperation that leads to tangible results’ and that ‘transnational networks and consortiums of news professionals facilitate investigations that were unimaginable ten years ago’ (OECD 2018: 3-4). How do the most widely celebrated (or notorious) examples of what appear to be transnational investigative journalism fit into this environment? Both WikiLeaks and, by implication, 228

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the 2013 NSA global surveillance leaks by Edward Snowden have been decisively dismissed by the veteran British editor Harold Evans (2011: 344) as ‘not investigative journalism’. The scandalous topics – scurrilous diplomatic cables; secret communications on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; unwarranted surveillance of citizens; etc. – were certainly of global import and interest. However, Julian Assange, the editor of WikiLeaks, and Snowden identified the media they wished to use so as to effect, in Assange’s words, ‘maximum impact’ (Quinn 2011: 241). In Snowden’s case that was operationalised through the selective release of different elements of the data to a range of media around the world, largely utilising the intermediation of the journalist Glenn Greenwald and the documentarian Laura Poitras (Maas 2013). This seemed to lack prearranged transnational collaboration among journalists. Similarly, after Assange had agreed to release documents to The Guardian in the 2010 Cablegate case, he, rather than the newspaper, sought the participation of the New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and El País (Leigh and Harding 2011: 109-110, 170). However, in both this instance and the parallel investigation into telephone hacking by British tabloid newspapers, The Guardian saw advantage in collaborating with the New York Times, partly because of the protection offered by the US First Amendment which was not available in the UK (Davies 2014: 152; Rusbridger 2012: 132). These arrangements may be compared to the Investigate Europe (2018; emphasis added) initiative of nine individual journalists from eight countries who ‘research as a multinational team . . . share, merge and crosscheck facts’. And, indeed, to the decision taken by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung to seek assistance from the ICIJ when given access to the Panama Papers because of the sheer amount of data which needed to be analysed. Such variations in configurations of transnational investigative journalism led Heft, Alfter and Pfetsch (2017: 6-7) to suggest that this kind of journalism was characterised by a matrix of degrees of collaboration and of organisation and control determined by the size and durability of the cooperation, the intensity of the teamwork and the ownership of the project. As described above, ‘transnational journalism networks can be established with a “top-down” approach, when leading media organisations initiate collaboration across borders, or a “bottomup” approach, when individual journalists and actors from within the professional community strive to foster cross-border collaboration’ – and at many points in between (Carson 2013, 18-19; Heft, Alfter and Pfetsch 2017: 8; Hume and Abbott 2017: 7). The greater the intensity and stability of the collaboration among journalists and the more rigorous (top-down) the management of the effort (whether by mainstream media, not-for-profits, NGOs or funders), the more likely, it seems, that the same scandals will be publicised at the same time in different countries, that the same actors in those scandals will appear in all the media irrespective of countries of origin and representation, and that the same explanatory frames and concepts will be used by the media (although the evidence for this is as yet inconclusive) (Heft, Alfter and Pfetsch 2017: 3, 14-16).

Scandalous topics Two approaches appear to underpin all transnational investigative journalism. The first is positive and holds power to account and informs publics; the second is negative and exposes corruption in many forms — political, administrative, financial, business, in sport and in aid projects (OECD 2018: 3; Sullivan 2013: 10). Transnational collaboration also serves to protect both freedom of speech and journalists and the media from retribution in the forms of censorship, prosecution and (sometimes violent) intimidation (Rusbridger 2018: 328–334). Much of the corruption is itself criminal but crime, such as cross-border trafficking, is also a common focus of attention.2 Perhaps more contentiously, transnational investigative journalists may work to 229

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promote social justice, reform and ‘strengthening civil society’ (Kaplan 2013: 11). In sum, the underlying orientation of transnational investigative journalism is, as noted above, to work to foster and uphold liberal democratic principles. A list of scandalous topics was compiled for this chapter using the archives of five transnational investigative journalism initiatives (ICIJ, GIJN, OCCR, ARIJ and ANCIJ) and the Transnational Investigative Journalism social media space (@TIJcommunity), with references in parentheses where the authors were part of the project. Where appropriate the name of the project is also given. The list is no more than illustrative of the scandals tackled by transnational investigative journalists in recent years (c.2008–2018). In addition to the various financial scandals exposed in the Papers series and governmental corruption, they are: • • • • • • • •

The World Bank’s failure to protect vulnerable populations; Criminal trafficking of migrants; Money laundering (Russian Laundromat; Investiga Lava Jato); Secrecy behind EU confiscation of criminal assets (Confiscati Bene); Child sex tourism; The trade in stolen cultural artefacts (Memoria Robada); Treatment of indigenous peoples; Activities of mining companies (Fatal Extraction: Australian mining’s damaging push into Africa); • Human rights violations; • Trade in human body parts; • The organised crime of ‘disappearing’ people (Desaparecidos. Duelo Eterno); • The tobacco trade; • Asbestos sales (Danger in the Dust: Inside the Global Asbestos Trade) (Koch 2018: 65); • Illicit trade in minerals; • Deadly work-related diseases; • Use of Interpol files to target political opponents; • Migration routes (El Nuevo Éxodo Latino); • War profiteering; • Climate change lobbying; • Subversion of a US global AIDS initiative; • Drug trafficking; • Stolen works of art (Las Últimas Prisioneras de los Nazis en América Latina); • Sales of contaminated meat; • Pharmaceutical companies’ monopolisation strategies (The Big Pharma Project); • Overfishing; • Deaths of migrants (Migrants’ Files) (Kayser-Bril 2018: 59); • The finances of soccer players (Football Leaks); • The presence of the Mafia in Africa (Mafia in Africa); • Bribery in business; • Mistreatment of injured protesters (Upside Down).3 The largest transnational collaboration, involving 400 journalists from more than 100 media organisations in 76 countries, came in the Panama Papers investigation (Sambrook 2018: 31).4 The smallest were undertaken by no more than two journalists; for example, Saadah Abdul Qader from Egypt and Najwa Hamami from Tunisia who authored Upside Down (see above). Consequently, not all transnational investigations were global, or even regional, but many were 230

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bilateral (Romanian fugitives in Costa Rica; the failure of Spanish contractors to deliver basketball training to Georgians).

Latin America: an exemplar? Transnational collaboration has been described as ‘the new paradigm’ in investigative journalism in Latin America. Insofar as there are shared languages and a largely common journalistic culture, as well as similar problems of corruption and impunity, mutual experiences of migration, economic integration and regional crime – and declining investment in journalism by mainstream media across the continent – the situation has proved to be conducive to crossborder cooperation, in order both to foster investigative journalism and to protect journalists. Furthermore, the development has been supported by US governmental funding (Castillo 2018; Linares 2017). Latin American journalists participated enthusiastically in the Panama Papers investigation: 96 (almost a quarter of the global total) from 15 countries (20 per cent of the total) contributed (Linares 2017). Flores and Huertas (2018: 99) believe that the experience ‘awoke a sleeping lion in Latin America so that all kinds of journalistic collaborations are now being produced’. As noted above, Latin American transnational collaborations have been responsible for a number of significant cross-border investigations: • The Institute of Press and Society (Instituto de Prensa y Sociedad or IPYS) was set up in 1993 in Peru and has correspondents in seven countries. It acts chiefly as a journalists’ defence organisation and collects and publishes data. • Connectas is a Colombian-based hub made up of 200 journalists in 17 countries. • IDL-Reporteros, founded in 2009 in Peru, claims to have completed more than 500 investigations into corruption, drug trafficking, etc. • The Investigative Reporting Initiative in the Americas has expanded its coverage beyond the mainland to the Caribbean. It has undertaken 135 investigations into: money laundering between South America and the United States; crime and violence; the environment; drug trafficking; governance and corruption; mismanagement of public funds; human trafficking; and the rights of marginalised populations. • ALiados is an alliance of ten news organisations in nine countries: Agência Pública (Brazil), Animal Político (Mexico), CIPER (Chile), Confidencial (Nicaragua), El Faro (El Salvador), El Puercoespín (Argentina), IDL-Reporteros (Peru), La Silla Vacía (Colombia), Plaza Pública (Guatemala) and The Clinic (Chile). • Agência Pública in Brazil uses a Creative Commons licence to allow republication of its investigations which were carried by 700 outlets in 2017 and brings overseas journalists to Brazil to report on human rights (de Assis 2018: 40–42).

Conclusion Transnational investigative journalism (in a variety of forms) grew substantially over the first years of the twenty-first century as a means of bringing to light a wide range of cross-border abuses and presenting them for public consideration. This might be considered to be a journalistic offensive in response to declining investment in investigative journalism in the global North and to ‘backsliding’ on transition to democracy in the global South and the former Soviet empire (InternationalIDEA 2017: 70-87) – an attempt to (re-)establish the value of traditional journalistic practices made more potent and relevant to the early twenty-first century by the adoption of digital ICTs and cross-border collaboration (Gearing 2016: 351).5 However, many 231

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parts of the world were also experiencing profound change at a time when communication capacity was increasing, and these conditions are likely in any event to have been favourable to investigative journalism (Bromley 2017: 224-225). Nevertheless, press freedom provides the critical context for investigative journalism to flourish, and much of its capability is still ‘underexploited’ (OECD 2018: 5–7, 18). Given its liberal democratic orientation, transnational investigative journalism is attempting to export scandal to often unresponsive non-democratic and transitioning states (Tumber and Waisbord 2004: 1034-1035). In any event, in order for corruption, abuses and criminality to evolve into scandals, they need not only to be constructed as ‘public events’ but received as such by publics (ibid.: 1034). Even at the level of the nationstate there is little evidence that publics are readily scandalised (ibid.: 1032). Revelations in the Panama Papers led to mass demonstrations in Iceland in 2016 (Osborne 2016); at a transnational level, public response to the revelations of cross-border investigative journalism has been largely muted. Transnational investigative journalism may be better at producing evidence of gross misconduct than it is at generating scandal per se.

Notes 1 The situation in Latin America is explored later in the chapter. 2 The theme of UNESCO’s World Press Freedom Day 2018 held in Ghana was ‘Keeping power in check: media, justice and the rule of law’ (United Nations 2018). 3 Many of these projects maintain websites; see for example, http://www.spiegel.de/thema/football_ leaks/#done; http://www.themigrantsfiles.com/; https://bigpharma.ojo-publico.com/en/. 4 See also www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/pages/panama-papers-about-the-investigation/ 5 InternationalIDEA (2017: 72) identified some of the countries mentioned in this chapter among the ‘backsliders’: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Thailand, Russia, Turkey and Ukraine.

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Michael Bromley Knightley, P. (1997) ‘A battle won late’, The Independent (25 August), https://www.independent.co.uk/ news/media/a-battle-won-late-1247236.html: accessed 28 July 2018. Kramer, M. (2017) ‘Journalists around the world are working together more than ever. Here are 56 examples’, Poynter (12 April), https://www.poynter.org/news/journalists-around-world-are-workingtogether-more-ever-here-are-56-examples?mc_cid=86d46e0c14&mc_eid=d13701961d: accessed 11 August 2018. Leigh, D. and Harding, L. (2011) WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy (London: Guardian Books). Lewis, C. (2018) ‘Tear down these walls: Innovations in collaborative accountability research and reporting’ in R. Sambrook (ed.) Global Teamwork: The Rise of Collaboration in Investigative Journalism (Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism), 5–25. Linares, C.L. (2017) ‘Journalistic investigations without borders: Latin American journalists innovate with transnational projects’, Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas (29 March), https://knightcenter. utexas.edu/blog/00-18166-journalistic-investigations-without-borders-latin-american-journalistsinnovate-transn: accessed 30 July 2018. Maas, P. (2013) ‘How Laura Poitras helped Snowden spill his secrets’, New York Times Magazine (13 August), https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/magazine/laura-poitras-snowden.html: accessed 9 August 2018. Meyer, C.O. (2009) ‘Does European Union politics become mediatized? The case of the European Commission’, Journal of European Public Policy 16(7), 1047–1064. OECD (2018) The Role of the Media and Investigative Journalism in Combating Corruption, www.oecd.org/ corruption/The-role-of-the-media-and-investigative-journalism-in-combating-corruption.htm: accessed 9 August 2018. Osborne, S. (2016) ‘Panama Papers leak sparks massive protests in Iceland over PM’s link to tax havens’, Independent (5 April), https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/panama-papers-leadto-massive-protests-in-iceland-over-pms-link-to-tax-havens-a6968996.html#done: accessed 11 August 2018. Pal, S. (2017) ‘Power of press: 5 times India was rocked by investigative journalism’, The Better India (16 November), https://www.thebetterindia.com/121148/journalist-investigations-that-changed-india: accessed 13 June 2018. Quinn, A. (2011) ‘All roads lead to Assange: WikiLeaks and journalism’s duty of care’ in J. Mair and R.L. Keeble (eds) Investigative Journalism: Dead or Alive (Bury St Edmunds: Abramis), 230–243. Reporters without Borders (2018a) ‘RSF Index 2018: Journalists are murdered in Europe as well’, https:// rsf.org/en/rsf-index-2018-journalists-are-murdered-europe-well: accessed 11 August 2018. Reporters without Borders (2018b) ‘Mission so possible: Investigative journalism in Bulgaria, https://rsf. org/en/reports/new-rsf-report-obstacles-investigative-journalism-bulgaria: accessed 11 August 2018. Robinson, W.S. (2012) Muckraker: The Scandalous Life and Times of W.T. Stead Britain’s First Investigative Journalist (London: Biteback). Rusbridger, A. (2012) ‘Hackgate reveals failure of normal checks and balances to hold power to account’ in R.L. Keeble and J. Mair (eds) The Phone Hacking Scandal: Journalism on Trial (Bury St Edmunds: Abramis , 129–144. Rusbridger, A. (2018) Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now (Edinburgh: Canongate). Sambrook, R. (2018a) ‘Introduction’ in R. Sambrook (ed.) Global Teamwork: The Rise of Collaboration in Investigative Journalism (Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism), 1–4. Sambrook, R. (2018b) ‘The elements of collaboration’ in R. Sambrook (ed.) Global Teamwork: The Rise of Collaboration in Investigative Journalism (Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism), 27–40. Schlesinger, P. (2008) ‘Cosmopolitan temptations, communicative spaces and the European Union’ in D. Hesmondalgh and J. Toynbee (eds) The Media and Social Theory (Abingdon: Routledge), 75–92. Statsministeriet (2003) Address by Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, 2nd International Conference on Global Investigative Journalism, http://www.stm.dk/_p_11264.html: accessed 6 August 2018. Stead, W.T. (1886) ‘Government by journalism’, Contemporary Review 49, 653–674. Stone, J. (2016) Panama Papers live: David Cameron defends tax affairs and insists he’s done nothing wrong’, Independent (11 April), https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/panama-paperslive-update-david-cameron-parliament-statement-mps-a6978751.html: accessed 8 August 2018.

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23 MEDIA STINGS AND THE NORMALIZATION OF SCANDAL IN INDIA Kalyani Chadha

Overview Even as media systems and journalistic practices vary across diverse national contexts, the coverage of scandal—defined as an action or event regarded as morally or legally wrong—has come to constitute a major focus of journalistic activity globally. Certainly this is true of India, where an emphasis on uncovering “scandals” via sting operations has emerged as a staple of news coverage, notably on television. This chapter—which examines the relationship between media and scandal in India—analyzes both the underlying imperatives and practices associated with this type of coverage and briefly addresses the implications of this development for the country’s news landscape. Broadly, in this chapter I will seek to make the case that, although some initial as well as a few contemporary stings no doubt highlight issues relevant to the public interest, television stings in India have increasingly emerged as an innovation employed by outlets to present sensationalized information primarily aimed at attracting viewers. This has resulted in a normalization of the notion of the “scandal” to the point that it has little meaning. In other words, the constant construction of “scandal” has become a routine mechanism for news organizations to gain a competitive advantage in a financially challenging media landscape. Yet India is by no means singular in this regard. As Just and Crigler (2014, 3) put it, “attention grabbing news helps to maximize audience size and hence the revenues of media outlets.” In fact, such patterns of news coverage that offer viewers scandal-as-news, typically presented via dramatic episodic narratives, have become pervasive globally, primarily due to the growing commercialization of media systems worldwide (Thussu 2007). Arguably, this development necessitates an expansion of the analysis of scandal within the broader journalism studies literature that goes beyond the examination of issues related to the manner in which scandals are covered to an understanding of scandal coverage as an institutional response engendered by the constraints of economic uncertainty and competition that characterize journalism as an organizational field.

A brief history of television media stings in India The terms “media” and “scandal” are frequently employed in conjunction with one another, no doubt because modern scandals overwhelmingly tend to be “mediated” in nature (Thompson 2000, 51) That is to say they are “event(s) which involve disclosure through the media of 236

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previously hidden and morally disreputable activities, the revelation of which sets in motion a series of further occurrences” (Thompson 2000, 52). Meanwhile, as Tumber and Waisbord (2004, 31) point out, scandals seem to be “recurrent rather than sporadic events” that “have become ubiquitous worldwide,” occurring in “countries with dissimilar political trajectories and practices, economic standards, political cultures and levels of corruption.” As such, scandals, not surprisingly, have emerged as a fundamental locus of contemporary news coverage, one that “sells” and hence enables news organizations to draw in and engage audiences reliably (Thompson 2000). As Elizabeth Bird—who undertook a reception analysis of scandal-related stories—has put it, “scandal sells newspapers and tabloids, keeps people in front of their televisions, and provides endless opportunities for conversation” (Bird 1997, 99). Similarly, Tumber (2004) has made the case that expansive coverage of scandals is underpinned, at least to some degree, by news outlets’ motivation to build and expand audiences. This is certainly true of India where a growing, even endemic, emphasis on the presentation of “scandals,” unearthed through so-called sting operations, has become a defining characteristic of the country’s television news landscape. From a journalistic perspective however, Indian television’s current focus on scandal is not only of comparatively recent vintage, but also represents a sharp disjuncture in terms of the practices that traditionally defined Indian television news. Indeed, television news—which was wholly controlled by state-run broadcaster Doordarshan until the mid-1990s—historically offered audiences a compilation of anodyne news stories closely monitored by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Thus even as Indian newspapers (starting in the late 1970s) edged away from a pro-establishment stance— responding to the growing public appetite for news that had developed in the wake of the Post Emergency period—and began reporting on a variety of scandals, television news continued to hew to the party line largely reflecting the views and positions of the government in power. As a result, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the reporting of scandal, including developments uncovered via major investigative undercover operations, remained the exclusive preserve of the print sector. During this period, India witnessed what many regard as its first “sting” operation in 1981, when a reporter for a major English-language daily purchased a tribal woman from a village and brought her to New Delhi to highlight the ongoing trafficking of women from marginalized rural communities. At the same time, other newspapers, such as the Indian Express, the Statesman, and The Hindu, broke numerous stories exposing widespread political corruption including the Bofors scandal where members of the government were accused of receiving illegal kickbacks from a Swedish arms manufacturer. By the turn of the century however, the relationship between television news and scandal coverage began to shift. This change took place via the emergence of televised sting operations which revealed “transgressive acts” by corrupt politicians and government officials that arguably had significant connotations for the public interest. Dubbed “Operation West End” for the British company the journalists claimed to represent, the first of these transformative television sting operations was carried out by the website Tehelka.com (a Hindi word meaning sensation). Using hidden miniature cameras, journalists from the outlet filmed 34 members of India’s defense establishment (including a minister and government and military officers) “accepting (and often demanding) favours . . . ranging from wads of dirty rupees to visits from nubile prostitutes” from fictitious arms dealers (The Independent 2006). While no television channel was directly involved in carrying out this sting—which was originally released on the Tehelka website as a documentary—soon after the story broke, the privately owned Zee TV purchased the rights to the footage and simultaneously telecast the tape across 15 channels, broadcasting “grainy video snippets” to citizens who were “transfixed by the sight of hands reaching out greedily for stacks of rupees and the sound of loot crinkling as it brushes past hidden microphones” (Dugger 2001).  237

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This scandal was important in that it not only led to the resignation of the Indian defense minister and effectively threw the ruling coalition into disarray, but from a journalistic point of view, it marked both the advent as well as the legitimization of sting-generated scandal as an acceptable form of news on television. And although some media observers decried the tactics used by Tehelka reporters, accusing them variously of making unsubstantiated claims, to using prostitutes to entrap members of the military establishment (Ninan 2001), others in the news media acknowledged “that the issue of ethics pales before the sleaze” that the Tehelka team “had dug up” (Dugger 2001). Given the success of this exposé, it was not a surprise that by the mid-2000s sting-based scandal reporting began to emerge as a pervasive feature of the television news landscape in India. Within a five-year period of Operation West End, virtually every major news channel had established a so-called undercover news division. Meanwhile, to quote a contemporary news report, “TV ads for storefront journalism schools” began to tout “courses” in how to pull off “devastating sting operations” before mentioning “more traditional skills like the inverted pyramid and video editing” (The Independent 2006). As Sundaram (2015) puts it, “following West End, established and upcoming television companies quickly added the sting to the prime feature of the nightly broadcast.” A class of “investigators, detectives, and public-interest lawyers emerged as stings were mounted against political parties, individuals, and companies.”

Media economics and television stings Underpinning this expansion was a profound structural shift, namely the overall liberalization and deregulation of the Indian economy. This process began in the early 1990s, when the government under pressure from global financial institutions introduced a process of marketoriented economic reforms (Rao 2010). This turn towards the market directly impacted the broadcast media sector, which was perceived as increasingly attractive by advertisers eager to find venues to reach out to the urban middle class that had begun to develop in the wake of the economic changes (Kohli-Khandekar 2013). Thus in 1991, Hong Kong based STAR TV introduced a package of satellite channels that were transmitted by a growing network of unregulated cable operators to viewers in several cities. This was followed in 1992 by the establishment of Zee TV, which “introduced a cable package focusing more on Hindi language programming and thus expanded cable viewing beyond the narrow confines of the affluent classes” (Derne 2008, 32). The most fundamental shift related to the broadcast sector, however, came in 1995, when the Indian Supreme Court put an end to the state of regulatory limbo in which satellite channels had been operating and ruled that the airwaves were not the exclusive monopoly of the state. This pronouncement not only effectively ended the government’s hegemony over electronic media but also enabled the exponential growth of national and regional language television channels in the country. While the majority of these new entrants were focused on entertainment, there was nevertheless a considerable increase in the number of news channels, which went from a single state-run channel in 1991 to over 30 in 2005, a mere decade after the Supreme Court decision (Savage 2005). But while this expansion was widely celebrated—with observers frequently touting India’s growing television market— the reality that the financial foundations of news channels were deeply unstable with large numbers of channels increasingly competing both for the attention of viewers and revenue from advertisers was largely obscured. In fact, between 2001 and 2005, the viewership of news channels only grew by a minuscule 1 percent while their share of the total advertising revenues also remained static at about 10 percent (Saha 2005). Explaining this 238

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situation at the time, a media agency executive made the point that the “number of product categories advertising on this genre” was extremely limited. As he put it, “it’s mainly the automobile or telecom companies, which advertise on news channels. In addition, the ad rates of news channels are under check due to the intense competition among them. This is the reason why the volume of revenues has not grown” (Saha 2005). Concomitantly, satellite television channels were also constrained by “structural challenges,” namely their lack of control over distribution networks (Mehta 2014, 212). This lack of control—which was a direct result of the proliferation of illegal cable systems that powered much of the early spread of satellite channels—meant that “networks never had full control of their own distribution and therefore lost out on a large chunk of subscription revenues” to cable systems that routinely underreported subscribers (ibid.). As a result, unlike in more developed television markets, Indian television channels found themselves extraordinarily dependent on advertising. Given this situation, it was then hardly surprising that the majority of news channels—under constant pressure to survive within India’s hypercompetitive news market—tried to devise new ways to distinguish themselves from others operating in the same space. Crucial to such efforts was the televised sting which emerged as an “innovation” in the existing repertoire of journalistic practices. As Ranganathan (2015) points out, 2005 was “easily the year of sting journalism,” when “through hidden cameras that flashed unclear pictures and audio that was often muffled or distorted,” numerous instances of corruption were brought to light. While widespread malfeasance was an open secret in the Indian context, in the sense that its existence was widely taken for granted, sting operations provided concrete and potentially actionable evidence of wrongdoing. During this period, television viewers saw police accepting bribes at a major prison in the capital, members of parliament misusing funds allotted for local development, clerics issuing so-called “fatwas” or decrees for money, and doctors filmed selling infants from hospitals (Ranganathan 2015). However, the place of the television sting-generated news scandal was truly consolidated following an operation that was carried out by the investigative news website Cobrapost (led by journalist Aniruddha Bahal, a Tehelka co-founder) and aired by a leading Hindi language channel, Aaj Tak. During this operation, 11 members of the Indian parliament were secretly videotaped accepting money in return for raising particular questions during the so-called Parliamentary “Question Hour,” in what came to be known as the “cash-for-questions scam” (Prasad 2005). While the questions themselves were largely nonsensical, they nevertheless revealed that the process by which questions were raised during official debate in the Indian parliament was open to manipulation. The sting eventually led to the guilty MPs being dismissed from their parties— a first in Indian political history. But whereas these pioneering television stings generally involved exposés centered on issues of public corruption—perhaps because they were initiated by investigative journalists whose goal was “to empower” the citizenry by “exposing democracy’s toxic acreage,” as a oneline manifesto on the Cobrapost website put it—the public attention and viewership that they garnered led to a rapid institutionalization of the practice across news channels in what neoinstitutionalists would call mimetic isomorphism (DiMaggio & Powell 1983). This resulted in a simultaneous explosion in the number of television stings undertaken as well as the types of scandals that came to be highlighted, as channels sought to imitate other outlets who seemed to be benefiting from airing sting-generated scandals. This proliferation of stings was however marked by a discernible shift in emphasis from so-called “hard” scandals involving “actions and events, occurring at least initially in secret, that entail transgression of certain accepted values, beliefs and moral codes,” (King 2013) to “soft scandals” that focused on so-called “sleaze and slime” (Biswas 2006). During this period, 239

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Indian audiences saw stings focusing on legislators engaging prostitutes and religious leaders propositioning female devotees (Ranganathan 2015) with the trend being best exemplified by the “Casting Couch” scandal where an ageing B-grade Bollywood actor was covertly filmed by a team from India TV— then a newly established 24-hour news channel—demanding sex in return for promising to help promote the career of a young woman pretending to be a struggling actress. But although this operation was attacked by many investigative journalists on the grounds that it “crossed the line,” with Tehelka co-founder Tarun Tejpal asserting that “the rules now are and have always been no private lives . . .it is only about abuse of public office, abuse of public money” (Reeves 2005), IndiaTV immediately saw a three-fold rise in its viewership, with the channel rising to the top of the weekly ratings (Indiantelevision.com 2005). In fact, one could plausibly make the case that it was the successful marketing of this stingproduced scandal that led a competing channel LiveIndia TV to broadcast another seemingly explosive sting in 2007 in which a young woman who claimed to be a student at a governmentrun school in New Delhi said that she had been “filmed in a compromising position” by a female teacher who then blackmailed her into joining a prostitution ring (Economic Times 2007). As one might expect, this sting caused a huge public scandal as parents and other members of the public, especially in the capital, expressed their anger and outrage in the form of violent protests. The teacher who was attacked by a mob was also dismissed from her position and arrested by the police. Within days however, it became clear that the entire sting was a “fake” and that the socalled student was an aspiring journalist hired by a LiveIndia TV reporter who had orchestrated the entire operation in concert with a former business associate of the teacher, who wanted to discredit her (Rediff.com 2007). Eventually, the sting operation was deemed “defamatory” and “false” by the government which also forced the channel to suspend broadcasting for a month (The Hindu 2007). However, the visceral audience response to the scandal that LiveIndia TV purported to show, combined with ongoing market pressures that were produced by an increase in the number of regional news channels, meant that private news broadcasters felt little compunction in pursuing sensational stings. Consequently, they continued to uncover so-called “scandals” in a fairly classic case of what Robert Entman has called “production bias,” which “grows out of the media’s need to manufacture news that attracts and retains mass audiences” (1990, 49). As Rajat Sharma, CEO of India TV (a leading purveyor of television stings) put it at the time, “Everyone does exposés for TRPs. Everything on television is for that” (Rediff.com 2005).

Diffusion and normalization of sting-generated scandals Over the past decade, as the number of news channels in India has grown exponentially and competition has intensified even further, the “innovation” represented by sting-generated scandals has come to be increasingly “diffused” across Hindi and other regional language news channels. As Rogers (2003) has pointed out, various criteria underpin the potential adoption and diffusion of any innovation. These include: the relative advantage or the degree to which an innovation seems to be better than existing approaches; the compatibility or the degree to which the innovation fits the values and needs of those adopting it; the complexity in terms of its use, trialability, or the possibility of limited introduction; and the observability or the degree to which the results of the innovation can be seen by others. In the case of sting-generated television scandals in India, all of these criteria would seem to be in play, albeit in varying degrees. Compared to traditional investigative reporting, the majority of stings currently carried out by Indian news channels are relatively simple, typically involving little more than the placement of concealed cameras. For instance, the top hits that come up via a YouTube search of stings on 240

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Indian television include precisely these types of stings that variously purport to show a wellknown so-called “Godwoman,” flirting with a male follower during a telephone conversation, a policeman asking a citizen for a bribe as well as the existence of prostitution in what a channel called “high-profile” New Delhi hotels. Usually based on tips, such stings are clearly not complex to undertake and offer a distinct advantage over undercover investigative reporting projects which require experienced reporters as well as the commitment of substantial newsroom resources. At the same time, sting-generated scandals serve a key need of adopters which is to draw in audiences. This is of crucial importance because, even though India’s overall television market is expected to grow at a rate of 15.5 percent to reach $15.2 billion in 2019, the nature of the news marketplace—which is estimated to contain approximately 163 news channels according to a recent industry estimate (Indiantelevision.com 2018)—remains extremely crowded. Moreover, much of this expansion has been funded by business and political groups who have little interest in journalism or news per se and are typically reluctant to make major investments in newsgathering (Chadha & Koliska 2016). At the same time, news channels also have to compete constantly with the ubiquitous general-entertainment channels who, with their popular combination of films, music, and sports offerings, dominate both the ratings as well as the advertising revenues in the Indian context. In such an environment, sensational sting-generated scandals thus offer an easy path to gaining eyeballs. Additionally, the adoption and diffusion of the sting-as-innovation has been facilitated by the fact that stings can be introduced into channel schedules without needing much by way of investment or prior set-up, with some channels even purchasing “ready-made stings” from so-called free-lancers who “hawk their ‘exposés’ to the highest bidder” (Nivas 2010). But perhaps the single most important factor driving the growth of scandals obtained via sting operations on Indian television is that the benefits of broadcasting such content are readily observable. For instance, India TV’s adoption of the sting-based scandal formula resulted in rapid growth, with the channel’s market share going from 12 to 17 percent within a few weeks in 2007. This increase was visible to the top managers of rival news channels who even “went into a huddle” to see how they could “jointly take steps to curb India TV’s growing popularity” (Bansal 2007). And although nothing came of this effort, other channels learned from the success of the India TV approach—as evidenced by their rapid adoption of similar news practices. Almost inevitably, the diffusion of sting-based news coverage has simultaneously been accompanied by what would seem to be a normalization of scandal across the televisual landscape with virtually every sting presented as “uncovering” sensational misdeeds within Indian society, typically presented using “dramatic graphics, loud music and special effects, which on American television seem to be reserved mostly for news about war or shootings in schools” (Kumar 2010, 61). In fact, a cursory search of YouTube using the terms “stings, scandal and Indian television” yields well over a million results! And while some contemporary stings no doubt highlight important public interest issues such as Operation MLA which filmed regional politicians seeking so-called “black money” to fund their election campaigns or the Narada channel sting which showed 12 members of the Indian parliament allegedly accepting money “from a decoy businessman in exchange for political favors” (Times of India 2017), the impact of these scandals is blunted by the fact that they are part of an ever expanding news narrative where stings constantly generate new scandals. That is to say, virtually every story obtained via a sting operation is framed as a “scandal” on television, regardless of the potential social and political ramifications of the particular incident.1 As a result, everything—from instances of so-called match fixing in national cricket games, the “tweaking” of poll data to favor certain parties by so-called independent polling organizations, and cases of corruption involving politicians and other public figures, to cases involving college students moonlighting as escorts or call girls, or 241

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sex scandals involving politicians—is uniformly constructed and presented as a case of “scandal” for television audiences.

Implications of sting-generated scandals for the Indian media landscape Such homogenization not only creates a sort of false equivalence between scandals but also elides very real differences in their implications for the public interest. Moreover, arguably, it also contributes to the creation of so-called “scandal fatigue” that potentially leads viewers to simply tune out the wall to wall coverage of scandal. Just as people seemingly become inured to spectacles of misery, suffering from what has been termed “compassion fatigue” (Moeller 1999), so it would seem to be the case with televised scandals in the Indian context. That is to say, because scandal is seemingly constantly present and presented it has lost its affective power, becoming routinized not only in the way in which it is presented, but, equally importantly, in the manner in which it is received. Thus whereas early sting-based scandals such as Operation West End struck a nerve among members of the public and resulted in demands for greater accountability, the relentless flow of scandal that currently characterizes television news in India has generally not resulted in similar outrage. As veteran investigative journalist Dilip D’Souza has noted, “crimes and scandals, come at us at a fearful rate . . . the inevitable fallout of this cascade of crime is that a certain ennui sets in . . . with the treadmill of scams, an inability or unwillingness to recognize and feel outrage at these crimes” (2005, 68). Though D’Souza was commenting on the relatively muted public response to major investigations in the print media over a decade ago, a similar and maybe even a stronger case can be made for the impact of sting-based scandals on television news on the creation of what Raymond Williams once called “the culture of distance” (1982). While audiences receive a flood of news about scandals centered on issues ranging from corruption and crime to sex and sleaze, not only is this coverage ephemeral—with stories appearing and then disappearing rapidly from television screens—but there is little emphasis on follow-up or solutions, even in the case of issues that do have major public interest ramifications. This style of television news coverage, particularly in relation to political issues, results in the “ferment of a culture of pessimism” (Udupa and Chakravartty 2014, 18), which has an impact on the public sphere in that it arguably fosters a sense of political and social alienation. Put differently, the all-scandal-all-the-time orientation potentially reduces citizens’ sense of efficacy, rendering them simultaneously disaffected and disengaged— a deeply problematic state for a country with already limited mechanisms for accountability and redress. Meanwhile, sting-generated scandals also affect the broader mediascape by acting as both drivers and exemplars of a major trend that characterizes Indian news, namely tabloidization. Highlighting the degree to which news content (especially on vernacular language channels) has become tabloidized, Prannoy Roy, the editorial director of the NDTV network (which has largely avoided sensationalism), pointed to a Hindi news channel where, as he put it, “an anchor, twirled her hair with her forefinger, looked into the camera and said, after the break we will show you a rape” (NDTV 2017). This “encroachment of tabloidized techniques and content” (Hughes 2006, 21), exemplified in sting-based scandals, contributes to the rise of a personalized and sensationalistic news narrative which—even as it makes some news stories more accessible to audiences—nevertheless provides little by way of depth or context. And although this trend is by no means confined to India, it nevertheless poses an especially serious challenge in a country where large segments of the public, including younger viewers, continue to turn regularly to television as a major source of news and information (Indiantelevision.com 2018; Statista 2016). 242

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Note 1 This rule does not apply to cases where media organizations are themselves implicated as in the recent case of an operation carried out by the investigative reporting website Cobrapost which showed representatives of 17 media outlets agreeing to carry pro-Hindu coverage for a price.

References Bansal, S. (2007). ‘Sex, sleaze spell boom for Hindi channels.’ Rediff.com. Available at: http://www.rediff. com/money/special/spec/20070602.htm (accessed February 14, 2018). Bird, S.E. (1997). ‘What a story! Understanding the audience for scandal.’ In J. Lull and S. Hinerman (eds.) Media Scandals: Private Desire in the Popular Culture Marketplace. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, pp. 99–121. Biswas, S. (2006). ‘Sting journalism under fire.’ BBC.com. Available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ south_asia/6076040.stm (accessed February 18, 2018). Chadha, K. & Koliska, M. (2016). ‘Playing by a different set of rules: Journalistic values in India’s regional television newsrooms.’ Journalism Practice, (5), pp. 608–625. Derne, S.D. (2008). Globalization on the Ground: New Media and the Transformation of Culture, Class and Gender in India. New Delhi, India: Sage. DiMaggio, P.J. and Powell, W.W. (1983). ‘The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields.’ American Sociological Review, 48(2), pp. 147–160. D’Souza, D. (2005). ‘Investigative journalism: Those who expose us.’ In N. Rajan (ed.) Practicing Journalism: Values, Constraints, Implications. New Delhi, India: Sage Publications, pp. 63–71. Dugger, C.W. (2001). ‘The sting that has India writhing.’ New York Times. Available at: https://www. nytimes.com/2001/03/16/world/the-sting-that-has-india-writhing.html (accessed February 15, 2018). Economic Times (2007). ‘TV Reporter arrested for fake sting operation.’ Available at: https://economic times.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/tv-reporter-arrested-for-fake-sting-operation/ articleshow/2348260.cms (accessed February 15, 2018). Entman, R. (1990). Democracy without Citizens: Media and the Decay of American Politics. New York: Oxford University Press. Hindu, The (2007). ‘LiveIndia channel banned for a month.’ Available at: http://www.thehindu.com/ todays-paper/lsquoLive-Indiarsquo-channel-banned-for-a-month/article14839084.ece (accessed March 1, 2018). Hughes, S. (2006). Newsrooms in Conflict: Journalism and the Democratization of Mexico. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Independent, The (2006). ‘Aniruddha Bahal: The king of sting.’ Available at: http://www.independent.co.uk/ news/people/profiles/aniruddha-bahal-the-king-of-sting-6229903.html (accessed January 26, 2018). Indiantelevision.com (2005). ‘India TV’s channel gains shakti with sting operations.’ Available at: http:// www.indiantelevision.com/headlines/y2k5/mar/mar253.htm (accessed January 25, 2018). Indiantelevision.com (2018). ‘Republic TV leads English news; Aaj Tak tops Hindi news ranking.’ Just, M.R. & Crigler, A.N. (2014). ‘Media coverage of political scandals: Addressing concerns about personalization’. American Political Science Association. Available at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/ papers.cfm?abstract_id=2454705 King, B. (2013). ‘A strain of heroes.’ Pacific Journalism Review, 19(2), pp. 11–27. Kohli-Khandekar, V. (2013). The Indian Media Business. New Delhi, India: Sage. Kumar, A. (2010). A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of his Arm a Tiny Bomb. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mehta, N. (2014). ‘Ravana’s airforce: A report on the State of India’s television’. In A. Punathambekar & S. Kumar (eds.) Television at Large in South Asia. Oxford, UK: Routledge, pp. 132–143. Moeller, S.D. (1999). Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death. New York, NY: Routledge. NDTV (2017). ‘Prannoy Roy’s analysis of TV news in India—and what to look out for.’ Available at: https://www.ndtv.com/book-excerpts/prannoy-roys-analysis-of-tv-news-in-india-and-what-tolook-out-for-1430857 Ninan, S. (2001). ‘Who cares for ethics?’ The Hindu. Available at: http://www.thehindu.com/2001/04/01/ stories/13010696.htm (accessed January 21, 2018). Nivas, G. (2010). ‘Sting or stink operation’. Deccan Herald. Available at: http://www.deccanherald.com/ content/44562/sting-stink-operations.html (accessed February 15, 2018).

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Kalyani Chadha Prasad, K.V. (2005). ‘11 MPs expelled for cash-for-questions-scam.’ The Hindu. Available at: http://www. thehindu.com/2005/12/24/stories/2005122410920100.htm (accessed February 1, 2018). Ranganathan, M. (2015). ‘Sting journalism: A sign of the times.’ In U.M. Rodrigues and M. Ranganathan (eds.) Indian News Media: From Observer to Participant. New Delhi, India: Sage, pp. 65–95. Rao, U. (2010). News as Culture: Journalistic Practices and the Remaking of Indian Leadership Traditions. New York: Berghahn Books. Rediff.com (2005). ‘We’ve many big names lined up for exposés.’ Available at: https://www.rediff.com/ movies/2005/mar/17minter.htm Rediff.com (2007). ‘Delhi fake sting: Uma Khurana reinstated.’ Available at: http://www.rediff.com/ news/2008/feb/19sting.htm (accessed February 21, 2018). Reeves, P. (2005). ‘Media stings create scandal in India.’ NPR. Available at: https://www.npr.org/templates/ story/story.php?storyId=5050300 (accessed February 15, 2018). Rogers, E.M. (2003). Diffusion of Innovations. New York: Free Press. Saha, P. (2005). ‘General entertainment TV loses share in ad revenue pie.’ Afaqs.com. Available at: http:// www.afaqs.com/news/story/11634_General-entertainment-TV-loses-share-in-ad-revenue-pie (accessed February 20, 2018). Savage, S. (2005). Analysis: Growth of Indian television news channels continues. Redorbit.com. Available at: http://www.redorbit.com/news/technology/267206/analysis_growth_of_indian_television_ news_channels_continues/#Lqrm2MOMK1Crxu0c.99 (accessed January 31, 2018). Statista (2016). Consumption of news via television among young adults across India in 2016, by frequency. Statista.com. Available at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/734962/young-adults-tv-newsconsumption-frequency-india/ (accessed April 15, 2018). Sundaram, R. (2015). ‘Publicity, transparency, and the circulation engine: The media sting in India.’ Current Anthropology, 56(12). Available at: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/683300 (accessed February 16, 2018). Thompson, J.B. (2000). Political Scandal: Power and Visibility in the Media Age. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Thussu, D.K. (2007). News as Entertainment: The Rise of Global Infotainment. London, UK: Sage Publications. Times of India (2017). ‘Narada sting: ED books 12 Trinamool Congress leaders.’ Available at: https:// timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/narada-sting-ed-books-12-trinamool-congress-leaders/ articleshow/58424668.cms (accessed February 16, 2018). Tumber, H. (2004). ‘Scandal and media in the United Kingdom: From Major to Blair.’ American Behavioral Scientist, 47(8), pp. 1122–1137. Tumber, H. and Waisbord, S. (2004) ‘Introduction: Political scandals and media across democracies.’ American Behavioral Scientist, 47(8), pp. 1031–1039. Udupa, S. and Chakravartty, P. (2014). ‘Changing with the Times of India (Bangalore): Remaking a postpolitical media field.’ In A. Punathambekar and S. Kumar (eds.) Television at Large in South Asia. Oxford, UK: Routledge, pp. 9–28. Williams, R. (1982). ‘Distance.’ London Review of Books. Available at https://www.lrb.co.uk/v04/n11/ raymond-williams/distance (accessed January 23, 2018).

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24 TO BARK OR TO BITE? JOURNALISM AND ENTRAPMENT Zohar Kampf

Introduction Entrapment as a method for bringing a scandal to light represents one of the most controversial practices of newsgathering. Defined as “dark art” (Greenslade, 2013) or “ambush journalism” employed in drawing out the worst in others (Rainey, 2011), entrapment is legally and ethically positioned in the gray area of the journalism profession. It entails various types of deceptive and trust-breaking techniques (Liebes & Blum-Kulka, 2004) applied to trick someone to commit a legal or moral transgression (Hill, McLeod, & Tanyi 2017). As such, it takes journalists away from the safe position of passive and distanced spectators whose aspirations for intervention in social reality are minimal to the more controversial position of active and engaged actors directly responsible for generating a scandal (Moncrieff, 2006; Kampf, 2011). Once a transgression is induced by a reporter, debate over the legitimacy and etiquette behind the entrapment (which could itself develop into a parallel scandal) arises: Was the motive to protect the public from misuse of power or just to increase sales (Campbell, 2001; Wasserman & Rao, 2008)? Was there enough prima facie evidence of wrongdoing by the target, or did the reporter go fishing in the hope of catching someone (Greenslade, 2013)? Were the deceptive techniques applied proportionally or were they too intrusive and forceful (Levy, 2002; Sleight, 2010)? This chapter discusses the reasons, practices, and ethics of entrapment journalism. I will first clarify what entrapment journalism is and point to its early roots in law-enforcement. After discussing the functions of exposing transgressive actions and worldviews via resorting to borderline, proactive strategies, I will survey the gamut of strategies employed by reporters, ranging from attempts to induce a source to commit a transgression or misrepresentation of their own identity to more mitigated “betrayal” strategies, such as exposing off-record information. I will then present emic and etic perspectives on entrapment journalism, namely, how journalists and scholars respectively perceive the practices of deception and trust violation, discussing scholarly debate on ethical issues surrounding entrapment. To conclude, I will point out several future directions for the practice and study of entrapment journalism.

What is entrapment journalism? The practice of entrapment is as ancient as human storytelling. Consider the story of Adam and Eve, in which the snake provoked Eve (who then induced Adam) to eat the forbidden fruit. 245

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“The serpent beguiled me” is probably one of the earliest known exonerating excuses (Buttny, 1993), pointing to the deceptive and persuasive means resorted to by the snake-as-entrapper for tempting humans into committing a transgression. Further in documented history, entrapment techniques were (and still are) utilized by intelligence agencies (consider the various practices of spying), law enforcement agencies (in the form of sting operations or making use of an agent provocateur to implicate someone in an illegal act; see Levanon, 2016) and even in academia, in the form of experimental methods in social psychology (recall Ash and Milgram’s studies). In the field of journalism, entrapment is linked to contemporary trends of active newsgathering and to the emergent genre of “crime-busting journalism” (Campbell, 2001). According to Campbell, the practice flourished in the UK from the 1990s onward, when tabloid newspapers, headed by the News of the World (which closed in 2011 following the phone hacking scandal), executed “a series of undercover operations ostensibly to bring drug dealers, fugitive financiers, and other criminals to justice” (2001, 184). A series of scandals, including the Lawrence Dallaglio drug claims scandal (1999), the Victoria Beckham kidnap plot (2002), the Kieren Fallon race-fixing case (2004), the John Higgins video over thrown frames (2010), and the Pakistan cricket spot-fixing scandal (2010) erupted following the use of entrapment techniques by News of the World reporters. They have led, however, to only a few judicial convictions (Bagchi, 2010; Williams, 2016). Although various scholars and practitioners may include or exclude specific methods from the practice of entrapment, there is an overarching agreement that all forms of entrapment include some trickery on the side of the entrapper. In its broader sense, entrapment entails the use of deceptive and persuasive means that induce or provoke the entrapped to commit a legal or moral transgression (Hill, McLeod, & Tanyi, 2017). Journalistic entrapment also entails some form of violation of trust or betrayal on the journalists’ side. It is defined as a proactive method of newsgathering (Levy, 2002) in which reporters break “a tacit or explicit agreement with a source” (Liebes & Blum-Kulka, 2004) in order to obtain and expose scandalous information they would otherwise not be able to gain access to. Scholarly debates conducted within the purview of philosophy (Levy, 2002; Harrison & Breit, 2004), law (Smith, 2004; Dyer, 2015; Levanon, 2016; Hill, McLeod, & Tanyi, 2017), and journalism studies (Sanders, 2003; Liebes & Blum-Kulka, 2004; Patching & Hirst, 2013) suggest further distinctions between the various meanings and practices of journalistic entrapment. Hill, McLeod, and Tanyi (2017) distinguish between legal (conducted by law enforcement agents) and civil or private (carried out by non-official agents) entrapment, two practices aimed at exposing either moral or criminal transgressions. Entrapment conducted by journalists is clearly related to the civil category. It may be designed to tempt the target to commit a crime (“civil entrapment to commit a crime”) or “to do something that is immoral, embarrassing, or socially frowned upon” (Hill, McLeod, & Tanyi, 2017, 2). At the normative level, Levy (2002, 122) distinguishes between permissible and “broader” versus illegitimate and “narrower” senses of entrapment. Whereas the broader meaning sees the practice as legitimate for information gathering, the narrower sense refers solely to the illegitimate use of such methods, thus attributing negative load to the practice. The difference between the two is related to the motivation behind the deception (public or commercial interests), an issue I will deal with in the next section.

Reasons for journalistic entrapment The practice of entrapment generates engaging stories about well-known figures who transgressed morally or judicially. It is therefore only reasonable that critics of entrapment point 246

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to commercial gain as the main reason for the performance and flourishing of the practice (Harrison & Breit, 2004; Dyer, 2015). Nevertheless, the functional justification for acts of entrapment and their subsequent scandals go beyond issues of profit. According to an idealized view of journalism, entrapment can be seen as part of investigative reporting and guided by the logic of activist ethics of problem-solving journalism (Campbell, 2001). Entrapment is probably the most active form of investigative journalism as it aims at alerting the public about the abuse of power while at the same time thwarting the corrupt conduct of the powerful. It expands the role of the watchdog from barking (i.e., providing information about the corrupt obtained from other sources) to attacking and biting (i.e., active policing and personal engagement in sting operations) and is legitimized by the need of the public to be informed of “public actions of the officials who claim to represent them or whose decisions impact significantly on their lives” (Levy, 2002). The activist’s logic guiding entrapment may also be seen as an expansion of the practice of enforcing norms (Lazarsfeld & Merton, 1948). Accordingly, journalists are responsible not only for exposing deviation from norms but also for solving crimes (Campbell, 2001) by way of implementing policing practices (Harrison & Breit, 2004) and deception (Patching & Hirst, 2013). The active role of the entrapper-as-norm-enforcer is mainly seen in the initial stages of scandals (disclosure of transgression; see Thompson, 2000), where journalists are traditionally dependent on inside sources and whistleblowers (Molotch & Lester, 1974). During this stage, they are responsible for designing the scene that allows them to expose transgressions later; but performing the role of norm enforcer does not stop here. After bringing the deviation to the public’s attention, journalists possess full legitimacy to demand accountability from the entrapped transgressor. Once corrective action is realized (in the form of apology, resignation, police intervention, etc.), journalists may score extra points with the public when seen as responsible for facilitating the reaffirmation of the transgressed norm (Kampf, 2011). Reasons for entrapment can be found beyond the expansion of journalism ethics. Scholars have identified a growing process of marketization and sophistication of impression management in the political field (Corner & Pels, 2003; Hamo, Kampf, & Shifman, 2010) that requires the use of “extreme,” nonconventional practices for exposing the “truth” (Liebes & BlumKulka, 2004; Kampf & Daskal, 2013). Entrapment can be understood as a professional practice for eliciting information from public figures who have learned how to conceal actions and evade responsibility. Accordingly, the only way to get information from experienced political figures and expose their “real” persona, ideas, or beliefs is by way of deception. Breaking an explicit agreement with interviewees who would otherwise not have spoken with reporters (Liebes & Blum-Kulka, 2002) or using other deceptive methods are thus the only options available for journalists to fight back against the growing sophistication of political marketing.

Methods of entrapment As noted earlier, regardless of the specific method applied for gaining hidden information or inducing others to commit a criminal or moral transgression, there is an overarching agreement among scholars that all forms of entrapment include some form of deception and betrayal (Levy, 2002; Liebes & Blum-Kulka, 2004; Patching & Hirst, 2013). The narrower, controversial definition of entrapment includes deceptive methods that also consist of some form of active persuasion by the entrapper (Levy, 2002). Consider, for example, the definition suggested by the BBC following a sting operation executed by The Daily Telegraph targeting the coach of the English national soccer team, Sam Allardyce, in 2011.1 Posing as businessmen representing a 247

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Far Eastern firm, undercover reporters filmed Allardyce bargaining for a $500,000 payment for consulting on an illegal deal in the soccer players transfer market (Warren, 2016). Following the public disclosure of the con, the BBC explained to its readers the practice of entrapment, using the following distinction: To be clear—it’s not just going undercover. So it wouldn’t be entrapment if a police officer or journalist secretly joined a gang to get evidence of someone committing a crime. But if they persuaded or forced someone to do something illegal that they wouldn’t otherwise have done, then it would count as entrapment. (Rahman-Jones, 2016) The combination of the two methods—falsifying identity and provoking the entrapped party to commit a crime—seems to be the extreme case of entrapment journalism. Examples are many and include the disclosure of corruption, as in the Sam Allardyce case, or of offensive sexual behavior, as in the case of the Presidents Club scandal in which undercover journalists of the Financial Times reported on the sexual harassment of women hostesses by members of the club during a charity dinner (Marriage, 2018). Entrapment evolved into a television genre in the United States when To Catch a Predator, an NBC investigative/reality television program, was aired between 2004 and 2007. The series was devoted to impersonating adolescents aged 12 to 15 and shaming suspected pedophiles who came to meet their young victims. The extreme and narrower case of entrapment is often denounced as journalistic “dark art” that resorts to dubious measures for gaining profits (Wasserman & Rao, 2008; Greenslade, 2013). Other less disputable but still controversial methods include a variety of borderline strategies for gaining information. Several of the methods included in the broader definition of entrapment can be found in international comparative studies that survey journalists’ perceptions of “questionable” methods of newsgathering (Weaver & Wu, 1998; Plaisance, Skewes, & Hanitzsch, 2012; Weaver & Willnat, 2012). On occasion, journalists justify the following methods of deception or betrayal: employment in a firm or organization to gain inside information; claiming to be someone else; using hidden microphones or cameras; exerting pressure on unwilling informants to get a story; making use of personal documents, such as letters and pictures, without permission; and revealing confidential sources (among other deceptive methods that do not fit neatly into the definition of entrapment). A profound lesson from this list of “questionable” methods for newsgathering is that betraying a source’s trust is the most unjustified technique in the eyes of journalists. According to Liebes and Blum-Kulka (2004), betrayal (with some form of subterfuge) stands at the core of entrapment. Pointing to the various options of breaking “a tacit or explicit agreement with a source” (ibid., 1154), the act of betrayal may transform the exposure of scandal from a commendable to a condemnable act. It positions journalists on the “thin line of befriending sources while remaining free enough of personal commitment to do honest reporting” (ibid., 1159). In contrast to other forms of journalistic entrapment, betrayal does not include misrepresentation of identity, at least not in the conventional sense. It does include, however, some form of pretending to be the source’s “best friend.” Trust built in the process of personal interaction between journalist and source is gained, only to be violated. Liebes and Blum-Kulka provide a variety of examples of trust betrayal, starting with Joe McGinnis’s and Joe Klein’s books (The Selling of the President and Primary Colors), which were a result of the authors gaining the trust (and friendship) of two American presidents, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton respectively, and violating it by harshly criticizing them. Other methods of entrapment are employed in the process of interviewing sources and include disclosing 248

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information that was given off record, breaking an existing agreement not to publish a source’s words, and encouraging unsuspecting sources to dig their own graves. The latter method is considered the most damaging to the source and, in the Israeli context, has ended or severely damaged the careers of several politicians and popular culture figures (Ori Orr, Yaffa Yarkoni, Jacko Eisenberg, to name a few). Entangled in this method, sources are given the impression that their words are communicated off record and some form of intimate relations with the interviewer exists. The latter exploit the trust gained by (naive) interviewees by inducing them to continue to provide information and/or express opinions that will cause damage to their public image. One famous example of tricking a source to dig her own grave was aired in 1995 during CBS’s “Eye to Eye with Connie Chung.” During a live interview with the mother of incoming House speaker, Newt Gingrich, Chung asked Kathleen Gingrich what her son thinks about Hillary Clinton. Holding a burning cigarette in her right hand, the loving mother answered, “Nothing, and I can’t tell you what he said about Hillary.” In the following turns, Chung constructed the broadcasted interaction with the appearance of a personal, intimate chat between friends: Chung: Gingrich: Chung: Gingrich:

You can’t? I can’t. (whispering) Why don’t you just whisper it to me, just between you and me? She’s a bitch.2

A scandal immediately erupted. The pointing fingers, however, were directed at Chung and not at Gingrich. According to Anderson (1999, 599), “Connie Chung was lambasted by the public and professional colleagues alike for compromising journalistic ethics by ’tricking’ (the naïve and unexperienced) Mrs. Gingrich into an embarrassing disclosure.” The Kathleen Gingrich– Connie Chung scandal, as well as others that erupted as a result of the formulation of misleading questions by interviewers (Ekström & Johansson, 2008), indicates once again that resorting to entrapment methods may boomerang. In the next two sections I will discuss justification and criticism of the practice from both emic (professionals’) and etic (ethics scholars’) perspectives.

Perspectives on entrapment journalism Emic perspectives on entrapment journalism How do journalists conceive the practice of deceiving and betraying sources? Surveys point to divided perceptions among journalists from around the world (Weaver & Wu, 1998). According to a Global Journalist study (Weaver & Wu, 1998), being employed by a firm or organization to gain inside information is justified on occasion (79.2%), as is falsifying identity (60%). However, betraying sources by revealing their identity is approved to a far lesser degree (9.7%). From a cross-cultural perspective, studies suggest that the assumption of a universal standard in regard to entrapment practices is at least questionable (Plaisance, Skewes, & Hanitzsch, 2012). Thus, for example, in response to a question about falsifying identity (claiming to be someone else), 88.4% of US journalists perceive the method unjustified under any circumstances, while 46.6% of UK journalists think it may be justified on occasion. The findings of the World of Journalism project also suggest that this method is justified or justified on occasion in different journalistic cultures such as China (86.3%) and Sweden (85.1%).3 Another question in the World of Journalism surveys focuses on the attitude of journalists regarding the use of hidden microphones and cameras. Interestingly, topping the list were Israeli 249

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journalists, of which 56.9% think this practice is always justified.4 In comparison, only 8.7% of US and 2.7% of UK journalists justified this practice. Journalists from Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (93.6, 92.7, and 92.7% respectively) considered the method justified on occasion, a finding that may point once again to a cross-cultural difference in ethical perceptions. The reason for the ranging levels of ethical flexibility are explained mostly by variances in ideological or state-level factors, rather than differences on the individual level (see Plaisance, Skewes, & Hanitzsch, 2012). Journalists’ disagreement on methods of entrapment may be understood as a struggle between those who perceive the practice as guided by an “activist ethic” (Campbell, 2001) and those who reject the use of any misleading and deceptive techniques in the process of newsgathering, criticizing the use of deceptive methods based on ethical or practical inappropriateness. This position was expressed, for example, by Ben Bradlee, the former editor of The Washington Post and a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board that did not award the prize to the Chicago SunTimes in 1977. According to Bradlee, journalists who aim to uncover deception “simply cannot deceive” themselves (see Levy, 2002, 126). Other critics divert from ethical idealism to more practical reasoning. For Wall Street Journal reporter Matthew Rose, undercover methods are dismissed as “a kind of investigative reporting without much investigating” (see Campbell, 2001, 184; for the same argument see Harrison & Breit, 2004). On the other hand, those who justify the use of entrapment methods perceive the practice as a powerful tool that “should be used sparingly” (Greenslade, 2013). According to former editor of the Daily Mirror, Roy Greenslade, the use of entrapment methods is justified, like any type of investigating reporting, if it adheres to the notion of “public interest.” If so, a series of questions should be asked by the editor before approving the sting operation: Is there enough prima facie evidence of wrongdoing by the targeted person? What is the position of the entrapped party? How much power does he or she have? How strong is the evidence? What is the nature of the offence—criminal or moral? And if morality is at stake, how bad is the transgression (Greenslade, 2013)? For journalists, answering these questions in a way that demonstrates strong evidence and a clear public interest justifies the employment of active measures for cleaning the rot at the top.

Etic perspectives on entrapment journalism Professional disputes over the practice of entrapment is mirrored in the debates among scholars of applied moral philosophy and journalism ethics (e.g., Levy, 2002; Sanders, 2003; Harrison & Breit, 2004). At the core of the debate stands the distinction between utilitarian interpretation of moral behavior and moral absolutism. According to the utilitarian perspective, the consequences of an action are the key parameter for assessing its moral value. Moral behavior is thus judged by the perceived effect of actions, and if methods of entrapment serve the higher value of public interest (even though compromising other, inferior, values such as individual privacy) they are morally justified (Sanders, 2003). Moral absolutism, on the other hand, delegitimizes the practice of entrapment. It calls for assessing an action on its own moral value, thus omitting its possible (positive) consequences from the question of morality. Accordingly, deception cannot be eradicated by a counter-deception because practices like falsifying identity and lying position professionals on the slippery slope of corruption (Williams, 2012; Sanders, 2003). Further debates on journalistic entrapment accept the fact that in everyday practice law enforcement agencies and other public institutions already resort to methods of entrapment. Adopting the utilitarian perspective, that is, that “morality is judged by its beneficial effects and that principles should always be weighed against consequences” (Sanders, 2003, 20), the locus 250

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of the debate is whether journalism as an institution has the right to employ entrapment methods and, if so, under what restricting conditions. The clearest position in favor of entrapment is advocated by Levy (2002). Building on the assumption that the news media is the fourth pillar of democracy, he argues that “journalists can ethically engage in deceptive behavior in the service of the important goal of informing the public of the actions of the officials who claim to represent them, or whose decisions impact significantly upon their lives” (ibid., 128). He adds two further justifications, focusing on the unique privileges of the powerful: (a) compared to ordinary people, public figures have more options for protecting their privacy; (b) their greater impact on society must entail greater scrutiny by law and norm-enforcing institutions. In response to Levy’s legitimization of journalism as an institution that has the right to exercise deceptive techniques, Harrison and Breit (2004) challenge the definition of journalism as the Fourth Estate. Journalists are guided by the public functions they perform but also, at times even more, by commercial constraints. Entrapment thus may be performed only with an appearance of public interest, whereas de facto it may be aimed at increasing sales. According to Harrison and Breit (2004, 2), operating “under the proprietorship of some of the most powerful media corporations” undermines the basic justification for resorting to deception and betrayal of trust. Accepting the assumption that journalists have the right to employ entrapment methods opens up a second line of debate, this one over the specific conditions under which deception methods are justified. Conditions (some of which were presented in the last section) that must be met are, for example, “probable cause to suppose that the individuals approached are already engaged in or are intending to engage in activity of a similar nature” (Levy, 2002, 125) and a clear public interest (Harrison & Breit, 2004). Despite disagreements over a specific condition, there is basic agreement among scholars that journalists must use entrapment with caution. For Levy, journalists “must consider the privacy implications of their actions, especially in the absence of probable cause, and the effects of their behavior on third parties” (ibid., 128). A similar stance is also expressed by the Independent Press Standards Organisation, the independent regulator of most of the UK’s newspapers and magazines: “Engaging in misrepresentation or subterfuge, including by agents or intermediaries, can generally be justified only in the public interest and then only when the material cannot be obtained by other means.”5

Concluding remarks Debates over the legitimacy of entrapment methods point to a deeper disagreement over the role of journalists in society: are they neutral and balanced observers of social and political reality? Or, alternately, are they engaged actors guided by activist ethics? Putting it differently, is their role to bark in order to draw our attention to the misuse of power, or rather to bite by inducing powerful actors to disclose their weaknesses? As demonstrated in the last two sections of this chapter, this ongoing controversy among both scholars of media ethics and professionals is to a large extent due to the efficiency of entrapment methods to provide valuable information in an age of public cynicism and political sophistication. It would not be too risky to predict that entrapment methods will be used in the future for constructing political scandals, even after the harsh criticism they received following the News of the World phone hacking scandal and the Leveson report. Even more so, with advanced digital technologies, entrapment methods are here not only to stay, but to improve as well. The questions for future debate are what self-restrictions journalists should adopt and how far they should go in using the various methods of entrapment journalism. 251

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Acknowledgment I wish to extend my gratitude to Devora Newman for assisting in collecting the materials and to Oren Meyers, Zvi Reich, and Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt for their good advice.

Notes 1 http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/37505199/entrapment-has-won---but-what-is-it 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vecw539MjWM 3 http://www.worldsofjournalism.org/data/data-and-key-tables-2012-2016/ 4 For further explanation of Israeli journalists’ justification of deceptive methods, see Tsfati and Meyers (2012). 5 https://www.ipso.co.uk/editors-code-of-practice/

References Anderson, K. V. (1999). “Rhymes with rich”: “ Bitch” as a tool of containment in contemporary American politics. Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 2(4), 599–623. Bagchi, R. (2010). Legacy of entrapment is a record of great stories with few convictions. The Guardian, September 3. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2010/sep/03/news-of-worldentrapment-sport Buttny, R. (1993) Social accountability in communication. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Campbell, W. J. (2001). Yellow journalism: Puncturing the myths, defining the legacies. Westport, CT: Praeger. Corner, J., & Pels, D. (Eds.). (2003). Media and the restyling of politics: Consumerism, celebrity and cynicism. London: Sage. Dyer, A. (2015). The problem of media entrapment. Criminal Law Review, 5, 311–331. Available at https:// ssrn.com/abstract=2622854 Ekström, M., & Johansson, B. (2008). Talk scandals. Media, Culture & Society, 30(1), 61–79. Greenslade, R. (2013). Journalism: To sting or not to sting? The Guardian, June 2. Retrieved from https:// www.theguardian.com/media/2013/jun/02/sleaze-journalist-sting-debate Hamo, M., Kampf, Z., & Shifman, L. (2010). Surviving the “mock interview”: Challenges to political communicative competence in contemporary televised discourse. Media, Culture & Society, 32(2), 247–266. Harrison, J., & Breit, R. (2004). If the watchdog bites, is it put down? A response to Neil Levy on journalism ethics and entrapment. Retrieved from https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/14981592.pdf Hill, D. J., McLeod, S. K., & Tanyi, A. (2017). The concept of entrapment. Criminal Law and Philosophy, 12(4): 539–554. Kampf, Z. (2011). Journalists as actors in social dramas of apology. Journalism, 12(1): 71–87. Kampf, Z., & Daskal, E. (2013). Too hostile, too deferential: Processes of media answerability following political interviews. Journalism, 14(4), 522–540. Lazarsfeld, P. F., & Merton, R. K. (1948). Mass communication, popular taste, and organized social action. In B. Lyman (Ed.), Communication of Ideas (pp. 95–118). New York: Harper & Brothers. Levanon, L. (2016). The law of police entrapment: Critical evaluation and policy analysis. Criminal Law Forum, 27(1), 35–73. Levy, N. (2002). In defence of entrapment in journalism (and beyond). Journal of Applied Philosophy, 19(2), 121–130. Liebes, T., & Blum-Kulka, S. (2004). It takes two to blow the whistle: Do journalists control the outbreak of scandal? American Behavioral Scientist, 47(9), 1153–1170. Marriage, M. (2018). Men only: Inside the charity fundraiser where hostesses are put on show. Financial Times, January 23. Retrieved from https://www.ft.com/content/075d679e-0033-11e8-9650-9c0a d2d7c5b5 Molotch, H., & Lester, M. (1974). News as purposive behavior: On the strategic use of routine events, accidents, and scandals. American Sociological Review, 39(1), 101–112. Moncrieff, C. (2006). A journalist looks at political scandal. In J. Garrard and J. Newell (Eds.), Scandals in past and contemporary politics (pp. 61–76). Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

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To bark or to bite? Patching, R., & Hirst, M. (2013). Journalism ethics: Arguments and cases for the twenty-first century. London: Routledge Plaisance, P. L., Skewes, E. A., & Hanitzsch, T. (2012). Ethical orientations of journalists around the globe: Implications from a cross-national survey. Communication Research, 39, 641–661. Rahman-Jones, I. (2016). “Entrapment has won”—but what is it? BBC, September 29. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/37505199/entrapment-has-won---but-what-is-it Rainey, J. (2011). Secret recordings trespass on ethics. Los Angeles Times, March 12. Retrieved from https://www.pressreader.com/usa/los-angeles-times/20110312/285787125121868 Sanders, K. (2003). Ethics and journalism. London: Sage. Sleight, D. (2010). The law regarding entrapment. The Law Society Gazette, June 24. Retrieved from https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/law/the-law-regarding-entrapment/55972.article Smith, K. A. (2004). Psychology, factfinding, and entrapment. Michigan Law Review, 103(4), 759–806. Thompson, J. B. (2000) Political scandal: Power and visibility in the media age. Cambridge: Polity. Tsfati, Y., & Meyers, O. (2012). Journalists in Israel. In D. H. Weaver and L. Willnat (Eds.), The global journalist in the 21st century (pp. 443–457). New York: Routledge. Warren, J. (2016). Was the Daily Telegraph’s undercover soccer exposé ethical? Pointer, September 29. Retrieved from https://www.poynter.org/news/was-daily-telegraphs-undercover-soccer-expose-ethical Wasserman, H., & Rao, S. (2008). The glocalization of journalism ethics. Journalism, 9(2), 163–181. doi:10.1177/1464884907086873 Weaver, D. H., & Willnat, L. (Eds.). (2012). The global journalist in the 21st century. New York: Routledge. Weaver, D. H., & Wu, W. (1998). The global journalist: News people around the world. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Williams, B. (2012). Morality: An introduction to ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, K. (2016). Bringing popular journalism into disrepute: The News of the World, the public and politics 1953–2011. In L. Brake, C. Kaul and M. Turner (Eds.) The News of the World and the British Press, 1843–2011 (pp. 213–228). London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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25 FROM SNOWDEN TO CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA An overview of whistleblowing cases as scandals Philip Di Salvo Introduction Scandals and whistleblowing are strongly connected. Whistleblowers can be the origin of a scandal, can bring evidence for a scandal to begin, or can be the raison d’être of a scandal themselves. Regardless of their role in sparking public outrage, several instances of scandals have been initiated by whistleblowers over the years. The “Watergate” and the “Pentagon Papers”, probably the most emblematic examples of whistleblowing from the history of journalism, together with the WikiLeaks publications from 2010 about US warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Snowden case, the “Panama” and “Paradise Papers,” and the Cambridge Analytica cases are only some of the most powerful mainstream scandals generated from the cooperation of whistleblowers and journalists. Many other instances, on national and regional if not metropolitan levels, have certainly made the news in their areas of influence, although without reaching the interest of international audiences: tracking whistleblowing cases and their impact can be complex, especially when whistleblowers decide to stay anonymous and not to appear publicly as the sources of their revelations. The presence of a declared whistleblower, like Edward Snowden or Christopher Wylie for the Cambridge Analytica case, is by itself a sign that scandalization will potentially follow the explosion of a whistleblowing case, but the overall impact may vary according to the severity of the misbehavior exposed, their direct impact on society at large, their capability of setting the agenda of the public debate, and their strength in shaping policy changes and influencing change as a response. Whistleblowers can bring the needed evidence to highlight a non-visible scandal that would otherwise be silenced or potentially lack the sufficient evidence needed by journalists to report on them extensively. This was the case, again, for the Cambridge Analytica exposure, where the whistleblower provided evidence to support previously raised concerns over the potential (mis)uses of Facebook profiling data (Cadwalladr & Graham-Harrison 2018) and also the case of the “Drone Papers,” published by The Intercept in 2015 and based on the substantial evidence provided by a still unnamed whistleblower from the US military armed drone program (Scahill 2016). Thus, a whistleblower may be the indispensable vehicle of “voice” to bring a scandal to the public and make the news. The aim of this chapter is to consider whistleblowing cases as scandals and to fit them within the existing theoretical framework of 254

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scandals (Entman 2012; Thompson 2000 in particular) and accordingly to propose a taxonomy of recent whistleblowing cases.

A taxonomy of whistleblowing cases as scandals In the years 2010–2018 leaks multiplied and were published, gaining international visibility, thanks to different kinds of whistleblowers. News outlets have certainly still played a major part, but less traditional players such as online whistleblowing platforms have also gained prominence. Moreover, the practice of “Megaleaks,” the release by a whistleblower of an enormous amount of digital data, has also become a common phenomenon that has reshaped whistleblowing and reporting practices, especially in the context of data journalism (Di Salvo 2017b; Reich & Barnoy 2016). Among others, the following can be considered as the most important whistleblowing cases exploded in the above timeframe. 2010. WikiLeaks, in cooperation with its media partners, published the “Afghan War Diary,” the “Iraq War Logs,” and the “Cablegate” in different releases. All the documents came from former Pvt. soldier turned whistleblower Chelsea Manning who downloaded the files from classified networks of the US intelligence and military. In total, Manning gave WikiLeaks about 700,000 documents. The leak also included the original footage of the “Collateral Murder” video that showed a US strike conducted in the suburbs of Baghdad as shot by the onboard camera of a US Apache helicopter (Madar 2013, 55–81). 2013. The Guardian and The Washington Post started publishing articles based on leaked material coming from inside the US National Security Agency (NSA). The revelations concerned the NSA’s global spying programs over the Internet and other forms of communication. All the quoted source material came from Edward Snowden, a former US intelligence contractor turned whistleblower who contacted journalists to hand over the information. The revelations provided evidence about mass and targeted surveillance and their impact on society and the Internet (Bell & Owen 2017). 2013–2017. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) coordinated the investigation of four different leaked databases exposing international offshore tax evasion mechanisms in different countries. The series includes “Offshore Leaks” (2013), “Bahamas Leaks” (2016), “The Panama Papers” (2016), and the “Paradise Papers” (2017).1 The leaks contained massive amounts of digital information, up to 13.4 million documents2 in the case of the “Paradise Papers,” and exposed more than 785,000 offshore entities. The investigations were all coordinated by the ICIJ and involved hundreds of journalists all around the world, who shared the data and worked jointly on several angles of the materials. In the case of the “Panama Papers” and the “Paradise Papers,” original source material was obtained by the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, which later shared the data with ICIJ. For its international collaborative approach, the practice has been defined as “cross-border investigation” (Murtha 2015). Also the “Luxembourg Leaks” (2014) and the “Swiss Leaks” (2015) investigations involved documents coming from whistleblowers and were conducted in the same fashion. 2015. The online investigative outlet The Intercept published “The Drone Papers”,3 an investigation based on classified documents obtained by a whistleblower coming from within the US secret military drone programs. The investigation provided more evidence and insights about contemporary US drone warfare in the Middle East and Africa and on the role played by signals intelligence and surveillance practices in the organization of the strikes (Scahill 2016). 2018. Whistleblower Christopher Wylie revealed to The Observer and The New York Times how the company Cambridge Analytica exploited data coming from more than 87 million 255

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Facebook users4 for its work for the Donald Trump presidential campaign in the field of psychographic profiling. Wylie, being an insider of the company and one of the masterminds of its own methodology, provided evidence of how Cambridge Analytica operated and gave more insight on the functioning of the data economy and the scope of its exploitment for political propaganda (Cadwalladr & Graham-Harrison 2018). All these whistleblowing cases led to extensive debates about the issues they raised and, in most cases, they led to scandalization and actively promoted change. The Snowden revelations, for instance, sparked a global discussion on Internet surveillance, online privacy, and digital rights, and inspired some legislation change in the USA; the offshore economy leaks caused the resignation of the Icelandic prime minister and other politicians and, globally, helped tax authorities recover over $500 million around the world (Obermaier & Obermayer 2018). In his seminal account of media and scandal, Entman (2012) has outlined a model to classify scandals according to their severity and impact on society. Entman’s model combines social costs and the area of influence of scandals that can include the “private”, “social,” and “government” realms. The scheme, that was originally intended to analyze presidential scandals in the USA, can also be applied to the above whistleblowing-originated scandals (see Table 25.1). The most important whistleblowing cases of the last eight years fit in Entman’s scheme at the intersection of the social and governmental realms with the higher degrees of social costs since they concerned the secret or classified activities of governments (Snowden), warfare (“The Drone Papers”, WikiLeaks/Manning), or the activities of private companies with a substantial impact on citizens’ lives (ICIJ’s offshore economy investigations, Cambridge Analytica). Interestingly, none of these major whistleblowing scandals were related to the private spheres of those involved. Thus, it is possible to argue that prominent whistleblowers in recent years have blown the whistle on highly impactful instances of misbehavior with widespread societal costs. This can’t be generalized about whistleblowing at large, since it occurs also on lower levels and within smaller and less powerful organizations, but the analyzed cases show a clear pattern. Moreover, the severity of what was exposed is also reflected in the international or global impact these cases generated and that went beyond the national borders of the contexts in which the scandals originally started. In this sense, the Snowden case is a clear example since, despite being mainly a US-centric case, it ended up involving many more countries and rapidly evolved into being a global scandal (Di Salvo & Negro 2016; Wahl-Jorgensen, Bennett, & Taylor 2017). All these instances outline the peculiarities of whistleblowing-originated mediated scandals in this era of “networked journalism” and the growing loss of gatekeeping powers by traditional media. For instance, they all indicate an interconnection among new kinds of whistleblowers, relationships with media outlets, and modalities of scandal initiation and diffusion. All of them outline how whistleblowing plays a crucial role in the shaping of contemporary scandals and in addressing accountability towards those in power. Thus, the connection between whistleblowing and

Table 25.1  A Taxonomy of Whistleblowing Cases as Scandals Limited social costs

Substantial social costs

High social costs

Government realm

The Drone Papers

WikiLeaks/Manning leaks Snowden case

Social realm

Cambridge Analytica ICIJ’s offshore economy investigations

Private realm

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scandals is increasingly strong. What follows is an overview of their multiple points of contact in light of the available literature.

Whistleblowing and scandal: the igniting match and the fire In their widely accepted definition, Marcia P. Miceli and Janet P. Near define whistleblowing as: the disclosure by organizational members (former or current) of illegal, immoral, or illegitimate practices under the control of their employers, to persons or organizations that may be able to effect action. (1992, 15–21) Here, three elements are clearly defying the rationale behind whistleblowing: the notion of “disclosure”; the “illegal, immoral and illegitimate” nature of what gets disclosed; and the idea of causing “action” as a response to what is exposed outside the affected organization. According to where whistleblowers decide to direct their complaints, it is also possible to distinguish between internal and external whistleblowing as two distinct practices (ibid., 21–31). Internal whistleblowing happens within the organization where the whistleblower is based; external whistleblowing implies the presence of recipients who are located outside the affected organization and are not affiliated with it but are interested in receiving information and conveying it to the public. External whistleblowing goes public and explicitly looks for recipients who are outside of the affected organization’s control. External recipients can be of different kinds, including media outlets and journalists. Whistleblowing to the media can be considered as the “last resort” available to organizational members who are willing to expose wrongdoings (Lewis, Brown, & Moberly 2014, 1-37; Near and Miceli 2016, 105114), because the risks that follow publicity and media exposure are usually tougher and consequences and retaliation that whistleblowers may have to face could inevitably be more dangerous. Many whistleblowers, before going public with the media, try the “internal” way, frequently without finding adequate attention or trust. In any case, whistleblowing implies a communication exchange between the whistleblower and the recipient. Albert O. Hirschman (1970) has identified three different options available to witnesses of wrongdoings: “exit,” “voice,” and “loyalty.” In his scheme, organizational members can decide to: leave the organization in order not to be further involved (“exit”); show loyalty, by not breaking their connection and trust with their superiors (“loyalty”); or opt to give voice to what is going on and bring notice to it (“voice”). This third scenario is the one of whistleblowing. As Hirschman puts it (1970, 30-33): In this age of protest, it has become quite apparent that dissatisfied consumers—or members of an organization—rather than just go over to the competition, can “kick up a fuss” and thereby force improved quality or service upon delinquent management . . . Voice is here defined as any attempt to all to change, rather than to escape from, an objectionable state of affairs, whether through individual or collective petition to the management directly in charge, through appeal to a higher authority with the intention of forcing a change in management, or through various types of actions and protests, including those that are meant to mobilize public opinion. This element of “publicity” and “voice” recur in the literature about media and scandals. As Jacobsson and Löfmarck put it, for instance, “for a transgression to evolve into any type of 257

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scandal, publicity is necessary” (2008, 209). The idea of publicity emerges also from Thompson’s (2000, 13-14) description of the five elements constituting a scandal. He writes that, in a scandal, disapproval towards certain acts is expressed by “publicly denouncing the actions or events.” This is a first, evident connection between whistleblowing and scandals on the level of the origin of both: whistleblowing begins with an act of “voice” and denunciation, in the same was as a scandal requires a “voice” of disapproval to be unleashed. Again, in Thompson’s words (2000, 20), a scandal is constituted by acts of transgression and, at the same time, by speech acts that articulate public outrage. The aim of whistleblowing is to make some misbehavior public by bringing it outside the realm of the organization where this is occurring. This means, in most cases, to break some sort of secrecy or of shared trust and loyalty. Prominent whistleblowers such as Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning, or Edward Snowden, among others, all faced or are facing trial for releasing classified or secret documents to the media in order to fulfill a whistleblowing act through the contribution of journalists (Lebovic 2017). Similarly, scandals also explode when misbehaviors exit the boundaries of the environment where they originally took place and get out into the public sphere. Lull and Hinerman, in their definition of scandals (1997), have also mentioned the crucial role of the media in determining the circulation and impact of a scandal, by underlying how they require wide circulation via the media and to be turned into a narrative and to inspire interest and discussion. In other words, a scandal “lends itself with particular ease to the use of communication media” (Thompson 2000, 21). For Waisbord (1994), scandals are even “unthinkable without the intervention of the mass media” and press freedom is a conditio sine qua non for scandals to reach the public. Moreover, scandals and whistleblowing also have in common the characteristic of being a forum for public awareness and major contributions to the mediated public sphere in modern society (Tumber & Waisbord 2004). Moreover, whistleblowing is one of the potential origins of a scandal, one where “an insider, for idealistic or political or personal motives, volunteers information about a carefully hidden dark secret, damaging the perpetrator (Liebes & Blum-Kulka 2004, 1154). In this sense, whistleblowing can even be considered as the “classical” and “purest” form of scandal (ibid.). Following Liebes and Blum-Kulka’s framework, whistleblowing plays the role of an igniting match. Whistleblowers’ motivations are difficult to schematize, as they may vary from being purely idealistic, public good-oriented, political, self-interested, or even manipulative (ibid., 1155); still, on a broader theoretical level, whistleblowing aims at providing accountability towards those in power, organizations, or powerful people. Scandalization can happen because of a request of accountability or a push to “alter the direction of public policy” (Tumber & Waisbord 2004, 1143), and whistleblowing, in this sense, is an instrument to achieve these goals through visibility. The exposure of evidence, which is a pivotal element of both whistleblowing and scandal, is also a contributing element in this scenario as the existence of evidence fixed in a relatively durable medium also plays a central role in mediated scandals (Thompson 2000, 69). Or, to put it in the words of philosopher Slavoj Žižek (2011): “This is the paradox of public space: even if everyone knows an unpleasant fact, saying it in public changes everything.” In particular, this kind of evidence-based scandal is also tightly connected with the work of news outlets keen on investigative reporting, adversarial reporting, and muckraking: But scandal was also closely linked to the aims and practices of journalists and media organizations which sought to emphasize factuality. For investigative journalists came to see themselves not only as reporters who had to probe beneath the surface of things in order to get at the truth, but also as social reformers who sought to shape policy agendas by provoking moral outrage in their readers and viewers. (Thompson 2000, 82) 258

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The publication of scandals has been considered a sign of the presence, rise, or growing of investigative journalism cultures and infrastructures in different national contests, such as Argentina (Waisbord 1994), France (Chalaby 2004), and elsewhere in the world (Schiffrin 2014). Now that the connection between whistleblowing and scandals has been outlined, it is time to focus on the evolution of whistleblowing and scandals in the digital era, by looking at the changes imposed by the rise of “network journalism,” the weakening of the gatekeeping role of mainstream media, and the growing relevance of hybrid, boundary, and innovative forms of “acts of journalism” (Stearns 2013).

Networked journalists, networked whistleblowers, networked scandals A vast amount of literature about the origins and characteristics of scandals has attended extensively to the changes brought by technological innovation in recent years (e.g. Thompson 2000, 39-41; Tumber & Waisbord 2004; Williams & Delli Carpini 2004). The literature generally points at the loss of gatekeeping power pertaining to mainstream and legacy media over the past 20 years and blames round-the-clock cable networks and Internet news service for this. In the early 2000s this reflected the emergence of new news providers and the consequent multiplication of news sources as one of the reasons behind the “turning of scandal politics into common features of contemporary democracies” (Tumber & Waisbord 2004, 1147). Parallel to that, and following that debate of only a few years, in the wake of what could be summarized as the rise of the “network society” at large, journalism experienced what has been defined as “networked journalism” as a new set-up of the news environment. In a classic definition, “networked journalism” is defined as: a diffused capacity to record information, share it, and distribute it. In a world in which information and communication are organized around the Internet, the notion of the isolated journalist working alone, whether toiling at his desk in a newsroom or reporting from a crime scene or a disaster, is obsolete. Every journalist becomes a node in a network that functions to collect, process, and distribute information. (Van der Haak, Parks, & Castells 2012) This meant: the entering of new providers and dissemination platforms for news, such as social media, blogs, and other digital outlets; the launching of new hybrid, non-traditional providers of acts of journalism, such as the hacker organization WikiLeaks or other players coming from the hacktivism realm that occasionally have been involved in information-oriented activities, such as the hacker collective Anonymous; the raising of hybrid forms of reporting, such as data journalism and a growing process of hybridization of journalistic cultures. This last phenomenon can be seen in the numerous instances of collaboration between reporters and other professional figures, such as hackers in the field of cybersecurity for journalism (Di Salvo 2017a), data scientists and coders in the field of data journalism and data visualization (Porlezza 2017), or activists at large (Russell 2016). The results of this evolution also took the form of “boundary work” as “journalism is not a solid, stable thing to point to, but a constantly shifting denotation applied differently depending on context (Carlson 2015, 2). A clear example of this happening in the context of journalism and whistleblowing has been WikiLeaks, for the way the organization brought together hackers and journalists to work on the same leaked information. Charlie Beckett (2012, 13) considers the WikiLeaks saga as a “prototype for the shift from a closed, linear structure to a more open, networked and collaborative process” and a symptom of how “control over what the public knows is being exercised and resisted in new ways.” 259

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WikiLeaks demonstrated that a whistleblower like Chelsea Manning could reach out with one of the biggest leaks of the decade to an irregular, difficult-to-define, and alternative outlet rather than a well established and renowned newsroom. This had a profound impact on the whistleblower–journalist relationship—as new intermediaries such as whistleblowing platforms arrived on the stage—and on the gatekeeping process at large. WikiLeaks showed once more that “information will make it to the public sphere, regardless of actions taken by the legacy media” (Vos 2015, 6). Following the parallelism between whistleblowing and scandals proposed in this chapter, WikiLeaks—intended here as a paradigm of the new forms of hybrid journalism— showed how scandals can now find origins without the direct involvement of journalists keeping watch over information. Moreover, the new “networked” asset of the media environment had an impact on the empowerment of scandal sources and, consequently, whistleblowers. As Williams and Delli Carpini (2004, 1225) write: just as the new information environment created multiple axes of power within the media, it also created new axes among the political actors who operate to shape the media’s agenda. Under the social responsibility theory, authoritative sources were traditionally limited to a largely mainstream political, economic, and social elite: elected officials, spokespersons for major interest groups, and so forth . . . But the new media environment with its multiple points of access and more continuous news cycle has increased the opportunities for less mainstream individuals and groups to influence the public discourse. This reflects also a change in who decides to blow the whistle and become the source for a journalist and, potentially, of a mediated scandal. The transition from an analog age to the network society, as Patrick McCurdy (2013, 123) argues, shaped both who can be a whistleblower and how the practice of whistleblowing is carried out. In particular, whistleblowers coming from lower positions of power—or from no-power position at all—are now able to leak very sensitive information coming from classified or secret archives with ease by using digital channels and their empowerments. A clear example of this pattern is visible from the comparison of Daniel Ellsberg (the 1971 “Pentagon Papers”), an insider (who also contributed to the writing of the Papers he later leaked) within the higher ranks of the US intelligence community, and Chelsea Manning—a private soldier with the same security clearance of hundreds of thousands of people—who leaked more than 700,000 digital files to WikiLeaks (McCurdy 2013). More potential whistleblowers means also more leaks and, consequently, more scandals, to the point where information control has been described as an impossible goal (Fenster 2013).

Conclusion This chapter has analyzed whistleblowing as one of the most peculiar and potentially powerful triggers of scandals in the media by proposing a dedicated taxonomy based on the existing literature on media and scandals. Recent international cases have been used here to highlight the potential spheres of influence and social costs of whistleblowing as an initiator of scandals. These cases, which are definitely only a smaller sample of all whistleblowing cases, combined with the changes that have occurred to whistleblowing in the passage from an analog to a digital context, are explicative of the growing incidence of whistleblowing in setting the media agenda and in triggering journalistic investigations, scoops, and scandals. As the taxonomy shows, most of the recent international cases have touched on the “government” and “social” realms, with either “substantial” or “high” social costs. 260

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This is again interesting if interpreted as a signifier for the crucial role of whistleblowing in an increasingly secretive society where media and journalists are frequently excluded from accessing information relevant to the public interest, especially when it comes to crucial issues such as mass surveillance, as happened with the Snowden case for instance. That said, it would be an exaggeration to consider whistleblowing as the one and only way available to journalists to perform their watchdog role in the digital era. Investigations leading to scandals start frequently from other sourcing strategies—data journalism is a clear example—but once more whistleblowers show their huge potential to provide information in the higher levels of Entman’s (2012) taxonomy, by defining those where the scandalization is usually stronger and the impact on society may be more substantial. A stronger understanding of whistleblowing in this context is thus essential in order to have a deeper overview of how mediated scandals, intended as change agents, may shape policy changes and wider change in society, business, and politics.

Notes 1 All available on the ICIJ’s website: https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/pages/about 2 Available from https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-a-german-newspaper-became-thego-to-place-for-leaks-like-the-paradise-papers 3 Available from https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/ 4 Available from https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-exposed-87-million-users-to-cambridge-analytica/

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26 DATA JOURNALISM AND THE PROMISE OF TRANSPARENCY Sylvain Parasie

This chapter focuses on emerging journalistic practices that have been labeled ‘data journalism’. Since the late 2000s, an increasing number of journalists have seen databases and algorithms as appropriate means for making news. Taking advantage of the growing availability of digital data, they promote a ‘computational approach’ to news production. This means that news production is viewed as a process based on a heterogeneous set of digital technologies and computing skills, where data are collected, analyzed, and presented to provide readers with various news products, from conventional articles to news applications or visualizations. In many countries, journalists have seen ‘data journalism’ or ‘computational journalism’ (for definitions, see Coddington 2015) as a way to address the multifaceted crisis facing their profession: the contraction of financial resources for news organizations, the decline of investigative reporting, and a relentless suspicion of partisanship. In other words, the ‘data journalism’ claim is that as they rely on data-processing technologies, news organizations are less dependent on their sources, demonstrate greater objectivity, and serve their customers more efficiently. The main question of this chapter is how these emerging practices affect the ways in which media organizations produce scandals or collective indignation by revealing government dysfunction, showing injustice, or pointing out individual misconduct. Data journalism has generated many promises in this respect, from both inside and outside journalism – especially in technological worlds. Like previous technological innovations (photography, television), databases and algorithms are expected to enhance transparency in our democracies by allowing journalists to investigate deeper and in a more robust way, to be less dependent on official sources, and to reach out more easily to the average citizen. But are these promises fulfilled? What are the pitfalls and how do news organizations adopt this computational perspective on news making? This chapter builds not only on recent scholarship on data journalism, but also on more established literatures related to journalism, and on science and technology studies. Drawing on empirical investigations mostly conducted in the United States and Europe, I identify five lines of inquiry that have been partially investigated by scholars in sociology, communication science, and science and technology studies: (1) What is the history of data journalism and computational perspectives on news making? (2) How does the use of data-processing techniques affect the way that journalists and news makers work together to produce scandals or revelations based on digital data? 263

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(3) How have journalistic ‘epistemologies’ evolved, i.e. the conditions on which the knowledge claims made by journalists appear to be valid for the journalists themselves? (4) What are the implications of data journalism for the journalistic profession? What does it concern? (5) How are citizens involved in the making of indignation, and to what extent do data journalists successfully involve their readers in this respect? Before addressing these research questions, we shall begin with the promises related to data journalism as regards the contribution of media to scandals.

A promise of transparency Both inside and outside journalism, many see the adoption of data-processing technologies in news organizations as a way to enhance the democratic contribution of journalism (Parasie and Dagiral 2013). One general argument is that, because more and more actions – from governments, administration, firms, NGOs, or ordinary citizens – are associated with the production of digital data, journalists have to adopt digital technologies in order to make the world more transparent. As Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, put it, ‘now it’s also going to be about poring over data and equipping yourself with the tools to analyze it and picking out what’s interesting. And keeping it in perspective, helping people out by really seeing where it all fits together, and what’s going on in the country’ (Arthur 2010). For news organizations, the promise of data-processing techniques is that they will afford the opportunity to make governments, powerful firms, and other organizations more accountable. Several reasons are usually put forward to support the idea that data journalism enhances the accountability function of journalism. The first one is that in Western democracies, governments are more and more inclined, and even compelled, to release their documents in the form of digital data. This phenomenon is explained both by longstanding dynamics within public administration – notably the ‘new public management’ initiated in the 1980s – and scientific communities, and by more recent mobilization such as the ‘open data’ advocacy which has promoted the idea that public authorities should release their documents as digital data that are usable by citizens (Yu and Robinson 2012). As a consequence, news organizations can more easily collect data about a wider range of social activities: administrative records, government decisions, environmental pollution, health or educational issues, and so on. Another reason is the fact that in the last decade new techniques and infrastructures have emerged, which make it easier for news organizations to transform a wide range of documents (printed papers, books, pictures, etc.) into digital data. Spawned by computer engineering, computer science, and statistics, these techniques have increased what is often called ‘the datafication’ of the world: in other words, our collective ability to turn documents into data. This process is closely associated with the growth of digital platforms that produce huge amounts of data about online activities. Thus, news organizations can have access to a greater number of documents in the form of digital data, but also to data-processing techniques from the so-called ‘data science’ community, at the interface of computer science and statistics. Journalists and scholars have also pointed out the financial cost of investigative reporting to claim that data-processing technologies make it cheaper for news organizations to do investigative or quality reporting (Cohen, Hamilton and Turner 2011; Hamilton 2016). It is common knowledge that, in most Western countries, many news organizations have radically reduced the resources devoted to investigative reporting (Schudson 2010a; see Siles and Boczkowski 2012). Data journalism and computational journalism are consequently viewed as promising 264

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ways of reducing the costs of investigative reporting (Hamilton 2016). One reason is that these technologies are said to serve investigation by allowing for the analysis of extensive sets of digital data, which is supposed to cost less than traditional human reporting. Another reason is that by automating the production of standardized articles based on digital data, news organizations are believed to be able to invest more resources in investigation (see Young and Hermida 2015). Yet these promises are not to be taken for granted. The adoption of data-processing techniques by news organizations has unquestionably led to the revelation of significant scandals or affairs. WikiLeaks’s revelations in 2010 of the abuses committed by the US army against civilians in Iraq, or more recent investigations on tax evasion carried out by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, are good examples of greater transparency regarding governments and private actors. However, these techniques cannot be assumed to increase automatically the general level of transparency in our societies. ‘Technological determinism’, that is, the tendency to suppose that technology has an effect by itself, has to be challenged by scholars if they want truly to understand how these emerging practices affect the production of scandals or affairs by news organizations (see Anderson 2013).

Historical background of data journalism One way of adopting a critical approach to data journalism is to study the historical background of the use of data-processing techniques to make government more accountable. Several scholars in sociology and communication have shown that these journalistic practices are neither entirely driven by technology, nor imposed from outside of journalism (Schudson 2010b; Parasie and Dagiral 2013; Anderson 2016). Instead, they build on previous democratic norms and well-established journalistic practices. This is the point made by Michael Schudson, who shows that journalistic interest in databases dates back to the early twentieth century (Schudson 2010b). As he notes, in the 1920s philosopher and writer Walter Lippmann wrote that the world had already become too complex to be adequately grasped by the conventional tools of journalism. Lippmann called for the creation of political observatories and even what he called a ‘machinery of record’ that would provide newspapers with objective, exhaustive, and trusted information. In an era when computers did not exist, he imagined that journalists might be able to grasp every social, economic, or political issue through quantified information, since that was already possible at the time in sport and finance. Schudson concludes that the contemporary impetus for data or computational tools has a long history in US journalism. He also suggests that data journalism in the United States makes sense only if one considers a set of political changes that took place in recent US history. For instance, many NGOs such as political observatories that emerged in the 1970s have increased government transparency by producing huge amounts of quantified information about governments. Other studies also suggest that data journalism builds on previous historical developments. Chris Anderson, for instance, analyzes how the ‘social survey movement’ in the 1910s generated new journalistic practices combining social science and investigative journalism (Anderson 2016; Anderson 2018). In the United States, some movements – such as ‘Men and Religion Forward’ – promoted quantitative approaches and social science in order to reform society, with some interest from newspapers which published charts or diagrams. But at the time, journalists did not consider that their professional role was to produce interpretations based on techniques which were moreover very difficult to integrate into the news making process. The situation changed in the late 1960s, as US investigative reporters began to use computer and quantitative social science in order to reveal government wrongdoings or inequalities within US society. Philip Meyer and David Burnham were among the first journalists to make major revelations 265

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based on computer processing of public data, showing for instance that black people are the main victims of urban violence in New York. As Sylvain Parasie and Éric Dagiral (2013) have shown, these investigative reporters identified with the term ‘computer-assisted reporting’ that was gaining currency in US journalism in the late 1980s. They believed that quantitative social science and computers provided a more efficient way of revealing wrongdoings or public issues through public documents: courts records, public decisions, and so on. In their view, adopting a computational approach to investigation would allow journalism to serve its accountability function better (Meyer 1973). Rather than singling out individual wrongdoings, this approach would shed light on more systemic explanations of government dysfunction. So far, few scholars have studied the historical background of data journalism, particularly outside of the USA. As these practices develop in European countries, for instance, it remains unclear how journalists build on shared professional norms when they develop an interest in quantification and data processing as a way to increase transparency and accountability.

A new division of labor In basing their work on digital data and algorithms, journalists collaborate with professionals and organizations that they were previously not used to working with (Gillespie, Boczkowski and Foot 2014). The revelation of scandals or public issues based on digital data and algorithms thus entails the contribution of a greater number of people and organizations. This has been noted by the researchers who have studied corpora of data-journalism projects praised by the profession (Loosen, Reimer and de Silva-Schmidt 2017). Whereas traditional investigative reporters usually work in small teams, these investigations require journalists to work with new actors – programmers, computer scientists, NGOs, etc. – and infrastructures such as databases, software, and digital platforms. As we shall see, these new collaborations raise new questions that scholars have only partially investigated. The most significant aspect of data journalism is the renewed relationships of news organizations with people with a background in computer science, statistics, or Web development. Some of them have integrated newsrooms and have been recognized as being part of the journalistic profession, as ‘data journalists’, ‘programmer-journalists’, or ‘news applications developers’ (Royal 2010; Parasie and Dagiral 2013). In short, the division between journalists in charge of producing editorial content, on the one hand, and programmers in charge of publishing or displaying that content on the other, is being challenged, as it is more widely accepted that computational skills may contribute to the production of the editorial content itself. Not only have data journalists called for an end to this division, but the institutions of journalism themselves have acknowledged the journalistic contribution of programmers and developers. This is evidenced in the emergence of the international ‘hacks/hackers’ network, where coders and journalists share their experience (Lewis and Usher 2014), or in the fact that major US journalism foundations increasingly value news projects initiated by computer scientists or propose a data-oriented solution, to the detriment of more traditional news projects (Lewis 2011). These new forms of collaboration between journalists and programmers raise several questions for research. One major question is: to what extent do the people with a background in computer science share some of the core journalistic values about what constitutes a scandal? Some authors have noted that programmers, developers, or designers often share a concern for the notion of free flow of information in society, which may differ significantly from the journalistic commitment to freedom of information (Ananny and Crawford 2015). Does this entail a departure from what journalists have historically understood to constitute a scandal? Another 266

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question is how journalists can develop data-processing skills, at least to interact with programmers or designers. Recent research suggests difficulties in many newsrooms in the USA and Europe (Gynnild 2014; Karlsen and Stavelin 2014; Hannaford 2015). Another critical question is the extent to which the relationship between journalists and programmers can be described as balanced or imbalanced. As programmers design algorithms in order to collect, process, or visualize information, do they increase their control over the news-making process at the expense of traditional journalists? These are critical questions for future research. A second aspect of this new division of labor is the role played by ‘data providers’. In most cases, they are governments or public institutions more generally, which provide news organizations with digital data and statistics. Official agencies in charge of producing statistical information (US Census; Eurostat) remain the most common data sources for news organizations (Parasie and Dagiral 2013; Loosen, Reimer and de Silva-Schmidt 2017), but other data providers have emerged. They may be individuals or small organizations leaking data from a private firm or government, for civic or commercial reasons. Such data leaks have aroused keen interest among journalists, especially around WikiLeaks and the emerging networks of investigative journalists. They may also be private companies selling digital data they collect from online platforms or public agencies (‘data brokers’), or NGOs or political observatories releasing data for civic-oriented reasons. These data providers raise important questions for research. Since the grounds on which they base their release of data are civic or commerce-oriented, on what conditions can news organizations trust them and reveal scandals based on their data? Decades ago, sociologists Harvey Molotch and Marilyn Lester (1974) analyzed the role of information promoters in the journalistic making of public events. The same line of questions emerges here, as journalists have to work with data providers that have their own agenda which potentially conflicts with that of the news organization. Yet, it would be wrong to assume that news organizations cannot use data from unofficial sources. The main question is how journalists develop their own standard as they assess the quality of the data (Parasie 2015). Even with ‘open government data’, journalists can find it very difficult to reveal scandals or affairs. As scholars have shown, the process of openness draws on a series of transformations that require significant work from administrations in order to ensure that the data remain intelligible outside of their organizations (Denis and Goëta 2017). As a consequence, journalists often face major challenges with open government data, as they struggle to articulate them to reveal scandals involving governments or private interests. There is a need for scholars to analyze the effects of these new collaborations on the making of scandals. How does the growing availability of digital data affect the collective production of scandals? To what extent can media organizations rely on digital data coming from new sources without being manipulated by political or commercial interests? And does the growing involvement of people with a background in computer science imply new ways of considering scandals? These are major questions for research.

A shift of epistemologies? Another line of research focuses on the epistemological foundations informing data journalists’ work as they reveal scandals or affairs based on data-processing techniques. Anchored in the sociology of knowledge, the study of journalistic ‘epistemologies’ implies the analysis of how journalists make knowledge claims that they collectively find acceptable – and not an evaluation of whether those claims are valid or not (Ettema and Glasser 1998). The question here is how the collection and processing of digital data affect the epistemologies on which journalists rely to 267

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produce scandals. In the last decades, many activists have considered that the internet offered an opportunity to limit the media control over the production and broadcasting of scandals. Since the late 2000s, WikiLeaks has raised significant concerns by releasing a considerable volume of data about many governments’ actions (Benkler 2011). More recently, computer scientists have argued that so-called ‘big data’ techniques are prompting major change in news organizations’ production of scandals (Lewis 2015). They claim that the statistical processing of huge datasets by news organizations facilitates revelations about the nature of society without relying on any theoretical or normative assumptions. This, they argue, means a change towards greater objectivity, since most journalists usually make assumptions before investigating a topic (Ettema and Glasser 1998). Scholars have analyzed the epistemological claims made by data journalists and people with a background in computer science. Studying data journalism in Chicago in 2010, Parasie and Dagiral pointed out that the rise of ‘programmer-journalists’ within news organizations challenged the epistemologies conveyed by established journalists, and especially computerassisted reporters (Parasie and Dagiral 2013). Drawing on the study of news projects and interviews with data journalists, these authors highlight three propositions that partially challenge long-standing journalistic epistemological principles: (1) news in itself should be viewed as computer-processable data, and not only as a story hidden in the data; (2) readers should be given the opportunity not only to check the data but also to combine them and to use them for other goals; (3) as databases are regularly and automatically updated, online applications allow journalists and ordinary citizens to check decisions made by city officials and to monitor possible wrongdoings. Yet most researchers stress that existing epistemologies tend to prevail in established news organizations. In the USA and in Europe, reporters working on computational news projects usually claim that they put these techniques at the service of their own journalistic standards. As Bucher (2017) found in several Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish news organizations, journalists emphasize the fact that they established their own priorities, without letting technology take the lead in any way. Interviewing reporters and data journalists from the Los Angeles Times, Young and Hermida (2015) analyzed how they collected homicide data from official sources and designed algorithms in order to generate automatically articles about every homicide, along with an interactive map. The authors’ claim is that data-processing techniques are tailored to fit established journalistic norms: each homicide is viewed through various criteria that are relevant for journalists; various sources of data are collected and combined in order to identify inconsistencies; and so on. Other researchers confirm this tendency among journalists to stick to their established epistemological perspective on news making. Although scholars have produced many ethnographic accounts of online news work in the last decade (Paterson and Domingo 2008; Boczkowski 2010), few have undertaken ethnographic research on how news organizations conduct particular investigations based on data and algorithms in order to examine ‘journalistic epistemologies in action’. One researcher has focused on a particular news organization, analyzing how it revealed that the State of California had failed to enforce earthquake safety standards in public schools (Parasie 2015). On the basis of in-depth interviews with the team of reporters and data journalists in charge of this investigation, the author shows that the organization devoted huge resources so that the database and the algorithms match with the established epistemology of journalistic investigation. The study shows that if the investigative team succeeded in producing a revelation despite the poor quality of the data, it is mostly because the reporters remained skeptical about the objectivity of the data. Thanks to a great deal of organizational work, they managed to rely on the data to produce a revelation that had a political impact. 268

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Journalism as a profession Data journalism can be viewed as an emerging ‘professional segment’ within journalism (Bucher and Strauss 1961). Data journalists are a coalition of people for whom some uses of technology provide the opportunity to accomplish better the traditional mission of journalism: mainly, informing citizens and holding governments accountable. Like any segments, they often challenge the norms of the profession as a whole. Several researchers have significantly contributed to the analysis of this process, but quite a few questions remain unanswered as regards media scandals. Some scholars have started to map this emerging segment in the United States and Europe, describing the educational backgrounds, skills, tools, and values of the individuals who call themselves data journalists (Fink and Anderson 2015; De Maeyer et al. 2015). These researchers show the strong diversity of trajectories. Some of them had professional experience in computer science before joining news organizations; others had been first trained as journalists, and chose to develop their skills in web development, programming, or statistics. More research is needed here to grasp fully the diversity of this emerging professional segment. Specifically, it is important to study their connection to investigative journalism, and more generally the production of scandals. Some scholars have studied the ‘boundary work’ done by journalists as they refused to acknowledge as ‘journalistic’ certain ways of producing scandals based on data processing. Coddington (2014) analyzed this collective work done by British and American journalists in the case of WikiLeaks. This organization has triggered critical reactions by most journalists, who refuse to see this as journalism. In order to dissociate themselves from WikiLeaks, these journalists claim that journalism involves many tasks such as selecting, editing, and interpreting documents, which WikiLeaks refuses to take on. Parasie and Dagiral (2013) have also analyzed criticism against data-oriented news projects, voiced by journalists who stress that the data is often not verified, whereas traditional journalists must verify every document. Data journalists usually claim that they only use data-processing techniques to perform what traditional journalists do: collect information, analyze it, and display it to the audience. Several researchers have pointed out that journalists from established news organizations often consider data journalism as ‘journalism as usual’, underlining the necessity for any journalist to share common professional standards (Appelgren and Nygren 2014; Bucher 2017). In a provoking essay, Daniel Kreiss criticizes the definition of journalism that is often assumed by data journalists (Kreiss 2016). He argues that journalism cannot be defined as information production, for two reasons: first, because the good health of a democracy is not proportional to the volume of information that is provided to the citizens; and second, because this definition jeopardizes journalism as a profession, since computer scientists are better equipped to produce and process information on an industrial scale. Kreiss calls for another definition of journalism that emphasizes the production of a ‘civic skepticism’ in society, notably against public or private authorities. As we can see, the rise of data journalism gives professionals and scholars the opportunity to reconsider what the core missions of journalism are. But more research is needed on that topic.

Involving citizens in the making of scandals A last area of research questions focuses on the involvement of citizens in the making of scandals or affairs. Promoters of data journalism often claim that their techniques help citizens play a greater role in the process of making wrongdoings or scandals visible. As they can check the data themselves – in raw formats, or via online maps and web applications – citizens are said to be able to identify wrongdoings, inequalities, or public issues. Consequently, ordinary citizens are afforded the opportunity to contribute more substantially to the making of scandals 269

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(Parasie 2013). This idea has been supported by many ‘open data’ advocates, often from the computer world, and implemented by many news organizations. News organizations have reached out to their readers through web applications displaying data about a wide range of political, social, economic, or environmental issues. Users can check measures of air quality at street level, parliamentarians’ expenses accounts, crime rates in cities or neighborhoods, and so on. In some cases, newspapers have crowd-sourced some tasks that needed too many resources inside the newsroom, such as data collection, cleaning, verifying, or analysis (Diakopoulos 2015). For instance, The Guardian obtained high levels of participation from its readers when it asked them to identify which parliamentarians’ expenses could be worth investigating (Daniel and Flew 2010). This led to a major scandal in the UK. But most established organizations have been reluctant to get their readers involved in the making of scandals, both because it challenged their professional role as journalists, and because it proved to be very difficult to get ordinary citizens involved in such time-consuming tasks. As a few scholars have pointed out, most organizations have used data-processing techniques to provide their readers with more personalized information (Parasie and Dagiral 2013), which has important implications for media scandals. Whereas traditional scandals usually focus on problems that are removed from readers, these techniques allow readers to situate themselves in relation to a particular problem. For instance, an investigation on air pollution would identify government responsibilities at national level, offering readers the possibility to check measures of air quality in their neighborhood. This phenomenon is in line with previous research on digital journalism (Boczkowski 2004), which shows the reluctance of established news organizations to use fully the interactive potentials of digital technologies. And yet we know very little about the people who actually check the data provided by news organizations. What are their backgrounds and motives? Are they only interested in making decisions as consumers, or do they seek to satisfy more civic-oriented interests? There is a major issue here, as many critics and scholars express a strong concern that citizens may be provided with information that revolves only around themselves as individuals (Sunstein 2018).

Conclusion As news organizations access more information in the form of digital data, the way they can contribute to the making of scandals appears to be significantly affected. Therefore, it becomes urgent to analyze how these emerging media practices may increase government accountability, the transparency of powerful interests, and more generally our collective ability to make public issues visible. Social science has an important part to play here, not only by offering tools to describe and explain social phenomena emerging from the data, but also by providing an alternative to technological determinism – that is the tendency to assume that data-processing techniques automatically increase the general level of transparency in our societies. At the intersection of sociology, communication science, and science and technology studies, several scholars have made significant contributions to account for these emerging media practices. They have identified several research questions that are worth exploring further if we wish to understand fully the evolution of our democracies.

References Anderson, C. W. (2013) ‘Towards a sociology of computational and algorithmic journalism’, New media & society, 15, 7, pp. 1005–1021. Anderson, C. W. (2016) ‘Social survey reportage: Context, narrative, and information visualization in early 20th century American journalism’, Journalism, 18, 1, pp. 81–100.

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Data Journalism Anderson, C. W. (2018) Apostles of Certainty: Data Journalism and the Politics of Doubt. New York: Oxford University Press. Ananny, M. and K. Crawford (2015) ‘A liminal press: Situating news app designers within a field of networked news production’, Digital journalism, 3, 2, pp. 192–208. Appelgren, E. and G. Nygren (2014) ‘Data Journalism in Sweden: Introducing new methods and genres of journalism into “old” organizations’, Digital Journalism, 2, 3, pp. 394–405. Arthur, C. (2010) ‘Analysing data is the future for journalists, says Tim Berners-Lee’, The Guardian, 22 November. Available online at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/nov/22/dataanalysis-timberners-lee, accessed on 10 April 2018. Benkler, Y. (2011) ‘A free irresponsible press: Wikileaks and the battle over the soul of the networked fourth estate’, Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, 46, pp. 311–397. Boczkowski, P. J. (2004) Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers. Cambridge and London: MIT Press. Boczkowski, P. J. (2010) News at Work: Imitation in an Age of Information Abundance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bucher, R. and A. Strauss (1961) ‘Professions in process’, American Journal of Sociology, 66, 4, pp. 325–334. Bucher, T. (2017) ‘Machines don’t have instincts’: Articulating the computational in journalism’, New media & society, 19, 6, pp. 918–933. Coddington, M. (2014) ‘Defending judgment and context in “original reporting”: Journalists’ construction of newswork in a networked age’, Journalism, 15, 6, pp. 678–695. Coddington, M. (2015) ‘Clarifying journalism’s quantitative turn: A typology for evaluating data journalism, computational journalism, and computer-assisted reporting’, Digital Journalism, 3, 3, pp. 331–348. Cohen, S., J. T. Hamilton and F. Turner (2011) ‘Computational journalism’, Communications of the ACM, 54, 10, pp. 66–71. Daniel, A. and T. Flew (2010) ‘The Guardian reportage of the UK MP expenses scandal: A case study of computational journalism’, in Record of the Communications Policy and Research Forum 2010, Network Insight Pty. Ltd., Sydney, pp. 186–194. De Maeyer, J., M. Libert, D. Domingo, F. Heinderyckx and F. Le Cam (2015) ‘Waiting for data journalism: A qualitative assessment of the anecdotal take-up of data journalism in French-speaking Belgium’, Digital Journalism, 3, 3, pp. 432–446. Denis, J. and S. Goëta (2017) ‘Rawification and the careful generation of open government data’, Social Studies of Science, 47, 5, pp. 604–629. Diakopoulos, N. (2015) ‘Algorithmic accountability: Journalistic investigation of computational power structures’, Digital Journalism, 3, 3, pp. 398–415. Ettema, J. S. and T. L. Glasser (1998) Custodians of Conscience: Investigative Journalism and Public Virtue. New York: Columbia University Press. Fink, K. and C. W. Anderson (2015) ‘Data Journalism in the United States: Beyond the “usual suspects”’, Journalism Studies, 16, 4, pp. 467–481. Gillespie, T., P. J. Boczkowski and K. A. Foot (eds.) (2014) Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality and Society. Cambridge and London: MIT Press. Gynnild, A. (2014) ‘Journalism innovation leads to innovation journalism: The impact of computational exploration on changing mindsets’, Journalism, 15, 6, pp. 713–730. Hamilton, J. (2016) Democracy’s Detectives: The Economics in Investigative Journalism. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Hannaford, L. (2015) ‘Computational journalism in the UK newsroom’, Journalism education, 4, 1, pp. 6–21. Karlsen, J. and E. Stavelin (2014) ‘Computational journalism in Norwegian newsrooms’, Journalism practice, 8, 1, pp. 34–48. Kreiss, D. (2016) ‘Beyond administrative journalism: Civic skepticism and the crisis in journalism’, in Jeffrey C. Alexander, Elizabeth Butler Breese and Maria Luengo (eds.), The Crisis of Journalism Reconsidered: Democratic Culture, Professional Codes, Digital Future. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 59–76. Lewis, S. (2011) ‘Journalism innovation and participation: An analysis of the Knight News Challenge’, International Journal of Communication, 5, pp. 1623–1648. Lewis, S. C. (2015) ‘Journalism in an era of big data: Cases, concepts, and critiques’, Digital Journalism, 3, 3. Lewis, S. C. and N. Usher (2014) ‘Code, collaboration, and the future of journalism: A case study of the Hacks/Hackers global network,’ Digital Journalism, 2, 3, pp. 383–393.

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27 CAUGHT BETWEEN TRANSPARENCY AND SCANDAL-MAKING Conceptualising WikiLeaks Benedetta Brevini and Jorge Valdovinos Introduction Transparency and scandals have been conventionally considered as two distinct—and even incompatible—categories on the grounds of their alleged relationship to the truth value of an event. Transparency is thought to be a precondition for scandals (something first needs to be exposed before the public can evaluate if a moral transgression has occurred), and yet at the same time, scandals are thought to foster transparency. In order to advance a proper understanding of the role that WikiLeaks has played in our contemporary public sphere, it is necessary to place both of them as part of an ideological continuum in the manufacturing of consent. The fluidity and progressive imbrication of trust and attention in our contemporary digital landscape makes it difficult to anticipate the public’s response to media events in terms of resistance and co-option. The various ways in which we frame an event can rapidly shift from politics to spectacle—or from accountability to distraction. The interchangeability of these modes (scandal politics and political scandals) is deeply related to the operation of power through media and information, and involves subtle operations that cannot be grasped by a clear-cut separation between these terms. This chapter develops a theoretical and critical understanding of how disclosure platform and transparency champion website WikiLeaks has shaken and shaped scandal discourses in the public sphere. Scholarship that has explored the rise and the legacy of WikiLeaks ranged from studies on the effect WikiLeaks has had on traditional journalism to the platform’s challenge to dominant power and secrecy; further scholarship uses WikiLeaks as a case study to understand the relationship between media and social movements and its ethical motivations (Brevini 2017). Thus, in this chapter we will first review the current literature on WikiLeaks in relation to transparency and openness; second we will contextualise it in current debates on scandals. Transparency operates by framing an event in specific ways, and then drawing attention away from this operation. The price we pay for seeing an event in a specific manner is losing sight of the constructed nature of such a point of view—which can naturalise political decisions into cultural assumptions. Scandals can be instrumental in this process, generating virtual lines that cut across the overlapping spheres of the public and the private, and reifying them through the very performative denunciation of their transgression. While it is unquestionable that disclosure 273

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and whistleblowing serve a crucial function in democracy, we argue that, in order for these acts to reach their full political potential, they need to be expressed in a way that can foster a strong (and long-lived) public response.

WikiLeaks: history and background WikiLeaks was founded in 2006 as an online platform for whistleblowers and the publication of information censored by public authorities and private actors. Its goal was to harness the speed, interactivity and global reach of the Internet to provide a fast and secure mechanism to submit information anonymously that will then be accessible to a global audience. In its first few years of existence, WikiLeaks electronically published a range of documents of varying significance to mixed media impact. The revelations included secret Scientology texts; a report documenting extensive corruption by the family of former Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi; proof that British company Trafigura had been illegally dumping toxic waste in Côte d’Ivoire (a story that the British media was legally barred from reporting); the financial dealings of Icelandic banks that led to the collapse of the country’s economy (a story the local media, too, were banned by court order from reporting); the private emails of then US Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin; member lists of a British right-wing party; the Internet filter lists of several countries; and many other disclosures of information that was previously hidden from the public eye. In hindsight, these releases, occurring between 2006 and 2009, were only the warm-up acts for the torrent of information that WikiLeaks unleashed in 2010, the year that established the website as a household name and saw its founder lambasted by some as a traitor and high-tech terrorist, and celebrated by others as a hero and leading transparency activist. On 5 April 2010, WikiLeaks published a video online evocatively titled “Collateral Murder.” It was an edited version of a classified US army video taken from an American Apache helicopter depicting a controversial 2007 US air strike on Baghdad that resulted in the deaths of Iraqi civilians and two Reuters employees. On July 25—in collaboration with established newspapers The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel—WikiLeaks published the Afghan War Logs before releasing the Iraq War Logs on 22 October. Altogether, the two dispatches comprised almost 500,000 documents and field reports that provided a comprehensive and unprecedented account of the two wars, revealing thousands of unreported deaths, including many US army killings of civilians. Finally, on 28 November, WikiLeaks and its partner newspapers began publishing select US diplomatic cables in what became known as Cablegate. Taken from a pool of over 250,000 cables, the communications offered a fascinating perspective on international diplomacy. They revealed many backroom deals among governments and between governments and companies, as well as US spy practices on UN officials, cover-ups of military air strikes and numerous cases of government corruption, most notably in Middle Eastern and North African countries, where the revelations fuelled the population’s growing anger towards their national elites. Nine months after the first releases were published in its partner newspapers, WikiLeaks made the full tranche of cables available on its website. It has since published other material, such as the Guantánamo Bay Files, information about the digital surveillance industry (Spyfiles) and emails from political figures and companies tied to Syria (Syria Files). However, in the wake of Cablegate, WikiLeaks’ operations became increasingly hampered by government investigations into its staff (particularly founder and editor-in-chief Julian Assange), internal strife and extralegal economic blockades that have choked its access 274

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to financial resources (Brevini and Murdock 2013). As Cablegate exposed WikiLeaks to the mainstream, the platform has seen an onslaught of attacks from both public and private actors, sustained attempts to shut down its operations and even calls for Julian Assange’s assassination. During the US election campaign, on 22 July 2016, WikiLeaks released over 20,000 emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC), the governing body of the US Democratic Party, including key DNC staff members: later in October the same year, WikiLeaks started releasing emails from John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. In 2017, WikiLeaks published internal CIA documents concerning hacking programmes and spy software targeting cellphones, smart TVs and computer systems in cars.

WikiLeaks in current literature: WikiLeaks and transparency Scholarship has explored the rise of WikiLeaks from a journalism studies perspective (Dunn 2013; Benkler 2013); further scholarship has employed WikiLeaks as a case study to understand the relationship between media and social movements and its ethical motivations (Brevini 2017). A very fruitful stream of scholarship has focused on the effect of the WikiLeaks model as a platform that challenges dominant articulations of power by investigating how it affects the current balance between openness and secrecy in domestic and international politics. In this way, WikiLeaks has been posited as a case study in the history of Internet policy; one which reflects the enmity between open and closed systems that have existed since the Internet’s commodification (Hintz 2013). This battle, Winseck warns, is not a fair one as “commercial businesses (seem) to be all too willing to serve the state on bended knees” (Winseck 2013, p. 167). Internet service providers, in particular, are thought to have fallen victim to state interests, and are seen by advocates of open-media to increasingly be assuming the role of the Internet’s gatekeepers— establishing the sovereignty of the state over cyberspace by identifying breaches in copyright, and complying to the demands of law enforcement and national security (Winseck 2013). From the perspective of transparency advocates, WikiLeaks is largely put forward as a symptom, rather than a cause, of the push for transparency on a global scale (Sifry 2011). Indeed, to transparency advocates, plurality is essential if the Internet’s distributive capacity is to compete with centralised control (Sifry 2011). As Sifry argues, it is not another “Big Brother” but a host of “Little Sisters” that are needed to “watch government(s) from below” (Sifry 2011, p. 110). York (2013) adds that in accepting the dynamism that is created by the transparency movement’s diverse actors, WikiLeaks’ present status is fated to subside as it continues. It must, she argues, make way for new, mobilised actors when information snowballs into real world action. Analysing WikiLeaks’ role in the Middle East, she states that this has, in fact, already been the case. It is difficult to pinpoint the presence of WikiLeaks in the events that unfolded in Tahrir Square, even if it assisted in inciting them (Saleh 2013). To Lovink and Riemens (2013), WikiLeaks has resigned itself to soft targets in its attacks. He suggests that it is yet to surmount the linguistic, cultural and political barriers that prevent it from inflicting significant damage in more authoritative regimes like Russia and China. As a result, it cannot claim that it is “a truly universal or global undertaking” (ibid., p. 247).

Transparency, ambiguity and WikiLeaks As a concept and visual metaphor, transparency has a longstanding tradition in the cultural imaginary of the West, spanning domains as diverse as political philosophy and aesthetics. And although the term still carries with it echoes of earlier semantic connotations, in the last few decades it has come to signify mostly “access to information,” or the degree to which 275

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evaluation-enabling information about “insiders” is made available to “outsiders” (Florini 2007). This usage has given the term a privileged role in attempts to describe the tensions between the disclosure and the secrecy of flows of data, some of which lie at the very core of our contemporary struggles for power (such as business regulation, environmental protection or national security). This ability to capture these tensions also make it a key term for understanding how our social conceptions of the spheres of the public and the private are being measured, compared, disputed and reformulated. It is important to note that this meaning (along with the whole semantic network to which it belongs, including associated terms such as “openness”) has come to express a positive cultural valence: the best and most desirable way to end corruption, to expose negligence, to increase efficiency, to enhance democracy, to promote policies, to build trust, to encourage accountability, to empower users, to improve public awareness, and so on. In the case of governmental institutions, for instance, transparency is used to refer to a “free” access to information held by authorities under the belief that citizens should have the fundamental right to see the operations and activities of those in power. Though this could imply, in principle, a certain degree of collaborative decision-making, it does not necessarily guarantee that the public will have access to “raw” or unfiltered data, or that the accessed information will translate into useful knowledge— knowledge that would serve as the basis for action. Nonetheless, this access is usually contrasted against a model of centralised authority, closed organisation or vertical hierarchy, in order to suggest a willingness to disclose or share information that can clarify the manner in which processes have (or are being) conducted. This “lack of impediments” to information is then equated as an implementation of the “right to know,” and then treated as an intrinsic good. This mechanism can be seen at work in various strands of cyber-utopianism and technological determinism, usually carrying the assumption that we are moving towards a “transparent society” (Brin 1999) due to the simple fact that ubiquitous networked technologies are making it increasingly hard for anyone to “hide from scrutiny.” Downplaying or altogether avoiding issues of surveillance and panoptic control, the generalised claim is that these networked digital technologies will also bring about a new era of collaboration, user empowerment and citizenled democracy. Supporters of WikiLeaks have usually framed the platform in these terms, making it “a symbol of the freedom of information” (Beyer 2014). In these discourses transparency is treated as an inherently valuable “meta-principle,” acquiring relevance across all domains and in spite of all contextual particularities. From a purely conceptual perspective, however, transparency is neither good nor bad: it is a logical operator that posits a fundamental ambiguity. For something to be “transparent” (having the property of transmitting light), it also needs to be partially invisible (so we can see through it, to the other side), and yet, this something also needs to remain perceptible as such (for us to qualify it as “transparent”). This suggests the coexistence of a medium and a barrier— transparency is always “open” to view in some respects, and “closed” to view in others. The most important distinction we can make is thus not between “good” transparency and “bad” transparency, but between transparency that has been framed as an instrumental value (as merely a means to achieve some other goal, such as accountability or public consent), and transparency that has been framed as an intrinsic value (as an end in itself). While the former might be about denunciation, censorship or political emancipation, the second has to do with the ways in which we “think” about transparency (the implicit cultural understanding of what it means to disclose or conceal something). By looking closely into the evolution of this second category, we might reveal how it is that we came to decide which are the “good” and “bad” ways of generating, circulating, accessing and putting barriers to information—decisions related to broader cultural, social and historical norms. 276

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At different times, Assange has gone from treating transparency as a goal in itself—as he did in a manifesto posted in 2006 (the same month that WikiLeaks would publish its first leak) where he talks about the “people’s will to truth”—to seeing it as an instrument for the achievement of justice: “It is not our goal to achieve a more transparent society; it’s our goal to achieve a more just society” (Assange, cited in Beckett 2013, p. 145).

Understanding scandals: “political scandals” versus “scandal politics” In this chapter, we will conceptualise scandals as a “breach of virtue exposed that causes public disapproval” (Markovits and Silverstein 1988, p. vii). Much of the literature on scandals has simply taken for granted that certain events are able to generate public indignation. But how is this assumption altered by a digital ecology in which attention itself has changed? Do echo chambers alter our assumptions about the nature of scandals? Although scandals are certainly not a novel occurrence, it can be argued that our globalised digital media has altered our relationship to them considerably: “What is most remarkable about scandal in a digital age is that we are all vulnerable—a completely unknown person who takes a mocking photo or posts an ignorant tweet can become the subject of intense international scrutiny and anger” (Mandell and Masullo Chen 2016, p. vii). On the one hand, we all know that the possibility of going suddenly public is an unavoidable feature of our contemporary lives, and thus we all fear being caught in a scandalous situation. But on the other hand, we also know that what is commonplace quickly loses its scandalous potential: “In a world where everything is public, it becomes less alarming that anything ceases to be private” (ibid., p. 211). But while the normalisation of a culture of selfexposure, coupled to an increase in everyday practices of digital surveillance, may have altered our conceptions of where the line between the public and the private might or should be, the need to imagine that line—and to separate spheres in such a way—remains a constant. As Thompson (2000) succinctly claimed, “scandals are reactions or events involving certain kinds of transgressions which become known to others and are sufficiently serious to elicit a public response” (p. 14). While scandals involve a transgression of a common perception of what “proper behaviour” is, they also entail a process of “converting people and ideas from acceptable to unacceptable in the public eye” (Allen 2016, p. 32). This conversion only occurs after a process of social construction: a given act needs to be framed in a such a way that it can receive a sanctioning judgement (ibid., p. 5). As Allen puts it, “the scandalicity of scandals is a meaning surplus value over and above the meaning that regulated the original conduct or behaviour” (ibid.). In other words, a scandal is experienced as something “extra,” something that cannot be located in the act itself, and that nonetheless is able to move us and trigger a moral response. One way of clarifying the role that scandal discourses might play in fostering public debate is by distinguishing between “political scandals” and “scandal politics,” drawing on the construction by Demirhan (2017). In a participative democracy, the correlation between access to information and active participation is taken for granted—usually by positing some form of critical public discussion as a transitional state between the publication of information and political engagement. But while a political scandal (emphasis on the political) refers to an event that has the potential to become a catalyst for critical public discussion, and thus to function as a preamble for political change, scandal politics (emphasis on scandals) involves the systematic portrayal of scandals in media as a continuous flow for the sake of generating profit, managing reputations and aligning private interests with public opinion. In a political scandal, the release of information used as evidence for claiming a transgression of social and political norms is able 277

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to generate a sustained and critical public debate, whereas in scandal politics we encounter the deliberate construction of “sensational events [that] take the attention of audiences temporarily instead of being a part of long term public discussion as a main problem of political systems” (Demirhan 2017, pp. 26–27). According to Castells (2013), media politics is the “politics of our age” and scandal politics is the “instrument of choice to engage in the political struggles of our time” (p. 250). Although he states that the effects of scandal politics on particular political outcomes are highly contextual, and thus findings are largely inconclusive, he notes that this instrument has seemed to have at least one clear, cumulative effect, namely amplifying citizen disaffection and contributing to a “worldwide crisis of political legitimacy” (p. 254). In a footnote to his essay Conspiracy as Governance, Assange himself wrote that “the impact of reported, but unanswered injustice is far greater than it may initially seem,” and that we are living in a time in which people are exposed to an “unprecedented deluge of witnessed, but seemingly unanswerable injustices” (2006, p. 1). Scandal politics involves a self-sustaining movement that can very easily feed into a logic of conspiracy: power is seen as the privilege of a few agents lurking in the shadows—as opposed to a distributed network that we all contribute to and sustain through our everyday practices— which elicits a high demand for discourses of disclosure, in the hope that these might contribute to levelling the playing field. This distinction gives us two very different kinds of transparency: one based on an economy of attention, and the other one based on the reassessment of trust. On the one hand, we have a politics centred on the systematic production and normalisation of scandals, that gives us only a momentary and partial glimpse onto specific happenings that are able to harness the public’s attention. While a transgression might be disclosed, secrecy is rapidly relocated, maintaining a succession of leaks and counter-leaks until attention declines. On the other hand, when a political event is able to spark (and maintain) critical public deliberation, we are in the presence of a form of transparency that can both disrupt and rearrange social relations of trust—we gain a window, so to speak, to the way in which public will has hitherto been structured. The first might be termed first-level transparency, or access to informational contents that are able to garner attention without producing long-lasting or far-reaching critical debate (we might not trust a politician or government after this, but the faith in the overall system remains untouched), while the second might be called second-level transparency: access to information that is able to generate a public discussion on the nature of trust as such—on the social, economic, cultural and legal relations that sustain our expectations regarding other people’s intentions. “In a culture of secrecy, that which is not secret is easily disregarded or dismissed” (Moynihan, quoted in Sifry 2011, p. 158). At the same time, in a world with an over-abundance of information, marking something as “secret” or “classified” is one of the quickest ways to add value to it: if everything is readily available, then the few things that are not immediately available become worthy of attention. Scandals work as such precisely because we live in a culture of secrecy: the mere mention of an effort to conceal guarantees public interest. Its inaccuracy or deceptiveness is secondary—due to being necessarily retrospectively proved.

WikiLeaks as a continuum between politics and scandals Transparency is thought to be a precondition for scandals (something first needs to “surface out” before the public can evaluate if a moral transgression has occurred), and yet at the same time, scandals are thought to foster transparency—both a posteriori (when in the aftermath of a 278

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publicly relevant issue people are able to assess if more transparency has, in fact, been achieved), and a priori (when the very threat of legal consequences or social shaming is thought to act as a deterrent for non-transparent behaviour). Both of these modes (scandal politics and political scandals) are deeply related to the power of media and information, and thus should not be seen as mutually exclusive. Both of these modes (scandal politics and political scandals) are deeply related to the power of media and information, and thus should not be seen as mutually exclusive. At the same time that WikiLeaks scandalised political corruption, mainstream media scandalised WikiLeaks by focusing on allegations of sexual misconduct against Assange (Demirhan 2017, p. 38). The centre of attention shifted, the locus of secrecy changed and trust was consequently modified—the question now became: “Who is Assange? What are his true intentions? Can we believe him?” In order for the promises of transparency to be fulfilled, they need to become political events that are able to go beyond its taming reabsorption by the media industry. For any modality of scandal to be treated as such, it needs to be framed as a situation with deep ethical or moral implications. The transgression needs to be posited, claimed, demonstrated. “While a scandal story needs facts, it needs them for purposes that are not justified from those facts” (Ehrat 2011, p. 7). This “something more” goes beyond a neutral depiction of reality—which means that the connection between scandals and transparency exceeds the mere exposure of evidence related to corruption—it is at the same time a performative definition of what corruption “is.” I want to set up a new standard: “scientific journalism.” If you publish a paper on DNA, you are required, by all the good biological journals, to submit the data that has informed your research—the idea being that people will replicate it, check it, verify it. So this is something that needs to be done for journalism as well. (Assange, cited by Khatchadourian 2010) As we now know, Assange and his team of collaborators still edited the “raw” footage, as well as manipulated the soundtrack, adding context to it. And although the famous video of the Apache helicopter was released in both raw and edited forms, the very choice of the title “collateral murder” serves this framing purpose, straining any simple claim to objectivity. In December 2006, WikiLeaks posted its first document: a “secret decision,” signed by Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, a Somali rebel leader for the Islamic Courts Union. The document called for the execution of government officials by hiring “criminals” as hit men. Assange and the others were uncertain of its authenticity, but they thought that readers, using the Wikipedialike features of the site, would help them to analyze it. They published the decision with a lengthy commentary, which asked, “Is it a bold manifesto by a flamboyant Islamic militant with links to Bin Laden? Or is it a clever smear by US intelligence, designed to discredit the Union, fracture Somali alliances and manipulate China?” The document’s authenticity was never determined, and news about WikiLeaks quickly superseded the leak itself (Khatchadourian 2010).

Conclusion Although transparency and scandals have been traditionally treated as two distinct—and irreconcilable—categories on the grounds of their alleged relationship to the truth value of an event, in order to advance a proper understanding of the role that WikiLeaks has played in our contemporary public sphere, it is necessary to place both of them as part of an ideological continuum in the manufacturing of consent. 279

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The contents leaked by WikiLeaks are largely seen as “raw data” without any specific frame, which allows them to attain an aura of objectivity and reliability. But leaks still need to be framed. And transparency serves as a conceptual modality of framing that can be used to preempt, resolve (and dissolve) the tensions that emerge through public debate. Scandals are scandals as long as they are able to generate public debate, and transparency involves a specific way of framing that debate in advance. Alexandra Plows (2012, p. 20) has defended the point that public debates are always already “framed” in one way or the other, and thus publics have little option but to engage with issues on terms they would not have necessarily set themselves. Plows recognises that “line drawing” debates, which are often framed in “pro or anti format,” are most prominent in the public sphere (ibid., pp. 4–5). It is not to be doubted that radical disclosure serves a crucial function for democracy. But in order for this function to reach its full political potential, it needs to be articulated in a way that can stir and harness the forces of public debate. Although the transparency wars are fought on the levels of politics and governance, the ongoing discursive instrumentalisations of “transparency,” as well as the successful exploitation of its associated terms in the public sphere, have largely shifted the battle to the cultural terrain. WikiLeaks’ contribution in this regard can be said to transcend the potentially scandalous nature of any particular leak: it has helped to establish our social imaginary, not just the viability or usefulness of a global public intelligence platform, but the necessity of a model for disclosure that can surpass the barriers and limitations imposed by local governments and their vertical hierarchies. That this model of radical transparency is able to sustain itself over time, circumventing its absorption by the dominant powers, remains contestable.

References Allen, N. (2016) ‘Using Political Scandal to Limit Social Justice.’ In H. Mandell & G. Masullo Chen (Eds.), Scandal in a Digital Age (pp. 29–40). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Assange, J. (2006) ‘Conspiracy as Governance.’ Available at https://e00-elmundo.uecdn.es/documentos/ 2010/12/01/conspiracies.pdf Beckett, C. (2013) WikiLeaks: News in the Networked Era. Cambridge: Polity Press. Benkler, Y. (2013) ‘WikiLeaks and the Networked Fourth Estate.’ In P. McCurdy, B. Brevini & A. Hintz (Eds.), Beyond WikiLeaks: Implications for the Future of Communications, Journalism and Society (pp. 11–34). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Beyer, J. L. (2014) ‘The Emergence of a Freedom of Information Movement: Anonymous, WikiLeaks, the Pirate Party, and Iceland.’ Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 19(2), 141–154. Brevini, B. and Murdock, G. (2013) ‘Following the Money: WikiLeaks and the Political Economy of Disclosure.’ In P. McCurdy, B. Brevini & A. Hintz (Eds.), Beyond WikiLeaks: Implications for the Future of Communications, Journalism and Society (pp. 35–55). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Brevini, B. (2017) ‘WikiLeaks: Between Disclosure and Whistle-blowing in Digital Times.’ Sociology Compass, 11(3). Brin, D. (1999) The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? New York: Basic Books. Castells, M. (2013) Communication Power. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Demirhan, K. (2017) ‘Scandal Politics and Political Scandals in the Era of Digital Interactive Media.’ In K. Demirhan & D. Çakır-Demirhan (Eds.), Political Scandal, Corruption, and Legitimacy in the Age of Social Media (pp. 25–50). Hershey, PA: IGI Global. Dunn, Hopeton S. (2013) ‘“Something Old, Something New . . .”: WikiLeaks and the Collaborating Newspapers—Exploring the Limits of Conjoint Approaches to Political Exposure.’ In B. Brevini, A. Hintz, & P. McCurdy (Eds.), Beyond WikiLeaks: Implications for the Future of Communications, Journalism and Society (pp. 85–100). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ehrat, J. (2011) Power of Scandal: Semiotic and Pragmatic in Mass Media. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

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Transparency and scandal-making Florini, A. (Ed.) (2007) The Right to Know: Transparency for an Open World. New York: Columbia University Press. Hintz, A. (2013) ‘Dimensions of Modern Freedom of Expression: WikiLeaks, Policy Hacking, and Digital Freedoms.’ In P. McCurdy, B. Brevini & A. Hintz (Eds.), Beyond WikiLeaks: Implications for the Future of Communications, Journalism and Society (pp. 146–165). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Khatchadourian, R. (2010) ‘No Secrets.’ New Yorker, 7. Lovink, G. & Riemens, P. (2013) ‘Twelve Theses on WikiLeaks.’ In P. McCurdy, B. Brevini & A. Hintz (Eds.), Beyond WikiLeaks: Implications for the Future of Communications, Journalism and Society (pp. 245–253). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mandell, G. & Masullo Chen, G. (Eds.) (2016) Scandal in a Digital Age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Markovits S. A. & Silverstein, M. (Eds.) (1988) The Politics of Scandal: Power and Process in Liberal Democracies. New York: Holmes & Meier. Plows, A. (2012) Debating Human Genetics: Contemporary Issues in Public Policy and Ethics. London: Routledge. Saleh, I. (2013) ‘WikiLeaks and the Arab Spring: The Twists and Turns of Media, Culture, and Power.’ In B. Brevini, A. Hintz, & P. McCurdy (Eds.), Beyond WikiLeaks: Implications for the Future of Communications, Journalism and Society (pp. 166–177). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sifry, M. L. (2011) Wikileaks and the Age of Transparency. New York: OR Books. Thompson, J. (2000) Political Scandals. Cambridge: Polity. Winseck, D. (2013) ‘Weak Links and WikiLeaks: How Control of Critical Internet Resources and Social Media Companies’ Business Models Undermine the Networked Free Press.’ In P. McCurdy, B. Brevini & A. Hintz (Eds.), Beyond WikiLeaks: Implications for the Future of Communications, Journalism and Society (pp. 166–177). York, J. C. (2013) ‘The Internet and Transparency Beyond WikiLeaks.’ In P. McCurdy, B. Brevini & A. Hintz (Eds.), Beyond WikiLeaks: Implications for the Future of Communications, Journalism and Society (pp. 229–235).

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28 SCANDAL MINING AND SOCIALLY MEDIATED VISIBILITY Daniel Trottier

Aspiring and actual public figures make use of social media to author uncivil and vitriolic statements. While this is hardly a new practice, these statements may be unearthed at a later stage, for example, in the context of an election campaign. These discoveries appear to have significant implications for our understanding of scandal, notably through a potential democratisation of political interventions. This appears to be a by-product of the recent emergence and uptake of digital devices, which enable a more pervasive monitoring of public and private spaces, along with prominent digital platforms that trouble such dichotomies. Political candidates become an easy target when anyone can comb through their Twitter profiles for objectionable content. At the same time, established political and media figures adapt to these conditions and develop both reactive and proactive strategies in response to online scrutiny and denunciations. This chapter considers scandal mining as an emerging practice that is shaped by longstanding forms of political denunciation, and in turn shapes potentially democratised forms of scrutiny and accountability. Drawing from previous research on this topic (Trottier 2017a), I begin with a critical review of academic literature on political scandals, notably as they relate to mediated visibility. Particular attention is devoted to the role of digital media technologies in particular. I then provide an overview of the 2015 federal election in Canada as a pivotal moment in scandal mining practices. This election saw nearly 40 candidates from four major parties becoming compromised as a result of content they either authored or shared online. In light of current concern with political scandal, I conclude by considering directions for future scholarship, while attempting to anticipate what the mediated political and electoral landscape will resemble in the coming years.

Defining political scandal Earlier literature on political scandal provides an indication of how personal incidents (of varying degrees of severity) are expressed in news media. Thompson (2008) identifies five features of scandal (13–14): (1) transgressions of certain norms or values that (2) were meant to remain concealed, but become known to others, who (3) disapprove of these transgressions, and (4) publicly express this disapproval, and (5) may damage the reputation of those involved. First, the transgression itself may be categorised in terms of “financial corruption, political corruption, personal scandals, and international scandals” (Basinger and Rottinghaus 2012, 218). We may 282

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anticipate that the opening up of candidates’ lives via social platforms affords a preponderance for personal scandal, if only because one struggles to imagine evidence of financial and political corruption manifest through a candidate’s public posts. Also, we may consider “talk scandals” as an additional category of speech acts that transgress discursive norms about “how one should behave in the public sphere” (Ekström and Johansson 2008, 64). Not only can such utterances be situated within a social media platform at their conception, but they can easily circulate through a broader digital media landscape. Examples include transgressive public statements, but also instances where “back-stage utterances” are rendered public. Speech acts contained on (and circulated through) social media platforms further complicate distinctions between front and back stage (Goffman 1959; Trottier 2013), as statements presumed to be fit for circulation in the interpretation of a context-specific public (such as the fellow members of a regional or hobby-based social media group) may still provoke offence and recourse if they circulate to a broader public (such as through coverage by a national broadcaster or newspaper). Second, the process of concealment and discovery is “often characterised by a drama of concealment and disclosure” (Thompson 2008, 18). On first pass, this drama may be greatly diminished in the case of digital media scandals, when offending acts are posted on public profiles. Yet the retroactive management of online content (deleting posts; augmenting privacy settings) may nevertheless constitute a “second order transgression” (ibid., 17), which can potentially overshadow the original offence. Third, discovery without disapproval by some kind of audience will not constitute a scandal. In considering the role of digital media, revelation and disapproval followed by silence (or online chatter that fails to reach an indeterminate threshold) may not suffice either. Scandal is partly enacted by “opprobrious discourse” (ibid., 20), including condemnation, reproach and rebukes. Thompson comments that the intensity and perhaps also the veracity of such moralitybased discourse are lessened in contemporary media culture, and may instead serve partisan or policy ends. Nevertheless, the response must be uttered “in a way that it can be heard by a plurality of others” (ibid., 21) in order to produce “consistent views and widespread anger among the audience” (Kepplinger et al. 2012, 659). With digital media tools “individuals can express opprobrium in ways which, by virtue of the medium itself, endow the expressions with the status of public speech-acts” (ibid.). Yet we can consider the amount of circulation or plurality necessary for such speech-acts to trigger scandal. If a social media-based talk scandal in the 2015 election was discovered and circulated by a blog with a few thousand readers, but not recirculated by the national broadcaster or major newspapers, can it be considered as scandalous? Finally, damaged or depleted reputation is neither necessary nor inevitable, but the risk of it is. While this has been the end state for many twentieth-century scandals, the magnitude of this depletion (for the individual candidate as well as the political party and its leader) may be lessened depending on the status of the political actor targeted by scandal mining. Beyond individual or party reputation, we can consider scandal’s broader impact on “the perceived boundaries of public institutions, either reinforcing or blurring traditional lines of demarcation between the political class, the media, the judiciary and corporate interests” (Fieschi and Heywood 2004, 290).

Mediated visibility as constructed and contested In explaining a growing prevalence of political scandal, Thompson (2008, 108) provides three attributions. First, an increased visibility of political actors produces vulnerabilities for candidates. Media publicity is a requirement for political life, while simultaneously binding aspiring politicians to other actors and unanticipated and unmanageable circuits of information exchange. 283

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Second, changes in technologies of communication and surveillance result in supposedly private conversations that “may unexpectedly acquire a public character” (ibid., 109). These features are addressed in further detail below. Third, we can consider a changing culture of investigative journalism. To this we may specifically consider actors that are placed at the margins of conventional journalism, such as online semi-professionalised or crowd-sourced venues. This is considered in the following section. Visibility stands as a central condition (Lyon 2002) and category (Brighenti 2007) for the social sciences. Recognising this importance implies a need to appreciate the deliberate effort taken to produce and acknowledge social visibility. In the context of political scandal, it is not simply a matter of discrediting details being revealed (or leaked). In addition to discrediting content, scandal depends on the media and the public, who must accept the event as both having occurred and being offensive. In pointing to perceived shortcomings in the literature, Welch addresses an overemphasis on the determinant nature of the moment of exposure, at the expense of understanding “the prolonged and contested process through which that exposure occurs and is made significant” (2007, 182). Focusing on exemplary twentieth-century American cases such as Watergate and the Clinton–Lewinsky affair, he advocates for an anti-essentialist understanding of political scandal “characterized not by exposure but by the political construction of exposure” (ibid., 187). In contrast to the epistemologically simplistic “smoking gun” metaphor, the notion of plausible deniability “expresses its politicized complexity” (ibid., 188). While the construction and management of scandal warrants greater scrutiny, we may presume that in the case of lesser political figures (including inexperienced candidates in unfavourable ridings), established parties prefer the strategy of removing disgraced candidates, rather than denying the scandalous nature of social media postings. Yet treating mediated visibility as “always shaped by a broader set of cultural assumptions and frameworks” (Thompson 2005, 36) supports an understanding of scandal that is necessarily coconstruction by political, journalistic and other mediated actors and contexts. The recent focus on social media gaffes further complicates this co-construction, as platforms where the offending act is authored and circulated are prominently used in a range of personal and professional contexts. Indeed, social media are often framed as indispensable tools for politicians in elections, notably in order to reach and mobilise younger voters (Aldrich et al. 2016). Yet recent scholarship also suggests that politicians generally make use of platforms like Facebook and Twitter for “the more familiar and conventional logic of [a] one-way flow” of party approved content (Ross et al. 2015, 266), and that those who actively make use of these platforms tend to hold a kind of political “underdog” status as they are “younger, in opposition and out of the political limelight” (Larsson and Kalsnes 2014, 653). This suggests a generalised reluctance among established political actors to go beyond a conservative and calculated presence on these platforms. Under these circumstances, scandalous speech acts may play a greater role in shaping public understandings of political engagements online. Not only do citizens come to expect and seek out available content linked to politicians, but scandalous revelations may be found on accounts also used for strategic ends by candidates, notably those bearing an “underdog” or “nobody” status. The openly available and easily recirculated nature of social media content appears to dampen the possibility of political actors engaging in denial and/or concealment of scandalising content. In providing a more rigorous account of candidate reactions to these discoveries, it is possible that they invoke privacy and/or unsanctioned visibility in defending their reputation (and delegitimising the revelations). As such, these revelations and the kinds of appeals to privacy that are (not) made speak to the negotiated status of such personal or political data. And while citizens may be in a position to locate and remediate incriminating content from political actors, these conditions of visibility may also shape how their own online visibilities are understood and negotiated. 284

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A shifting news media landscape? The press are typically understood as fulfilling multiple roles in the construction of political scandal. These include setting “a stage for the denouncer to suggest scandal”, further legitimating the proposed scandal by “react[ing] to make the pattern evolve from the stage of suggesting scandal to a fully developed one”, and finally serving “as a proxy—or more formally speaking, as a functional equivalent—for the public in scandal communication” (Esser and Hartung 2004, 1047–1048). Formal media outlets are thus understood as not only providing the conditions for an initial revelation, but also for the subsequent denouncement and deliberation. Such an emphasis on scandal may serve to trivialise popular understandings of the political process (Fieschi and Heywood 2004, 299), although politicians themselves may exploit “the media’s shift to a more personalised content” as a means “to bypass more conventional party-based channels of communication with the electorate” (ibid., 300). Whereas potentially scandalous information was previously withheld and brokered by specific gatekeepers, Williams and Delli Carpini describe the contemporary digital media landscape as “providing virtually unlimited sources of political information (although these sources do not provide anything like an unlimited number of perspectives)” that “undermines the idea that there are discrete gates through which political information passes: If there are no gates, there can be no gatekeepers” (2004, 1208). Digital media tools can be broadly understood as enabling greater citizen engagement, notably in the manifestation of citizen journalism as well as userled campaigns (Tufekci and Wilson 2012). They also allow citizens to identify and circulate potentially discrediting information about political actors. Indeed, recent scholarship considers how news media practices can adapt to user-led digital media activity. Chadwick refers to the emergence of “nonelite participants” who “now interact exclusively online in order to advance or contest specific news frames or even entire stories” (2011, 8). The fact that social media platforms in particular are both a source of scandalous data as well as spaces to publicise further this content supports the view that coverage of scandal “takes place in public or semipublic online environments” (ibid.). Yet empirical studies suggest that “viral” spikes in social media viewership of a scandalous event depend on coverage from mass media venues (Toepfl 2011). News may “break first online” and then be picked up, circulated and even validated by the press (Chadwick 2011, 5). The degree to which political events are rendered meaningful and visible nevertheless continues to depend on press organisations. The role that digital media might play in the propagation of scandal needs to be understood more in terms of how these platforms “function in tandem with other spheres of traditional mass media rather than as isolated forms of communication” (ibid., 1315). It is necessary to examine the interactions between digital media and other media spheres as co-constitutive of scandal. Individuals engaged in scandal mining may depend on conventional media channels in order to reach a sufficient audience, but also for the designation of a mediated act as scandalous. For this reason, cases that are reported online and not picked up by broadsheets and major broadcasters are especially illustrative of this mutual co-construction of scandal. Yet even if the role of the citizen journalist in reporting scandal is limited and dependent upon more established media channels, this marks a departure from previous understandings of the public as the mere recipient of the scandalous event (especially if mass media served as a more effective proxy for the public than members of the public themselves). This fits an understanding of citizens as an audience “who have had their fill of scandalous disclosures” (Thompson 2008, 88), contributing both to a weariness towards the media, as well as a generalised distrust of politics. While digital media may offer a novel engagement to mitigate these effects, they are also characterised by a socalled engagement economy (McGonigal 2008) whereby user input is itself a scarce and fleeting 285

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resource. Potentially, engaging through social media platforms enables citizens to mobilise fellow citizens, for example, in the context of discrediting a political candidate. Yet this potential does not obviate the need for scandal to flow through conventional media channels.

Scandal mining in the context of the 2015 Canadian federal election The 2015 Canadian federal election was first announced on Sunday, 2 August. With the election date set for 19 October, the 78-day campaign period would be the longest in recent history, and longer than the previous two federal elections combined. Already prior to the election call, three federal candidates were identified as a result of political missteps. Béatrice Zako from the NDP resigned in June after being identified as favouring Quebec independence on another (provincial) party website,1 while the Liberal’s Ray Fox and the Conservative party’s Julian DiBattista had published offensive content of their Facebook profile and blog, respectively.2 In the week following the election call, three candidates from the Liberal and Conservative parties were targeted by Montreal based newspapers La Presse and the Journal de Montreal, along with political analyst Jean Lapierre. In the following weeks, unaffiliated blogger Robert Jago and political content start-up True North Times (TNT) were collectively responsible for the discovery and reporting of at least 15 cases on Facebook and Twitter, but also YouTube, Tumblr as well as personal blogs and comments posted on news websites. These actors stood alongside more conventional news media such as the national broadcaster (CBC), prominent newspapers such as the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star, as well as online news venues like Huffington Post Canada. While the latter did first identify some candidate missteps, such as Conservative candidate Jerry Bance’s infamous urination into a client’s coffee cup,3 they also provided Jago and TNT with greater circulation by reporting their discoveries. During the 11-week campaign a constellation of actors, including unaffiliated or covertly affiliated individuals and organisations as well as journalists and political professionals, rendered candidate missteps visible. The line separating journalistic and independent actors from major party campaigns is not evident. The website MeetTheNDP.ca took aim at the official opposition, and circulated potentially controversial perspectives expressed online. While nominally similar to sites like Conservatives of FB,4 a Facebook page that targets semi-anonymised Facebook users and circulates their views, MeetTheNDP was in fact registered to the Conservative party.5 Such sites indicate that scandal mining marks a convergence of established party attack advertisement strategies and broader online campaigns of public shaming through recirculation. In terms of alleged offences, candidates like the Bloc Québécois’s Chantal St-Onge had expressed support for extremist groups like Pegida,6 while others like the Conservative’s Blair Dale and Gordon Giesbrecht expressed controversial views about abortion.7 Interestingly, the TNT identified Liberal Kimberley Love’s anti-gun rhetoric as potentially incompatible with her rural Ontario constituents,8 and NDP candidate Ethan Rabidoux’s pro-gun sentiment as incompatible with his party.9 Thus, the expression of scandal seems based on any available political incompatibility, rather than from a personally rooted sense of moral offence. Yet the above examples of political incompatibility were overshadowed by cases of sexist, racist, xenophobic and generally vitriolic sentiment, which made up a significant part of the documented offences. Of the 39 candidates who were targeted online, 18 resigned or were removed by their party (along with Conservative board member Sue MacDonell), while the other half apologised, transferred blame to other members of staff, or simply did not acknowledge the revelation. When looking at the candidates who were targeted, only three (Buddy Ford, Nicola Di Iorio and Jerry Bance) did not involve content which those candidates previously posted on either 286

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social media, comments sections in online news sources, or other websites. Social media features predominantly in the public expression of political scandal, as for both party-affiliated and autonomous actors it is a platform to express and announce it, but also the platform where the gaffe occurs. As Facebook and other platforms become sites for user-led production and circulation of content, these actors begin to maintain assumptions about candidates: that they have some kind of public presence on social platforms (especially as political hopefuls), and that this presence contains incriminating statements. Of the 39 targeted candidates, only one was an incumbent: NDP Pat Martin, whose offending utterances occurred at a public forum.10 Likewise, only three of 39 candidates were elected. As social media allow for a greater focus on non-political life of political figures (including those at the margins), unelected candidates become more visible and legible in election media. As it becomes taken for granted that all candidates are present on digital media (for electoral as well as in other professional and personal capacities), marginal political party members may have a greater bearing on the success of their parties. Candidates identified in scandal mining often were based in ridings where the party had little historic evidence of former success, such as Liberals in Calgary and Conservatives in Toronto. These non-incumbents could be assumed to be comparatively inexperienced in public political communications, and for strategic reasons not as carefully vetted by their party. Yet the previous election also demonstrated that these ridings’ predictability was not assured, particularly as when the NDP’s electoral gains in Quebec placed a party-affiliated type of “political nobody” into the public eye. The content used to scandalise political actors in the 2015 elections dates as far back as 2005. While political strategists may look back at 2015 as a formative moment in social media liabilities, social media platforms, blogs and comments sections on news websites were by no means a novelty at that point. Political parties and prominent candidates employed digital media strategists. And while lesser candidates surely have forward-looking strategies for social media that are to some degree directed centrally by party strategy, they may still have to cope with online content they posted previously. We can presume that many candidates proactively remove content, though these strategies may fail to evade automated caches and vigilant (manual) screencapping, often by unaffiliated individuals and self-styled “political nobodies”. We may consider the origins and motivations of this particular category of political nobody. Though unaffiliated with influential media outlets (or political parties), they use digital media to discover and announce scandal, while relying on the national broadcaster and major newspapers’ reporting and confirmation of these scandals when their discoveries are picked up on these venues. Robert Jago is a Montreal-based blogger who cites several reasons—including electoral reform, the fair elections act and anti-terrorism measures—as justification to target a particular type of Conservative candidate: one with little public visibility standing in tactically important ridings.11 True North Times is a website managed by a group that is partly inspired by Jago’s efforts12 yet employs more of a start-up framework in expressing its purpose and structure. They claim to produce media content “designed to engage the demographics that have a huge potential impact but are plagued by apathy”.13 Although they may stand outside of conventional political parties and mass media outlets, their political experience and organisational structure is not fully captured in the term “political nobody”. Likewise, Liberal candidate Ala Buzreba’s offensive tweets were discovered by Sheila Gunn Reid, currently the “Alberta Bureau Chief” of TheRebel, an online platform run by former Sun News Network host Ezra Levant. Online platforms like Press Progress also contribute to scandal mining, notably through the identification of Conservative candidate Marilyn Gladu’s anti-Muslim rhetoric on Facebook.14 Yet this particular outlet has explicit links to progressive think tank the Broadbent Institute (founded by former NDP leader Ed Broadbent), and as such do not share the same 287

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kind of non-professionalised designation. Other cases may be linked to less prominent actors who remain unnamed in press coverage. Low-level scandal can also be triggered by real-time activity on digital media, for example when Chantal St-Onge expressed support for Pegida on Facebook nearly seven weeks into the campaign. In this case scandal is framed as being brought about in direct response to the candidate’s online act, and the process of seeking offensive content is greatly downplayed. While digital media platforms are thus framed as a resource that can be extracted for political and or media gains (through the visibility of missteps), the 2015 election also indicated some limitations to the kind of visibility that can be constructed. First, as discussed previously, candidates will remove incriminating content, either pre-emptively before a discovery, or shortly after it is announced or covered in the media. Such tactics mirror earlier denial and concealment moves by political actors in the grips of a scandal. What is more striking is that those involved in the extraction and circulation of scandalous content also have an ephemeral presence online. At the time of writing, neither Jago’s website (Some Random Political Blog) or Twitter account contains any substantial evidence of the revelations made during the 2015 election campaign. In these cases, the process of making scandals visible is itself no longer visible. Such findings are in line with a generalised strategic use of mediated visibility (Trottier 2017b) whereby any evidence of a mediated campaign is itself removed. They also problematise a claim by Thompson that political scandals “are unlikely to rely solely or heavily on relatively ephemeral forms of evidence” (2008, 68–69). Social media content may initially be more accessible to the public than other evidence of scandal, notably through the recirculation of offending content by investigative journalists and “political nobodies”. Yet if the offending content and the initial discovery can both be removed by their respective perpetrators, it bears reflecting on the ephemerality of such campaigns, with evidence of the offence and ensuing campaign accessible only through secondary press coverage and archived caches.

Discussion and considerations for future research The above literature review taken together with the 2015 case study raise a number of concerns about the manifestation of scandal through contemporary digital tools. We can anticipate that political strategists as well as journalists will continue to refine their professional strategies, all while new digital media tools become available to the public. Scholarly research ought to be attentive to the following considerations. First, in 2015 the notion of the “political nobody” stood out as a prominent subject position, yet it remains unclear who will continue to be able to bring political candidates to resignation in the future. In questioning who is entitled to participate in mediated scrutiny and denunciation of politicians, scholars must be mindful of the types of barriers to participation that will be upheld in the coming years. As a starting point, one would expect political actors to remove any problematic content. On the one hand we can anticipate a more proactive self-management by individuals aspiring to hold political office. As is the case with social media use more broadly (Marwick and Boyd 2014), high profile incidents may prove instructive in guiding candidates to either sanitise or withhold objectionable content online. Along with candidates themselves, it seems likely that party strategists will implement a more direct management of candidates’ public, but also private and personal, digital media content. Inexperienced candidates in particular will likely undergo more rigorous and further reaching screening practices, and those who risk bringing scandal to the party will be omitted. Finally, scholarship should remain attentive to commercially available tools and services for managing and scrubbing missteps, as well as for working towards a collective “forgetting” of past indiscretions, for example, through search 288

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engine manipulation. As Jon Ronson notes in the context of public shaming (2015), such tools are available, and disproportionally favour those who can afford them. Alongside political actors, it is important also to consider the role of platforms in either enabling or dampening user scrutiny of public figures. This seems especially important as platforms like Twitter appear to occupy the status of default platforms for political communication with the public, and may even serve as a kind of public record in a more cross-contextual sense (Trottier 2015). Researchers should continue to interrogate the perceived status of prominent platforms, especially as recent platform-specific scandals (such as Facebook’s troubles with regards to Cambridge Analytica) bring about a disinvestment from these sites. Yet political figures may feel compelled to maintain an authentic presence on these sites. Authenticity in this case may be measured in terms of how long they have been online, and how frequently they upload original content. It may also be measured in terms of the extent to which this content appears to reflect the candidates’ own views, which in turn may stray from either party lines or public opinion. Critical social media scholarship should consider the maintenance of different strata of users, and in particular the additional affordances that are granted to (as one example) “verified” Twitter users. A related concern is the requirements that non-privileged users must meet to obtain privileged status, or simply to carry on practising scandal mining. For the time being it is technically possible for any Twitter user—as well as non-user—to comb through someone’s public tweets (which may date back to the launch of the platform) and use their web browser’s search function to identify sexist, racist or transphobic content. Such functionality may be curtailed in the service of the so-called “right to be forgotten”, and could conceivably disproportionally benefit those with greater social or financial capital. It is also worth noting that when considering the role of media platforms, the press continued to play a pivotal role in publicising scandal. We may question whether they will continue to maintain this agenda-setting role, as well as whether they will remain as persistent in reporting on social media incivilities. Relatedly, it bears noting that digital media shaming of politicians in 2015 focused predominantly on talk scandal. While problematic utterances can be considered a worthy subject of political intervention (and at the very least a relatively convenient one to unearth), there is a risk that among citizens, journalists and political rivals scandal mining may overshadow other types of political scandal. This risk is especially salient in a media climate that may prefer to avoid complex deliberations about (for example) financial misdeeds. The tendency towards talk scandal in the above case study is at least partly a product of social media platforms that most readily facilitate text-based communication. As such we can speculate whether live streaming and other audio-video forms of expression will lead to the discovery of other kinds of objectionable acts in the future. While the range of actionable misdeeds may diversify to include more instances of public urination, we can equally presume that candidates would have enough self-discipline to avoid doing so, alongside the continued scrutiny by their parties. These concerns are applicable for political scandal mining, but also other instances of public scrutiny. This follows a pattern of introducing surveillance technologies and practices in response to exceptional events, or categories of objectionable individuals, and then broadening their scope through what Lyon calls “surveillance creep” (2007). It seems reasonable to expect that both the standards and scrutiny maintained for politicians and other highly public figures will be extended to other communities. Recent examples include the mediated denunciation of young adult authors (Rosenfeld 2017), social media celebrities (Grant 2018) as well as potentially any individual achieving a modest amount of publicity (Romano 2017). As with politicians, we may also anticipate that those who self-identify as a public or quasi-public figure (regardless of the size of their following) may self-scrutinise and self-manage their online presence in anticipation of scandalous outbreaks. Yet despite a continued mainstreaming of mediated scrutiny, it seems 289

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reasonable to expect that services to mitigate scandalous denunciations may remain in reach of those able to afford them. Finally, the term “scandal mining” itself warrants scrutiny. The language of resource extraction may have limited value in making sense of contemporary digital media practices (Andrejevic 2013), and in particular may overlook the crucial role of (mis-)interpreting personal data as either valuable or actionable. Also, such imagery often coexists with other ways of rendering data practices meaningful, such as the imagery of the virus (Nahon and Hemsley 2013). Scholarship should remain attentive to how such imagery may both enable but also limit scholarly and public understandings of scandal.

Notes 1 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/b%C3%A9atrice-zako-resigns-as-ndp-candidate-aftersovereigntist-revelations-1.3159691 2 http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/06/19/ray-fox-liberals-facebook_n_7620260.html; http://www. metronews.ca/news/toronto/2015/08/06/conservative-toronto-candidate-apologizes-for-comments. html 3 http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/jerry-bance-marketplace-1.3217797 4 https://www.facebook.com/conservativesss 5 http://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2015/08/17/when-attack-ads-backfire.html 6 http://montrealgazette.com/news/quebec/bloc-quebecois-candidate-says-she-is-profoundly-sorryfor-facebook-post 7 http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-blair-dale-newfoundland-cpc-1.3229260; http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/gordon-giesbrecht-tory-candidate-9-11-abortionvideo-1.3239298 8 http://www.truenorthtimes.ca/2015/09/27/liberal-candidate-kimberley-love-compared-alberta-oilsands-mordor/ 9 http://www.truenorthtimes.ca/2015/09/28/ndp-rabidoux-gun-democracy/ 10 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/candidate-wants-apology-ndp-to-dump-pat-martin-forson-of-a-bitch-comment-1.3231387 11 https://www.buzzfeed.com/ishmaeldaro/blog-against-the-machine?utm_term=.pkGZ4VXdmO#. grBZ2EaqrR 12 http://www.truenorthtimes.ca/2015/10/19/true-north-times-endorsement-democracy/ 13 http://www.truenorthtimes.ca/about/ 18 April 14 http://www.pressprogress.ca/this_conservative_candidate_is_not_happy_about_the_separation_ church_and_state

References Aldrich, John H., Rachel K. Gibson, Marta Cantijoch and Tobias Konitzer. 2016. Getting out the vote in the social media era: Are digital tools changing the extent, nature and impact of party contacting in elections? Party Politics 22(2): 165–178. Andrejevic, Mark. 2013. Infoglut: How too much information is changing the way we think and know. New York: Routledge. Basinger, Scott J. and Brandon Rottinghaus. 2012. Skeletons in White House closets: A discussion of modern presidential scandals. Political Science Quarterly 127(2): 213–239. Brighenti, Andrea. 2007. Visibility a category for the Social Sciences. Current Sociology 55(3): 323–342. Chadwick, Andrew. 2011. The political information cycle in a hybrid news system: The British prime minister and the “Bullygate” affair. The International Journal of Press/Politics 16(1): 3–29. Ekström, Mats and Bengt Johansson. 2008. Talk scandals. Media, Culture & Society 30(1): 61–79. Esser, Frank and Uwe Hartung. 2004. Nazis, pollution, and no sex political scandals as a reflection of political culture in Germany. American Behavioral Scientist 47(8): 1040–1071. Fieschi, Catherine and Paul Heywood. 2004. Trust, cynicism and populist anti-politics. Journal of Political Ideologies 9(3): 289–309.

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Scandal mining Goffman, Erving. 1959. The presentation of self in everyday life. New York: Anchor Books. Grant, Stacey. 2018. 10 of YouTube’s most horrifying scandals and controversies. Seventeen, 28 February. https://www.seventeen.com/celebrity/movies-tv/g18753797/youtube-scandals-controversies/ Kepplinger, Hans M., Stefan Geiss and Sandra Siebert. 2012. Framing scandals: Cognitive and emotional media effects. Journal of Communication 62(4): 659–681. Larsson, Anders O. and Bente Kalsnes. 2014. ‘Of course we are on Facebook’: Use and non-use of social media among Swedish and Norwegian politicians. European Journal of Communication 29(6): 653–667. Lyon, David. 2002. Editorial. Surveillance studies: Understanding visibility, mobility and the phenetic fix. Surveillance & Society 1(1): 1–7. Lyon, David. 2007. Surveillance studies: An overview. Cambridge: Polity. Marwick, Alice. E. and Danah Boyd. 2014. Networked privacy: How teenagers negotiate context in social media. New Media & Society, 16(7), 1051–1067. McGonigal, Jane. 2008. Engagement economy: The future of massively scaled collaboration and participation. Institute for the Future. http://www.iftf.org/node/2306 (accessed 29 August 2017). Nahon, Karine and Jeff Hemsley. 2013. Going Viral. Cambridge: Polity. Romano, Aja. 2017. Milkshake Duck: What it is, and why it’s coming for us all. Vox.com, 13 December. https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/12/13/16767626/what-is-a-milkshake-duck Ronson, Jon. 2015. So you’ve been publicly shamed. New York: Riverhead Books. Rosenfeld, Kat. 2017. The toxic drama on YA Twitter. Vulture.com, 7 August. http://www.vulture. com/2017/08/the-toxic-drama-of-ya-twitter.html Ross, Karen, Susan Fountaine and Margie Comrie. 2015. Facing up to Facebook: Politicians, publics and the social media (ted) turn in New Zealand. Media, Culture & Society 37(2): 251–269. Thompson, John B. 2005. The new visibility. Theory, Culture & Society 22(6): 31–51. Thompson, John B. 2008. Political scandal: Power and visibility in the media age. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Toepfl, Florian. 2011. Managing public outrage: Power, scandal, and new media in contemporary Russia. New Media & Society 13(8): 1301–1319. Trottier, Daniel. 2013. Identity problems in the Facebook era. New York: Routledge. Trottier, Daniel. 2015. Open source intelligence, social media and law enforcement: Visions, constraints and critiques. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 18(4–5), 530–547. Trottier, Daniel. 2017a. Scandal mining: Political nobodies and remediated visibility. Media, Culture & Society (online first). Trottier, Daniel. 2017b. Digital vigilantism as weaponisation of visibility. Philosophy & Technology 30(1): 55–72. Tufekci, Zeynep and Christopher Wilson. 2012. Social media and the decision to participate in political protest: Observations from Tahrir Square. Journal of Communication 62(2): 363–379. Welch, Stephen. 2007. Political scandal and the politics of exposure: From Watergate to Lewinsky and beyond. Politics and Ethics Review 3(2): 181–199. Williams, Bruce A. and Michael X. Delli Carpini. 2004. Monica and Bill all the time and everywhere: The collapse of gatekeeping and agenda setting in the new media environment. American Behavioral Scientist 47(9): 1208–1230.

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PART IV

Themes and settings of media scandals

29 SURVEILLANCE SCANDALS AND THE SYSTEMIC CRISIS OF THE PUBLIC Risto Kunelius and Adrienne Russell

The 2013 Snowden revelations launched an ongoing series of surveillance controversies, implicating both governments and corporations in violations of privacy that involves basically anyone with an internet connection. While news about extensive post-9/11 data gathering and intelligence did not begin with Snowden, the NSA revelations pushed the debate to a dominant theme of global news and of moral and political outrage regarding fundamental shifts in data collection practices, infrastructures, and capacities. The more recent Cambridge Analytica scandal, which revealed that the company harvested the personal Facebook data of 87 million users in order to manipulate how they vote, represents another high point. It demonstrates how data collection and sorting practices have transformed election campaigns and other political communication strategies by using psychometric data to micro-target advertisements, amounting to covert and deceitful messaging, including misinformation. It also puts a spotlight on the increasing temptation for different kinds of actors to exploit people’s practical dependency on social media platforms and their lack of media savvy, suggesting among other things, massive efforts to dissuade people from voting (Howard & Bradshaw 2017). Five years after the initial Snowden revelations, it is obvious that major social institutions are increasingly driven by such datafication—turning aspects of our life into data for sale to the highest bidder—and that data are a central component of social power in the digital age. In April 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg publicly apologized for his company’s involvement with Cambridge Analytica on CNN, calling it an “issue,” a “mistake,” and a “breach of trust” while critics pointed out that extended use of personal data is not a departure from but rather the very foundation of Facebook’s business model. As Edward Snowden put it in a March 17, 2018 tweet: “Facebook makes their money by exploiting and selling intimate details about the private lives of millions, far beyond the scant details you voluntarily post. They are not victims. They are accomplices.” Snowden’s tweet highlights the fact that both the NSA and Cambridge Analytica revelations go beyond particular incidents, individuals, and organizations that have “scandalously” violated legal or moral boundaries. They reveal how digital communication infrastructures are altering the conditions in which democracy plays out. These revelations are often treated like scandals by journalists and commentators, suggesting that they are transgressions from the otherwise well-functioning codes on which our central institutions are run (Kunelius et al. 2017). 295

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Closer examination, however, suggests that the series of surveillance revelations that have unfolded since the summer of 2013 do not point to a temporary departure from the normal. Rather, they denote a disruption in the inherited roles and relationships between the intelligence community, political elites, tech companies, and journalists. We have, of course, known for some time that affordances of the networked, digital environment reshape political dynamics (Castells 2009). But recent developments and revelations show how the capacities to gather and analyze user data are shaping new forms of social power. Our starting point in this chapter concerns the ways these new resource and related forms of power create instability in the hegemonic constellation of resources of social power—be they economic, political, military, ideological (e.g. Mann 2014)—which, in turn, creates new threats, as well as new opportunities for reform. We begin by discussing how to capture theoretically the recent “surveillance scandals” with a short review of the scholarly discussion on scandals, crises, and historical events. We then offer an overview of the tensions within and among key institutions of social power with the aim of building an understanding of the complex and at times unpredictable transformations under way.

From scandals to crisis A scandal is a transgression of norms, values, or codes that has been kept hidden and when exposed raises offense and damages the reputations of those involved (Thompson 2000, 11–25; Allern & Pollack 2012, 9-13). In this sense, the original revelations of Edward Snowden were a paradigmatic example of a public, global scandal that tarnished the image of Western intelligence agencies, made politicians look vulnerable, and put tech companies on the defensive. John Thompson describes heightened public scrutiny and possible progressive results prompted by political scandals: In this modern era of mediated visibility, those who hold or aspire to positions of power will be subjected to a degree of public scrutiny which greatly exceeds what their predecessors were obliged to endure, and we should not underestimate the personal anguish and political damage that can cause. But if it helps to produce more openness and accountability in government, if it stimulates more effective debate about standards of conduct both in public life and in the media and if it encourages political leaders to handle with circumspection and humility the trust that is vested in them as holders of public office, then the gains would not be insignificant. (2000, 271) Thompson sees scandals as operating through the power of transparency, thus mobilizing the presence of the public as a collective, as training an eye on the powerful. He also suggests that, despite the political damage scandals cause, their consequences can go beyond mere ritual reinforcement of existing institutional paradigms (e.g. ousting corrupted actors or tweaking laws and rules). Surveillance scandals present somewhat exceptional interpretive challenges. First, the notion of transparency plays a double role in surveillance scandals. Scandals, by definition, make violations transparent. But surveillance scandals are also about transparency. They reveal the asymmetrical relations of transparency that, at a historical level, are part of the “constitutional” structure of modern societies and thus our subjectivity. Surveillance scandals dramatize some things that we already know. For instance, the shadowy world of espionage, the clandestine intelligence operations to protect “national security”, are part of our social unconsciousness, thanks to the 296

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proliferation of spy stories during the Cold War years, a genre replaced in more recent years by terrorist narratives. Snooping on your own citizens, of course, pre-dates the Cold War. Robert Darnton’s (1985, 145-189; 2010) work, for instance, offers lively descriptions of how “public opinion” and “surveillance” were intertwined in the late days of the Ancien Régime in France: before the advent of the polling industry, “surveying” public opinion was the business of police. Indeed, the key role of surveillance and policing has long been noted by social theorists (e.g. Giddens 1985, 13-14, 309ff; Foucault 2000, 58-89). As David Lyon (2007, 190) puts it, “surveillance practices and citizen rights grew hand in hand in the modern era.” This long historical trajectory is important and points to an “already known” level of panoptic suspicion that is part of the moral and psychological puzzle (see Heikkilä 2018) of how we have reacted—and keep reacting to—surveillance and privacy scandals. As modern subjects, we see privacy as a core value and right and, at the same time, we know it is something that is constantly threatened as we are always under the gaze of powerful institutions and are schooled, measured, and disciplined. This “privacy paradox” (Barnes 2006) is manifest in contemporary reactions to systematic invasions of privacy where people do not accept the snooping and intrusion of their privacy but also—at the same time—seem somewhat oddly and practically resigned to the fact that not much can be done about it. Second, scandals tend to reveal violations of social and professional norms rather than challenge them. And while they can lead to a more heightened sense of transparency and change of behavior by those in power, they also help strengthen the given rules, values, and practices of institutions. Surveillance scandals, however, point to possible structural changes in the relationships between powerful social stakeholders, leading in turn to challenges to some of their fundamental underpinnings. Facing the facts of how deeply datafication and the surveillance on which it depends can shape the institutional power balance of democratic societies can surely be said to be “scandalous.” But rather than merely pointing out breaches of norms and rules, which would demand repair, the consequent debate on surveillance scandals suggests a heightened moment of crisis in systemic legitimacy. New kinds of tensions are being articulated, placing institutional actors into new roles and relationships, and energizing and politicizing some tensions to the point of antagonism. This suggests reading surveillance scandals as episodes or parts in a larger historical event to which both the 2013 NSA revelations and the outrage over Cambridge Analytica belong. It is worth noting that what we are witnessing is a transnational public drama where the different resources of power are rearticulated in the networked democracies. As Sewell (2005, 225-270) usefully puts it, we are seeing how the partly “already dislocated” structures have been brought to light and how the struggle over how the new order will be articulated is under way. In the broadest sense, such moments can point to a legitimacy crisis (Habermas 1973) for the institutional order of democracies. Such a moment puts to the test—as we suggest below—the inherited vocabularies and justifications of key institutional actors and begs them to justify how they are and should be situated in the changing environment which leads to contradicting rationalizations about institutions, their capabilities, and relations. What makes this struggle so important and fascinating in the case of surveillance debates is the fact that it is at the same time a systemicinstitutional and identity crisis (McCarthy 1978, 367ff). When we debate the potential and limits of surveillance, we also debate whether “we” are what we wish to be. Our argument here is that, while the notion of scandals can be useful to pay attention to the global outrage provoked by surveillance revelations and assess their full historical resonance, it is important to go beyond the moral dynamics of scandals. Such an approach demands a more systemic view. How are key actors and stakeholders repositioned in the unveiled era of “surveillance logic”? What kind of legitimation challenges are they facing? What new 297

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contradictions and tensions are surfacing? This is the line of questioning we will address below by highlighting some tension and contradictions that the most central actors of the surveillance scandal have faced.

Key actors and their challenges The intelligence community/the deep state The Snowden Revelations brought to light the overreach of digitally empowered intelligence communities. It showed surveillance agencies taking stealthy advantage of the post-9/11 political mandates and climate and put them on the defensive. With its enhanced capacities and international networks, the “deep state” actors had quietly gained a new kind of power vis-à-vis political elites (Bauman et al. 2014). Reacting to the revelations, the intelligence communities across the world have argued that surveillance laws need to be brought up to date with the digital world. By doing so, they have in fact in many places been successfully enhancing their legal mandate and powers (e.g. Tréguer 2016; Steiger et  al. 2017; Baisnée & Nicolas 2017; Hintz & Brown 2017; UNESCO 2017; Wahl-Jorgensen & Jones 2017; Lidberg & Muller 2018). The framework of security, national interests, and explicit calls for patriotism have served as key elements of the public production of this discursive defense. The success of this framing—for better or worse—has also been buttressed by highly publicized acts of terrorism and by waves of anti-Islamic and often xenophobic populism, especially in Europe where, thus far, the high point of the migrant crisis in 2015 has had a significant impact on the political climate. A strong and explicit discourse of security has legitimized this development, upstaging concerns of security over privacy. This new role of the intelligence community, however, also comes with the price of more of the public demanding transparency and oversight of surveillance activities. Even the former NSA director Michael Hayden—despite a severe animosity towards whistleblowing— admitted that Snowden was the “visible effect not the cause of a broad cultural shift that is defining legitimate secrecy, necessary transparency, and what constitutes the consent of the governed” (Hayden 2016, 422). As secrecy is a necessary part of intelligence work, this has been a tricky challenge for the newly empowered state surveillance actors. Generally speaking, these debates have led intelligence agencies and surveillance work to present itself increasingly—and also to be seen—as a kind of last line of defense of democracy. At some level, instead of healthy suspicion of institutions of power, this may suggest a shift in the trust–doubt relations of the democratic imagination, where institutions doubt the people—and not vice versa—and where the role of citizens is to trust new kinds of guardians of democracy. This, of course, is not new, rather a revival of Cold War mentalities (Zelizer 2018), and of the spirit of policing the emerging public of the eighteenth century. This demand for trust and loyalty from rather than by citizens is embodied in the NSA slogan, displayed on the marquee outside their Utah server center: “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.”

Political elites/the democratic state In response to the Snowden revelations, political elites faced a dilemma. They could either emphasize the fact that they had not known about the reach of mass surveillance, thus admitting that they were badly informed and unable to represent the fundamental interest of their electors. Or they could claim—in the name of security—that nothing was wrong with mass spying, which would mean arguing against initial outrage over the scale and reach of 298

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surveillance operations. For representative political institutions and actors these alternative arguments point to particularly fundamental and problematic questions. The weakness of political actors and institutions in relation to the security actors calls into question the democratic power of politicians by revealing that they are actually not in control. In addition, as these out of control surveillance forces violated privacy, they also undermined the democratic authenticity of political representation. Without privacy and individual formation of “opinions,” the whole notion of “representation” could—in principle—be in jeopardy. By failing to protect privacy, political actors, then, failed to protect the ultimate source of their power, the sovereignty of the people. These tensions continue to play out in the aftermath of the NSA Snowden revelation. In the volatile and changing conditions, they also seem to create new kinds of tensions between core actors. We can see, for instance, how the claim that politicians were caught just as unaware of the new digital surveillance as the public at large—a claim that splits the “democratic” state from the “deep” state—has been powerfully taken up by populist rhetoric. In this sense, the baffling war of president against his own intelligence community partly exploits a distrust towards the intelligence community, but also articulates dissatisfaction about the established political elite who have been unable to control the intelligence actors. This visible tension between the security state and political state points to shifting power dynamics in the era of digital mass surveillance and to the price the intelligence community must pay for visibility and enhanced power. Gradual widespread awareness of the uses of social media data to target political messages and develop micro-managed campaigns of biased or false information further complicates the role of political actors. Such political strategies demonstrate that “surveillance” and data analytics are not only used to find out or predict what people think but also—increasingly and effectively—is used to construct, create, and manipulate “public opinion.” While the idea of manipulating or constructing public opinion is certainly not new, it is clearly being taken to a new level in the era of mass collection and analysis of data. Potentially, the surveillance debate has led us to realize that the collection of behavioral data has become a new source of power. Ultimately it raises the question of the authenticity of political representation: what happens to public opinion if my data footprint seems to know me better that I do myself? Underneath the day-to-day scandals, then, disturbing questions about the imagined political identity of citizens are surfacing.

Tech industry/the market The technology industry is arguably the most challenged by the surveillance revelations. Digital platforms were at the core of the NSA scandals from the very beginning. In December 2013, major tech companies sent a collective letter to the US President and Congress, describing what they saw as a stand-off between the government and themselves: For our part, we are focused on keeping user’s data secure—deploying the latest encryption technology to prevent unauthorized surveillance on our networks and by pushing back on government requests to ensure that they are legal and reasonable in scope. (cited in Fidler 2015, 150) This reflects the first line of defense for technology companies: the attempt to convince their customers that they had not been—at least not willingly—leaking their customers’ data to the intelligence organizations. It is not difficult to see why this was politically and economically crucial to the tech industry. Their success is premised on a narrative that they embody the ethos 299

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of individuality, participation, creativity, and openness or, as Fred Turner put it, “a peer-to-peer ad-hocracy, a leveled marketplace, and a more authentic self” (Turner 2006, 3). At the core of this industry ideology and branding, of course, are the concepts of privacy and authenticity, which were immediately at stake when the surveillance debate began. On this front, the post-Snowden years have seen tech companies taking steps to resist government intrusion. For example, Apple refused to assist the FBI in extracting data from a locked iPhone recovered from one of the San Bernardino shooters, who in a December 2015 terrorist attack killed 14 people and injured 22. (The FBI took Apple to court and then dropped the case once they found another way to access the data on the phone.) In addition, today, device encryption is pervasive, including end-to-end encryption for email platforms and messaging apps and hardware level full-disk encryption that protects the contents of devices. Once the government was caught hacking the private fiber cables between Google and Yahoo data centers, both companies began encrypting the links and most others followed suit. These obstacles forced the NSA to get court orders and obtain data through the front door, which in turn has prompted most major digital platforms to issue regular transparency reports where they divulge the number of legal requests they received from the government to turn over user data (as Google have).1 But even as technology companies resist government surveillance, they are clearly implicated in its proliferation. As Snowden’s tweet at the beginning of our chapter points out, the very economic existence of internet companies hinges on a surveillance model of analyzing user data in new and innovative ways, and selling it to the highest bidder. Tech companies may not be the ones coercing their loyal customers, yet they have become scandalously central to the process. Instead of a leveled, peer-to-peer space the internet has been taken over by a highly centralized platform economy that sells audiences and user attention on an unprecedented scale (e.g. Benkler 2016; Wu 2016).

Journalism and the public Journalists have been the central actors in breaking the news of mass surveillance and keeping the debate going. At the same time, the new realities of corporate and government spying significantly influence their position among other social and political institutions. Good journalism is almost always the result of a coproduction of knowledge between journalists and their sources, and the democratic power of professional journalism lies in its ability to cultivate new knowledge of wide networks of such relationships. Surveillance revelations have highlighted the vulnerability of this core of journalism and made journalists increasingly aware of the fact that they are targets of surveillance themselves. When surveillance is trained on issues of national security, critical reporting of some of the key contemporary issues becomes more difficult (see e.g. Thorsen 2017; Bell & Owen 2017). If the ability of journalists to protect their sources weakens, the profession itself is compromised. Thus, the ability of journalists to defend the confidentiality of their sources and keep their information networks secret is a key struggle. Journalism—at least in the so-called Western democracies—is by definition juxtaposed to state power. Transnational reporting during the unfolding surveillance debates has shown that professional networks of journalists and institutions can temporarily take advantage of global networks of cooperation (e.g. Sambrook 2018). At the same time, however, the coverage of surveillance and national security has also exposed tensions inside the professional field: between “patriotic” and more cosmopolitan and critical journalists, between reporters and editors, and between new actors and more traditional professionals (see e.g. Lloyd, 2017; Eide & Kunelius 2018; Eldridge 2018). For better and worse, this means that journalism will be increasingly 300

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politicized and drawn explicitly into the discourses of trust, loyalty, and identity. This, in turn, will suppress its ability to address a broad public that is needed if the core legitimation challenges of surveillance, security, and privacy are to be deliberated, however imperfectly. Finally, since journalism is embedded in the digital landscape, it is also entangled with the commercial attention logics, data-driven audience strategies, and quest for advertising revenues. Volatile political spectacles—particularly since 2016—have strengthened hopes that subscriptions might someday help to sustain institutionally strong and independent newsrooms. Audiences increasingly find their way to journalism—when they do—through the dominant platforms and search services (see Reuters 2018). This puzzle of how to sustain journalism as a practice that could address the public in the evolving communication infrastructure remains unsolved (Ananny 2018).

Conclusions Despite the intensive debates prompted by exposés of mass corporate and government surveillance, the concept of media and political scandals is inadequate to grasp fully what is at stake because scandal underscores a departure from the rules rather than, as is the case with surveillance, a breakdown in the structures that support those rules and thus the rules themselves. Indeed, recent surveillance controversies are better understood as episodes in a more fundamental and structural shift that has disrupted major institutions, stakeholders, and actors. This has created new kinds of tensions between stakeholders and challenged political and social imaginaries of democracy. At a systemic level, new challenges of public legitimation to major social institutions are at hand. Identifying these fissures—through moral and emotional outrage—is the key democratic question for our time. In this chapter, we have suggested some tensions that will have to be somehow settled in the years to come. The intelligence community has gained new power but also increasing pressure to defend publicly their practices. They have to defend spying in a world where the principle of transparency is a key public demand. Politicians seem to have been taken mostly by surprise both by the reach of surveillance and the volatile dynamics of the meta-data-driven hybrid media. The datafied environment has both enhanced strategic political communication and posed serious questions about the role of public opinion in the political process. Ultimately, changing the meaning, practices, and infrastructure of publicity can put representative democracy and the legitimation of the current political establishment itself at risk. For the digital platform industry, a yawning gap has opened up between the ideology that has branded customer trust and the actual practices of attention management, audience production, and the prediction of consumer behavior. This points to a possible slow redefinition of the value and meaning of privacy— unless such structural violations force a reaction that can somehow be turned into effective political action and change the forward march of the surveillance logic of digital marketing and opinion management. And finally, journalism, which serves as the storyteller and scriptwriter of the controversies that these tensions provoke, is embedded in this same networked environment and is dependent on the data-driven logics of the digital surveillance age. Our analysis here suggests that its ability to sustain its autonomy—and to continue cover surveillance—depends on at least two kinds of resources: the ability to revitalize the values that are jeopardized, and the agility to take advantage of the conflicts and tensions between other stakeholders. The institutional and systemic imperatives that shape the relationships of power in the era of surveillance are enormously strong. What the surveillance scandals can do is to highlight the discrepancies and conflicts between the powerful actors and trends. As Ben Wizner, Director 301

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of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), in his Speech, Privacy & Technology Project, and Edward Snowden’s lawyer argued two years after the NSA leaks: The real hope for us is if those entities take on each other. We really will need the government’s help to protect us as consumers. Only the government can really ensure that we will have fairness in due process in confronting the effects of big data which you already see . . . At the same time, there will be no legislative surveillance reform without Google and Facebook and Apple and those companies being in our coalition. Civil society doesn’t have the power to get that change through legislatively without having them as allies. There’s a strategic necessity in separating those battles rather than having them together. (Wizner 2015) Writing about the relationship between history and event, William Sewell reminds us that “symbolic interpretation is part and parcel of the historical event” (Sewell 2005, 245). The point about reading the moral outrage of surveillance “scandals” (the events) against the evolution, crisis, and self-defense (the history) of democratic values is to locate better the systemic fissures that help to enhance the transparency of institutions, political representation, and viable publics.

Note 1 A compilation of transparency report links can be accessed at: https://www.accessnow.org/transparencyreporting-index/

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Surveillance scandals Habermas, J. (1973). Legitimation Crisis. Boston: Beacon Press. Hayden, M. (2016). Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror. New York: Penguin Press. Heikkilä, H. (2018), ‘Privacy under Surveillance: Towards a Conceptual Analysis of the Price of Connection’. Northern Lights, 16, pp. 59–74. Hintz, A. & Brown, I. (2017). ‘Enabling Digital Citizenship? The Reshaping of Surveillance Policy After Snowden’. International Journal of Communication, 11, pp. 782–801. Howard, P. & Bradshaw, S. (2017). ‘Troops, Trolls and Troublemakers: A Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation.’ Working paper no. 2017.12, Oxford University Computational Propaganda Project. Kunelius, R., Heikkilä, H., Russell, A. & Yagodin, D. (Eds.) (2017). Journalism and the NSA Revelations: Privacy, Security and the Press. London: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and I.B.Tauris. Lidberg, J. & Muller, D. (2018) In the Name of Security: Secrecy, Surveillance and Journalism. London: Anthem Press. Lloyd, J. (2017). Journalism in an Age of Terror: Covering and Uncovering the Secret State. Oxford and London: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and I.B.Tauris. Lyon, D. (2007). Surveillance Studies: An Overview. Cambridge: Polity. Mann, M. (2014). The Sources of Social Power. Volume 4: Globalization, 1945–2011. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCarthy, T. (1978). The Critical Theory of Jurgen Habermas. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Reuters Institute Digital News Report (2018). Edited by Nic Newman with Richard Fletcher, Antonis Kalogeropoulos, David A. L. Levy and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen. Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Sambrook, R. (Ed.) (2018). Global Teamwork: The Rise of Collaboration in Investigative Journalism. Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Sewell, W.H. (2005). The Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformations. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Steiger, S., Schünemann W.J. and Dimmroth, K. (2017). ‘Outrage without Consequences? Post-Snowden Discourses and Governmental Practice in Germany’. Media and Communication, 5(1), pp. 7–16. Thompson, John B. (2000). Political Scandal: Power and Visibility in the Media Age. Cambridge: Polity. Thorsen, E. (2017). ‘Cryptic Journalism: News Reporting of Encryption’. Digital Journalism, 5(3), pp. 299–317. Tréguer, F. (2016). ‘Intelligence Reform and the Snowden Paradox: The Case of France’. Media and Communication, 5(1), pp. 17–28. Turner, F. (2006). From Counterculture to Cyberculture. Chicago: Chicago University Press. UNESCO (2017). Protecting Journalism Sources in the Digital Age. Paris: UNESCO. http://unesdoc.unesco. org/images/0024/002480/248054E.pdf on Wahl-Jorgensen, K. & Jones, K. (2017). ‘Justifying Surveillance: The New Discursive Settlement in UK Opinionated Journalism’. In R. Kunelius, H. Heikkilä, A. Russell & D. Yagodin (Eds.), Journalism and the NSA Revelations: Privacy, Security and the Press. London: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and I.B.Tauris, pp. 51–68. Wizner, B. (2015). ‘Keynote Remarks at the Surveillance and Citizenship: State–Media–Citizens Relations After the Snowden Leaks Conference’, Cardiff University, 18–19 June. Wu, T. (2016). The Attention Merchants. New York: Vintage Books. Zelizer, B. (2018). ‘Why Journalism in the Age of Trump Shouldn’t Surprise Us’. In P.J. Boczkowski and Z. Papacharissi (Eds.), Trump and the Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 9–16.

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30 SCANDAL AND CELEBRITY Linda Steiner

Celebrity stories, especially regarding Hollywood scandals, have long been regarded as guilty pleasures for both audiences and journalists. Pandering to market tastes has pushed celebrity news to the bottom of journalism’s food chain. “Public consciousness tends to perceive celebrity coverage in terms of a dirty pleasure of sensationalist tabloid reporters who capitalize on exposing the private lives of the famous” (Dubied & Hanitzsch 2014, 137). News audiences consistently tell Pew researchers they pay little attention to celebrities and scandals, and complain that these get too much attention. Yet, they knew more about such stories than about virtually any other category; on average, the public correctly answered 60 percent of the questions dealing with scandal, entertainment, and crime (Parker and Deane, 1997). The popularity—now evident algorithmically—of this disreputable genre notwithstanding, scholars have also treated reporting on Hollywood scandals, especially sex scandals, as unimportant; at best it constitutes escapism, an addictive weapon of mass distraction. But Hollywood scandal coverage can be significant and impactful in explaining and exposing broad vectors in social relations and power structures. The assumption has been that in circulating gossip about the transgressions of prevailing moral codes by Hollywood personalities, otherwise only famous for being famous, journalists’ goal was only gaining profit-enhancing audiences. This dismissal of scandal reporting is compounded by sensational tabloid stories with bold and literally colorful headlines promising scoops, accompanied by paparazzi shots of celebrities “caught” doing what lots of people do but looking glamorous while doing it. An even more damning viewpoint treats celebrity scandal news in the context of a dumbed-down but essentially conservative industrial manufacture of pop culture and news; it conserves materialist hegemony, preserves social inequalities, and represents audience interests that are prurient at worst, moralizing at best (Conboy 2014). Yet, celebrity news arguably represents a trend to personalize and democratize news. Moreover, scandals turn on celebrities’ private behaviors, highlighting the blurring of the public/private divide. They also expose a blurring across genres: for example, legacy outlets use relatively high levels of information subsidies to provide entertainment news, while entertainment sites carry original coverage. To highlight important dynamics driving (or disrupting) the journalism/celebrity relationship, this chapter focuses on news of scandals involving film and television industry celebrities. I define “celebrities” as mediated, constructed personae of relatively durable fame, and whose private and off-screen life attract as much attention as their professional work does. Indeed, 304

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their celebrity may partly be achieved through publicized participation in scandalous activity. To point out how the contemporary dynamics of Hollywood celebrity scandal reporting is both similar and different from other scandal domains, I focus on the scandals involving actor and comedian Bill Cosby and the well-known and acclaimed film producer Harvey Weinstein. These scandals opened the floodgates to accusations of sexual harassment and misconduct by other Hollywood figures, bringing down wrongdoers otherwise long protected. It also exposed the workings of power in celebrity, in terms of how secrets are maintained or exposed, who can meaningfully make such accusations stick, whose victimization gets taken seriously, and how journalists can cover interrelated issues turning on sex scandals. The attention precipitated by the exposure of these two scandals is not necessarily permanent. Indeed, the stories were enormously helpful in explaining both why harassment victims might stay silent for decades and why they still might remain silent.

The nature of celebrity news The concepts of public and private, including as opposites, are modern inventions, but neither celebrity gossip nor celebrity scandal news is new. A mutually constitutive and profitable relationship between fame, celebrities, and journalism goes back to the 1850s, when new technologies allowed for the birth of “mass” circulated newspapers. Rival nineteenth-century mass publications leveraged their own position in reaction to popular culture figures to enhance their profitability (Conboy 2014). In the early twentieth century, the film industry encouraged fascination with stars’ off-screen lives, shifting people’s attention away from information about individual films to stars’ personal lives as a site of knowledge (deCordova 2007). Celebrity managers and public relations representatives for celebrities or for popular culture products employing those celebrities have usually, if indirectly, controlled gossip, working assiduously to eliminate leakage and minimize negative exposure. When the studios controlled Hollywood, they often used gossip to keep stars in line. Columnists regularly protected or damaged individual stars as a favor to studios, lest studios shun the periodical for printing unfavorable or unsanctioned items (Petersen 2014). The demise of the studio system ended the power of gossip outlets and made cover-ups far less efficient; this enabled speculation over stars’ sexual preferences and illicit or illegal activities (Petersen 2014). Some academics, journalists, and audience members fret that the increasing amount of entertainment and scandal news available from serious news outlets illustrates what is wrong with journalism generally (Dubied and Hanitzsch 2014). Others treat celebrity news as a hybrid, blending the characteristic themes, formula, routines, and styles of news and entertainment. Indeed, a few Dutch tabloid journalists went out of their way to position themselves as “regular” journalists interested in truth-finding, even though they admitted that neither what they do nor how they do it is typically considered “regular” journalism (Deuze 2009). But most others described their work routines as distinctive to gossip (i.e., marginalized or deviant) and serving gossip magazine audiences, and thus unlike working for non-gossip media. This tension is similar to sports journalism, long derogated as journalism’s “toy department.” Rowe (2007) properly connects such ideological denigration of play (as unimportant) to classbased and patriarchal views of the press and popular culture; it also aligns with complaints that sports journalists, largely abandoning critical investigation, have moved closer to the entertainment and celebrity journalism’s star system, willingly limiting themselves to what Rowe calls “ingrained occupational assumptions about what ‘works’” for fans (400). I treat celebrity news as having the potential to serve audiences; in presenting the ways that Hollywood personalities are both good and bad, it gestures toward social-cultural values (Gorin & Dubied 2011). If various 305

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media platforms have increasingly accepted the responsibility to provide moral orientation, celebrity news provides models for how “to be.” Hollywood and sports heroes have endorsed disease research and promote getting tested for cancer. They illustrate the horrors of drug abuse. As news outlets’ major economic linchpin, sports and celebrity scandal reporting often or even usually avoids confronting problematic social issues. This does not mean that these genres cannot do otherwise.

Theories of interest in bad behavior Gorin and Dubied (2011) note that American film stars are dynamic evolving icons with Januslike dual personae: stars represent glamour and vulgarity, the ordinary and the extraordinary, the imitable and the inimitable. To achieve commercial durability, they say, stars embody clear, timely, desirable images incorporating traditional/dominant values: self-fulfillment through social and financial success, love, and family responsibilities. In French-language celebrity news Gorin and Dubied find a new macro-story: wayward behavior and excesses causing meltdown, sometimes with the possibility of a rebound or cycle of fall and rebound. Nonetheless, media are increasingly critical of illegal behaviors, reprehensible morality (including sexual addiction), or disorderly living (violence, loss of self-control, greed). “The stigma does not fall on the privileged world of celebrities itself, but rather on their decline and their inability to overcome difficulties” (ibid., 615). But American celebrities “excommunicated” for scandalous sins can lay low for a while and then later, having repented, be redeemed. What is tolerated among stars— or, conversely, what attracts media scrutiny and public criticism—can also vary by class and gender. To avoid the stigmatizing disapproval of women in public life, late fin de siècle actresses like Sarah Bernhardt deliberately adopted androgynous eccentricity. This way they couldn’t be judged. Unfortunately, this also foreclosed their serving as positive models for women (Roberts 2010). Even now, lower-class women stars are subjected to exceptional levels of public scrutiny and punitive media commentary (Gies 2011). Sociological accounts of how celebrity scandals humanize Hollywood stars and demonstrate that celebrities are like us fail to explain why understanding that celebrities have the same weaknesses as ordinary people is useful to audiences, who, these days, know celebrities are not moral paragons. Scandal erupts with disclosure of “immoral” private actions simultaneously at odds with cultural norms and a star’s public image. Another explanation for the genre’s popularity relies on the concept of Schadenfreude—the German term (schaden = harm; freude = joy) for taking joy in another’s pain. This sense of disgust with hypocrisy, outrage at excess, and using another person’s downfall to reinforce self-esteem or sense of self-worth (van Dijk & van Koningsbruggen 2011) would be expected to be greater the more powerful the person is. Social comparison theory predicts that high-status people are resented, attacked, begrudged, or criticized specifically because they have been classified as better than their peers (Feather 1989). Schadenfreude’s moral status is contested. The Book of Proverbs warns: “Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth, and let not thine heart be glad when he stumbleth.” The early nineteenthcentury philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer condemned Schadenfreude as cruelty. Yet, another’s loss may bring tangible rewards; downward comparison boosts our emotional lives and is justified, especially when Schadenfreude is moderated by empathy and compassion (Smith 2013). Smith uses reality show “humilitainment”— public humiliation as entertainment—to illustrate the pleasurable narrative of deserved downward comparison. More to my point, the misfortunes suffered by others sometimes legitimately satisfy our sense of injustice, when people with power, visibility, and status pretend holiness and then act egregiously. The joy in seeing justice served may be particularly sweet when we feel personally wronged. In the past, celebrities 306

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gained a degree of sympathy when unscrupulous tabloid journalists and paparazzi (neither were “real” journalists as the boundary work on professional journalists shows) invaded their privacy; because most Hollywood scandals cause no real injury to citizen rights or property, using drones or spying merely for splashy photos provokes outrage. The celebrity who seeks publicity and later hypocritically complains it went too far by revealing something scandalous, however, deserves comeuppance. Celebrities’ complaints about intrusive video and audio, taken with concealed cameras or recorders, cannot always be taken literally, even when the personal behaviors thus exposed are normally kept secret. Public figures’ reliance on publicity makes quoting Queen Gertrude in Hamlet, “the lady doth protest too much,” appropriate here. Put another way, Shadenfreude’s “shameful” associations can be politicized. Jacquet (2015) advocates shame as a means to regulate social behavior by warning potential or actual deviants about punishment that they will suffer if they are caught failing to conform to group standards. Public shaming, through media exposure and social media and hashtag activism (I suggest that often the media exposure comes first and, in either case, the shaming works better when all these forms bloom), is a nonviolent, effective, and legitimate form of resistance that can promote large-scale political and social reform. Although some individuals and corporations may be impervious to shame, public shaming can push many corporations and even governments to change policies and behaviors. Modern society relies more heavily on personal feelings of guilt, but ineffectively so. Guilt motivates only individuals, and then only sometimes; it won’t work for sociopaths. I suggest here that, although coverage of Cosby and Weinstein’s decades of scandalous sexual harassment and predatory assaults did not solve the problem of sexual harassment, it did galvanize still-continuing consciousness-raising about sexual misconduct at the institutional level—eventually among universities, religious organizations, professional firms, non-profits, corporations, and federal agencies, among others. The New Yorker and New York Times, which won the Pulitzer Prize for public service for “explosive, impactful journalism that exposed wealthy and powerful sexual predators,” represents an extreme but important case of celebrity scandal news causing change. Below, I first highlight relevant details that were prominently and consistently reported to underscore the similarities and differences of the Cosby and Weinstein scandals.

The Weinstein scandal In October 2017, the New York Times published a 3,500-word story titled “Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers for Decades.” Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s (2017) investigation found previously undisclosed allegations of sexual harassment and unwanted physical contact by Weinstein. After being confronted, Weinstein had reached settlements with at least eight women. His predatory behavior “wasn’t a secret to the inner circle,” as one assistant put it. Then, in Ronan Farrow’s (2017a) 7,788-word article, 13 women, several “on the record,” accused Weinstein of sexual harassment, assault, and rape. Former and current executives and assistants at Weinstein’s companies told Farrow they witnessed or had knowledge of his unwanted sexual advances, or even abetted him by using subterfuge to make women feel safe about meeting with him. The stories immediately created a furor, unleashing a torrent of reporting about Weinstein. Within two weeks nearly 50 women had accused him of serious sexual misconduct; the two investigations are widely credited with encouraging at least 80 women, including many celebrities, to come forward with allegations against him. Weinstein subsequently pleaded not guilty to six felony counts in New York involving three women. He (as well as his brother, Miramax, the Weinstein Co., and some board members) faces two proposed class-action lawsuits, as well 307

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as civil suits. Typically, audiences take pleasure in uncovering celebrity secrets “because it is possible rather than because there is any presumption of hypocrisy or venality being exposed” (Turner 2014, 150). Here, however, learning about the venality was horrifying, not pleasurable or amusing. The “lightest” the reporting got was a widely recirculated Huffington Post story that Weinstein, sexually rebuffed by a television anchorwoman, made her watch as he ejaculated into a restaurant’s potted plant. The Weinstein effect also properly refers to a tsunami of stories in other publications across the country and then around the globe about other predators. Even entertainment sources such as Variety and the Hollywood Reporter and social media produced serious investigations of sexual misconduct and predation and harassment across the industry. By April 2018, more than 200 powerful people had faced public allegations, nearly always involving multiple victims. Entertainment celebrities who were accused included actor and comedian Andy Dick (accused of genital groping and sexually propositioning at least four members of a film production team); Dustin Hoffman (accused of sexual harassing two women); showrunner Andrew Kreisberg (Variety found 19 women accusing him of sexual harassment); producer and director Brett Ratner (accused of sexually harassing or molesting six women); and actor and director Steven Seagal (accused of raping two women). Film director James Toback was accused of sexually harassing over 300 women, including some famous actresses. Comedian Louis C.K. represents a rare case in that he almost immediately admitted to irresponsibly wielding power over five women who accused him of sexual misconduct. At least 24 men accused actor Kevin Spacey of sexual misconduct or assault. More importantly, the exposés galvanized the #MeToo movement.

The Cosby scandal A 2017 trial of Bill Cosby for drugging and sexual assaulting Andrea Constand ended with a hung jury, despite revelations about a 2005 deposition by Cosby in which he admitted to some of the acts. Constand testified that during a visit to Cosby’s home, the famous celebrity, then more than twice her age, gave her pills that essentially immobilized her. But Constand and 12 other women who described similar assaults were met, mostly, with skepticism, threats, and attacks on their character. Cosby paid Constand $3.38 million in 2006 as part of a confidential settlement of a civil lawsuit. In 2018, however, Cosby was convicted of three felony counts. Many reporters speculated that the cascade of powerful men who fell from grace post-Weinstein (i.e., once women could explain why they might remain silent for years about victimization, including by men who did not “obviously” look like rapists) at least partly accounted for Cosby’s conviction upon retrial, especially given evidence that jurors are highly reluctant to convict in sexual misconduct cases, particularly when the accused is powerful, or when the victim is poor or a member of a minority group (Williams 2018). By all accounts, Cosby was long protected by his reputation as an upright, if moralizing, paterfamilias, developed especially as the sitcom producer and star, from 1984 to 1992, of The Cosby Show. “No one wanted to believe the TV dad in a cardigan was capable of such things, and so they didn’t” (Makarechi 2015). As a sign of how the pre-Weinstein Cosby continued to enjoy work and good reputation, in 2014, he was appearing on television and in comedy clubs, NBC was planning a new sitcom, and a high-profile Cosby biography glossed over the accusations. The tide turned in 2014 after a reporter uploaded a clip of comedian Hannibal Buress calling Cosby a “rapist.” When he had performed this bit before, Buress complained on stage, it was “upsetting” that people did not take it seriously. This time, the clip went viral on Facebook 308

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and Twitter, and news outlets also vented. Barbara Bowman described her frustration in a Washington Post op-ed titled: “Bill Cosby raped me. Why did it take 30 years for people to believe my story.” New York published interviews with 35 women who described being sexual assaulted by Cosby. The magazine’s dramatic cover showed the 35, each sitting primly in a chair, plus an empty chair representing still-silent women. (The magazine said it knew of 46 women; eventually more than 50 have accused him.) After reading each other’s stories, finding one another on social media, or meeting in person at the magazine’s photo shoots, many of the women apparently forged a bond, “a sorrowful sisterhood” (Malone 2015).

The complicity machine and other barriers to reporting Investigative reporting on scandal is difficult, risky, time-consuming (Farrow took ten months), and expensive. Investigating scandals involving rape and sexual assault confront additional constraints. Kantor and Twohey (2017) and Farrow (2017b) expressed considerable concerns about the pain that public truth-telling might cause actresses already traumatized by Weinstein; the reporters worried about endangering sources, some of whom risked their livelihoods by speaking out and most of whom said they feared significant retaliation, given their personal experience or having heard Weinstein brag about crushing enemies and planting derogatory news items about critics. Witnesses’ or victims’ refusal to cooperate had stopped other news outlets’ attempts to expose him (Twohey et al. 2017). Although previously she refused to talk, after Farrow’s first story appeared, actress Annabella Sciorra told Farrow (2017b) that for 20 years she lived in physical fear of Weinstein, who had raped her and repeatedly sexually harassed her. The tabloids’ historic reputation for sensational moralizing produced an additional self-censoring effect. Having revealed both forcible and consensual sexual contact by Weinstein, the Italian actress Asia Argento said, “I was unprepared for the naked contempt, the unapologetically hateful public shaming and vilification” from the Italian tabloids.1 Other challenges were not specific to sexual assault. Both Cosby and Weinstein leveraged relationships with media leaders to fend off negative stories. Weinstein paid a gossip writer to collect juicy celebrity tidbits to barter, if reporters stumbled onto an affair he wanted to keep quiet (Twohey et al. 2017). Weinstein was a close friend of the chief executive of American Media Inc. (which publishes the National Enquirer, Globe, OK!, among others); and the company’s chief content officer gave Weinstein material obtained by one of his reporters, as part of an effort to help him dispute certain allegations (Twohey et al. 2017). The National Enquirer likewise pulled a big story when Cosby gave them an exclusive. That said, Weinstein’s mastery in deploying power, threats, and charm may have been extreme. Weinstein “commanded enablers, silencers and spies” and “courted those who could provide the money or prestige to enhance his reputation as well as his power to intimidate” (Twohey et al. 2017). Already months before the exposure, Weinstein reportedly drafted a secret list of 91 actors, producers, publicists, financiers, and other industry workers, apparently to figure out who to silence (Townsend 2017). Weinstein also convinced journalists to interview potential or known accusers and supply information that he could use to undermine them. He hired corporate-intelligence and private security operatives who used false identities to extract information from targets, block Farrow, and stop publication; New York abandoned an investigation (Farrow 2017c). News organizations also censored themselves. When Farrow’s original employer NBC News passed on his story, he hired his own camera crew and ultimately switched to the New Yorker.2 The new investigation also inspired others to recall how Weinstein pressured outlets to suppress or radically change stories to suit him, including by awarding book, film, and consulting deals (Raphael 2017). 309

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Who is shocked by the open secret Conventional wisdom holds that exposure of legal or moral scandal causes surprise and shock. But sometimes many people know about bad behavior and do nothing, which is itself scandalous. Sometimes people say they didn’t know but “suspected.” Hirsch and Milner (2016) suggest that information passes through several stages en route to becoming scandal. A scandal remains safe from exposure if it does not get leaked to outsiders who might publicize it. But inside information (known only to participants) can reach a tipping point that leads to notoriety and infamy as a public scandal. Even journalists who suspect corruption do not generally designate it as a scandal until it passes a tipping point that leads to documentation from more official sources, becoming “public knowledge,” and finally bringing “institutional response.” In Cosby’s case, journalists’ limited attention to women’s allegations prevented the outsider awareness of his alleged behavior from becoming public knowledge. The tipping point occurred only after statements from close to 50 women. Weinstein’s predatory behavior was certainly an open secret, including with journalists. In a 2001 New York magazine profile of Weinstein, David Carr, the late New York Times media critic, said Weinstein “re-engineered the media process so that he lives beyond its downsides.” Weinstein’s sexual exploitation had been referenced in coded online gossip, a storyline on Entourage, jokes on 30 Rock, and at the 2013 Oscars. In 2015, Gawker discussed New York Times coverage of police questioning of the “supremely powerful” Weinstein about whether he groped a young model (Sargent 2015). After recounting several examples of Weinstein’s creepiness taken from “the internet’s sleazier entertainment gossip blogs” Gawker invited readers to, as the headline put it, “Tell Us What You Know About Harvey Weinstein’s Open Secret.” On October 5, 2017 CNN’s Jake Tapper tweeted: “Shocked it’s taken so long for a Harvey Weinstein behavior expose. One of the most open secrets in Hollywood.” Many Hollywood stars issued statements professing total ignorance about Weinstein’s predations. But several Hollywood men told journalists they had known something and failed to act. Given what he “sensed,” Steven Spielberg told CNN he was not surprised by the revelations: “I knew enough to do more than I did.” Telling the New York Times that he had heard more than just the normal rumors, Hollywood director Quentin Tarantino explained, “We allowed it to exist because that’s the way it was.” On a PBS “Frontline” documentary, a former Miramax executive admitted he had made “a deal with the devil,” adding, “I think we were all enablers. I think we were all complicit.” Indeed, this widespread complicity may still be daunting when (or if) Weinstein goes to trial. Galloway (2018) predicted Weinstein will argue that not only is he not guilty, but that anyone and everyone who got into his proximity knew the rules of the game. And those rules were that sexism and chauvinism, lewdness and lechery, violence and predation were OK. More than that, they were the order of the day.

Discussion The intense coverage of actor, comedian, director, and screenwriter Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle— tried three times but never convicted of the rape and manslaughter of an actress in 1921—traded in titillation. The scandal left him ostracized. But there was little potential for public impact. Nevertheless, news of celebrity scandals can effectively illuminate major problems. They can illuminate not merely flamboyant excess and underscore deep societal or cultural anxieties, but also can expose unethical behaviors with larger implications, quite literally exposing issues that 310

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without such exposure cannot be solved. US Weekly’s slogan “Stars: They’re Just Like Us!” proved correct: Like other women, marquee actresses are vulnerable to bullying, intimidation, harassment, rape. Arguably, the stars’ allegations and their accounts of how they were frightened into silence both inspired non-famous women to come forward from professions, crafts, and industries and enhanced their credibility. The scandal news produced disgust, anger, and demands for justice. Cosby and Weinstein had different ways of controlling open secrets and achieving protection. Cosby was long protected by his paternal form of celebrity. The women he drugged and raped were not A-list stars, or stars at all; lacking a public image they were vulnerable to being disbelieved. Cosby had years to burnish his public persona as a conservative African American family icon; many fans faced a real dilemma about destroying the moral authority of a black hero. The unusual delay in this scandal’s emergence reflects a gradual cultural change, resulting in a new-found willingness to take rape accusations more seriously, to see the casting couch as deviant, and to believe victims, even when going against powerful icons. Nonetheless, once the tipping point was reached, 56 of Cosby’s 70 honorary doctorates were rescinded. Never known as a nice guy, Weinstein had to work harder at this, expending far more money and power to fight off both the journalists and the stars accusing him. He fell immediately. Signaling his excommunication from Hollywood, he was expelled from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Ultimately, both celebrities, once known for philanthropy, lost all their celebrity capital—the accumulated visibility that results from recurrent media representations (Driessens 2013). Dramatic transformations of the media landscape were also relevant. Reporting on Weinstein immediately (re)inspired the #MeToo hashtag, which went viral on Twitter, and developed into a full-fledged movement. Various social media amplified, magnified, supplemented the testimony of targets. Social media handed a megaphone to those who were previously silent. No wonder the “Silence Breakers” were Time’s Person of the Year. The new online platforms could never have afforded to launch and sustain the original investigations. Getting past the complicity machines and breaking these stories required well-funded, elite outlets with veteran reporting and legal staffs. But new media platforms certainly could carry on the movement, pursuing smaller threads, and offering sisterhood to those who testified, literally and figuratively. Indeed, the leverage that Weinstein and Cosby exerted over more conventional media gatekeepers was irrelevant with social media: their lawyers could not control the new, multimedia, multiplatform “web” where individuals could tweet, glob, and comment on news stories with their own allegations or support for others. With both of these scandals, as with other Hollywood scandals, news outlets’ approaches varied over the years and differed in ways consistent with their political orientation. In 2014– 2015, E! and FOX News highlighted Cosby’s support from the black community and costars, whereas CNN highlighted the power of survivors’ voices (Terán & Emmers-Sommer 2018). With Weinstein, not surprisingly, the Wall Street Journal emphasized corporate consequences while entertainment outlets such as Variety’s Hollywood-centric approach entailed emphasizing the implications for job-seeking actors. Either way, sheer courage and persistence were necessary but not sufficient. The investigations also required old-fashioned “shoe leather” investigation, not fancy surveillance technologies. Months of research by many people, protecting sources and journalists, double-checking accuracy, and vetting were crucial to avoiding lawsuits and to ensuring credibility. So, Turner’s (2014) claims that accuracy is irrelevant to celebrity news which journalists merely filter are wrong. Moreover, Hollywood scandal reporting here shows at least some notable impacts. Initially some cynics wondered aloud if sexual misconduct would have gotten press coverage without 311

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its celebrity actors. Perhaps so. Nonetheless, the quickly spreading MeToo movement served to shame publicly entire institutions, bringing change and a sense of justice for non-celebrity agents. For example, Ashley Judd was emboldened to sue Weinstein for spreading lies about her, causing her career to wither (Barnes 2018); at least one director acknowledged having removed Judd from a casting list given Weinstein’s “false information” that Judd was a “nightmare.” A Judd victory could have major implications for people who face harassment in “nontraditional” working relationships, where recovering damages for smear campaigns is even more difficult than in conventional workplaces. A Harvard Law professor called Judd’s suit notable for demonstrating that this is not just a sexual issue; beyond physical and emotional harm, “it also involves economic harm” (Barnes 2018). Whether scandal producer or scandal investigator has the upper hand remains an open question. Further research is necessary to determine how best to encourage and support sustained investigation of such scandals. Clearly, fame no longer inoculates. Yet, the challenges facing Kantor and Twohey and especially Farrow offer a cautionary tale about over-estimating journalistic power. Whether the MeToo movement erupted because people recognized the awfulness of sexual harassment, or because people were frustrated at women’s inability to pursue claims against Donald Trump, is impossible to know. No doubt one concern is the so-called Gawker effect, referring to the chilling effect of Hulk Hogan’s successful invasion-of-privacy lawsuit, which essentially bankrupted Gawker.3 One theory about Weinstein was that he represented the power of celebrity exceptionalism. Referencing Weinstein and his defense of accused rapist Roman Polanski as a great artist, but also Bill Cosby, Garber (2017) argues that celebrity functions as an American secular religion. Meanwhile, though legacy and social media clearly work best in combination, even this is insufficient. Petersen (2017), a BuzzFeed writer and expert on celebrity gossip, argues that—because of men’s power, the heavy burden of proof on accusers, and the steep price of making accusations—women utilize “whisper networks” and gossip to keep each other safe. Precisely because celebrity gossip enables women to gain knowledge and protect themselves, Petersen says, men often deride and degrade gossip. What is clear is that celebrity is becoming more human, more accountable, and operates in a complicated, dynamic, still-evolving relationship between legacy media, social media, power, and expertise in manipulation.

Notes 1 In an unsettling twist, in 2018 the New York Times revealed that one month after Argento’s allegations became public, an actor and rock musician accused her of sexually assaulting him in a California hotel when he was 17 and she was 37, a decade after he played her son in a movie. Argento agreed to pay him $380,000 in damages. 2 Farrow has not (yet) directly accused NCB of caving in to Weinstein. 3 Three outlets invested months of work investigating R. Kelly’s cult-like hold on young women and then got cold feet, suggesting a post-Gawker fear (Sullivan 2017). In January 2019, however, Lifetime debuted a six-part documentary series, “Surviving R. Kelly”; the new allegations from survivors and people from the singer’s inner circle about his sexual, mental, and physical abuse provoked other celebrities to renounce him and promise never to work with him again.

References Barnes B (2018) Ashley Judd Sues Harvey Weinstein, Saying He Harmed Her Career, April 30, https:// www.nytimes.com/2018/04/30/business/media/ashley-judd-harvey-weinstein-lawsuit.html Conboy M (2014) Celebrity journalism: An oxymoron? Forms and functions of a genre. Journalism, 15(2): 171–185.

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Scandal and celebrity deCordova R (2007) The Emergence of the Star System in America. In S. Redmond and S. Holmes (Eds.), Stardom and Celebrity: A Reader. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp.132-40. Deuze M (2009) Popular Journalism and Professional Ideology: Tabloid Reporters and Editors Speak Out. Media Culture and Society, 27(6): 861–882. Driessens O (2013) Celebrity Capital: Redefining Celebrity Using Field Theory. Theory and Society, 42(5): 543–560. Dubied A and Hanitzsch T (2014) Studying Celebrity News. Journalism, 15(2): 137–143. Farrow R (2017a) From Aggressive Overtures to Sexual Assault: Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers Tell Their Stories, October 23, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/from-aggressive-overtures-tosexual-assault-harvey-weinsteins-accusers-tell-their-stories Farrow R (2017b) Weighing the Costs of Speaking Out About Harvey Weinstein, October 27, https:// www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/weighing-the-costs-of-speaking-out-about-harvey-weinstein Farrow R (2017c) Harvey Weinstein’s Army of Spies, November 6, https://www.newyorker.com/news/ news-desk/harvey-weinsteins-army-of-spies Feather NT (1989) Attitudes Towards the High Achiever: The Fall of the Tall Poppy. Australian Journal of Psychology, 41(3): 239–267. Galloway S (2018) Watch Out, Hollywood: Harvey’s Coming For You, July 3, https://www.hollywood reporter.com/news/harvey-weinstein-charges-hollywood-revenge-1124674 Garber M (2017) Harvey Weinstein and the Power of Celebrity Exceptionalism, October 13, https:// www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/10/harvey-weinstein-and-the-power-ofcelebrity-exceptionalism/542880/ Gies L (2011) Stars Behaving Badly. Feminist Media Studies, 11(3): 347–361. Gorin V and Dubied A (2011) Desirable People: Identifying Social Values through Celebrity News. Media, Culture & Society, 33(4): 599–618. Hirsch, PM and Milner D (2016) When Scandals Yield “It’s about Time!” Journal of Management Inquiry, 25(4): 447–449. Jacquet J (2015) Is Shame Necessary? New Uses for an Old Tool. New York: Pantheon. Kantor J and Twohey M (2017) Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers for Decades. October 5, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/us/harvey-weinstein-harassment-allegations. html Makarechi K (2015) 35 Bill Cosby Accusers Photographed and Interviewed for Powerful New York Magazine Cover, July 26, https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/07/bill-cosby-accusers-nymag-cover Malone N (2015) ‘I’m No Longer Afraid’: 35 Women Tell Their Stories About Being Assaulted by Bill Cosby, and the Culture That Wouldn’t Listen, July 26, https://www.thecut.com/2015/07/billcosbys-accusers-speak-out.html Parker K and Deane C (1997) Ten Years of the Pew News Interest Index. Presented at The American Association for Public Opinion Research, http://www.people-press.org/files/legacy-pdf/107.pdf Petersen AH (2014). Scandals of Classic Hollywood: Sex, Deviance, and Drama from the Golden Age of American Cinema. New York: Penguin. Petersen AH (2017) Here’s Why So Many Women Knew the Rumors about Harvey Weinstein, October 8, https://www.buzzfeed.com/annehelenpetersen/women-believe-other-women?utm_ term=.iv70rpvmm#.xmdojmpa5 Raphael TJ (2017). The Harvey Weinstein Cover-up: How Censorship, Settlements and Silence Kept the Allegations Out of the News, October 11, www.pri.org/stories/2017-10-11/harveyweinstein-cover-how-censorship-settlements-and-silence-kept-allegations Roberts ML (2010) Rethinking Female Celebrity: The Eccentric Star in Nineteenth Century France. In E. Berenson and E. Giloi (Eds.), Charisma, Fame, and Celebrity during the Long 19th Century. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 103–116. Rowe D (2007) Sports Journalism: Still the “Toy Department” of the News Media? Journalism, 8(4): 385–405. Sargent J (2015) Tell Us What You Know About Harvey Weinstein’s “Open Secret,” July 2, http:// defamer.gawker.com/tell-us-what-you-know-about-harvey-weinsteins-open-sec-1695071092 Smith RH (2013) The Joy of Pain: Schadenfreude and the Dark Side of Human Nature. New York: Oxford. Sullivan Margaret (2017) That R. Kelly “Cult” Story almost Never Ran. Thank Hulk Hogan for that, July 30, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/that-r-kelly-cult-story-almost-never-ranthank-hulk-hogan-for-that/2017/07/30/19e1f8ea-72c5-11e7-8839-ec48ec4cae25_story. html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.52a4e4fbdda9

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31 REFRAMING THE GENDER GAP IN AMERICAN POLITICAL SEX SCANDALS IN THE #METOO ERA Hinda Mandell The roots of American political sex scandals run deep, and can be dug up all the way back to the founding of the Republic (Summers, 2000). Yet media coverage today focusing on raucous and raunchy politicians is significantly more aggressive, and certainly a more contemporary phenomenon. Perhaps the first example of a contemporary political sex scandal, replete with voracious media coverage that caught unfolding impropriety in real time, belongs to presidential candidate Gary Hart’s “Monkey Business” in 1987 (Bai, 2015). The public has been eager to consume news coverage of political sex scandals, which generates a moral discourse about sex, gender, and power (Bauer, 2008; Berlant & Duggan, 2001; Thompson, 1995). Consider this: The Pew Research Center found that sex-scandal stories take up much space within a news cycle (Anderson, 2013). For instance, news about then New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s prostitution ring entanglement occupied 23 percent of the news cycle from March 10 to March 16, when he resigned from office in 2008. Media coverage of then Idaho Senator Larry Craig occupied 17 percent of the news cycle from June 22 to June 28, 2009, after charges of lewd conduct in a Minneapolis airport became public. Similarly, coverage of then South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s extramarital affair occupied 11 percent of the news cycle from June 22 to June 28, 2009, when it was revealed that he was romantically involved with a woman who was not his wife in Argentina – rather than hiking the Appalachian Trail as he previously said. Over time, media coverage of politicians’ mistakes has been found to blossom, as stories about one scandal generate interest about other scandals, crowding out other, less scintillating, news (Balkin, 1999). Yet the fact remains that, despite the plethora of philandering politicians, and with a fervent media always ready to deploy its legions of reporters, talking heads, and commentators when scandal becomes public – offering rapid-fire updates as news of the transgression unfolds (Apostolidis and Williams, 2004) – there has never been a major political sex scandal where the woman, as the powerful figure, was caught with her proverbial pants down (Mandell, 2017a). When it comes to political sex scandals, women typically occupy one of two roles: as the political wife or as the mistress. With the former role, women are charged with carrying out their wifely duties, embodying the gender norms of her sex (West and Zimmerman, 1987). With the latter role, women are cast into a cloying, money-grubbing, and fame-seeking frame (Mandell, 2017b). 315

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In the wake of the #MeToo movement that began in fall 2017, a tsunami of personal stories burst forth from the social media stratosphere, claiming the careers of male elites in industries as diverse as Hollywood, the culinary arts, entertainment, news, nonprofits, and politics. I have been researching and writing about the gender gap in American politics since 2008, and my work has focused on how the gendered construction of power drives public reaction to scandal and foments distrust in the political system. While a scandal researcher can easily identify instances in which a male politician engages in illicit sex acts that strangled his career which are not connected to workplace sexual harassment of misconduct,1 it is worth revisiting the role of top-down workplace harassment in congressional and district offices, and on the campaign trail, as a major source of scandal activity.2 Any casual observer of American politics knows that there has historically been a plethora of male politicians, and a lack of female politicians, who are at the center of political sex scandals in the U.S. As I note in my book, Sex Scandals, Gender, and Power in Contemporary American Politics (Mandell, 2017a), women hold about 20 percent of congressional seats, but they do not account for 20 percent of sex scandals. (Can you recall a time in recent memory when an elite, female politician stole the headlines?) But it’s not hard to pull from our memories examples of male-led political sex scandals. The Washington Post reported in 2014 that of the 39 major such scandals that occurred since 1974, all involved men, with a partisan split of 17 Democrats and 22 Republicans. In my book, I come to the conclusion that the absence of female-led political sex scandals may reflect expected norms of gendered behavior that emerge long before a person chooses to run for office. For instance, political scientists Jennifer L. Lawless and Richard L. Fox surveyed a random sample of about 2,100 college students and queried them about their political aspirations. They found in their 2013 report, “Girls Just Wanna Not Run: The Gender Gap in Young Americans’ Political Ambition,” that “young women are less likely than young men ever to have considered running for office, to express interest in a candidacy at some point in the future, or to consider elective office a desirable profession” (Lawless & Fox, 2013). The #MeToo movement represents a powerful consciousness-raising shift in the broader American culture, and we continue to see a similar script within the sex-scandal ecosphere, where male politicians have been outed for misbehavior. Whether there’s been an uptick in such occurrences due to the #MeToo movement is beyond the scope of this chapter but it should be considered for future research endeavors. In the fallout from the #MeToo social movement initiated in fall 2017, we’ve witnessed nine instances from November 2017 to June 2018 (at the time of writing) of prominent political officials in the U.S. facing severe allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct within a workplace setting by this researcher’s count alone. The following list does not claim to be exhaustive but involves the male politicians who faced sexual harassment charges or sexual misconduct allegations where news of such incidents rose to national prominence and received national media coverage. 1

In November 2017, Steven T. McLaughlin, a New York State Assemblyman, was disciplined for sexual harassment “after an investigation by the Assembly’s ethics committee found he had asked a female Assembly staff member for naked pictures” (Maslin Nir, 2018). 2 Michigan Congressman John D. Conyers, a Democrat, resigned in December 2017 amid sexual harassment and sexual misconduct allegations made by multiple women going back decades. The former congressman even paid a settlement of $27,000 to one of his accusers, a former aide (Naylor & Montanaro, 2017). 3 The Arizona Republican Trent Franks, a congressman, announced his resignation in December 2017 after he learned he was under investigation by the House Ethics Committee 316

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“regarding my discussion of surrogacy with two previous female subordinates, making each feel uncomfortable,” he said in a written statement (Bade, Cheney & Schneider, 2017). 4 Minnesota Senator Al Franken, a Democrat, resigned in January 2018 after news broke that he inappropriately kissed, and later groped, an entertainer with whom he was performing on a 2006 United Service Organizations (USO) tour. Other women subsequently came forward detailed sexually assaulting behavior. “Multiple women claimed that Franken inappropriately touched them or attempted to kiss them” (Martinez, 2018). 5 That same month, a New York State Senator, Joe Klein, a Democrat, was “accused by a former staff member of forcibly kissing her outside an Albany bar in 2015” (McKinley, 2018). The senator has denied the misconduct allegations. 6 Also in December 2018, the Republican Congressman Blake Farenthold announced he wouldn’t seek reelection in 2018, “following allegations that he harassed female staff members and created a poor environment in his office” (Naylor, 2017). 7 That same month the Nevada Democrat Ruben Kihuen, a Democrat, said he too would not seek reelection following accusations that he sexually harassed women, including a staffer on his 2016 congressional campaign and a lobbyist when he worked as a state legislator in Nevada (Viebeck, 2017). 8 Pennsylvania Republican, Congressman Patrick Meehan, announced in January 2018 that he wouldn’t seek reelection following a sexual harassment scandal in which he paid his former aide a tax-funded settlement. He had previously confided in this younger female aide that he was attracted to her. Meehan was serving on the House Ethics Committee, the body that investigates and censures congress members who have breached professional propriety, when news of the settlement broke (Detrow, 2018). 9 Lastly, for this chapter at least, the casino magnate Steve Wynn (while himself not an elected official) resigned as the Republican National Committee finance chairman when accusations of sexual misconduct by female employees at Wynn Resorts surfaced (Isenstadt, 2018). Wynn has denied the allegations.

Sexual harassment and political sex scandals From a quantitative perspective, the categories of “sexual harassment” and “sexual relations with a female subordinate” appear frequently in my categorization of political sex scandals in the U.S. Incidents involving sexual harassment are present in 30.8 percent of scandals involving Democrats, making it the third most common category of scandals involving Democrats (Mandell, 2017a, 29). The category of sexual harassment is not in the top-10 categories for Republican politicians. Sex with a female subordinate occurs in 25 percent of scandals involving Democrats and 17.1 percent of those involving Republicans (ibid.). And, indeed, according to my previous research the top-10 most frequently occurring scandal attributes for politicians serving in Congress, as governor, or in the White House, “sex with a female subordinate” and “sexual harassment” rank two and four accordingly (ibid., 27). In other words, these are frequently occurring events whose impacts on the legislative system in the U.S., and with implications for an already divided and polarized electorate, demand further and future study. Before proceeding with an extended analysis of this chapter’s focus, the 2018 scandal involving Pennsylvania Congressman Patrick Meehan and his unnamed (in media accounts) female subordinate, it is worth noting the categorical distinction between “sexual harassment” and “sex with a female subordinate.” Previously, I conceptualized the former as incidents where a subordinate, such as a staff member or an intern, received unwanted attention from her (male) boss and came forward publicly with these claims. In the latter, I conceptualized these incidents 317

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as consensual sexual activity between boss and subordinate. But while there are qualitative distinctions between these two categories I am not sure they are conceptually useful. After all, we know, or should know, that an imbalance of power may likely make it impossible for a female subordinate, whose salary is significantly less than that of her powerful male boss, and who is often quite younger, to consent to a sexual relationship in an equal manner as her boss – a political elite – even if she does not view it as sexual harassment or sexual misconduct. As political operative Kristin Nicholson explained in a series of tweets following news reports that California Congresswoman Jackie Speier said publicly in October 2017 that Capitol Hill must reform the way it responds to sexual harassment and misconduct allegations, “It’s a melting pot of powerful, respected public figures & young, ambitious public servants – and few if any layers of barriers between” (Nicholson, 2017a). In an October 27, 2017 tweet Nicholson foregrounded her barrage of tweets with the preface that she worked on Capitol Hill “for 20yrs, most as Chief of Staff” (Nicholson, 2017b). She added that “the most and least senior, the most and least powerful, interact constantly in performing their daily professional duties” (Nicholson, 2017c), which creates a dynamic that is “fraught with potential for exploitation” (Nicholson, 2017d). In the wake of this crop of sexual harassment scandals, the House passed landmark legislation in February 2018 to overhaul sexual harassment legislation on Capitol Hill. The new legislation would streamline the process for victims to register their complaints, would appoint them with and advocate, and would prevent elected officials from using taxpayer money to fund harassment and misconduct settlements (Marcos, 2018). While noting the scandal-tarnished backdrop of political resignations and crises as listed above, this chapter focuses exclusively on the scandal involving Pennsylvania Republican Congressman Patrick Meehan, paying particular care to the gendered nature of scandal through the deconstruction of a letter that Meehan sent to a female aide working for him in his office. Because Meehan released a copy of this letter to news outlets in the wake of the scandal’s publicity in January 2018, we have a unique scandal artifact: an item written for the private audience of one, at least initially, but then brought into the public sphere as the congressman attempted to prove the “innocent” nature of his affection for his subordinate. Following this particular scandal’s fallout, Meehan announced that he would not seek reelection in the 2018 midterms. Meehan wrote the letter to his aide, dated May 4, 2017, following an ice cream outing with her that occurred on May 3, 2017 (Taylor, 2017). According to screenshots of a text exchange between the congressman and the aide that Meehan released to the public along with the handwritten letter, he asked her: “You want to take some time and go out for ice cream on Wed after the tele town hall? It might be nice. It was an intense week and I feel I added unnecessary tension and I do [sic] don’t want you to be the brunt of it. Now I feel very bad” (ibid.). Following their ice cream outing, Meehan placed a note to the aide in her drawer: “Thank you for your very kind words and for your friendship. [smiley face emoji] I appreciate your letting me in on where you are. Enjoy the weekend and take some time to relax!” (ibid.). In an attempt at damage control, no doubt, following news that he later used taxpayer money to settle the sexual harassment case brought by his aide, Meehan released the texts to demonstrate the “friendly” nature of their texts, and particularly her “positive” response after receiving his intimate letter. Indeed, Meehan told the New York Times in an interview that the aide “‘specially invited’ his intimate communications, and that he was emotionally wounded when she filed a complaint against him” (Vogel & Rogers, 2018). The ice cream outing, which Meehan suggested and which connotes a childlike innocence, coupled with his response of being distraught over her complaint in response to his behavior, indicates (from an outside observer) a type of delusional orientation toward the aide that his behavior was appropriate because it was 318

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rooted in harmless, non-physical activities like eating ice cream behavior, undercutting the power of personal dynamics, language, and contrived intimacy in a workplace setting. In this chapter I employ narrative inquiry to unpack the congressman’s letter to his aide as a tool for deconstructing the text and the gendered nature of power embedded in this artifact that led to the aide bringing a complaint against her boss. “It is commonplace to note that human beings both live and tell stories about their living,” writes D. Jean Clandinin. “These lived and told stories and talk about those stories are ways we create meaning in our lives as well as ways we enlist each other’s help in building our lives and communities” (Clandinin, 2006, 51). Storytelling represents a portal through which a person interacts with his or her world and extracts meaning. It is therefore a ripe site for analysis. “Narrative inquiry, the study of experience as story, then, is first and foremost a way of thinking about experience.” This narrative approach explores an object of the everyday – in this case the contents of a private letter – and privileges it as a key to understand experience and life situations. By shifting storytelling from the periphery to the center we are assured of their value to unlock lived experience. As Clandinin writes with powerful provocation: “The truth about stories is that that’s all we are” (ibid.). By focusing on the congressman’s letter we can better understand how he understands himself in orientation to the aide with whom he acted inappropriately. The work of Joanne Martin (1990) can act as a template for deconstructing and then reconstructing stories of organizational taboo. In a journal article on such taboos, Martin retells an anecdote shared by a prominent (although unnamed) CEO at an industry conference. By deconstructing that story from a feminist standpoint, and then reconstructing it by changing small portions of the text, Martin demonstrates how the retelling of an artifact of lived experience can reveal an imbalance in the power structure that is connected to the workplace. I also used this approach in my book, focusing specifically on how New York State assembly members personalized scandal stories about boundary-crossing. Martin outlines nine steps or “analytic strategies used in deconstruction” (ibid., 355). “Deconstruction,” writes Martin, “is able to reveal ideological assumptions in a way that is particularly sensitive to the suppressed interests of members of disempowered, marginalized groups” (ibid., 340). Since Meehan clearly believes in his innocence – despite settling the complaint to his former aide with a $40,000 payment (Tamari & Brennan, 2018) – a deconstruction proves valuable because it “peels away the layers of ideological obscuration, exposing the conflict that has been suppressed; the devalued ‘other’ is made visible” (ibid.). While we may be interested in the multiple meanings and interpretations to emerge through a deconstruction, it’s necessary to note that we can never assert that we’ve arrived at the “truth about what the author of a text intended to communicate” (ibid., 342). Therefore, we do not focus on intent. Rather, it’s the meaning and impression of the storytelling site that hold our attention.

Deconstruction strategies: the congressman’s letter The first analytic strategy in a deconstruction, according to Martin’s process, is “dismantling a dichotomy, exposing it as a false distinction” (ibid., 355). By dismantling a dichotomy, we are in fact complicating the story and situation under review. The first dichotomy embedded in the congressman’s letter (see Appendix for a transcribed draft of the letter) to his female aide centers on two men. While the congressman describes the aide as “a complete partner” to him she has chosen another man romantically who may be the “one.” The figures of these men in opposition to each other, with the congressman representing himself as profoundly smitten with the aide and views her as “a complete partner,” in contrast to her boyfriend, “who might get to be 319

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your partner for more of your life,” loom large as competing options for the aide’s affection. The false distinction here is that the congressman poses himself as a romantic option for the aide even though she does not view him that way, according to news reports. The congressman has injected himself into her romantic life because of feelings of attraction that are not mutual. Martin also instructs us to pay attention to the element “most alien” to the text (ibid., 348). It’s worth noting that the entire tone of the letter, written by a married congressman to an aide that he has a clear infatuation with, is “alien” to what decorum considers to be an appropriate and professional communication. There is no phrase that better encapsulates the “most alien” nature of this text than his closing line of the letter, where he signs off with the flourish, “with all my heart, Patrick.” The congressman is apparently a religious man, since he mentions God twice in the letter, including his wish that himself and his aide “discover our paths through His light.” While the reference to God in a letter written by a boss to his subordinate is also a “most alien” element to the text, perhaps the aide was also religious and the congressional office participated in prayer meetings or Bible studies or worship circles. We do not know. Yet the congressman’s sign-off is perhaps even more “alien” than the reference to God in the letter because it solidified his romantic interest in his aide, and while reference to God may be out of place in the workspace, and certainly grounds for complaints depending on the belief systems of those involved, the sign-off “with all my heart” can never be normalized in a work environment, especially since the Republican is married, and as a religious person he should no doubt know that expressions of infidelity are problematic. Moving on, another analytic strategy instructs us to unpack metaphors in deconstruction work. To do this, we need to visit a reference to the Vietnam War Memorial. In the letter, the congressman references his presence at the memorial as a place for personal reflection. He writes that the Vietnam War is “the war I grew up with,” prompting readers to unpack the metaphor of war in this missive. In a letter that is dripping in affection for his aide, it’s hard not to call forth the cliché that “all’s fair in love and war.” While the congressman referred to the Vietnam War Memorial as a site of contemplation, he ventures into a description of death, of people with shared last names, whose life paths were cut short. The war allusion can either indicate that his romantic feelings to the aide will be cut short as well, or perhaps he’s willing to fight for her affection since, as he writes in the letter, “as we travel our paths together, I am comforted that there is more unwritten.” The allusion to war in a letter centering on love demonstrates the significance of his emotions, the risks he is willing to take and has already taken, and the dangers in recklessness when certain men don’t get what they want. Another storytelling deconstruction strategy focuses on textual double entendres “that may point to an unconscious subtext, often sexual in content” (Martin, 1990, 355). We can point to a relevant subtext at the start of the letter, when the congressman describes the aide’s boyfriend as “a very, very lucky man who might get to be your partner for more of your life.” Since the aide and congressman have not been physically intimate with each other – although the congressman did tell reporters that they did once share a hug “maybe longer . . . than needed to be” (Taylor, 2017) – the reference that the boyfriend can be involved “for more of your life” points to sex. Since the congressman/aide relationship lacked physical intimacy (with him telling a National Public Radio (NPR) affiliate that he “never touched her,” although “it was something that, from time to time, I struggled with” (ibid.)), the “more” insinuates a sexual element that his relationship to the aide lacks. This subtext is compounded by a line later in the same paragraph, where the congressman writes, “I pray that you might be blessed with children that you will raise so wonderfully in your image.” Therefore, the “very, very lucky man” who gets to be involved in “more of your life” may also be the man whose sexual union results in children raised “so wonderfully in your image.” 320

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A congressman fixated on his aide Ultimately, Martin instructs those engaged in this reconstruction to “explain the persistence of the status quo” (Martin, 1990, 355), which in this instance is an older male congressman, age 62 at the time of his scandal, who has emotionally attached himself to a younger female subordinate, so much so that he draws upon his own life narrative – including a belief that God sets forth a path for him to follow, and a historical backdrop of growing up in the shadow of the Vietnam War – to press upon her that their life paths are entwined “together” and that their future is “unwritten,” even if she has chosen “the one” who is not the congressman. The 1959 foundational text, Studies in Social Power, offers a multitude of definitions of power that remain relevant to the power structures at play in the Meehan scandal. For instance, “Power may be defined as the capacity of the individual, or group of individuals, to modify the conduct of other individuals or groups in the manner which he desires” (Cartwright, 1959, 186). And there is also the elegantly phrased, “Power may be defined as the production of intended effects” (ibid.). Through the congressman’s letter it becomes evident that he cannot release his affections, which are sexual harassing, for his aide. Because Meehan and the aide’s relationship did not extend into a physical exchange, Meehan views their interactions as pure and innocent. When the aide rejects Meehan’s claims of affection, his sense of power to control their relationship is diminished. It no longer produces his “intended effects.” And while their futures “together” may remain “unwritten,” as expressed in his letter, it’s clear that his political career is over. What demands further study is an in-depth analysis that compares political fallout among two distinct eras of political sex scandals: those occurring before fall 2017 with the inception of the #MeToo movement, and those occurring since then. We know from previous research (Mandell, 2017a) that male politicians caught in sexual harassment scandals in the workplace can and do face political failure. Yet in a #MeToo era, how does that failure differ? Does it occur more swiftly? Is public opinion less divided and more on the “side” of the female target? Or does partisan politics remain the most important element in predicting the political futures of sexually harassing politicians? These questions demand attention in our democracy, lest mistrust of our elected officials, and the way they treat women in public service, continues to erode further.

Appendix Letter from Congressman Patrick Meehan to his aide, an unidentified woman (Tamari, 2018): May 4, 2017 As you bask in this moment of extreme joy I want to share with you my sentiment of how richly it is deserved. You are kind and sensitive and caring and infectious with your laugh. You are and have been a complete partner to me and you have brought me much happiness. It is a very, very lucky man who might get to be your partner for more of your life. If this is indeed “the one,” I hope you will find great contentment. I pray that you might be blessed with children that you will raise so wonderfully in your image. As I walked this evening and glanced over at the White House I smiled at the irony that on a day that I had to say “no” to the president and to the speaker of the House, I got to say “yes” to you. I hope that the former will be judged as a vote of conscience and the latter as an expression of care. There is a funny saying that “man plans and God laughs.” I hope that we each discover our paths through His light. From time to time, when I need perspective, I will sit quietly in the embrace of the Vietnam memorial, the war I grew up with. I found surprisingly close together 321

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the names of [redacted] from Montana and [redacted] from Pa. As I traced the names with my finger, I wondered who they were and why their plans ended so sadly and abruptly. As we travel our paths together, I am comforted that there is more unwritten. Thank you for all that you have done for me, and for all you continue to do. I thank God for putting you into my life and for all that we have seen, and experienced [illegible] shared together. With all my heart, Patrick

Notes 1 See for example, in recent years alone, the scandals of former Louisiana Senator David Vitter in 2007; Idaho Senator Larry Craig in 2007; former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer in 2008; former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford in 2009; and former New York Congressman Anthony Weiner’s scandals from 2011 to 2016. 2 I use gendered pronouns intentionally.

References Anderson, M. 2013. Sanford, Weiner, and Spitzer: Trying to Overcome the Headlines from their Scandals. Pew Research Center, July 10, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/07/10/sanfordweiner-and-spitzer-trying-to-overcome-the-headlines-from-their-scandals/ Apostolidis, P. & Williams, J. (Eds.) 2004. Public Affairs: Politics in the Age of Sex Scandals. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bade, R., Cheney, K. & Schneider, E. 2017. Rep. Trent Frank Resigns After Discussing Surrogacy with Female Staffers. Politico, https://www.politico.com/story/2017/12/07/trent-franks-expected-toresign-286967 [accessed March 28, 2018]. Bai, M. 2015. All the Truth is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid. New York: Vintage. Balkin, J.M. 1999. How Mass Media Simulate Political Transparency. Journal for cultural research, 3(4), pp. 393–413. Bauer, S.W. 2008. The Art of the Public Grovel: Sexual Sin and Public Confession in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Berlant, L. & Duggan, L.A. 2001. Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and National Interest. New York: NYU Press. Cartwright, Dorwin. 1959. A Field Theoretical Conception of Power. In D. Cartwright (Ed.), Studies in Social Power (pp. 183–220). Ann Arbor, MI: Research Center for Group Dynamics Institute for Social Research. Clandinin, D.J. 2006. Narrative Inquiry: A Methodology for Studying Lived Experience. Research studies in music education, 27(1), pp. 44–54. Detrow, S. 2018. Rep. Patrick Meehan Reeling from “Soul mate” Scandal, Won’t Run Again, National Public Radio, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/01/25/580908247/rep-patrickmeehan-reeling-from-soul-mate-scandal-wont-run-again [accessed March 28, 2018]. Isenstadt, A. 2018. RNC Finance Chair Steve Wynn Resigns after Sexual Harassment Allegations, Politico, https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/27/steve-wynn-resign-rnc-finance-chair-sexual-misconductaccusations-373768 [accessed March 28, 2018]. Lawless, Jennifer, L. and Fox, Richard, L. 2013. Girls Just Wanna Not Run: The Gender Gap in Young Americans’ Political Ambition. School of Public Affairs, American University, https://www.american.edu/ spa/wpi/upload/girls-just-wanna-not-run_policy-report.pdf Mandell, H. 2017a. Sex Scandals, Gender and Power in Contemporary American Politics. Santa Barbara, California: Praeger. Mandell, H. 2017b. When Mistresses Become Media Starlets: The Ascension of the Political SexScandal Celebrity. In H. Mandell (Ed.), Sex Scandals, Gender, and Power in Contemporary American Politics (pp. 57–75). Santa Barbara, California: Praeger. Mandell, H. 2018. Why Stormy Daniels is different. Politico, March 31, https://www.politico.eu/article/ stormy-daniels-donald-trump-stripper-why-is-different/

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32 SCANDALS AND SPORT David Rowe

Introduction: the sport of scandal Scandals relating to sport are highly variable in nature, frequent and occupy extraordinary prominence in the media. They have in common with all other scandals elements of normative transgression, but also possess specific properties that are related to the socio-cultural positioning of sport in the multiple spaces between bounded local communities and seemingly boundless global cyberspace. A small sample of sport scandals during this century includes: French captain Zinedine Zidane head-butting Italian player Marco Materazzi and being sent off during the 2006 Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup final in Berlin; American golfer Tiger Woods’s exposure as a serial adulterer in 2009; confirmation in 2013 of cyclist Lance Armstrong’s systematic, clandestine use of performance-enhancing drugs; the 2014 trial and jailing of Olympic and Paralympic runner Oscar Pistorius for the murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp; arrests for corruption of senior officials attending the 2015 FIFA Congress in Zurich; and the 2016 revelation of Russia’s state-sponsored doping in Olympic and other sports. These scandals range from the tragic to the ethically dubious to the relatively trivial, but are united by their capacity to garner enormous media coverage. They have this degree of prominence because of the popularity of sport and the celebrity status of the sportspeople involved or implicated. Their relationship to sport is diverse and uneven, but the various associations with it invariably evoke or play on sport’s institutional structures, practices, myths and symbols. It is necessary to understand this socio-cultural context in order to explain how a transgression involving sport becomes, indisputably, a sport scandal. For it to be deemed as such, the relationship with sport must be more than an incidental one. Instead, sport must be a crucial factor in either causing or interpreting what has occurred and the reactions to it, and the media – both institutional and social – integral to its scandalous magnification. The literature on sport scandals is now quite extensive, although the media dimensions may not necessarily be central. If the essence of scandal lies in the nature of the transgressive act, then the role of the media can be reduced to that of the vector carrying information and analysis to the wider world. But, in a variation of old epistemological and ontological questions about the relationship between an event and its apprehension, a full-blown scandal requires substantial media attention for it to acquire that status. Professional sport provides an instant connection to 324

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the media, not least because the convergence of the two institutions has produced the synthetic phenomenon of ‘MediaSport’ (Wenner 1998) set within a vast ‘media sports cultural complex’ (Rowe 2004). However, the media do more than merely relay elements of scandal to large, dispersed and heterogeneous audiences (the conventional definition of mass communication – McQuail 1997), but help determine its trajectory and fate in such a way that it may be called a ‘media scandal’, which is defined by Lull and Hinerman (1997, 3) as follows: A media scandal occurs when private acts that disgrace or offend the idealized, dominant morality of a social community are made public and narrativized by the media, producing a range of effects from ideological and cultural retrenchment to disruption and change. From this analytical perspective, a ‘media sport scandal’ is a private transgression involving a sportsperson or organisation that becomes common knowledge via mediation, and then is ‘mediatised’ (Skey et al. 2017) in the sense that the extensive involvement of the media crucially affects the meaning and nature of the scandal and its implications beyond the MediaSport world. A curious paradox here, though, is that, as in the abovementioned case of Zidane, some of the largest global media audiences ever assembled may be watching an apparently spontaneous transgression in real or slightly delayed time. But such acts are never only played out in public and consigned to history. Instead, once they transpire the imperatives of explanation and elaboration take the media audience away from the stadium and into the private sphere; in this case to the protagonist’s origins (North Africa and Mediterranean France in the case of Zidane), the complicity of others (what did Zidane’s victim say to provoke the assault?) and into other aspects of personal and social history that led to the pivotal moment, such as the incidence of racism in world football (Rowe 2010). They also take the collective gaze into other public and private spaces – streets, night clubs, locker rooms, hotels, motor vehicles, car parks, private homes and so on. Sport scandals, therefore, always play in two directions, with conduct that is mostly out of sight suddenly and spectacularly brought into the media spotlight, while conduct that is available for all to see (usually on the field of play) is scrutinised for hidden meanings that, in turn, are compulsively connected to what happens outside the live media frame. In order to understand the specific nature of the sport scandal, it is necessary to understand the dynamics of sport culture, and especially its entwinement with media, in constantly producing scandalous transgressions which, in turn, spill out well beyond the sport world that seeks to suppress or contain it.

Sport and the culture of scandal Sport is a form of popular culture that is extraordinarily susceptible to scandal of many kinds. As competitive, rule-governed physical activity, it offers manifold possibilities for transgression, which may involve breaking the rules (in some sports called ‘laws’) that govern it. This conduct may be surreptitious – for example, ingesting performance-enhancing drugs or fixing the outcome of sport contests by bribing athletes and officials in the service of betting ‘stings’. It may also be overt, such as through media-captured illegitimate physical violence. Such unethical actions can only lead to full-blown scandals because of the industrial scale of modern professional sport, with its vast, emotionally invested audiences, active support by national governments and transnational private corporations and, above all, its saturation presence in the media. This combination means that even relatively trivial transgressions, such as the extra-marital dalliances or illicit recreational drug use of prominent sportspeople (usually men), may take on 325

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the appearance of scandal because of the reach and intensity of the attendant media coverage and of reactions to it. Contrastingly, sport can become a vibrant, significant theatre of collective discourse and debate around social issues involving legitimate scandals that have been historically submerged, such as spousal abuse or discrimination based on ‘race’, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. This compulsive generation of scandal in sport needs to be analysed and understood, not only to learn more about the social institution of sport, but to grasp how the phenomenon can come to consume so much prominent media space and, in some cases, become the lead global or national news story of the day (Rowe 2011). Scandals in sport, while much deplored, are nonetheless integral elements of a mediated sports culture that noisily demands constant attention in a crowded popular cultural marketplace. They have held considerable interest in the sociological, cultural and communication literature of sport for a range of reasons. First and most obviously, they are imbued with the negative news values that make for more dramatic, attention-grabbing news than most orthodox ‘good’ news stories. During the twentieth century, in particular, when newspapers tended to contain much of the sport news on the back pages and news broadcasts confined most of the sports reporting to a dedicated segment towards the end of bulletins (just before the weather), a major sport scandal involving famous people could break out into what print journalists call ‘the front end of the book’ and might lead broadcast bulletins. The advantage of this discursive mobility is that sport is able to resonate beyond the important but still limited world of athletes, clubs, associations and fans, meaning that a sports scandal becomes something of far greater consequence – for example, bad behaviour by an athlete, team or sport body may be regarded as a crisis of national character or as an indictment of contemporary society. Although it is possible to exaggerate the social and cultural importance of sport – even in so-called ‘sports mad’ countries like Australia only one in five adults plays any organised sport at all, and less than half go to stadia to watch it – sporting mythologies pervade the national social imaginary. This is because sport has derived much of its affective force from its founding mythology in the Ancient Games of Greece, although what is recognised today as sport is mainly an invention of the nineteenth century and was first established in Britain. Early forms of physical culture that mutated into the institution of sport bore only a passing resemblance to its modern forms. It was intermittent, loosely controlled and usually had little concern with keeping score, and was closer to carnivalesque rituals than to regulated encounters (Guttmann 2004). The opportunities for an expansive scandal, given the relatively unlicensed violence of the likes of ‘folk football’ and the lack of a media apparatus to project them beyond the local, were limited to the everyday grudges within what Tonnies (Harris 2001) calls ‘gemeinschaft’ (community). As sport industrialised and professionalised, especially at the end of the nineteenth century, it became more rationalised and governed, thereby magnifying the opportunities for transgression in the wider ‘gesellschaft’ (society). At the same time, it was placed under greater surveillance by the media which, by the second half of the twentieth century, could besiege sporting encounters with a vast battery of cameras with increasing capabilities to get close to the action, playing and replaying it at many speeds and from multiple angles. Later, the mobile camera phone was possessed by most citizens in many societies. This combination of strict rules, intense scrutiny and media technology created perfect conditions for scandal. Formed mainly out of these unruly forms of folk physical play, sports such as cricket and rugby union emerged that made much of following appropriate rules and respecting one’s opponent as part of the ‘civilising process’ in which ‘sportisation’ was a key constituent (Elias and Dunning 1986). Good conduct was celebrated at the expense of winning, and playing sport in the right way became a mark of class distinction. As it was progressively insinuated into the educational system (to the point of being compulsory), sport became something of an 326

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ethical classroom where leadership, hierarchy, cooperation, organisation, preparedness, flexibility, competition and the division of labour were promoted and learnt. Elite private schools found in sport the means of symbolically training the officer class and other anointed leadership strata, imbuing them with approved masculine traits (Hargreaves 1986). Inimical to such nobility was what was seen as the repugnant practice of being paid to play. Amateurism in sport was, therefore, viewed as a sign of aristocratic gentlemanliness that could be distinguished from the petty bourgeoisie, proletariat and peasantry, who mostly lacked the independent means to sustain themselves as fully committed sporting amateurs. When French aristocrat Baron Pierre de Coubertin agitated to revive the Olympics in the late nineteenth century, he grafted selected elements of the Ancient Games onto this nascent British sport culture shaped by Dr William Penny Brookes (Young 2002). The actual domination of amateurism was greatly exaggerated and the longstanding practice of remunerating or generously compensating athletes was submerged in this carefully confected mythology. A fully fledged sport industry, tied closely to the developing media industry, increasingly matched the rise of paying spectatorship with paid players and commercial sport organisations. But the traces of amateurism’s relatively brief hegemony remain in the nostalgia and fantasy that still permeate much of what is said about professional sport, as opposed to its actual practice. The belief that sport is a haven from the wider, crueller world that surrounds it still periodically surfaces and, most importantly, attends the eruption of scandal. It is here that there are anguished complaints of ‘loss of innocence’, ‘disillusion’ and ‘shock’. In other words, professional sport, which has developed as a ruthlessly capitalistic global industry through its close alliance with the equally commercially hard-nosed media industry, unavoidably manufactures scandal out of the cleavage between its idealised past and its prosaic present. This unstable mix has attracted a substantial literature because almost any transgression in sport can be construed as an affront to its historically nurtured sense of ethical nobility. Such work has focused variably on the sport-society nexus, with some contributions working inwards from the society that creates scandals in sport, and others using a specific sport scandal to critique the institution of sport and/or the society that shaped it. An example of the former, taking inspiration from the approach adopted in works like Critcher’s (2003) Moral Panics and the Media and the classic sociology of Max Weber, is McDermott’s (2016) book The War on Drugs in Sport: Moral Panics and Organisational Legitimacy, which sees in the ongoing scandals surrounding performance and image-enhancing drugs a crisis of order and legitimacy among elites, rather than a social problem that merits such stringent, bodily invasive policies and procedures (Critcher 2013 addresses sport directly in this context). A similar perspective, but here enlisting Foucauldian and post-structuralist theory, is deployed by Pappa (2013), in advancing the position that drugs in sport scandals at the 2004 and 2008 Olympics were emotive media constructions that enabled the imposition of policies of surveillance and control that extended well beyond sport and athletes. Another conspicuous area where moral panic theory has been used in the sport scandal literature relates to spectator violence in sport, especially hooliganism in association football in the United Kingdom (Poulton 2005; Spaaij 2011; Whannel 1979). Here again, it is argued that the phenomenon that produces a string of scandals in the media – threatening or violent conduct before, during and after football matches by young, mainly working-class men supporting opposing teams – is exaggerated by a range of ‘moral entrepreneurs’. Although the problem is not treated as a complete invention, it is argued that, following the pioneering work of Stanley Cohen (2002), it is used to create ‘folk devils’ who symbolise a contemporary malaise, which must be countered by the police with additional powers, and by the judiciary with demographically targeted sentencing of escalating severity, urged on by a complicit media that benefits from such drama-infused bad news in terms of influence and/or profit (Rowe 2009). 327

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Sport scandals manifesting as moral panics tend to varying degrees to underplay the seriousness of what has prompted them and to challenge the explanatory accounts provided by authority figures, especially those who use the institution of sport as a laboratory for exerting greater power across whole societies. Other approaches work mainly in another direction, treating scandalous transgressions as an institutional failure of sport, with some going further in presenting sport as the bearer of socially damaging ideologies and practices that are drawn from the society at large, and then reproducing and reinforcing these social pathologies. For example, sport has long been critiqued as male-dominated and as a bastion of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ (English 2017). This situation is thrown into stark relief during sport scandals that revolve around sexism directed at women and also homophobia (often towards men, whose masculinity is inconsistent with sporting machismo). Thus, for example, Toffoletti (2007, 435) has used the scandals involving sexual assault allegations in Australian rules football to advance a critique of both sport and media culture: Some common themes emerged in the reporting of sexual assault and the Australian Football League in sport sections of the Herald-Sun and The Age. Over the course of a year, it was found that there were stories in both papers that favoured narratives of individualism to explain how sexual assault occurs. These reports relied on gender stereotypes to depict female ‘groupies’ as transgressors of proper femininity that expects women to be (hetero)sexually available, yet passive. At the same time, errant male players were constructed as ‘wayward’ individuals, and solely responsible for their actions. In these articles, very little attention was given to a consideration of the gender power relations that play out in Australian football culture and the systems of value that inform how women and men are differently positioned in the Australian sporting landscape. The focus here is on scandal in sport – ‘Australian football culture’ – while other gender critiques make a clearer linkage between sexism in sport and in wider society (e.g., Birrell and McDonald 2000). This dialectical relationship plays across a range of domains of male athlete misbehaviour (including homophobia – Osborne, Sherry and Nicholson 2016). Along with sex, gender and sexuality, sport scandals involving race and ethnicity have also been a key entry point into the critical analysis of the two-way flow of ideologies and practices of dominance into and out of the sport field (Cashmore and Cleland 2014). The most prominent and well-remembered sport scandals often combine the ‘liveness’ of sport television and the substantial ‘back stories’ that touch on major social issues. A famous example is Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson, who won the 100 metres final at the 1988 Seoul Olympics in world record time only to be found guilty of taking steroids. In seeking to explain this misdemeanour (parodied two decades later by Johnson in later-banned advertisements for an online sports betting company – Meade 2017), attention turned to his origins in Jamaica and to the murky world of athlete doping. Similarly, when US boxer Mike Tyson (who was convicted of rape in 1992 and served a jail sentence) bit off part of Evander Holyfield’s ear in the ring in 1997, much attention was given to his upbringing in a New York ‘project’, to the treatment of women and to the ‘crisis’ of African American masculinity. In this way, sport scandals prompt high-profile debates about the ethics of sport and the window that it holds up to the society that sustains and glamourises it. The visibility of celebrity sportspeople means that scandals involving them become news almost automatically (Whannel 2002), not least among people with little interest in sport. But the less ‘spectacular scandals’ in which sport organisations are implicated are no less important – and probably more so. Journalists and academics who have long worked in this area with little mainstream interest may, in some circumstances, be propelled into the spotlight by an institutional sport scandal that in some respects echoes 328

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dramatised media treatments of organised crime. This narrative frame dominated in, for example, the aforementioned FIFA scandal (Mersiades 2018), just as it has in the case of a peak body of comparable scale – the International Olympic Committee (Jennings and Sambrook 2000). There are, then, many types of sport scandal, each of which has a different aetiology and trajectory, receiving attention at different levels and sometimes remaining in the memory for decades. It is useful, finally, to take a recent example that exposes the mechanics of scandal formation, revealing elements common to all media sport scandals as well as others that have special resonance in particular sports.

Cricket’s lost spirit In March 2018, during a test cricket match between South Africa and Australia in Cape Town, the Australian cricketer Cameron Bancroft was observed by cameras at the ground engaging in the forbidden practice of ‘ball tampering’ (interfering with the surface of the cricket ball in order to give advantage to the bowling side) by using a rough surface – sandpaper. Aware that he had been caught, Bancroft placed the offending article inside his trousers (leading to ribald jokes in tabloid and social media). At an ensuing media conference, Steven Smith, the Australian captain, admitted that the plan to interfere with the condition of the ball was taken by the team’s leadership group during the prior luncheon interval. Over the following hours, the news was released and debated across time zones, and in Australia the scandal dominated the news cycle for over a week. This was not treated as a straightforward technical case of rule breaking, but was widely regarded as a moral affront – in other words a full-blown media sport scandal. Smith, Bancroft and vice-captain David Warner were banned for a period, and appeared in highly emotional, ‘confession-style’ media conferences. Later media coverage of the inevitably named ‘sandpapergate’ included Warner’s wife Candice’s interview with Australian Women’s Weekly, and constant references to the stigma now attached to Australian sport (not just to cricket) (Clarke 2018). The classic constituents of the media sport scandal are exposed in this instance. The moral affront is necessarily accentuated. Cricket is particularly susceptible to scandal (along with the Olympics, which has a formal charter, and baseball, with its heavily mythologised, nostalgic ethos of lost American innocence) because of its historically cultivated reputation as a ‘gentleman’s game’. Much is made, therefore, of the ‘spirit of cricket’, including protocols such as not dissenting from the rulings of umpires and avoiding direct physical contact between batters and bowlers. Although this behavioural ideal is often not realised in practice, especially as the game has progressively turned into a year-round transnational sport (including shorter, spectacular forms of the game like the Twenty20 format of the Indian Premier League, with its franchise system and player auctions), it is routinely evoked. Thus, for example, The Sydney Morning Herald (2018), the oldest still-published newspaper in Australia, immediately produced an editorial which opened with the statement ‘The Australian Test side is our oldest, best known and most widely followed national team’ and closed with the lament that ‘For a nation so proud of its sporting prowess, this is a shameful episode. It is no overstatement to describe this as one of the darkest days in Australian sport’. On a day when the story led all broadcast news bulletins, newspaper front pages and news website pages in Australia, the then current Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, complained on television that: We all woke up this morning shocked and bitterly disappointed by the news from South Africa. It seemed completely beyond belief that the Australian cricket team had been involved in cheating. 329

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After all, our cricketers are role models and cricket is synonymous with fair play [. . .] I have to say that [to] the whole nation, who holds those who wear the Baggy Green up on a pedestal, about as high as you can get in Australia. (Cricket Network 2018) At that same time the Australian Sport Commission (ASC) (2018), the peak federal sporting body (now known as Sport Australia), issued a media statement declaring: The ASC condemns cheating of any form in sport. The ASC expects and requires that Australian teams and athletes demonstrate unimpeachable integrity in representing our country. The Australian cricket team are iconic representatives of our country. The example they set matters a great deal to Australia and to the thousands of young Australians playing or enjoying the sport of cricket and who look up to the national team as role models. These are the quintessential elements of one major sport scandal form – national shame, defective role models to the young, unfair and unethical play, and so on – that is produced out of the symbolic alignment of sport and national identity upon which international sport relies for its affective potency. The saturation institutional media coverage was accompanied by enormous social media activity on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, and spread well beyond South Africa and Australia. In the United Kingdom, for example, major broadcasters like the BBC and Sky UK, the ‘qualities’ such as The Telegraph and The Guardian, and tabloids including The Sun and The Daily Mail/Mail Online, all featured the story heavily, with many print articles adopting a condemnatory nationalistic stance, including making allegations about previous cases of ‘cheating’ (Davies, Leclere and Moore 2018; Hayward 2018). The elevated ethical tone evident in the torrent of interventions that transformed a story of unethical sporting conduct into a sprawling media scandal contained constituents of ‘moral panic’ as previously elaborated. The degree of moral entrepreneurship evident in the media, much of which was elegiac in nature, relied on a sharp contrast between the spirit of cricket and its abjuration. Yet, as in the case of most such scandals, the ‘loss of innocence’ that was described could only be maintained by underplaying – indeed, in some sense, forgetting – previous transgressions and scandals in cricket and in other sports (Ferguson 2016), and by neglecting to recognise and analyse the structural forces that had created the conditions that induced the unethical conduct that was almost universally condemned.

Future scandals It has been proposed in this chapter that scandals in sport are not controversies arising from unpredictably aberrant behaviour. They are the products of its structural dynamics as commercialised, mediatised, popular culture fashioned out of folk life and heroic amateur mythology. This may be criticised as an overly functionalist position, but it does not deny the myriad ways in which such scandals play out. For example, the efflorescence of social media in the twentyfirst century has exacerbated the proliferation and acceleration of scandal cycles – in Cohen’s (2002) terms, the result is constant, rapid ‘amplification’ and ‘de-amplification’ of moral panics in sport. At the same time, the digital record means that earlier sport scandals are always, already available for evocation and recirculation across institutional and social media. Scandals may also 330

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be deliberately manufactured as a way of generating and distributing capital within the ‘attention economy’ (Hutchins and Rowe 2012) – the logic that, for example, turned ‘bad boy’ athletes like basketballers Dennis Rodman and Charles Barkley into media celebrities (Baker and Boyd 1997). Future intellectual work on media sport scandals needs to be critically reflexive about its position in the cultural economy, and to be appropriately sceptical of deployments of the concept of moral panic that critique media processes while underemphasising the substantive social issues to which they are intimately linked. Sport scandals are never just about sport, and sometimes have a very direct bearing on matters ranging from institutional governance to domestic violence. The communicative hyperactivity that they generate in a febrile media environment should not distract the critical gaze from sport’s role as a major social institution that is deeply implicated in both progressive social currents and their stubborn obstruction through an exceptionalist ideological appeal to sport’s foundational Corinthian mythology.

References Australian Sport Commission (2018) ‘ASC Statement on Australian Cricket’, 25 May, https://www.ausport. gov.au/news/asc_news/story_668717_asc_statement_on_australian_cricket Baker, A. and Boyd, T. (eds) (1997) Out of Bounds: Sports, Media, and the Politics of Identity. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Birrell, S. and McDonald, M.G. (2000) ‘Reading Sport, Articulating Power Lines: An Introduction’, in S. Birrell and M.G. McDonald (eds) Reading Sport: Critical Essays on Power and Representation. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 3–13. Cashmore, E. and Cleland, J. (2014) Football’s Dark Side: Corruption, Homophobia, Violence and Racism in the Beautiful Game. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Clarke, J. (2018) “‘Simply Astonishing”: How the World Reacted to Australia’s Cheating Scandal’, 25 March, The Sydney Morning Herald, https://www.smh.com.au/sport/cricket/simply-astonishing-howthe-world-reacted-to-australia-s-cheating-scandal-20180325-p4z65r.html Cohen, S. (2002) Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (3rd ed.). London: Routledge. Cricket Network (2018) ‘PM: Ball Tampering News “Beggars Belief”’, 25 March, https://www.cricket. com.au/news/steve-smith-cameron-bancroft-ball-tampering-quotes-adam-gilchrist-allan-borderprime-minister/2018-03-25 Critcher, C. (2003) Moral Panics and the Media. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. Critcher, C. (2013) ‘New Perspectives on Anti-doping Policy: From Moral Panic to Moral Regulation’, International Journal of Sport Policy and Politics, 6(2): 153-169. Davies, G., Leclere M. and Moore, C. (2018) ‘Is this the Moment Australia Cheated Against England in the ASHES? Player at the Centre of Scandal Caught on Camera Appearing to Pour SUGAR into his Pocket “to Tamper with the Ball”’, 25 March, The Daily Mail/Mail Online, http://www.dailymail. co.uk/news/article-5541529/Is-moment-Australia-cheated-against-England-ASHES.html Elias, N. and Dunning, E. (1986) Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilising Process. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. English, C. (2017) ‘Toward Sport Reform: Hegemonic Masculinity and Reconceptualizing Competition’, Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, 44(2): 183–98. Ferguson, N. (2016) Sports Scandals: True Stories of Cheating, Corruption and Greed. Chichester, UK: Summersdale. Guttmann, A. (2004) From Ritual to Record: The Nature of Modern Sports (updated version). New York: Columbia University Press. Hargreaves, J. (1986) Sport, Power and Culture: A Social and Historical Analysis of Popular Sports in Britain. Cambridge: Polity. Harris, J. (ed.) (2001) Tönnies: Community and Civil Society (trans. M Hollis). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hayward, P. (2018) ‘Australia Has Finally Lost Faith as its Arrogant, Cheating Cricket Team Reaps what it Sowed’, 25 March, The Telegraph, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cricket/2018/03/25/ australia-has-finally-lost-faith-arrogant-cheating-cricket-team/

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David Rowe Hutchins, B. and Rowe, D. (2012) Sport Beyond Television: The Internet, Digital Media and the Rise of Networked Media Sport. New York and Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Jennings, A. and Sambrook, C. (2000) The Great Olympic Swindle: When the World Wanted its Games Back. London: Simon and Schuster. Lull, J. and Hinerman, S. (1997) ‘The Search for Scandal’, in J. Lull and S. Hinerman (eds) Media Scandals: Morality and Desire in the Popular Culture Marketplace. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press and New York: Columbia University Press, 1–33. McDermott, V. (2016) The War on Drugs in Sport: Moral Panics and Organisational Legitimacy. New York: Routledge. McQuail, D. (1997) Audience Analysis. London: Sage. Meade, A. (2017) ‘Sportsbet’s Ben Johnson Ad Banned for Making Light of Drug Use’, The Guardian, 6 June, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/jun/06/sportsbets-ben-johnsonad-banned-for-making-light-of-drug-use Mersiades, B. (2018) Whatever it Takes: The Inside Story of the FIFA Way. Cheyenne, WY: Powderhouse Press. Osborne, A., Sherry, E. and Nicholson, M. (2016) ‘Celebrity, Scandal and the Male Athlete: A Sport Media Analysis’, European Sport Management Quarterly,16(3): 255–73. Pappa, E. (2013) ‘Sports Spectacle, Media and Doping: The Representations of Olympic Drug Cases in Athens 2004 and Beijing 2008’, PhD dissertation, Brunel University, UK. Poulton, E. (2005) ‘English Media Representation of Football-related Disorder: “Brutal, Short-hand and Simplifying”?’, Sport in Society, 8(1): 27–47. Rowe, D. (2004) Sport, Culture and the Media: The Unruly Trinity (2nd ed.). Maidenhead, UK and New York: Open University Press/McGraw-Hill Education. Rowe, D. (2009) ‘The Concept of the Moral Panic: An Historico-Sociological Positioning’, in D. Lemmings and C. Walker (eds) Moral Panics, the Press and the Law in Early Modern England. New York and Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan: 22–40. Rowe, D. (2010) ‘Stages of the Global: Media, Sport, Racialization and the Last Temptation of Zinedine Zidane’, International Review for the Sociology of Sport 45(3): 355–71. Rowe, D. (2011) Global Media Sport: Flows, Forms and Futures. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Skey, M., Stone, C., Jenzen, O. and Mangan, A. (2017) ‘Mediatization and Sport: A Bottom-Up Perspective’, Communication & Sport, 1 November, https://doi.org/10.1177/2167479517734850. Spaaij, R. (2011) ‘Mindless Thugs Running Riot? Mainstream, Alternative and Online Media Representations of Football Crowd Violence’, Media International Australia, 140(1): 126–136. Sydney Morning Herald, The (2018) ‘For a Proud Sporting Nation, this is a Shameful Episode – Editorial’, 25 March, https://www.smh.com.au/sport/cricket/for-a-proud-sporting-nation-this-is-a-shamefulepisode-20180325-p4z65f.html Toffoletti, K. (2007) ‘How is Gender-based Violence Covered in the Sporting News? An Account of the Australian Football League Sex Scandal, Women’s Studies International Forum, 30(5): 427–438. Wenner, L. (ed.) (1998) MediaSport. London: Routledge. Whannel, G. (1979) ‘Football Crowd Behaviour and the Press, Media, Culture & Society 1(2): 327–342. Whannel, G. (2002) Media Sport Stars: Masculinities and Moralities. London: Routledge. Young, D. C. (2002) The Modern Olympics: A Struggle for Revival. Baltimore, MA: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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33 THE SCANDALOUS POWER OF THE PRESS Phone hacking in the UK Natalie Fenton Much news media thrive on scandal. But what happens when the scandal is about the media itself? In 2011 News of the World journalists stood accused of illegally hacking the phone of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler. This proved to be the tip of a very large iceberg as the scandal uncovered industrial-scale phone hacking taking place across the tabloid press. Rather than open up their practices of news production to scrutiny and accept the recommendations of an independent inquiry, the news industry closed ranks and hid behind the banner of ‘press freedom’. This story reveals the enduring power of the press and its ability to control scandal, direct the national conversation and set the agenda. It also reveals the continuing entanglement between press and politicians who still seek favour with those they think have the potential to influence voting behaviour. In this chapter I reflect on the power of news corporations to defy the public interest whenever it suits them and the role of mainstream news journalists as part of an elite power complex. Ultimately I argue that media scandal, wherever it is found, is all about power and commercial priorities.

Introduction It is journalism’s job to expose wrongdoing, hold power to account, to flush out corruption, immorality or illegality where it exists. In doing so, it is argued that scandals help to set the parameters of ethical practice, moral conflict and consensus (Adut 2008). Who or what is declared as ‘scandalous’ is not a neutral endeavour. As Entman (2012) notes, journalists’ responses to trangressions of apparently equal gravity or triviality vary considerably. This variability is deeply problematic because it reveals a media bias that calls into question journalistic practice itself – why has that politician or that celebrity been singled out for particular media treatment when others are entirely overlooked? Which scandals are elevated and which squashed or sidelined can tell us much about where power lies and the sorts of power that can be held to account. The role of elites is crucial here – how various groups block, deflect or promote scandal is indicative of broader power relations and dynamics at play at any one time (Nyhan 2014). Recognising the media as one of these elites is at the heart of this chapter. Taking this approach has implications for the study of scandal more broadly: not only does it seek to recognise and interrogate the key role of journalists in the social construction of scandal but it also acknowledges the media

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industry as a crucial power broker deeply entangled in a particular political-economic system made up of a combination of elites each seeking to advance or protect their own interests. Thompson (2000, 13–14) marks out five distinguishing characteristics of scandal: transgression of moral codes, norms or values; an element of secrecy denoting a violation that makes outsiders suspicious; disapproval of the act by outsiders; public denunciation of transgression; and potential damage to the reputation of transgressors. The media can elevate and accelerate, demote and sideline any of these factors at any one time and not all of them need be present at once. In this chapter I consider what happens when the transgression is found within the media industry itself; when secrecy involves media collusion with officials of state power such as police and senior members of Cabinet; when disapproval by the public elides with plummeting levels of public trust in sections of the mainstream media leading to potentially devastating damage to the link between news media and democracy. Revealing the ways in which mainstream media respond to scandals within their own backyard, brings to the fore how journalists are part of a political economic complex and illustrates how the media function in collusion with elites to manage the potential damage to their reputations, their profit margins and ultimately to their own power-base.

The scandal of phone hacking In the summer of 2011 the News of the World, owned by Rupert Murdoch, stood accused of illegal, unethical behaviour through the systematic phone hacking of politicians, members of the royal family, celebrities, murder victims and their families. Murdoch subsequently closed down the News of the World and several ex-editors and journalists found themselves under criminal investigation. The UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, publicly embarrassed by his employment of Andy Coulson, a former Editor of the News of the World during 2003–2007, as his Director of Communications,1 then called for a public inquiry chaired by Lord Justice Leveson to investigate the issue. Hackgate, as it became known, revealed in full Technicolor through live web-streaming of courtroom evidence, the mechanisms of a system based on the corruption of power – both of governing elites and of mediating elites and the relations between them. During the Leveson Inquiry it was revealed that a member of the UK Cabinet had met executives from Rupert Murdoch’s empire once every three days on average since the Coalition was formed.2 The Inquiry also heard that on 7 October 2009, the day before David Cameron addressed the Conservative Party conference, Rebekah Brooks, then chief executive of News International (2009–2011) and former Editor of News of the World and The Sun, sent Cameron the following text message: But seriously I do understand the issue with the Times. Let’s discuss over country supper soon. On the party it was because I had asked a number of NI [News International] people to Manchester post endorsement and they were disappointed not to see you. But as always Sam was wonderful – (and I thought it was OE’s [Old Etonians] that were charm personified!) I am so rooting for you tomorrow not just as a proud friend but because professionally we’re definitely in this together! Speech of your life? Yes he Cam!’3 The Brooks–Cameron relationship was seen as indicative of a culture of press–politician mutual interest in which media executives and party leaders work together to ‘push the same agenda’, in Cameron’s words. The inquiry also revealed: the systematic invasions of privacy by headline hungry journalists that wrecked lives on a daily basis (Cathcart 2012); the lies and deceit of senior newspaper figures; and a highly politicised and corrupt police force. Rebekah Brooks admitted 334

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to paying police for information in a House of Commons Select Committee in 2003 but denied it in 2011 (BBC News UK, 15 April 2011) and we discovered that over a quarter of the police public affairs department were previous employees of the News of the World (Warrell 2011). Alongside the Leveson Inquiry the criminal trials of journalists accused of phone hacking were taking place. The scale of the trials was huge. They involved more than three years of police work; 42,000 pages of crown evidence; seven months of hearings; up to 18 barristers in court at any one time with 12 defendants facing allegations of crime spreading back over a decade. Rupert Murdoch funded the defence of Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson at a cost that ran into millions of pounds with an entourage of barristers, solicitors and paralegals plus another team monitoring all news and social media. On the other side, the Crown Prosecution Service consisted of one full-time solicitor and one administrative assistant. By the time the trial finished, News International had paid compensation to 718 victims of phone hacking with many more following. The phone hacking debacle fulfilled all of the definitional characteristics of scandal but perhaps of more concern to the media was that it revealed their own duplicity: that the real scandal was a media that wilfully and incessantly manufactured scandal through lies and distortion for the benefit of sales, through illegal practices and corrupt relationships with the police and through invidious entanglement with political elites. Their self-acclaimed primary function of holding power to account was exposed as illusory. Rather than watchdogs at the grand gates of democracy, these were the rats of the gutter press using their own power to distort democratic practice rather than enhance it; bringing misery and pain to the powerless through the hacking of a murdered teenager’s mobile phone messages. In the process, they exposed the contradictions in their own practices: where commercial imperatives drive news production amidst ever decreasing profits, the ethical underpinning of journalistic practice is quickly swept aside. As such, the problem that the phone hacking scandal exposed extended far broader and deeper than any slippage in ethical practice seemed to suggest. This may have accounted for the desire by the industry to pin the problem on a few ‘rogue journalists’. Media organisations played the long game – admitting limited guilt early on and then attempting to derail the consequences at every opportunity that followed. More than any other organisation, they were well aware that the public often tire of scandals quickly (Thompson 2000; Waisbord 2004) and News International were happy to make large settlements to litigants to prevent cases being heard in a court of law and ensure that the number of those found guilty could remain as low as possible. But even with these forms of containment the scandal revealed the dirty under-belly of a thoroughly marketised, deregulated, corporate system of news production. With a broken business model for newspapers still struggling to recover from the shift of classified advertising to new online sites; with news produced and distributed at a faster rate than ever before and often on several platforms at once; maintaining profit margins and shareholder returns has resulted in fewer journalists with more space to fill. Doing more work in less time has led to a greater use of unattributed rewrites of press agency or public relations material and the cut and paste practice that is now commonly referred to as churnalism (Davies 2008). Churnalism does not lend itself well to ethical practices. Combine the faster and shallower corporate journalism of the digital age (Phillips 2014) with the need to pull in readers for commercial rather than journalistic reasons and it is not difficult to see how the values of professional journalism are quickly cast aside in order to indulge in sensationalism, trade in gratuitous spectacles and deal in dubious emotionalism. The phone hacking scandal brought this fundamental transgression of professional journalism ethics into full public view. As Trevor Kavannagh, Associate Editor of The Sun noted in his own evidence to Leveson: ‘news is as saleable a commodity as any other. Newspapers are commercial, competitive businesses, not a public service’ (6 October 2011).4 335

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The scandal many newspapers sought to cover up is that news is primarily for profit – a marketplace that operates on market principles. But of course, news is no ordinary commodity – it offers the possibility of directing the public conversation and hence is of relevance to politicians keen to convince voters of the benefits of their particular policy formulations. This is where the characteristic of scandal as secrecy denoting violation of moral codes comes into play. The phone hacking scandal didn’t reveal a media holding power to account rather it exposed a media in bed with power.5

Deflecting and diverting scandal After an inquiry lasting nearly a year and a half, Lord Justice Leveson delivered his recommendations in November 2012. The report discussed in detail how the newspaper industry had become too powerful, distorting policy-making and the democratic process, and that meaningful reform was needed to restore public confidence in the press. Leveson was clear to emphasise that his recommendations were about enshrining press freedom and ensuring that any subsequent regulatory system was independent from government, albeit underpinned by statute. He also had to satisfy the many victims of press abuse that his recommendations would bring about an independent regulatory system with teeth that could hold the industry to account when necessary while ensuring that the press could not, as was popularly remarked, mark their own homework (Leveson 2012). A common response from much of the news industry was to direct responsibility for phone hacking towards the law and inadequate policing, claiming that it was not the concern of the media industry but rather a result of failures in criminal investigations and prosecutions. The solution must lie therefore with the police and the enactment of the law and not through further regulation of the profession or industry which should remain ‘free’ to do, effectively, as it pleases. The language of free speech became the main tactic of deflection of scandal by the press lobby. Cries of the ‘end of 300 years of press freedom’ littered the pages of newspapers. This prompted the prime minister, David Cameron, who had initially said he would implement the Leveson recommendations unless they were ‘bonkers’, to state that even statutory underpinning – a law to enact the costs and incentives of a new system with no interference whatsoever in the actual running of, or decision making of, the new independent self-regulatory body – would be ‘crossing the Rubicon’. In other words, the sacrosanct position of a free press in a free society would be irreparably undermined – there would be no going back. ‘Freedom of the press’ regardless of whether they have democratic intent or not, became the primary means of defining the debate. This kind of corporate libertarianism (Pickard 2014), that aligns freedom with established and vested power interests and their ability to do whatever they like within the law, means that any form of regulation that may encourage news organisations to behave in particular ways is assumed to be detrimental to democracy even if its purpose is to refocus news practices on democratic intentions. Furthermore, involvement of the state in any form whatsoever in relation to the press (even at the hands of an entirely independent regulator) becomes nothing more than state censorship. Thus to avert the potential damage to the good name of journalism and to preserve their own ability to manufacture scandal to suit their own purposes, the press lobby insisted that they alone were beyond accountability. That the press were successful in their deflection of the consequences of scandal was due to their willingness to peddle it hard and shut down debate wherever possible and is testimony to their enduring power. The scandal of phone hacking was ultimately contained by the news media because of the industrial and ideological power of the industry itself. 336

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It is no surprise then, that the journalist who broke the hacking scandal story (Nick Davies, The Guardian, 8 July, 2009) was an investigative journalist of high esteem deemed to be an outsider to the Fleet Street cabal. He writes: This is a story about power and truth . . . about the abuse of power and the secrets and lies that protect it . . . In an established democracy, abuse of power cannot afford to be visible . . . In this case the concealment had an extra layer, because the news organisations which might otherwise have exposed the truth were themselves part of the abuse, and so they kept silent, indulging in a comic parody of misreporting, hiding the scandal from their readers like a Victorian nanny covering the children’s eyes from an accident in the street . . . Some did this because they were linked to the crime by common ownership or by their own guilty secrets about law-breaking in their own newsrooms; some turned away for fear of upsetting their political allies. Too many journalists had simply ceased to function as independent truth-tellers, separate from and critical of the people they were writing about. The crime reporter made common cause with the police and also with criminals. The political correspondent developed a loyalty to one party or faction. The media reporter became a tool for his or her owner. The news executive turned into a preening power-monger, puffed with wealth and self importance, happy to join the elite and not to expose it. (Davies 2014, xiv–xv) Unpicking how the distinction between private interest and public good has become blurred in news journalism is fundamental to a critique of how media scandal operates. ‘Freedom of the press’ as an ethical practice does not somehow magically transcend the market it is part of. Rather, it has become embroiled in a particular neoliberal political-economic system that enabled the media elite to use the rhetoric of freedom to close down further interrogation of journalistic malpractice. ‘Freedom of the press’ came to stand in for freedom of private industry. A free market discourse that tells us that productivity is increased and innovation unleashed if the state stays out of the picture and lets businesses get on with it. Productivity in the market and hence news as a commodity takes precedence over the social and political concerns of news as a mechanism of democratic process. In other words, the less ‘interference’ in the form of regulation, the more liberalised the market, the better the outcome (Jessop 2002). Freedom of the press expressed purely as the need to get the state to butt out and give commercial practice free reign is about nothing more than enabling market dominance to take priority over all other concerns. Freedom of the press expressed in this way is not a precondition or even a consequence of democracy so much as a substitute for it (Fenton 2014). With a general election creeping ever closer, Cameron bowed to the rhetoric of ‘press freedom’ and opted for setting up a new press self-regulatory body not by statutory underpinning but by Royal Charter. The Royal Charter sets out a mechanism for independent self-regulation of the press overseen by an independent body called the Press Recognition Panel (PRP). The job of the PRP is to ensure that any organisation that regulates the press and seeks recognition is independent, properly funded and able to protect the public. Any recognised regulator must meet the 29 criteria listed in the Charter. These criteria were designed to secure press freedom and protect the public interest. In order to respond to criticisms of government interference in press regulation it was agreed that the Charter can only be amended by a two-thirds majority of each of the House of Commons, the House of Lords and the Scottish Parliament and with unanimous agreement of the PRP Board. 337

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Initially, it looked like the press lobby were willing to accept this, it was, after all, devised in response to their concerns, but when their own version of the Charter was not accepted, powerful press interests soon backtracked and found excuses to repudiate this mechanism making it quite clear that they had no intention of ever agreeing to a system that they were not able fully to control. Instead they revamped the discredited Press Complaints Commission and called it the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) – an organisation run by the industry, that meets less than half of Leveson’s recommendations. IPSO has so far refused to seek recognition and only meets 12 of the 29 criteria (Media Standards Trust 2013).6 The majority of the UK national press has signed up to this non-recognised regulator, flouting democratic process and flying in the face of public interest. Every attempt by media reform campaigners to try and get full implementation of the Royal Charter framework was met with a press propaganda offensive to try to ensure it failed.

Hypocrisy and hype Herman and Chomsky (1988) evoke the idea of ‘manufacturing consent’ whereby propaganda is used to naturalise ideas of the most powerful groups in society and to marginalise dissent. Their propaganda model depends on five ‘filters’ working on the media that ensure a structural bias in favour of dominant frames: concentrated private ownership, the power of advertising, the domination of elite sources, the use of ‘flak’ (sustained attacks on oppositional voices), and the construction of an enemy, here the so-called ‘liberal leftie luvvies’ hell-bent on media reform (Fenton and Freedman 2018). The hacking scandal revealed that mainstream media are tied to current relations of power and involved in distorting, suppressing and silencing alternative narratives to capitalist power. During the period of public consultation over the full implementation of the Leveson recommendations the press engaged in an industry-wide shutdown of debate over media reform. This was not a struggle for organisations whose fundamental mission is to hold power to account – far from it. This was about hanging on to power and defying any form of accountability. Thompson (2000) notes that scandal can be defined by disapproval from outsiders and public denunciation as well as the potential damage to those at the centre of the scandal itself. During the height of the hacking scandal persistent public opinion polling came out in favour of the need for press regulation. Constant polling since has shown high levels of support for media reform and a firm rejection of press manoeuvring. A poll in January 2017 undertaken by YouGov for Hacked Off7 (the campaign group set up in the wake of the hacking scandal), after an onslaught of anti-press regulation coverage across all news media, still showed that 73 per cent of the public thought press behaviour had either got worse or not changed since the Leveson inquiry. Public disapproval was beyond doubt. The failure of the press to cover the scandal adequately did not prevent mud from sticking. Media scandal has also contributed to the demise of trust in it. In 2017 the Edelman Trust barometer said that trust in the media in the UK had plummeted to an all-time low of 32 per cent – this was repeated in 2018 with only 23 per cent of UK youth saying they trusted the media. More interesting perhaps are the 64 per cent of people who agreed that ‘the average person does not know how to tell good journalism from rumour or falsehoods’. The same survey noted that 33 per cent are reading or listening to the news less and 19 per cent are avoiding the news altogether because they believe it is: too depressing (40 per cent); too one-sided or biased (33 per cent); or controlled by hidden agendas (27 per cent). In May 2018 exactly one week after the government announced that it would repeal Section 40 – a key part of the Royal Charter framework – and abandon Leveson Part 2 338

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because the first part of the Leveson Inquiry ‘had done the job and the world had moved on’, another story broke involving a whistleblower – John Ford. This was the first time a broadsheet paper, also from the Murdoch stable, faced serious allegations of illegal behaviour on a grand scale. Ford revealed his work as a former ‘blagger’ for the Sunday Times over a period of 15 years from 1995 to 2010, during which he says his activities included hacking, impersonation, fraud, deception and data theft relating to thousands of people including leading politicians, celebrities and hosts of ordinary people. Although the story got very little media coverage, several Members of Parliament immediately questioned the wisdom of abandoning Leveson 2. A Conservative MP, Kenneth Clarke, who was Justice Secretary when the Leveson Inquiry was established, queried whether the Minister for Culture, Media and Sport at the time (Matt Hancock) could really think that there is no longer sufficient public interest in new allegations of this kind or in knowing which newspapers were bribing which policemen because it was as long ago as seven years? Does he think that the best newspapers in this country would accept that judgment for a moment if it was applied to any other sector of the economy? We have public inquiries in hand at the moment looking into much older things—allegations of sexual abuse, the haemophilia tragedy, and others—so will he not wait until we have a new allegation that is post-2011 before at least thinking again a bit about his decision? (Hansard, 7 March 2018, vol. 637) Although no-one mentioned the Hillsborough disaster and its coverage by The Sun in the discussion, it offers a good example of the time it can take for the truth to become established and the role the press can play in suppressing it when the scandal relates to them. Beneath the headline ‘The Truth’ The Sun claimed that some Liverpool supporters urinated on police and stole from dead bodies causing tremendous distress and anger and contributing to the length of time it took finally to get the official verdict of unlawful killing and exonerate the supporters some 27 years later. The Minister’s reply effectively denied such hard-fought histories and was indicative of a long-standing refusal to shine a light on any potential wrongdoing in the newspaper industry and a relationship of collusion between press and politicians: ‘I am concentrating on what we need for the future, not on what happened more than seven years ago’ (ibid.). However, the Minister and the media mistakenly saw these scandals as any others that would blow up and blow over. What they did not account for was continued public support engendered by determined campaign groups. In both the case of the Hillsborough disaster and the corrupt relationship between the media and police that was finally exposed after years of campaigning by friends and families who had lost loved ones in the disaster; and the case of phone hacking that also launched a campaign peopled by victims of phone hacking and press abuses relating to invasions of privacy, misrepresentations and lies that wrecked lives, citizens showed they were unwilling to settle for fudges and obfuscations, that they would not forget these media scandals and were determined to gain justice, however long it took.

Conclusion: corruption and competition as easy bedfellows Tumber and Waisbord (2004, 1036) argue that corruption ‘scandals bring out the duality that underlies political life: the gap between what is said and what things are, between idealized politics and down-and-dirty politics, between the norms that are publicly legitimated and upheld and actual behaviour’. Corrupt media practices are nothing new but the contradictions between 339

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what is claimed and what is seen to be the case may be perceived as more stark and less easily dismissed in a climate where the power of elites is ever more challenged (Davis 2018). The hacking scandal uncovers a system of political communication involving a sordid entanglement of media and political elites warring to fight and protect their own interests. How a scandal involving the media itself is portrayed and then dealt with is deeply dependent on the political and media context in which it occurs. Entman (2012) argues that whether scandals blow up and then spread and endure depends on the skills of the partisan competitors as well as the norms and incentives governing news production rather than the nature of the offence itself. This chapter has shown that we must also pay attention to the relative power of each competitor, their entanglements and their ability to shift the focus and terms of the issue, as well as the ability of the public to challenge and contest it. The UK press are competing for economic survival but also to hang on to notions of journalistic prestige that are fast slipping through their fingers. They also want to retain political influence. The rhetoric of freedom of the press gave them this bridge. The irony is that the more the media make claims to press freedom the less likely they are able to deliver on its promises. Thus, the more likely scandals involving the media are likely to reoccur.

Notes 1 Andy Coulson was arrested by the Metropolitan Police Service in July 2011 for allegations of corruption and phone hacking and later charged. 2 Twenty Cabinet ministers met senior Murdoch executives 130 times in the first 14 months of office. See the full list on Number 10’s website: http://www.number10.gov.uk/transparency/who-ministers-aremeeting/ 3 Transcript of Morning Hearing 14 June 2012, pp. 82–83, pdf available at: http://www.levesoninquiry.org.uk/ wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Transcript-of-Morning-Hearing-14-June-2012.pdf 4 See http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/oct/06/trevor-kavanagh-leveson-inquiry-speech 5 Although this turn of phrase is used metaphorically here to reflect on the nature of scandal there were also suggestions that it was literally the case when it was alleged that Rupert Murdoch was divorcing his wife Wendi Deng because of an affair with Tony Blair (who was godfather to two of their children). 6 Another regulator, IMPRESS, did seek recognition and does meet Leveson’s recommendations but to date no national newspaper has signed up to it. 7 Declaration of interest: the author of this chapter was Vice Chair of the Hacked Off Board of Directors from 2012 to 2018.

References Adut, A. (2008) On Scandal: Moral Disturbances in Society, Politics and Art. New York: Cambridge University Press. Cathcart, B. (2012) Everybody’s Hacked Off: Why We Don’t Have the Press We Deserve and What to Do about It. London: Penguin. Davies, N. (2008) Flat Earth News. London: Chatto and Windus. Davies, N. (2014) Hack Attack: How the Truth Caught up with Rupert Murdoch. London: Chatto and Windus. Davis, A. (2018) Reckless Opportunists: Elites at the End of the Establishment. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Entman, R. (2012) Scandal and Silence: Media Responses to Presidential Misconduct. Cambridge: Polity Press. Fenton, N. (2014) ‘Defending Whose Democracy? Media Freedom and Media Power.’ Nordicom Review, 35: 1–13. Fenton, N. and Freedman, D. (2018) ‘Fake Democracy, Bad News.’ Socialist Register, 54: 130–149. Herman, E. S. and Chomsky, N. (1988) Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books. Jessop, B. (2002) The Future of the Capitalist State. Cambridge: Polity.

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The scandalous power of the press Leveson, The Right Honourable Lord Justice (2012) Leveson Inquiry: Report into the Culture, Practice and Ethics of the Press. London: The Stationery Office. Media Standards Trust (2013) IPSO: An Assessment by the Media Standards Trust. London: MST. Nyhan, B. (2014) ‘Scandal Potential: How Political Context and News Congestion Affect the President’s Vulnerability to Media Scandal.’ British Journal of Political Science, 45(2): 435–466. Phillips, A. (2014) Journalism in Context: Practice and Theory for the Digital Age. London: Routledge. Pickard, V. (2014) America’s Battle for Media Democracy: The Triumph of Corporate Libertarianism and the Future of Media Reform. New York: Cambridge University Press. Thompson, J. (2000) Political Scandal: Power and Visibility in the Media Age. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Tumber, H. and Waisbord, S. (2004) ‘Political Scandals and Media Across Democracies, Vol. I.’ The American Behavioral Scientist, 47(8): 1031–1039. Waisbord, S. (2004) ‘Scandals, Media and Citizenship in Contemporary Argentina.’ The American Behavioral Scientist, 47(8): 1072–1098. Warrell, H. (2011) ‘Police Chief Testifies on Met Public Relations Staffing.’ Financial Times, 20 July, http:// www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ef6997cc-b1e5-11e0- a06c-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2oxe2Hkdd (accessed 30 December 2013).

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34 #AIDTOO? THE 2018 HUMANITARIAN SCANDALS IN OXFAM GB AND SAVE THE CHILDREN UK Glenda Cooper Introduction On 31 July 2018, the UK’s House of Commons International Development Select Committee published its report into sexual exploitation in the aid sector. The results were highly uncomfortable reading. It concluded that sexual exploitation and abuse were endemic, there had been a collective failure of leadership and engagement, and a ‘self-delusion’ among the aid sector in dealing with and tackling problems (House of Commons 2018). The committee made clear what had sparked their investigation – the exposé by The Times newspaper earlier in the year into sexual exploitation and abuse by Oxfam workers in Haiti; and the subsequent revelations about abuse and harassment by senior executives at Save the Children UK’s head office as revealed by the Mail on Sunday. Following that, charities such as Médecins Sans Frontières, World Vision and the United Nations also found themselves answering questions about aid workers’ behaviour. Within six months, Oxfam GB and Save the Children UK had seen senior figures resign, had lost significant public support and donations – Save the Children estimated it would be in the region of £67m (Marsh 2018) – had had to step away from bidding for government cash and were facing new regulatory frameworks and oversights. These stories however were not new. The Oxfam scandal dated back to the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake of 2010, while the allegations against Save the Children executives referred to incidents in 2012 and 2015. Despite the previous efforts of whistleblowers, there was little coverage in the mainstream media until 2018 when a succession of exclusives lifted the lid on sexual abuse by aid workers towards both beneficiaries and other workers. This chapter therefore looks at the coverage of this humanitarian scandal in the first half of 2018, from when The Times broke the Oxfam GB Haitian scandal to the publication of the House of Commons report at the end of July. I adopt Greer and McLaughlin’s model (2017) to trace the development of the scandal; and I consider whether the #MeToo movement inspired the sudden focus on abuse and exploitation in the humanitarian sector. The humanitarian scandals of 2018 lend themselves to sociological theory around folk devils and moral panic (Cohen 2002). Aid workers, who are usually lauded for helping the neediest and least powerful in society, were transformed in the media into sexual predators and abusers. Flinders (2012) points out that with Cohen’s analysis of Mods and Rockers, it was not so much 342

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the activities of the groups, but the cultural strain that these ‘folk devils’ represent – and the same was true of the humanitarian scandal. This came in the wake of other scandals, such as the sexual abuse by celebrities such as Jimmy Savile and the BBC’s failure to deal with this, the child sex rings in different British towns and the abuse of children by UK football coaches. This suggested that institutions set up for the public good – social services, a public broadcasting corporation, children’s activities – had been used to further sexual exploitation, resulting in a collapse of public trust as a result. The aid agencies – those who aim to help the less powerful but who were exposed as exploiting them – were thus a natural progression of these scandals. Greer and McLaughlin’s model looks at recent institutional scandal in the UK such as these, and the regular calls for public inquiries by the news media, pressure groups and social movements that come in their wake. It conceptualises scandal as a process and suggests that there are five stages – latency, activation, reaction, amplification and accountability. This takes a story from being an ‘open secret’ within a particular institution/sector but with no wider coverage, through to publication, trial by media and moving beyond a problem affecting a small number of individuals to encompass a whole institution or sector. The Oxfam GB story fulfils this model in the way that the story developed. However, what is interesting to note is that both the Oxfam story and the Save the Children revelations come from outside typical ‘development journalist’ sources and were published in publications that are not as closely associated with covering humanitarian stories.

Latency Greer and McLaughlin posit that the first stage of their scandal model is latency, which is when the ‘scandal’ is an open secret within the institution, or is known to a select few, but is not in the public domain. The institutions then engage with denial, diversion or neutralisation to contain it. Both the Oxfam GB scandal and the Save the Children scandal were known about in some circles well before the story broke. With Oxfam, a report as far back as 2011 detailed that three men had been allowed to resign and four sacked after an inquiry into sexual exploitation, use of pornography, bullying and intimidation in Haiti. One of those allowed to resign was Roland van Hauwermeiren, the country director. This however did not break as a scandal at the time. While Oxfam GB were later accurate in saying that they had made public the fact that there had been a report into the men’s behaviour, the charity engaged in forms of dismissal and diversion to neutralise the risk of the knowledge of the full scandal becoming public (Cohen 2012; Marris et al. 2014). Print coverage between 13 August and 13 September 2011, according to a Nexis search, reveals that there were two Press Association newswire stories (Lancefield 2011; Silverman 2011) and a smattering of ‘news in briefs’ in the regional papers derived from these accounts. Most stories were less than 100 words long, none explicitly mentioned sexual exploitation or use of prostitutes; instead Oxfam said that the scandal involved ‘abuse of power’ and ‘bullying’ but was not concerned with fraud. The reason given for van Hauwermeiren’s resignation was because he took ‘managerial responsibility’ for the issues that had occurred. The charity, through its spokesperson Penny Lawrence, also stressed no beneficiaries were involved and none of the men were British. In terms of news values theory, Oxfam’s decision to categorise what had happened as nonspecific bullying/abuse of power of non-British people and not involving abuse of donations that had been given by British people would place the investigation very far down a newspaper’s 343

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news list. Harcup and O’Neill (2001, 2017) building on Galtung and Ruge (1965) attempt to categorise and refine news values to explain more fully why some stories receive the attention they do – of which some of the most important are relevance to those reading and the involvement of celebrities or elite people. But in this telling of the narrative, there were no references to elite persons or relevance to readers (what Galtung and Ruge term ‘elite nations’ – in this case Britain). Following Adams (1986), Oxfam’s insistence that this was not a ‘British’ problem decreased the interest the media might have had in it. The former International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell later described this approach as Oxfam abiding by the letter but not the spirit of the law when he gave evidence to the 2018 Select Committee (House of Commons 2018). Barbara Stocking however disputed this at the inquiry saying that they had been given legal advice not to mention the sexual exploitation but that Oxfam had voluntarily made press statements on the dismissals (Stocking 2018). As well as neutralising the story, Oxfam GB also employed what could be seen as diversionary tactics – in particular, promotion of its then chief executive, Dame Barbara Stocking, who was celebrating ten years in the role. Just before the story broke Stocking gave an interview to The Times (Sylvester 2011) in which she discussed Oxfam as a lifestyle brand and revealed before she had joined the agency that she had ‘hidden behind the sofa’ when an African child appeared on television during a disaster. Haiti and the ongoing investigation was not mentioned. She then gave a wide-ranging interview to The Guardian’s Women section, published during the coverage (Saner 2011). The interview began as follows: The idea that increasing female empowerment is the best way to reduce poverty isn’t new, but in the 10 years Barbara Stocking has been chief executive of Oxfam, it has been at the heart of what the organisation does. ‘It’s quite deliberately said that way,’ she says. ‘It’s not that we only work with women, it’s that we look at every programme and say, “What could this do for poor women?”’ (Saner 2011, 16) Again there is no reference to the investigation. Later in September, a positive feature also appeared in The Times suggesting different career options within Oxfam, such as public health engineers and marketing, with Oxfam employees talking enthusiastically about their work (Potter 2011). Unlike Oxfam GB, there had been a specific report in the mainstream media relating to the Save the Children scandal. In November 2015, the Mail on Sunday’s political editor Simon Walters reported that both Brendan Cox, Director of Policy, and Justin Forsyth, Chief Executive, had left Save the Children. The piece reported that Cox had had allegations of ‘inappropriate behaviour’ made against him but was quoted as saying that the rumours were ‘untrue’ (Walters 2015). Forsyth was said to have left for unconnected reasons. The story was also framed as the fall of ‘New Labour apparatchiks’ rather than a humanitarian story per se.1 There was limited follow-up, apart from a brief news story in The Times, a diary item about Samantha Cameron’s links to Save the Children in the Mail and a call-out from The Guardian’s global professional development network for people to send in their experiences of working for Save the Children (Purvis 2015a). On 11 November 2015 The Guardian published a selection of those views. While some were critical of Save the Children’s corporate attitudes (Purvis 2015b), none of those published mentioned allegations of inappropriate behaviour. The murder of Brendan Cox’s wife, the MP Jo Cox in June 2016 and the widespread sympathy for him, meant there was no further discussion of the allegations in the media. 344

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Activation Greer and McLaughlin posit that the second stage of scandal is ‘activation’ – when the allegations move from a network or social media chatter into the mainstream media. They argue that scandalous allegations circulating on social media can only gain real traction when they are repeated by mainstream news media (Chagnon and Chesney-Lind 2015; Liebes and Blum-Kulka 2004). This activation occurred on 9 February 2018, when The Times ran a front-page story with the headline ‘Top Oxfam Staff Paid Haiti Survivors for Sex’ (O’Neill 2018a). The article, written by the paper’s chief reporter, was following up on one written the previous autumn detailing how an Oxfam employee, Lesley Agams, had been sacked after complaining of sexual assault by an Oxfam senior official (O’Neill 2017). The February article alleged that the aid agency had covered up claims that senior staff working in Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake had used prostitutes, some of whom were said to be under-aged. Lurid headlines referred to ‘Caligulastyle orgies’. Among those who were accused was Roland van Hauwermeiren, who had been the charity’s director of operations. Oxfam revealed that, after an internal report into the matter in 2011, four members of staff were dismissed but three were allowed to resign before the investigation was over, including van Hauwermeiren. O’Neill wrote: Dame Barbara Stocking, offered the Belgian [van Hauwermeiren] ‘a phased and dignified exit’ because sacking him would have ‘potentially serious implications’ for the charity’s work and reputation. (O’Neill 2018a) Oxfam said that it announced the investigation at the time, but the Charity Commission said that it had not been made aware of the full facts of the use of prostitutes by aid workers (Charity Commission 2018). The Times also revealed that Oxfam did not warn other agencies, with the result that van Hauwermeiren then went on to work elsewhere in the aid sector. The day after The Times’s story about Oxfam, the Mail on Sunday ran a piece reporting that Brendan Cox, former director of policy at Save the Children UK, had been accused of assaulting a woman at Harvard University in 2015 (Walters 2018a). While Cox initially denied the claims, a week later he gave an emotional interview to the paper announcing that he would quit his roles at the charities set up in his wife’s name, and apologising to the women he had allegedly harassed (Walters 2018b). The paper also mentioned that Justin Forsyth, the former chief executive of Save the Children UK who had left soon after Cox in 2015, had also been subject to a complaint by a female employee.

Reaction Greer and McLaughlin describe the main approach of the reaction phase of the scandal model as trial by media (TBM). While scandal activation has had the intention of provoking shock and outrage from the public and confession, excuse or denial from the accused (Schönbach 2010), Greer and McLaughlin say that TBM is a key driver and ‘market-driven form of populist justice in which individuals and institutions are accused, prosecuted, judged, sentenced and permanently stigmatised in the “court of public opinion”’ (2017, 120). The media frame those named as guilty and approach any form of denial as lying, thus inviting journalists to intensify their investigations. The way that former and current CEOs of Oxfam reacted to the publicity at the time conformed to this model. When media organisations publish investigative stories with potentially 345

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libellous consequences, it is always difficult for journalists at other institutions to cover them in depth. So The Times’s exclusive could have well remained largely confined to the paper – as the Walters’ story about Brendan Cox did in 2015 – had it not been for actions by actors outside the newspaper, two of the most important being Barbara Stocking and Mark Goldring. Stocking, who had been in charge of Oxfam GB at the time of the scandal, agreed to do a Newsnight interview when The Times story came out. The result – in which Stocking admitted Oxfam had known for years about the abuse – gave other journalists a legitimate way in to the story without possessing the documents that The Times had based its stories on. The consequences went beyond her actual words: a nervous-looking Stocking appeared to smile inappropriately, and under attack from the interviewer Emily Maitlis, helped to perpetuate an image that her denials were more cover-up. The then current CEO of Oxfam GB, Mark Goldring, also found himself in this spotlight when he decided to give an interview to Decca Aitkenhead of The Guardian, which appeared a week later on 16 February, to explain the situation and allay the growing media furore. He told Aitkenhead of the difficulty of getting his point of view across: I went on the Today programme on the first day and tried to explain and it totally failed. All it did was fuel the fire. Every explanation he’s tried to offer has been branded an excuse and just failed in the court of public opinion. We’ve been savaged. Even apologies only make matters worse. I said on TV: ‘Yes, we could have done some things faster,’ and all of a sudden we’ve got two former ministers calling for my resignation. What I felt really clearly is many people haven’t wanted to listen to explanations. (Aitkenhead 2018) Ironically, a further quote that Goldring gave to Aitkenhead in the same interview fuelled the fire even more. Returning to the theme that the coverage of this story was in fact a way for the media to pursue an anti-aid agenda, Goldring tried to put what happened in perspective: The intensity and the ferocity of the attack makes you wonder, what did we do? We murdered babies in their cots? [my italics] Certainly, the scale and the intensity of the attacks feels out of proportion to the level of culpability. I struggle to understand it. (Aitkenhead 2018) Goldring’s words immediately provided the next day’s headlines, with condemnation and derision from the media and renewed intensity of focus on Oxfam. He was castigated for failing to grasp the severity of the accusations and to show enough penitence for what had happened. An editorial in the Daily Mirror – a newspaper’s customary way of speaking directly to its readers about what it thinks is most important – entitled ‘Face Facts Mr Oxfam’ read: THE chief executive . . . has done himself and his organisation no favours. If Mr Goldring cares about its reputation . . . he should stop blaming his critics and start taking responsibility. His crass comments have only undermined still further the dwindling support for a once venerable organisation. (Daily Mirror 2018) The consequences of TBM, Greer and McLaughlin say, are a ‘chilling’ of public sentiments towards the accused, potential prosecution, new regulatory frameworks and policy reform. 346

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Certainly, consequences for Oxfam were immediate. The International Development Secretary, Penny Mordaunt, threatened to cut funding within two days of The Times report (Elgot 2018), while the Charity Commission launched a full statutory inquiry into the NGO on 12 February (Booth 2018). The same day the deputy chief executive Penny Lawrence – who had given the statement back in 2011 – resigned, apologising for what had happened on her watch. But if Oxfam hoped this would be sufficient, it proved not to be. Despite Oxfam publishing its 2011 report, within a week Goldring revealed that the aid agency had lost significant public support with 7,000 public donors deserting it, while 16 celebrity ambassadors including the actor Minnie Driver resigned, as did Archbishop Desmond Tutu (Beaumont 2018; Elgot & McVeigh 2018; Slawson 2018a). As more revelations were published by The Times, Haiti temporarily suspended Oxfam’s right to work in the country, which four months later was made permanent. By that time, Goldring himself had announced that he would step down by the end of the year so that someone with ‘fresh vision and energy’ could take his place (Rawlinson 2018) and Oxfam was facing £16.2 million worth of cuts (Anders 2018). Save the Children UK also found themselves under the spotlight as a result, although the story unfolded in a different way. The Mail on Sunday which broke the story then secured an interview with Brendan Cox the following week in which he denied the allegations but said he might have ‘overstepped the line’ and resigned from two foundations set up in his wife’s name. The chief executive of Save the Children announced a review of the organisation’s culture but the charity started to come under more pressure on the 19 February when it became clear Cox had been allowed to resign before disciplinary procedures were completed (Bannerman and O’Neill 2018) followed by the revelations by Manveen Rana, a reporter for the BBC’s PM programme, that there had been three separate complaints against former chief executive Justin Forsyth between 2011 and 2015 and that he had admitted to ‘personal mistakes’ in sending overfamiliar text messages to women at Save the Children, which he had later apologised for (BBC 2018). When it emerged that Save the Children had not told Unicef (where Forsyth was now deputy chief executive) of the complaints, Forsyth resigned in order he said to protect the ‘wider cause’ of Unicef (Churchill and Martin 2018).

Amplification and accountability The fourth and fifth stages of Greer and McLaughlin’s scandal model are that of amplification and accountability. By this they mean that ‘the actions of individuals are connected with wider institutional structures and practices’ (Greer and McLaughlin 2017, 121) – in other words moving from the individual to the systemic. With the Oxfam revelations coupled with those of Save the Children UK, the media representation began to characterise the aid industry in the UK as suspect; some sections of the media called for the whole funding of charities to be reconsidered. Greer and McLaughlin argue that, if a scandal is contained at the individual level, then there is a separation of individual and institutional accountability, with the focus remaining on the individual and the institution as the backdrop. If it is not contained, however, there is a ‘conjoining of individual and institutional accountability’ (ibid., 122). I would argue that there was a conjoining in both the Oxfam and Save the Children scandals. This was partly caused by the fact that those who were the centre of the scandal at both charities had already left the organisation, leaving the TBM to focus attention both on what happened to those involved and on who else was responsible. And while Brendan Cox and Justin Forsyth both had to step down from subsequent posts they held after Save the Children, the media and 347

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protestors continued to focus their attention on the structures that they said had allowed sexual harassment and abuse to occur at both charities. Both Oxfam GB and Save the Children UK were now confronted by women who were willing to go public as whistleblowers to speak about failures of process by the organisations. Helen Evans, the former head of safeguarding at Oxfam GB, gave an interview to Channel 4 News to speak about how she had raised the alarm about women being coerced into sex as early as 2012, while former Save the Children UK employees Brie O’Keefe, Faiza Shaheen and Alexia Pepper de Caires also went public with a variety of media organisations (Bannerman and O’Neill 2018). In particular, the Save the Children whistleblowers wanted scrutiny of the role of the agency’s international chairman, Sir Alan Parker, as a symbol of how processes had failed women. Pepper de Caires wrote an open letter to the current CEO, Kevin Watkins, as well as helping to coordinate another letter signed by more than 1,000 female aid workers.2 She also gate crashed the charity’s board meeting to demand the resignation of Parker – an act that was filmed by the Women’s Equality Party.3 On 10 April the Charity Commission announced it was opening a statutory inquiry into whether Save the Children had covered up sexual misconduct (Hope 2018). Just over a week later Sir Alan Parker resigned (Slawson 2018b). But it emerged soon after during questioning by the Select Committee that, under Parker’s reign, Save the Children had spent more than £100,000 on the lawyers Harbottle & Lewis in order to try to shut down media reporting of the sexual harassment cases (O’Neill 2018b). The consequences of the two scandals, however, went far beyond the resignations of Parker et al. As a result, aid agencies found themselves facing widespread calls to change their practices. The investigation by the International Development Committee concluded with a highly critical report into the aid sector, accusing the sector generally of complacency, if not complicity, and a sexist ‘boys’ club’ attitude across agencies which saw women and girls, both beneficiaries and aid workers, being exploited and abused. It called for a global register of aid workers to be set up to help prevent sexual exploiters entering the profession. Meanwhile, the Department for International Development (DfID) announced a raft of new measures including the developing and updating of procedures such as the Due Diligence Framework, Risk Management Framework, Safeguarding Smart Guide and Whistleblowing Policy as well as preparing for an International Safeguarding Solutions Conference in October 2018. Added to that, right-wing newspapers took the Oxfam scandal as a clarion call to revise the whole UK government commitment to 0.7 per cent of GDP being spent on overseas aid. The charge was led by the Daily Mail, which had long criticised the government’s spending. On 11 February Dominic Lawson wrote a piece headlined ‘This Oxfam farrago must sound the death knell for our £13.5bn aid bonanza’ (Lawson 2018). The Telegraph, Times and Express ran similar pieces calling for a stop or rethink of foreign aid. While there were pieces in support of the aid sector – the former Tory leader William Hague wrote an impassioned piece in the Telegraph warning against slashing the aid budget (Hague 2018) – a ComRes poll conducted at the same time found that more than half of adults were now against the 0.7 per cent commitment (ComRes 2018).

Conclusion: the humanitarian scandal and the #MeToo movement The scandals mentioned fit the Greer and McLaughlin model in that they move through the five stages listed. But was there added significance of the timing of this scandal because of the #MeToo revelations in late 2017? Because of the timing of the Times stories, and that of Save the Children, some publications tried to link this overtly to the #MeToo revelations, 348

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and the link between #MeToo and the aid scandal was made clearly in the International Development Committee report: In recent months, the #MeToo movement has helped bring to light the extent to which sexual abuse pervades workplaces and society at large. The international aid sector is not exempt, and we should not expect it to be. But the distressingly familiar pattern of senior male executives sexually harassing junior female employees – while present in aid organisations – is not the whole story in that sector. Sexual exploitation and abuse is ultimately an abuse of power and the aid sector is one of extreme power imbalance: those receiving aid in humanitarian crisis situations are some of the most vulnerable and disempowered people in the world. The sector as a whole needs to confront the fact that, although the exact scale remains unknown, sexual exploitation and abuse is happening and it is happening across organisations, countries and institutions. (International Development Committee 2018) The New York Times story about sexual abuse allegations against the film producer Harvey Weinstein which triggered the #MeToo campaign was published in October 2017, and in its aftermath, #MeToo started to spread to other areas, particularly in the UK, concerning politics and the City. A potential link between the aid world and #MeToo was made early on with both the global development website Devex and The Guardian hosting their own #AidToo chats in order to try to establish whether the aid sector was about to have a similar moment. In theory, the spike in coverage in early 2018 suggests that there was a big change in 2017. A Nexis search of UK publications containing the words ‘aid agency’ and ‘abuse’ or ‘scandal’ reveals 209 stories between 1 January and 31 July 2018. For the same period in the previous ten years the figures never go above 16, suggesting that a significant change happened (see Figure 34.1).

Number of stories

250 200 150 100 50 0

Dates of coverage Figure 34.1  Coverage of Aid Agencies, Scandal and Abuse, 2008–2018

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Yet while #MeToo might have provided a conducive atmosphere for this and for women to feel more confident in speaking out, the story was not engineered by #AidToo activists in the first context, despite many trying for years to interest the mainstream media in the stories. There had been recognition of problems in the aid industry as far back as 2002 with the publication of a controversial report by Save the Children and UNHCR regarding exploitation of refugee children in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone (UNHCR & Save the Children 2002). However, attention to the sexual harassment and assault by and against aid workers in general had started to creep into the public domain two years before #MeToo, with newspaper coverage in 2015 and a succession of international reports in 2016 and 2017. These reports were important because they provided concrete statistics for journalists to use when reporting later scandals. The Humanitarian Women’s Network produced a survey in 2016 and there were two reports from Report the Abuse in 2017 (Nobert 2017). This was followed by a major analysis in May 2017 by the Feinstein International Center (Mazurana & Donnelly 2017) which coded and analysed 78 scholarly reports, grey literature and media reports as well as reviewing security training and carrying out semi-structured interviews. The Guardian with its Secret Aid Worker column had also noted problems around sexual assaults on aid workers as far back as 2015 (Secret Aid Worker 2015), running a series of pieces including an account by Megan Nobert of her rape (Nobert 2015). But most of the other reporting in the UK was restricted to The Guardian’s Global Development Professionals Network. The reports failed to become a widespread scandal. Perhaps then it is significant that the 2018 stories were not broken by those who traditionally covered this field, which perhaps also gave more freedom to the journalists involved. Both the Oxfam and Save the Children scandals were not revealed by foreign correspondents or development journalists but by crime and politics journalists from centre and right-leaning publications that were not well known for covering humanitarian issues. The Oxfam story was broken by Sean O’Neill. He was the former crime editor and now chief reporter of The Times, with a long history of covering abuse stories based in the UK. The Save the Children story was broken by Simon Walters, the political editor of the Mail on Sunday. The genesis of the Oxfam story came long before #MeToo. O’Neill had started investigating The Times story ten months before it was published, well before the Weinstein revelations came to light, while Walters had first published about Brendan Cox as far back as 2015. So to link directly the initial exposure of aid agency scandals to #MeToo is difficult. However, the framing of abuse and harassment stories in the light of #MeToo may well have allowed these stories to move through all stages of the scandal model, rather than stopping in the latency and minor activation phases as had happened earlier. As seen above, when stories concerning these two scandals came to light in 2011 and 2015 respectively, they did not gain widespread traction in the media and quickly disappeared again, despite the fact that this was a time when other institutional abuse scandals were coming to light. The whistleblowers, some of whom were willing to go public and who also helped to prolong the stories and reveal new angles after the first exposure, also appeared to gain traction from the social media campaign. For example the Save the Children whistleblowers mentioned earlier who pursued the involvement of Sir Alan Parker also explicitly aligned themselves with the #MeToo movement (Phillips 2018). As a result of the scandal, new groups supporting women in the aid sector were also formed, such as NGO Safe Space and ChangingAid.4 In conclusion, the Oxfam and Save the Children scandals fulfil the scandal model. The revelations were not directly the result of the #MeToo movement but the widespread nature of the scandal may have been aided by the atmosphere generated in its aftermath. 350

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Notes 1 Brendan Cox and Justin Forsyth had both worked for Gordon Brown during his premiership. Forsyth had earlier worked as an aide to Tony Blair. 2 See https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/mar/08/open-letter-on-sexual-misconductwe-stand-together for text and signatories. 3 See https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/save-the-children-charity-chief-sir-alan-parker-urged-to-quitover-handling-of-harassment-claims-7kt39nszw for the video 4 See https://www.changingaid.org/surveyresults.html

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35 SCANDALS AND THE ARMED FORCES Mark Blach-Ørsten and Anker Brink Lund

Introduction The increased mediatization of society (Hjarvard 2008) goes hand in hand with the increased possibility of exposure and scandalization (Blach-Ørsten 2011). As Thompson (2005) has argued, the rise of a new mediated visibility is a double edged sword for those in power. On the one hand the new visibility may be used to spread and control information, messages, and images, on the other hand the new visibility can be a risk and lead to loss of control, and to the exposure of secrets or information that may end up threatening those in power. As an example Thompson (2005: 31) points to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and writes: the hidden practices of U.S. military and paramilitary personal [were] suddenly opened up to public scrutiny, unleashing a sequence of further revelations that [was] difficult for those in power to explain and control. Thanks to the media, these previously hidden practices and events had been given an entirely new status as public . . . the invisible had been made visible. Historically, mediated scandals involving armed forces can be traced back at least to the Dreyfus Affair (1894–1906). This chapter, however, focuses on producing an overview of spectacles of this kind that have taken place in more recent times. More specifically, we test Thompson’s claim that fundamental changes in the power relations between the military and the news media occurred around the turn of the century, a relationship where scholars traditionally point to the military as the dominant power (Kristensen & Ørsten 2007). In doing so we apply Hoskins and O’Loughlin’s (2015) theory on the three phases of mediated war: broadcast war (the 1990s), diffused war (2000s), and arrested war (2010s). We find a number of mediated scandals with a focus on war and the armed forces that have cast a new and critical visibility on military and government practices. However, we also find that the most serious of these scandals became public in the age of diffused war when the internet, and new actors such as WikiLeaks, disrupted the traditional media ecology. In the present phase of arrested war, scandals seem less frequent. We discuss the possible theoretical reasons for this and suggest some possible explanations. One explanation might be that in the age of arrested war, the mediatization of the military has helped it to become better at avoiding media scandals 354

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(Crosbie 2015). Another explanation can be found in the “indexing” hypothesis (Bennett 1990) which states that most event-driven news, like scandals, quickly become constrained by routine journalistic practices such as framing stories within the range of sources and viewpoints that can be found amongst elite news sources. Finally, recent research on political scandals suggests that coverage of the more trivial, personalized ones simply outweigh the coverage of the more complex scandals such as the military ones (Entman 2012; Pollack et al. 2018).

The mediatization of the military War and the news media have been closely interlinked from the early 1900s. Both World War I and World War II saw the development of and spread of propaganda for use in radio, film, and newspapers (Carruthers 2011; Horten 2011). Studies of the Gulf and Iraq wars have pointed out that “military and media networks have converged to the point where they are now virtually indistinguishable; the media constitute the spaces in which wars are fought and are the main ways through which populations experience war” (Thussu & Freedman 2003: 7). Webster (2003: 57) writes: “We live today in an era of ‘new wars’ which is to say that the circumstances surrounding such conflict have been radically transformed . . . Furthermore, war itself is changing, increasingly being what one might call Information War.” This is not just a British or American phenomenon, but something scholars of media and war in for instance Germany (Esser 2009) and the Nordic countries also point to (Dimitrova & Strömbäck 2005; Kristensen & Ørsten 2007; Blach-Ørsten & Lund 2012). Research on news media and war have gained new traction with a focus on the mediatization of war and the military (Horten 2011; Maltby 2012; Crosbie 2015). The theory of mediatization builds on the premise that the news media in many Western countries have developed into an independent political institution guided by its own logic (Cook 1998; Strömbäck 2008; Allern & Blach-Ørsten 2011) and that over time that institution and its logic have become deeply integrated into different levels of society (Hjarvard 2008; Strömbäck 2008). Studies have mostly focused on mediatization and national politics (Esser & Strömbäck 2014; Blach-Ørsten 2016), but writing about news media and war, Horten argues (2011: 4) “that the mediatization of war [was] significantly accelerated with the news coverage of the Vietnam war and reached unprecedented levels during the Iraq War of 2003.” Writing about the connections between mediatization and studies on war and the news media Maltby (2012: 255) states that the military has become increasingly mediatized because the news media play “a constitutive role in informing communication between states and their external publics in the enactment of war and international politics.” Building on this argument Crosbie (2015: 1) points out that today media management have become a primary focus of the military, while Maltby (2012: 257) describes the media management policy of the British military and emphasizes that the aims of its media operations are to maintain public and political support for its activity and to achieve success. The mediatization of the military can also be traced outside of the USA and Great Britain. Kristensen & Ørsten (2006) as well as Aagaard et al. (2014) describe how the Danish military since the beginning of the new millennium has had an increased focus on media relations, a development that coincided with the involvement of Danish soldiers in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Three phases of mediatized war Thus scholars agree that, though there was always a close relationship between war and the news media, this relationship has become closer, deeper, and more multifaceted with the increased 355

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mediatization of war and the mediatization of the military (Maltby 2012; Crosbie 2015). Hoskins & O’Loughlin (2015) suggest viewing the recent intensified relationship between the news media and war through three distinct paradigms of mediatization. The first phase, broadcast war, characterizes the 1990s and such wars as the Gulf War of 1991 and the war in the Balkans. In this phase the media ecology is relatively contained with television as the dominant news media, such as the national news media and upcoming satellite channels, such as CNN. In this phase we also see a fairly traditional, but tightly managed, military–media relationship, where government sources and military sources dominate the news (see for instance Bennett & Paletz’s 1994 study of the media coverage of Operation Desert Storm). The second phase, the age of diffused war, characterizes the 2000s and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In this phase the traditional mainstream news media is challenged by increased global competition, the rise of the web, and new non-state actors such as WikiLeaks. The military is under pressure and struggles to maintain power and control, while also trying to streamline media operations (Hoskins & O’Loughlin 2015). In the third phase, from the 2010s and onwards, war is changing to become a combination of both new wars (war on terrorism) and older threats (an emerging new cold war with Russia). The news media have converged and/or—to some degree—adjusted to social media (see also Chadwick 2017) and the military’s relationship with the media has deepened as the former increasingly adapts to trends of mediatization (Maltby 2012). As Hoskins & O’Loughlin (2015: 1327) underline: “For us, phase three of the mediatization of war includes new synergies of main stream (news media) and the military.” Summing up Hoskins & O’Loughlin (2015) conclude that the three phases can be understood as three different iterations of the relationship between news media and government and military elites. A first phase characterized mostly by stable and traditional power relations between news media and the military. A second phase of disruption, where power to some degree is redistributed away from government, military elites, and the news media towards citizens-cum-users and non-state actors, to a third phase where government and the military are still struggling with the effect of the internet, but where both have adapted to the logic of mediatization (Maltby 2012; Crosbie 2015; Hoskins & O’Loughlin 2015). The mainstream news media, meanwhile, have expanded what is considered to be mainstream by going digital and by appropriating much of the user generated content, thus also adapting to and remaining relevant in a new media ecology that is hybrid (Hoskins & O’Loughlin 2015; Chadwick 2017). But even if the three phases are distinct from each other, Hoskins & O’Loughlin (2015) are also quick to emphasize that the three phases of mediatization are not fixed, but overlapping and contested.

Scandals and the military With the increased mediatization of the war follows the risk of increased scandalization. In fact Crosbie (2015: 2) points out that one way to investigate further the relationship between mediatization and the military would be to focus on scandals as “sites of mediatization.” Thompson originally (2000) defined three distinct types of political scandals: the political sex scandal, the economic political scandal, and the power scandal. The power scandal concerns the disclosure of hidden power to the public. One type of power scandal, such as the Watergate scandal, concerns the misuse of power by elected political leaders. Another type is labeled a “security scandal,” which concerns the blurring of the boarders between politics, the military, and the intelligence agencies. With regard to scandals and the military, Blach-Ørsten & Lund (2012: 105) have argued that one way to investigate the relationship between news media and war in the age of mediatization could be through the lens of the power scandal, especially with a focus on the security scandal. And in their study of scandals in Denmark they find a small number of security 356

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scandals concerning the Danish military’s involvement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (Blach-Ørsten & Lund 2012). Though scholars thus seem to agree that the increased mediatization of the military may lead to an increased scandalization of the military, Crosbie (2015: 2) points out that despite the increased mediatization of war and the military, full-blown military scandals are relatively rare. There may be several reasons for this. One rather simple one is that questions on the military and/or about war are all subjects that often fall within legislation on “national security” and therefore information is often labeled top secret. This of course makes it difficult for journalists to obtain critical information on the military and thus to scrutinize it in the same way the press in most Western countries on a daily basis scrutinize other types of political subjects. Another reason is that the mediatization of war and the military has led the latter to develop strategies to handle the news media. Of particular importance to war journalism is the strategy of embedding journalists within the military in times of war (Tuosto 2008; Schleicher 2016). This allows the press to have front-line access, but also puts the lives of the reporters in the hands of the military making them reliant on the troops and thus (potentially) less critical. Finally, Entman (2012) writes about silenced scandals and uses the case of the missing WMDs in the war on Iraq as an example. The fact that there were no WMDs found could have been a huge scandal, but was silenced—because the Bush administration and the presidential party were united in handling the scandal, the opposition failed to ignite a debate or investigation thus leaving the media with no way to ask whether Bush had deliberately manipulated evidence of WMDs (Entman 2012: 173–174). All in all, this suggests that scandals involving the military may been seen as political scandals in their own right, though news media investigating military scandals are faced with challenges that are different, and harder to overcome, than when writing about other types of political scandals.

Security scandals and military sex scandals in the age of diffused and arrested war Looking at mediated scandals with a focus on the army, the military in general, and war, we are confronted with the notion that, according to Crosbie (2015), military scandals are rare, and that research into the military is also difficult due to lack of access (Schleicher 2016). Looking into studies on media, the military, and scandal it is therefore perhaps not a surprise that we find relatively few international studies on the subject. We have chosen to focus on four distinct scandals that have all been the subject of research: two scandals that are internationally well known and may be categorized as security scandals, and two scandals that fall into the category of sex scandals and are less known outside the U.S.

Abu Ghraib prison scandal of 2004 Thompson (2005) points to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal of 2004 as an example of how the double-edged sword of scandal and visibility hit the U.S. Army. The scandal broke out in April 2004, when CBS’s 60 Minutes II published photographs showing Iraqi prisoners being subjected to various forms of humiliation and torture by the American prison personnel. The scandal soon became public worldwide (Jones & Sheets 2009) and one of the major scandals connected to the Iraq war (Thompson 2005; Bennett et  al. 2006; Entman 2012). The scandal put the Bush administration as well as the U.S. army under pressure, but a study of the news coverage in seven different countries (Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the U.S.) (Jones & Sheets 2009) also shows that, whereas news media in Germany and Spain described the events in the Abu Ghraib prison as torture, the U.S. news media were more likely to term 357

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what had happened as abuse or mistreatment. Bennett et al. (2006: 481) reached the same conclusion, looking only at coverage in the U.S. media: “for all the photos and available evidence suggesting a possible policy of torture laid bare at Abu Ghraib, the story quickly became framed as regrettable abuse on the part of a few troops”; the scandal ended up having few political or policy consequences (Andén-Papadopoulos 2008: 23). Bennett et  al. explain the framing of the scandal in U.S. news media using the “indexing” (Bennett 1990) hypothesis which states that most event-driven news, like scandals, quickly becomes constrained by routine journalistic practices such as framing stories within the range of sources and viewpoints that can be found amongst elite news sources, in this case sources in the U.S. military and the Bush administration.

Sexual assault in the U.S. military, 2004–2011 A study by Crosbie & Sass (2017) documents the history of sexual assault in the U.S. military via media coverage from about 1965 to 2014. They write (ibid.: 121) that the taboo of reporting military sexual assaults and other army atrocities was first broken during the Vietnam War. Since the 1980s they find a steady stream of reports linking sexual violence to the military, with a peak in 2004 when the Denver Post published “Betrayal in the Ranks,” a series of articles focusing on rape based on interviews with more than 60 victims (Pro-Publica 2018).1 Crosbie & Sass (2017: 129) find that the media coverage led to a large-scale scandal that made it impossible for the military to ignore the problems. The scandal thus led to several reforms and initiatives with a view to reforming military culture. However, in his study of “how print media frames the US military during time of scandal,” Kuhl (2017) points to a more recent scandal of 2011, the “Lackland Air Forces Base sexual assault scandal,” which only received minimal coverage in the U.S. news media. Kuhl (2017) studies three such cases: the Aberdeen Proving Ground scandal (1996), the United States Air Forces Academy scandal (2003), and the Lackland Air Force Base scandal (2011). He concludes that the coverage of these scandals decreases over time, but also argues that the media coverage may help bring more public focus on the darker sides of the culture of the U.S. military.

WikiLeaks: collateral murder 2010 Collateral murder refers to a video tape that was released by WikiLeaks in April of 2010. The tape was from a gun camera video on a U.S. army helicopter that in 2007 had been involved in an attack in a suburb known as New Baghdad in Iraq. The video shows how an air attack goes wrong and 12 civilians, including a photographer and a driver working for Reuters, are killed (McNair 2012; Mortensen 2012). The video was a global news story, just like the Abu Ghraib prison pictures, and according to McNair (2012) the video helped give new visibility to military atrocities and thus changed the power relationship between new media, old media, and the military and political establishment. Even though the video was covered by the traditional news media worldwide, a study on the coverage in Denmark, the U.S. and the United Kingdom (Mortensen 2012) shows that the selected newspapers published a total of 106 articles on “Collateral Murder,” with only 12 focused on the actual content of the video, whereas the rest of the articles focused more on WikiLeaks itself. Thus, as Mortensen (2012) sums up, the story of WikiLeaks, its organization, motivation, and its principal Julian Assange ended up with more coverage that the actual leak.

David Petraeus sex scandal of 2012 The David Petraeus sex scandal caught the attention of the international media in November of 2012. General David Petraeus, one the most highly decorated generals in the U.S. army, who 358

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at that time had taken over as Director of the CIA, had to resign as a consequence of infidelity. The FBI had uncovered the fact that Petraeus had an affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, a punishable offense in the military, and this led him to resign (Lanpher 2014). During the investigation it was also discovered that Broadwell had classified information, and Petraeus was charged with having given that information to her—a charge he later pleaded guilty to.2 A study comparing the media coverage of the Petraeus scandal to that of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal (Widegren et al. 2013) finds that the former received a lot less coverage from U.S. news media than the latter, but that this probably had to do with the fact that, while Clinton denied his affair, Petraeus admitted his and resigned almost immediately after it was revealed.

Discussion Scandals are not “something” that just happen by themselves, as Crosbie (2015) points out. The same type of information available at different times, or in different circumstances, may or may not lead to a scandal. So, when Crosbie (2015) also states that full-blown military scandals are relatively rare, the obvious question to ask is: why? One reason has to do with the mediatization thesis, more specifically the mediatization of the military itself. The massive military focus on news media and communication is clearly also an attempt to avoid, control, or steer relatively clear of scandals, as Crosbie (2015) also states. This argument can be linked to Hoskins and O’Loughlin’s (2015) three phases of military mediatization. In the age of diffused war (the 2000s) both the military and the traditional news media lost some control over the media ecology to the rise of the Internet and non-state actors as WikiLeaks—this is also the age of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, the sexual assault scandal ‘Betrayal in the Ranks’, and WikiLeaks and the collateral murder scandal. Indeed, studies of both the Abu Ghraib scandal and the collateral murder scandal go some way to argue that the unwanted visibility these scandals have brought to the military and the political establishment might be seen as possible major shifts in the relationship between news media, new media, and the military (Mortensen 2012), and even as a possible democratization of political communication (McNair 2012). At the same time the studies point out how the Web, or digitalization, have also brought a fundamental change to the news media, pushing it towards a chaos paradigm, to use McNair’s (2012) term. However, in the present age of arrested war WikiLeaks is far from the agenda setter it was in the early 2010s, and Hoskins & O’Loughlin (2015) argue that both the military and the now digitized mainstream news media have regained some status and control in the media ecology, leading to perhaps fewer military scandals. Leaks still occur (Snowden, LuxLeaks, the Panama Papers), but these leaks are mostly now the result of whistleblowers working together with international consortiums of investigative reporters and/or the traditional media organizations such as the larger international newspapers. To sum up, one part of the explanation behind the few full-blown military scandals might be that the news media ecology has moved away from chaos (McNair 2012) or diffused war (Hoskins & O’Loughlin 2015) and found a new order, where both the military and the traditional news media are reasserting themselves. Another part of the explanation would be to remember the indexing hypothesis (Bennett 1990) and the many studies—including during studies of the Abu Ghraib scandal—inspired by this theory that show how the American news media “indexed” their framing of a story according to the statements available by elite sources, thus limiting critique of the scandal. A third part of the explanation, and in some ways linked to the indexing hypothesis, are the studies of scandals in both the U.S. and the Nordic countries that show that the more trivial personalized scandals, like sex scandals, receive a lot more coverage than the more complex scandals (Entman 2012; Pollack et al. 2018). For Entman (2012) the personalized scandals are more media friendly 359

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because they are simple and do well on television; for Pollack et al. (2018) it is mostly the news media, working in an increasing competitive environment, that blow up the small-scale scandals because they so clearly arouse public attention and interest both in traditional media and social media. But as is the case with the indexing hypothesis, sources may play a key role in this as it is often easy for journalists to find many sources that are both willing and able to criticize the simpler transgressions in for instance a sex scandal (Blach-Ørsten 2011). On the other hand, more complex scandals, like those involving war and national security, require sources with more specialized knowledge of for instance the rules of engagement during war. These types of sources are often fewer and elite sources themselves, and perhaps also have more to risk by criticizing a government, or army, that may also employ them, or have employed them in the past (see also Maltby 2013).

Conclusion Looking at scandals and the military we have focused on two spectacular security scandals and two sex scandals involving armed forces. Further studies of the different scandals show that although the two security ones brought new visibility to some very dark secrets, both the media coverage of each scandal, and the political or military consequences of each scandal, was limited. The technology potential of Thompson’s new visibility still exists, but as we have shown the increased mediatization efforts of the military in countries such as the U.S., Great Britain, and Denmark (Kristensen & Ørsten 2007; Maltby 2012; Crosbie 2015) may have had some success in “blunting” the double-edged sword that Thompson wrote about, and perhaps even increasingly have had the success of turning the increased visibility to their own advantage and silenced the potential for scandal.

Notes 1 See https://www.propublica.org/article/the-most-important-muckreads-on-rape-in-the-military. 2 See http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-20317995.

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36 SEX TRAFFICKING AND SCANDAL Gretchen Soderlund

In this chapter I consider the concept of scandal as it relates to sex trafficking. I have argued elsewhere that sex trafficking scandals constitute a subset of sex scandals which has its own logic (Soderlund 2013). A century ago, the issue of sex trafficking had the capacity to generate what I call “surplus scandal.” That is, sex trafficking controversies, played out in the print media, were marked by such extremes of belief and skepticism that they turned on and transformed the messenger itself. But what about today’s sex trafficking scandals? The media are accustomed to discussing sexuality and prostitution. Earlier allegations of sex trafficking were scandalous in part because a handful of English and American journalists and editors insisted that sex and gender were legitimate areas of public discourse. In this chapter I consider the present day and ask the following questions. At what point does an issue of public concern like sex trafficking rise to the status of full-blown scandal? Which institutions, public actors, or social movements stand to lose or gain by these scandals? And how does a sex trafficking scandal differ from a moral panic? I use two recent attempts to initiate sex trafficking scandals in the United States, the 2009 ACORN scandal and the 2016 Pizzagate conspiracy theory, to make the case that scandal is an important, if under-utilized, framework for understanding sex trafficking claims, particularly in the United States. I argue that sex trafficking’s power to scandalize is rooted in the space between fact and fiction. It is a framework imposed on two already misunderstood and often demonized practices, prostitution and immigration; sex trafficking’s association with sex and the underworld of organized crime make it a prime vehicle for scandal and conspiratorial thought. Before turning to the issue of sex trafficking, however, I discuss the importance of scandal to political communication more generally.

Scandal as political communication Scandals are a recurring feature of U.S. political culture. They ensue when “private acts that disgrace or offend the idealized, dominant morality of a social community are made public and narrativized by the media, producing a range of effects from ideological retrenchment to disruption and change” (Lull and Hinerman 1997, 3). Their essential ingredients are media exposure, public censure, and social repercussion, and they can be triggered by misbehaviors of varying magnitude. An extramarital affair or offensive remark caught on a hot mic can generate as much or more public disapproval as embezzlement or rape. As a means of policing morality, their 362

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consequences can range from personal embarrassment to loss of legitimacy to broader institutional or political fallout. As Joshua Gamson notes, though, personal setbacks are rarely permanent as the attempted comeback is part of the scandal logic (2001). Further, political scandals are not always death sentences. They can simultaneously strengthen opponents’ convictions and shore up partisan support.1 In the pre-digital era, breaking a scandalous story conferred a measure of success on a journalist or news organization (which could also catch flak or be accused of sensationalism if the publicized transgression was perceived as unseemly or petty). The gap has narrowed between publicity and privacy with the rise of user-generated media, and the rate at which moral failings are exposed and censured has intensified. Today’s scandals are as likely to break on social media as they are via mainstream journalism but are no less an accomplishment. They hold audience attention, lead to re-posts, media attention, public commentary, and memes. Internet/ social media scandals can have severe repercussions, as with some #MeToo cases, but are often confined to social embarrassment. What remains unclear is whether the routinization of scandal serves any larger protective or normative function. Despite the ubiquity of scandals, their importance and influence are not cultural universals, even in highly mediated societies (Tumber and Waisbord 2004). Scandals are more common in countries with strong libertarian underpinnings that attribute broken institutions to bad social actors. In nations like the United States, conspiracy theory has historically stood in for social theory. Sex trafficking stretches at the limits of American’s capacity for abstract, structural thinking, becoming a moral litmus test in a society with few morals at all. Political cultures that view social problems through a structural lens are less prone to scandal. In countries like France, for example, individuals are often understood to be products of the institutions they occupy, and their imbrication in institutions guarantees their complicity in perpetuating a broken system. Until quite recently, French print and broadcast media deemed “explanation more important than investigation and exposition,” and the interplay of investigative reporting and scandal so prevalent in the American and English press was absent (Chalaby 2004, 1205). Investigation and exposure-based efforts in journalism and on social media rely on scandal for their efficacy, a point often overlooked in scholarship on media and political communication. Because scandals engage audiences and can have real-world consequences, generating scandal should be viewed as a key objective in news work and an important element in audience response. To overlook scandal is to diminish our understanding of the relationship between media and political processes. We need look no further than the 2009 American Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN)/sex trafficking scandal to see this principle in action.

Sex trafficking scandals and U.S. elections In 2008, presidential candidate John McCain warned American voters that a little-known advocacy group called ACORN might steal the election. The group, he claimed, was “on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy” (Holan 2008). Associating Barack Obama with ACORN became a central pillar of McCain’s election strategy as November neared. Republican strategists drove home connections between the candidate and the community organization in a conspiratorial style. They cast ACORN as an all-powerful entity with the capacity to steal elections and attempted to link Obama’s political trajectory to its “shakedown,” machine-style politics.2 ACORN, of course, neither rigged the 2008 election nor did racially tinged attempts to tie Obama to ACORN win McCain the presidency. Nonetheless, a poll conducted in late 2009 363

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found that 52 percent of Republicans believed ACORN had stolen the election (Connolly 2009). Conservatives, unable to abandon a theory they tirelessly promoted during election season, had a score to settle with ACORN. Swift and effective retribution arrived in the form of a sex trafficking scandal that was based on an idea conservative activist and college student, Hannah Giles, had while jogging. Giles and fellow activist James O’Keefe spent the summer of 2009 posing as prostitute and pimp and visiting ACORN offices from New York to California. Equipped with a hidden camera, the pair detailed a fictive scheme to traffic El Salvadorian girls into the United States and use proceeds from prostitution to finance a congressional run. At each site, they sought advice on how to evade law enforcement and outsmart the Internal Revenue Service (IRS)—and O’Keefe’s camera caught ACORN employees giving it to them in spades. The videos appeared on Breibart. com in September of 2009. They were heavily edited and elided important details, but there is no reason to doubt that most ACORN staff willingly provided this information (Hoyt 2010). The videos inflicted damage that excuses and apologies could not undo. ACORN supporters and donors fled. Congress froze federal funding. ACORN leaders pushed back to no avail. The organization shut down in 2010, bankrupt and politically ostracized. James Lull and Stephen Hinerman argue that generating a scandal is “an accomplishment with real ideological, cultural, and material winners and losers” (1997, 2). Indeed, the ACORN take-down was the first big Obama-era victory for conservatives. The Right hailed Andrew Breitbart, O’Keefe, and Giles as heroes, modern-day muckrakers, and fearless exposers of truth. The videos raised Breitbart.com’s profile and helped transform the link aggregator site into a creator of alternative news.3 During the ensuing media tour, the normally straight-laced O’Keefe often appeared in a sleek silver fur coat, dark sunglasses, jaunty hat, and walking stick (it was later revealed that he did not wear this outlandish get-up in ACORN offices, though the videos were edited to suggest he did). It is important to note that this was never a scandal about real sex trafficking. In this case, an organization staffed primarily by people of color, whose practices were already under scrutiny, was caught appearing to condone sex trafficking and prostitution.4 In at least one case an ACORN employee humored Giles and O’Keefe and then called the police.5 However, through a complicated process of rhetorical substitution and symbolic slippage, the sting gave credence to the Right’s election-year allegations and overall Obama cosmology. That mainstream news organizations failed to investigate ACORN themselves served as proof, in conservatives’ eyes, of widespread collusion around media-darling Obama. In reality, Obama’s connections to ACORN were limited (Holan 2008). But community organizer and community organization were cemented together in the conservative imaginary. The videos confirmed what the Right already believed about Obama: that underneath his charming, articulate demeanor was a conniving windbag hellbent on bringing ghetto-style politics to the White House.6 In their view, Obama was something of a pimp himself, all surface charm and inner wickedness.

Sex trafficking: Scandal, moral panic, or modern-day slavery? The 2009 ACORN sting is one example in a long history of strategic efforts to scandalize institutions, organizations, and political figures by associating them with sex trafficking. It is an instructive case because the focal point of sex trafficking scandals, past and present, often lies elsewhere. The ACORN case lacked identifiable traffickers or victims. In their stead was a fictitious rendering of sex trafficking for the sake of an investigation into broader claims. This is important because sex trafficking as practice and sex trafficking as scandal-object are 364

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rarely commensurable. Often, the national and local media spotlight practices and incidents that are not actual examples of trafficking. However, they come to stand in for actual trafficking and serve as alarm signals for broader targets of outrage such as conspiracies about voter fraud or immigration.7 To be clear, not every insinuation of sex trafficking is a cynically minded smear tactic intended to topple a political foe. A limited number of sex trafficking cases have been identified and prosecuted. Yet, despite a paucity of arrests, sex trafficking has become the predominant framework for understanding and policing commercial sex in regional, national, and international contexts over the last 20 years. In part this is because anti-trafficking organizations and activists greatly exaggerate the prevalence of these cases and conflate sex trafficking with a wide range of sexual/economic arrangements that may or may not be coercive.8 The most irresponsible of them contend that all sex workers are victims of traffickers. Journalists often parrot their claims, contributing to confusion over the meaning and extent of sex trafficking. Aside from my work and that of anthropologist Denise Brennan (2014), scandal has rarely been employed as a concept in studies of sex trafficking. Trafficking discourses have dimensions that transcend media representations and their public and/or institutional effects, and not all scholarship considers media as a key site for the production and reproduction of trafficking discourses. Studies that do consider media representations tend to focus on how the news media frame sex trafficking, the gaps between media claims and available empirical data, and anti-trafficking rhetoric.9 There is also a body of work that approaches the topic as a mass-mediated social construction and draws on a moral panic framework to account for the social and political effects of sex trafficking narratives (e.g., Blanchette and da Silva 2012; Cree et al. 2012; Weitzer 2007). The concept of moral panic was developed to account for the kind of social paranoia and anxiety that often accompanies rapid social change. In these cases, socially constructed “folk devils,” in the form of deviant identities and acts, emerge that give shape and form to vague social paranoias, channeling angst (Cohen 1980). Moral panics are sometimes fantastical, as in the case of the satanic ritual abuse scare in the United States (Jenkins & Maier-Katkin 1992). Whether the moral panic is about satanism or violent crime, the public response is often disproportionate to the actual prevalence of the alleged deviance. The panic gets stoked by mass media and moral entrepreneurs, who work in tandem to keep attention focused on the folk devil. Everyday citizens add their voices to the chorus of people demanding that legislators and law enforcement do something to fix the problem. New laws are created. Sweeping law-and-order crackdowns initiated, all because of a social bogeyman. In many respects, moral panics and scandals are conceptual cousins. Both erupt around perceived breaches of social norms and hold audience attention longer than standard news fare. Both have contours or an “anatomy” that scholars can trace, as well as a fairly predictable life cycle. For Lull and Hinerman, the difference lies in the number of people involved and the content of the transgression. Scandals, they argue, “must be traceable to real persons who are held accountable for their actions” (1997, 4). Scandals are tangible and ensnare specific people. Moral panics are sometimes fabricated and can affect whole classes of people. Lull and Hinerman provide helpful guidelines for distinguishing between moral panics and scandals. However, their formulation leaves some scandals unaccounted for. The ACORN scandal, for instance, strategically deployed the specter of sex trafficking as a means to take down an organization and cast doubt upon the president. Topics like sex trafficking symbolically taint their object, and thus fall outside Lull and Hinerman’s schema. Sex trafficking is a phenomenon that exists on the borderlands between the abstract and the concrete, fact and fiction. In moral panic, the center of outrage is the misdeed, crime, or behavior itself. In scandal, indignation is directed toward a person, group, or institution. Sex trafficking must neither 365

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be real nor even perpetrated by the politically motivated target. It must only be expedient in kindling the outrage of a specific polity.

Sex trafficking as scandal When I was researching my book on the history of the sex trafficking exposé, I searched for a framework that would explain the production and reception of a number of high-profile salacious and controversial investigative reports on sex trafficking that were published in the latenineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Exposés like William T. Stead’s 1885 “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” and George Kibbe Turner’s 1907 “Daughters of the Poor: A Plain Story of the Development of the White Slave Trade of the World, Under Tammany Hall” played a major role in forging the concept of sex trafficking (or white slavery, as it was often referred to during that era), and they simultaneously seized upon and produced anxieties about urbanization, immigration, race mixing, and shifting gender roles. These historic pieces, and the public response to them, shared many features of moral panics: they focused on sexual and criminal deviance, they cast sex trafficking as ubiquitous, hiding in plain sight, and they spawned social reform movements and legislation like the Criminal Law Amendment Act in England and the Mann Act in the United States that exceeded their original intention. However, at a certain point the moral panic framework lost its explanatory power, and I searched for a concept that was more closely linked to the print media and investigative reporting, an emerging form at that time. It was clear that the authors of these exposés were attempting to generate scandal and had specific targets in mind. In addition to selling newspapers, Stead hoped to raise age of consent laws in England and believed that only a sensationalist story about sex slavery would rouse the public and Parliament into action. Turner wanted to increase subscriptions to McClure’s Magazine, but he also sought to weaken Tammany Hall’s grip on New York City politics. Scandal was encoded in their projects from the beginning. Audiences, shocked by what they read, wanted to find and root out traffickers. But the exposés did not point to specific individuals. Instead, public disapprobation fell on specific institutions that were suspected of condoning and creating the conditions under which the crime could flourish. Both exposés generated widespread belief that sex trafficking was a significant social problem around the turn of the last century. Social reform movements developed in relation to them, and activists formed alliances with other newspapers and magazines willing to print their own stories about the traffic in women. But there was another element to these scandals that was neither as clear-cut nor unidirectional as the first, and that had to do with the nature of the claims being made. The scandals turned back on the print media because of their transgression of allowable (and at times credible) discourses, and because the journalists frequently violated ethical boundaries in investigating the stories. The controversies surrounding both pieces generated what I call “surplus scandal.” That is, the scandals they generated were marked by such extremes of belief and skepticism that they turned on and transformed journalistic practices, taking a few journalists down in the process.

Conclusion: sex trafficking, scandal, and conspiracy What about today’s sex trafficking scandals? Earlier stories of sex trafficking scandalized, in part, because key journalists and editors insisted, against the prevailing practice, that sexuality and gender were legitimate areas of journalistic discourse. Today’s media are accustomed to discussing sex and prostitution. It is unlikely that even the most egregious account of sex trafficking would generate the same level of outrage that Stead and Turner’s exposés did over a century ago. 366

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Nonetheless, sex trafficking has resurfaced as an object of public concern over the last three decades. For some, it is the most heinous human rights violation imaginable, a clear-cut form of abuse that is beyond critique (Soderlund 2005). The U.S. is increasingly politically polarized, but sex trafficking is an issue that still has the capacity to unite liberals and conservatives. The bipartisan nature of anti-trafficking efforts was on display in April 2018 when the House passed its Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and the Senate passed its Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act.10 Both bills garnered support from Republicans, Democrats, and the White House. No one in this climate wants to be associated with sex trafficking. Plus, being seen combating this seemingly ubiquitous evil is an easy way to look good. If most anti-trafficking legislation and activism has been bipartisan, the topic has very subtly been taking on a partisan edge. Anti-trafficking activism has emerged as a key mandate of the evangelical Right, for whom traveling to places like Cambodia and Honduras to assist local law enforcement in brothel raids has become something of a modern-day pilgrimage. And it is increasingly becoming a central theme in rightwing conspiracy theories and scandals. The Right may or may not still find sex trafficking narratives titillating, but for some followers these scandals clearly maintain their tried-and-true political efficacy, regardless of their veracity. Such was the case during the 2016 election when WikiLeaks published a trove of John Podesta emails at roughly the same time as the New York Police Department seized Anthony Weiner’s communiques. Trump supporters on the internet set about decoding secret messages in these Democrats’ missives, and the product of their cryptographic handiwork was a scandal/conspiracy known as Pizzagate. Pizzagate believers were convinced Hilary Clinton had a secret life as a child sex trafficker, and the epicenter of her nefarious activities was a Washington DC pizza place called Comet Ping Pong. The restaurant’s owner was subject to harassment and intimidation as the story circulated on social media. The episode seemingly peaked in December of 2016 when Edgar Welch fired shots into Comet Ping Pong’s walls. Welch, an evangelical, had traveled to DC from North Carolina to rescue the children he imagined were captive inside. If Giles and O’Keefe’s deployment of sex trafficking proved highly effective, Pizzagate attempted fewer layers of mediation between the crime and Hilary Clinton, with less obvious results. Pizzagate was one of the stranger episodes of 2016. The conspiracy theory seemed to fade away save as a relic from a strange election cycle. But it turns out it never died. It was still alive on Reddit and has recently made a comeback. Roseanne Barr alerted the outside world to Pizzagate’s ongoing influence when, in March of 2018, she attempted to contact a shadowy figure called QAnon on Twitter. QAnon, or Q, which refers to this figure’s “Q” level security clearance, claims to be privy to inside Trump information routinely censored by the mainstream media. QAnon has a growing number of followers, who have held Q rallies, purchased billboard space, and are often seen at Trump events wearing “Q” shirts. For these followers, Pizzagate was real, and busting Clinton’s pedophile ring was one of Trump’s first acts as president. But Trump did not stop there. According to QAnon, he has spent much of his first 18 months as president rounding up traffickers and pedophiles the world over and sending them to prison. This intel inspired the following Roseanne Barr tweet: “President Trump has freed so many children held in bondage to pimps all over this world. Hundreds each month. He has broken up trafficking rings in high places everywhere. notice that. I disagree on some things, but give him benefit of doubt-4 now” (Sommer 2018). All evidence suggests additional sex trafficking scandals are on the horizon. The Christian Post reports that Planned Parenthood is the next target. After the success of FOSTA/SESTA, Republican members of Congress are urging an investigation into the family planning and women’s healthcare organization for “covering up and not reporting the sexual abuse and trafficking of minors,” and “operating a nationwide pedophile protection racket” (Showalter 2018). ACORN, President Obama, Hilary Clinton, and now Planned Parenthood. This suggests to 367

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me that there are two principles operating here. Sex trafficking is a social practice, but it also exists as an idea. A set of images and associations that are ready-made and are deployed at various moments precisely to generate scandal and insinuate conspiracy. It is therefore worth asking: which institutions, public actors, or social movements stand to lose or gain by these scandals? Rarely, it seems, do alleged victims of trafficking gain by anti-trafficking efforts.

Notes 1 This dynamic was at work during the Monica Lewinski scandal in the 1990s. Similarly, the near-daily scandals encircling the current White House appear to galvanize Trump’s base while providing his opponents with continuous fodder for moral outrage. 2 See Horowitz (2009) for an example of such rhetoric used in reference to ACORN. 3 Indeed, the ACORN videos and the O’Keefe–Breitbart alliance are depicted as foundational in the 2012 hagiographic documentary Hating Breitbart. 4 ACORN was already mired in scandal when it got pulled under the electoral spotlight. The group raised eyebrows in 2007 when Washington state arrested seven unscrupulous part-time employees for falsifying 1,762 voter registration cards (Ervin 2007). The next year, a whistleblower revealed that the brother of ACORN’s founder, Wade Rathke, had embezzled nearly a million dollars a decade earlier. ACORN had handled the breach internally, allowing Rathke to receive ongoing paychecks and slowly repay the stolen funds (Strom 2008b). 5 Juan Carlos Vera, an ACORN employee in California, humored Giles and O’Keefe but immediately called the police after their interaction. A later court ruling made O’Keefe pay Vera $100,000 for damages (Ungar 2013). 6 See Hating Breitbart and any Stephen Bannon documentary for evidence of this rhetorical move. 7 An example of this popped up in my Twitter feed minutes after revising this sentence. In an article from CSP Daily News, a convenience store industry newsletter, a store owner in Bend, Oregon tells the reporter that a sticker supporting a local anti-trafficking nonprofit had been repeatedly torn off his shop window, even though he had it framed. Both the shop owner and the journalist take this act of vandalism as evidence that they “do in fact have human trafficking here [in Bend]” (Baltazar 2018). 8 There is an abundant literature that demonstrates the problematic nature of anti-trafficking campaigns. For a sampling of this literature, see Agustin (2007), Bernstein (2010), Kempadoo et al. (2005), Soderlund (2005). See also Open Democracy’s series of online essays, “Beyond Trafficking and Slavery.” 9 See Barnett 2016; Johnston et al. 2012; Pajnik 2010; Schaeffer-Gabriel 2010; Zhang 2009. 10 Sex trafficking provided the impetus for the first successful piece of legislation censoring portions of the internet. Passed in April 2018, FESTA/SOSTA replaces an earlier law stating that website owners and server hosts are not accountable for the content others put on their website. The legislation was designed to shut down sites where advertisements for prostitution flourish, and it has certainly succeeded in this goal. Critics point out that FOSTA/SESTA will drive prostitution further underground by stripping sex workers of web-based advertising venues. There is also fear that FOSTA/SESTA will have a chilling effect on other forms of online discourse (Romano 2018).

References Agustin, Laura María. 2007. Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets, and the Rescue Industry. London: Zed Books. Baltazar, Amanda. 2018. “Convenience Stores Tackle Human Trafficking: How Retailers can be a Vital Lifeline for Victims.” CSP Daily News. June 27. https://www.cspdailynews.com/industry-news-analysis/ corporate-news/articles/convenience-stores-tackle-human-trafficking Barnett, Barbara. 2016. “Dividing Women: The Framing of Trafficking for Sexual Exploitation in Magazines.” Feminist Media Studies 16: 205–222. Bernstein, Elizabeth. 2010. “Militarized Humanitarianism Meets Carceral Feminism: The Politics of Sex, Rights, and Freedom in Contemporary Antitrafficking Campaigns. Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society 36: 45–71. Blanchette, Thaddeus Gregory & Ana Paula da Silva. 2012. “On Bullshit and the Trafficking of Women: Moral Entrepreneurs and the Invention of Trafficking in Persons in Brazil.” Dialectical Anthropology 36: 107–125.

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Sex trafficking and scandal Brennan, Denise. 2014. “Trafficking, Scandal, and the Abuse of Migrant Workers in Argentina and the United States.” The Annals of the American Academy 653: 107–123. Chalaby, Jean K. 2004. “Scandal and the Rise of Investigative Reporting in France.” American Behavioral Scientist 47: 1194–1207. Cohen, Stanley. 1980. Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and the Rockers. New York: Routledge. Connolly, Katie. 2009. “Poll: Majority of Republicans Believe ACORN Stole the Presidential Election.” Newsweek. November 19. http://www.newsweek.com/poll-majority-republicans-believeacorn-stole-presidential-election-210966 Cree, Viviene, Gary Clapton & Mark Smith. 2012. “The Presentation of Child Trafficking in the UK: An Old and New Moral Panic?” British Journal of Social Work 44: 418–433. Ervin, Keith. 2007. “Seven Charged in Vote-Fraud Scheme.” Seattle Times. July 27. https://www. seattletimes.com/seattle-news/seven-charged-in-vote-fraud-scheme/ Gamson, Joshua. 2001. “Normal Sins: Sexual Scandal Narratives as Institutional Morality Tales.” Social Problems 48: 185–205. Holan, Drobnic Angie. 2008. “Sorting Out the Truth on Obama, ACORN.” Politifact. October 17. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2008/oct/17/sorting-truth-obama-acorn/ Horowitz, Carl. 2009. “House Panel Hears Testimony on ACORN Corruption, Coercion.” National Legal and Policy Center. April 11. http://nlpc.org/2009/04/11/house-panel-hears-testimony-acorncorruption-coercion/ Hoyt, Clark. 2010. “The Acorn Sting Revisited.” New York Times. March 20. https://www.nytimes. com/2010/03/21/opinion/21pubed.html Jenkins, Philip & Daniel Maier-Katkin. 1992. “Satanism: Myth and Reality in a Contemporary Moral Panic.” Crime, Law, and Social Change 17: 53–75. Johnston, Anne, Barbara Friedman & Autumn Shafer. 2012. “Framing the Problem of Sex Trafficking: Whose Problem? What Remedy?” Feminist Media Studies 14: 419–436. Kempadoo, Kamala, Jyoti Sanghera & Bandana Pattanaik, Eds. 2005. Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered: New Perspectives on Migration, Sex Work, and Human Rights. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press. Lull, James & Stephen Hinerman. 1997. “The Search for Scandal.” In James Lull and Stephen Hinerman, Eds., Media Scandals. New York: Polity Press. Pajnik, Mojca. 2010. “Media Framing of Trafficking.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 12: 45–64. Romano, Aja. 2018. “FOSTA-SESTA, a Law Intended to Curb Sex Trafficking, Threatens the Internet’s Future. Vox. April 18. https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/4/13/17172762/fosta-sestabackpage-230-internet-freedom Schaeffer-Gabriel, Felicity. 2010. “Sex Trafficking as the ‘New Slave Trade.’” Sexualities 12: 153–160. Showalter, Brandon. 2018. “Congressional Leaders Demand HHS Investigate Planned Parenthood’s Cover Up of Sex Crimes.” The Christian Post. June 8. https://www.christianpost.com/news/ congressional-leaders-demand-hhs-investigate-planned-parenthood-cover-up-sex-crimes-224782/ Soderlund, Gretchen. 2005. “Running from the Rescuers: New U.S. Crusades Against Global Sex Trafficking and the Rhetoric of Abolition.” Feminist Formations 17: 64–87. Soderlund, Gretchen. 2013. Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism, 1885–1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sommer, Will. 2018. “Roseanne Barr is Tweeting about QAnon, a New Pizzagate-Style Conspiracy.” Medium. March 30. https://medium.com/@willsommer/roseanne-barr-is-tweeting-about-qanona-new-pizzagate-style-conspiracy-theory-234526f52e54 Strom, Stephanie. 2008a. “On Obama, Acorn, and Voter Registration.” New York Times, October 10. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/11/us/politics/11acorn.html Strom, Stephanie. 2008b. “Funds Misappropriated at 2 Nonprofit Groups.” The New York Times. July 9. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/09/us/09embezzle.html Tumber, Howard & Silvio Waisbord. 2004. “Introduction: Political Scandals and Media Across Democracies, Volume II.” American Behavioral Scientist 47: 1143–1152. Ungar, Rick. 2013. “James O’Keefe Pays $100,000 to ACORN Employee He Smeared and Conservative Media Yawns.” Forbes. March 8. https://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2013/03/08/james-okeefepays-100000-to-acorn-employee-he-smeared-conservative-media-yawns/#4b9628c514bd Weitzer, Ronald. 2007. “The Social Construction of Sex Trafficking: Ideology and the Institutionalization of a Moral Crusade.” Politics and Society 35: 447–475. Zhang, Sheldon X. 2009. “Beyond the ‘Natasha Story’: A Review and Critique of Current Research on Sex Trafficking.” Global Crime 10: 178–195.

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37 RACE SCANDALS AS RACIAL PROJECTS Maryann Erigha

Ideas about race, racial ideologies, and racism are enmeshed in media scandals. What unfolds are race scandals—scandals that (1) involve disclosures of individual or institutional racism, (2) reveal moral or legal transgressions that violate accepted societal norms, and (3) receive widespread media and public attention. Race scandals remain a prominent fixture in United States (U.S.) media. Herman Gray’s (1997) framework of “scandal” versus scandal brings attention to the different ways audiences construct and reify race scandals. Gray uses “scandal” in reference to questionable “race scandals” created by whites—either through fictional media representations or biased mediation in journalistic coverage of real events. He uses scandal in reference to actual scandals where racial inequality, disparities, and discrimination form central components of injustice within a high-profile media narrative. Understanding a race scandal as a racial project—“an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics, and an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines” (Omi and Winant 1994: 56)—helps to illustrate the role of scandals in either the maintenance or disruption of the current racial order. As racial projects, some scandals are progressive, as they reveal racism, while other scandals are regressive, as they perpetuate racism and reproduce structures of hegemony, domination, and oppression. Race scandals in the media oscillate between these two ends—“racism as scandal” and “racialized scandals”—in competing racial projects. The former exposes the everyday realities and horrors of racism, while the latter perpetuates ideologies that keep racism alive. Typically in the case of racialized scandals, white journalists and media producers manufacture a race scandal by making racial deviance the focal point of real or imagined characters and events. Racialized scandals operate to reinforce the racial status quo, as they normalize, for primarily white audiences, the presentation of blackness and black people as moral transgressors in need of restorative transformation. The majority of black audiences, who view racism as scandal, render the anti-blackness of a nation and its people as scandalous and denounce the persistent disconnections between a commitment to racial equality and repeated practices that violate the social norm. When racism is scandal, the moral transgressors are the state, the nation, the society, and the citizens that, time and again, disregard codes of morality. The specific cases in this chapter, though not exhaustive, build on previous work to reveal the contemporary persistence of race scandals. Moreover, the proliferation of digital technologies and the ubiquity of the internet and digital media in everyday life add a new dimension to race scandals that facilitates their effectiveness as racial projects. 370

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Racism as scandal The very presence of racism should be scandalous in a society that purports to uphold ideals of racial equality and inclusivity; hence, the act of exposing institutional or individual racism involves divulging and publicizing statements that disavow commitment to racial equality. Racism as scandal, therefore, includes highly circulated media narratives that unfold stories about racism, discrimination, slurs, or other transgressions that violate the ideal moral order of a society ostensibly motivated to eliminate racist behavior. As racial projects, media coverage providing depth, scope, structure, characterization, visibility, and longevity to narratives about racism as scandal works to center controversies in order to bring disgrace upon individuals or institutions and, ultimately, to promote change.

The scandalous state At the center of U.S. race scandals is the scandalous state: the institutional racism of the local, state, and federal governments that illustrates moral and legal transgressions that violate norms of racial equality and receive immense media and public attention. Of late, police departments and law enforcement have been the subject of race scandals in the media, as videos of their misconduct with citizens has circulated and outraged millions worldwide. The March 1991 videotaped beating of Rodney King, a Los Angeles motorist, and the subsequent trial and not guilty verdict of Los Angeles police department (LAPD) officers, gained heightened media attention as a race scandal (Gooding-Williams 1993; Hunt 1997). The video of the LAPD repeatedly kicking, hitting, and beating King with batons was widely circulated in news media to showcase the police brutality of white police officers against unarmed black citizens. The verdict that exonerated the LAPD from blame was equally viewed as a scandalous example of deeply entrenched racism afflicting the nation and its people. In just the first decades of the twenty-first century, the names of countless black Americans have been etched in race scandals involving state-sanctioned violence or racially divisive court rulings—often linked to unnecessary, premature deaths of black citizens. In 2012, 17-yearold Trayvon Martin posthumously became a household name after 26-year-old George Zimmerman killed him, during Martin’s walk home from a convenience store in Sanford, Florida. Media coverage of the Zimmerman killing evolved as a psychodrama scandal—one that involves an otherwise unknown person who violates moral or social norms (Lull and Hinerman 1997). The scandal continued when the Sanford police department did not immediately arrest Zimmerman after the killing but permitted him to return home—to some, signaling an institutional devaluation of black life and privileging of white life. Only after nationwide efforts and outrage was Zimmerman apprehended and charged. The scandal further developed as white media outlets slandered Martin’s character, the public debated about what truly happened during the encounter, and the court handed Zimmerman a not guilty verdict. The death of Martin and the trial of Zimmerman symbolized a new visibility in the cycle of anti-black violence, non-indictments, not guilty verdicts, and white impunity under the law—a cycle that claimed multiple victims such as Eric Garner, Philando Castile, Rekia Boyd, Laquan McDonald, Freddie Gray, Dontre Hamilton, Jamar Clark, Alton Sterling, Walter Scott, Ezell Ford, Ramarley Graham, Amadou Diallo, Akai Gurley, Jonathan Ferrell, Sandra Bland, Sean Bell, Korryn Gaines, Aiyana Jones, and hundreds of other victims (Freelon et al. 2016). Widespread anti-black brutality and injustice erect places as symbolic monikers of race scandals, such that the names of cities—Selma, Ferguson, and more—hold deeper meaning beyond their geography. 371

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Flint, Michigan likewise gained national notoriety due to the Flint Water Crisis. In April 2013, the Michigan state treasurer Andy Dillon, a Democrat, authorized a switch in water source to the Flint River for the majority black Detroit suburb of Flint. A year later in April 2014, residents began receiving water from the contaminated river. The water contained dangerous levels of lead, fecal coliform bacteria, and other toxins. The media scandal unraveled after city, state, and national officials—such as the Republican governor of Michigan Rick Snyder and the state-appointed emergency manager Jerry Ambrose—continued to declare that Flint water was safe for residents, despite its visual discoloration and confirmatory tests that categorized it well above the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) threshold for hazardous wastes. Despite protests, lawsuits, and media outrage, it took nearly two years before the Michigan National Guard distributed clean bottled water to residents. Meanwhile, at least a dozen residents died from a Legionnaires outbreak, contracting pneumonia from bacteria between June 2014 and November 2015 during the time of the Flint Water Crisis. The incident resulted in several felony charges against government officials, a $100 million allocation for water infrastructure upgrades from the EPA, and a $97 million settlement for the state to replace water lines.

Institutions and individuals The scandalous state fuels the persistence of racism in U.S. history and the present, casting a shadow that embraces like-minded individual and institutional actions. In their framework of scandals, Lull and Hinerman (1997) describe institutional scandals as organizations or companies committing moral breaches in authority or conduct, usually racism or discrimination, with regard to their treatment of a racial group. Such was the case in spring 1994, when black workers filed a class-action racial discrimination lawsuit against the Texaco oil company. Shortly thereafter, in November 1996, a secret tape recording of a high-level corporate meeting was made public. On this tape, white Texaco executives referred to black employees as “black jelly beans” who would not advance up the corporate ladder because “all the black jelly beans seemed to be glued to the bottom of the bag” and “porch monkeys” who sit outside the company as window dressing to make the company appear to be more diverse and accepting of high-ranking black employees (Feagin et al. 2001: 154). Ultimately, the company settled with 1,348 black workers for $176 million, and the Texaco case made visible the scandal of racism in corporate America. More recently, the coffee chain Starbucks became entangled in a highly visible race scandal. In spring 2018, a white manager of a Philadelphia Starbucks called the police on two black men while they were waiting for a friend to arrive for a meeting. The police arrested the men on suspicion of trespassing, though the charges were later dropped, and the narrative manifested into a glaring example of everyday discrimination against blacks in America. The men settled with Starbucks for an undisclosed amount and with the city of Philadelphia for $1 each and a promise from the city to support a $200,000 initiative for young entrepreneurs in Philadelphia communities. In an attempt at image restoration, Starbucks closed thousands of stores nationwide for employees to undergo a four-hour session of racial bias training. Beyond institutions, white individuals become the subject of race scandals when they utter racist remarks or engage in racist behavior that gains heightened media attention. In 2007, chef Paula Deen made headlines when she suggested that her brother hire all black waiters for his wedding, insinuating a slavery or plantation-themed wedding. In 2013, Deen admitted to using the N-word during a deposition for a workplace racial and sexual discrimination lawsuit. Following the revelation, Food Network did not renew her show’s contract. Other companies such as Home Depot and Walmart dissociated themselves from Deen or backed out of business deals with her. In addition, Rachel Dolezal made headlines in 2015 when the story broke that 372

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she had been falsely posing as a black woman for years, during which time she became president of the local Spokane, Washington chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. As the story gained traction in news and online media, many people were angered with her fabrication of a black racial identity, particularly upset by her deceit and insensitivity to the lived experiences of real black women. Furthermore, sports commentary is a commonplace venue for media scandals about race, usually concerning white men who make racist on-air or otherwise audio-recorded statements and receive pressure to leave their positions following widespread knowledge of their remarks. In April 2007, radio personality Don Imus—host of his Imus in the Morning CBS Radio show, simulcast on MSNBC TV—called players on the Rutgers University women’s basketball team “nappy-headed hos” and was subsequently fired from CBS and MSNBC for the racist and sexist remark. However, by December 2007, in no small twist of irony, Imus received a multimillion dollar opportunity for a talk radio gig on WABC, the flagship for the The Rush Limbaugh Show (Bisbort 2008: 166). Earlier Limbaugh was subject to his own race scandal when he was forced to resign from ESPN following his racist commentary about Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb (Bisbort 2008: 195). Similarly, former Los Angeles (L.A.) Clippers basketball franchise owner Donald Sterling was forced to sell his NBA team in 2014 after a leaked audio recording of him became public, in which he urged a female friend to stop publicly associating and posing on Instagram with African Americans, including basketball legend Magic Johnson. Consequently, NBA commissioner Adam Silver ordered Sterling to break all affiliations with the L.A. Clippers, including selling the team, and handed Sterling a lifetime ban from the NBA. Acts of racism manifest into race scandals in the media when they garner widespread attention and become the subject of debate among audiences.

Racialized scandals Beyond scandals where overt racism centers the incident, other scandals do not appear to be directly about race but are made to be about race: they become racialized in the media. In manufactured race scandals, white media executives and workers label instances of black opposition— real or imagined—to the dominant white racial order as “scandalous.” Hence, “blackness and difference continue to function as the markers of ‘scandalous’ threats to the moral and social boundaries” (Gray 1997: 89). As racial projects to preserve the racial status quo, such racialized depictions aim to channel white anxieties into becoming outraged by the idea of black deviance. The focus of racialized scandals, therefore, centers on the portrayal of black bodies out of control, on the downfall, and in transgression of moral standards (Gray 1997), creating a scandalous monster of blackness (usually the black man) from which whites should seek protection. Racialized scandals further the ideology of white supremacism through the deployment of anti-black narratives, regularly and stereotypically attaching negative emotion and value to blackness, and by extension, framing black people as the default moral transgressors—imagery that in turn is used to justify the intense policing and scrutiny of black bodies (Alexander 2010; Gray 1997; Taylor 2016). Historically, racialized scandals have operated as racial projects intent upon provoking and justifying white violence against black people. The stereotype of criminality remains a recurring racialized trope in U.S. media to mobilize white sentiment around the notion of blackness being a threat to whiteness and, especially, to the “sanctity” of white womanhood (Dyer 1997). The racial projects of white media productions to construct and disseminate racialized scandals that stereotype black men as lecherous and violent have real world effects: inciting white violence and maligning the character of black people, families, and communities. 373

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In politics, campaigns deploy racialized scandals against political candidates. During the 1988 presidential campaign, Republicans created infamous paid advertisements featuring William Robert Horton, whom commentators nicknamed “Willie” to demean his manhood and diminish his stature. Symbolizing a threat of black criminality, the ads: depicted a bearded Horton; affiliated his image with violent crimes of kidnapping, assault, rape, and murder; and suggested that Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis was loose on crime and would allow black criminals to roam the streets freely. As racialized scandals, the ads played upon Horton’s moral transgressions (though Horton insisted on his innocence in the case of any violent crime for which he was charged or convicted) (Feagin et al. 2001). Receiving considerable media exposure, the ads intentionally distorted and presented exaggerated and inaccurate information with the intent to construct a savage black monster, murderer, and rapist in the minds of white voters (Feagin et al. 2001; Jamieson 1992; Mendelberg 2001). In the end, the Horton ads were influential in demonizing the black image while simultaneously garnering white support to elect Republican George H. W. Bush as the 41st U.S. president. Besides politicians, celebrities are also prime targets for race scandals in the media, as they are almost guaranteed to attract and retain viewership. Star scandals happen when celebrities receive intense media scrutiny for private or alleged acts that are made public and become the catalyst for disgrace (Lull and Hinerman 1997). Such scandals take advantage of media stardom and attach engrossing narratives to circulated and recognizable images of popular figures. By far, the most prominent example of the contemporary racialized star scandal is the case of Orenthal James (O. J.) Simpson. Simpson was arraigned and then tried in 1995 for the (1994) murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. Public discourse about Simpson’s trial centered on racial ideology (Hunt 1999; McKay and Smith 1995). Like the above examples, media coverage played upon the most scandalous of racial stereotypes pervading U.S. media—the image of white female victimhood and black male criminality. The trial also made visible racially segregated sites of reception, and reaction to the not guilty verdict, while bringing to light predominant narratives about the fate of African Americans at the hands of a white “justice” system (Hunt 1999; McKay and Smith 1995). In spite of the innumerable contributions of black people, blackness, and black popular culture to American culture and social life, blackness remains embodied in scandal in American ideology (Gray 1997). Indeed, racialized scandals are potent vehicles for racial projects spurring the persistence of racism, as they perform ritualized race baiting acts that kindle the flames of racial hatred and animus.

Race scandals in a digital age Digital technologies have fundamentally transformed everyday communications; the internet, digital video, and social media, especially, have altered the landscape of race scandals. Digital technologies provide various methods for capturing and diffusing information—such as via online social networks, social media, blogs, online petitions, digital video, and email. The near ubiquity and the mass adoption of the internet, and in particular social media, as a means of communication has led to increased awareness of issues, dissemination of information, development of narrative, and speed of mobilization for race scandals. In addition, digital technologies allow a large, visible, and persistent challenge and assembly against scandals of racism at an international scale, without requiring participants to be physically present in the same locality. As Herman Gray (1997: 86) argues,

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Because Martin Luther King and the leaders of the civil rights movement framed the question of black equality and civil rights in moral and religious terms, they were able to effectively define and reveal as scandalous the inhuman and brutal treatment which blacks suffered at the hands of a racist social system. In the same way that civil rights era activists defined racism as scandal, black Americans today use social media to mobilize race scandals as racial projects that interpret, explain, and articulate the racial dynamics involved in racist incidents and systems in order to generate media attention and combat affronts to their citizenship and belonging. The LAPD beating of Rodney King marked a significant instance of using digital technologies to influence the mediation of race scandals (Hunt 1997). A progenitor of the “going viral” phenomenon, the resultant video demonstrated the power of individual citizens with handheld digital cameras to capture and disseminate incidents of social injustice for public audiences. Decades later when the fatal shootings of African Americans at the hands of law enforcement captured the minds, television screens, and social media feeds of global viewers, mobile smartphones became the dominant mode for people to capture scandals of racism. Meanwhile, the internet via social media platforms and YouTube became the primary venue for the dissemination of video footage. An upswing in citizen journalism, with non-journalists capturing digital or mobile video and audio recordings of race scandals, has catapulted social issues of racial injustice before global audiences in a relatively short time span (Freelon et al. 2016). The racial projects of mobilization against scandals of racism have taken on a new life in the digital era.

Tweets, hashtags, and hackers Television star Roseanne Barr’s racist tweet about President Barack Obama’s senior advisor Valerie Jarrett, a prominent black woman in U.S. politics, developed into an online race scandal. In May 2018, Barr posted on her Twitter account that if the “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj.” Although Barr deleted and apologized for her tweet, ABC executives immediately canceled her sitcom, Roseanne—which had been recently resurrected after two decades—despite high ratings. The network’s entertainment president Channing Dungey said, “Roseanne’s Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant, and inconsistent with our values.” Adding to the media scandal, journalists criticized President Donald Trump for not condemning or calling out Barr’s remarks as racist but rather tweeting to change the subject and instead critique the network’s actions. Trump’s conduct reinforced the notion of a scandalous government that is mum on addressing race issues. On Twitter, hashtags, which join comments under a single theme using the # symbol, provide a reference point for defining scandals and gathering supporters (Brock 2012; Conley 2014; Freelon et al. 2016). Specifically, hashtag activism, wherein Twitter users mobilize around hashtags, is one method of calling out race scandals, uniting multiple publics, and organizing sentiment online to counter racialized scandals, challenge racism, and assemble for social change. Mobilizing against racism as scandal, the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag emerged to speak out against issues such as anti-black state-sanctioned violence or extrajudicial killings, with an offline movement to bolster the online activism (Taylor 2016). In another case, the #IfTheyGunnedMeDown hashtag brought attention to mainstream news outlets’ racist portrayals of black victims of police violence. Newspapers such as The New York Times displayed black victims of violence with mug shots and made references to victims’ past “deviant” behavior. In the case of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, mainstream news coverage referred to his parents’

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criminal behavior. Meanwhile, white mass murderers received coverage complimenting their brilliance or crediting them with mental illness, and not personal deviance, in relation to their violent and murderous acts (Walsh 2005). Via hashtags, Twitter users called attention to and mocked the implicit racism, using the #IfTheyGunnedMeDown hashtag to illustrate biased news media depictions. Demonstrating their perceptions of W. E. B. Du Bois’s double consciousness by comprehending the dissimilar perspectives of how they view their identities versus how others view them through a white supremacist lens, black participants showed how news media would depict them as violent, gang-related, deviants (Gross 2017). Meanwhile, white participants unmasked the cultural production of whiteness as they showed how news media would depict them as well-put-together individuals in neatly dressed clothing. In this manner, social media are central technologies used to highlight or narrativize scandals as racial projects to effect positive change. Another hashtag capturing a race scandal as a racial project is the #OscarsSoWhite controversy that plagued the Hollywood film industry. In 2015, #OscarsSoWhite became a trending hashtag following a lack of diversity: all 20 nominees for Best Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor, and Supporting Actress were white. Oscar nominations in 2016 followed the same all-white pattern in the acting categories (Yuen 2017). Some fans and celebrities boycotted the annual Academy Awards ceremony. In light of the controversy, Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs enacted changes aimed at increasing racial minority and female representation in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to extend voting power to underrepresented groups. The proliferation of digital technologies in everyday life also provides space for online hackers to create race scandals if information revealed violates the moral and social norms of society and gains widespread attention. One Hollywood studio became embroiled in a scandal of racism when the December 2014 hack of Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) disclosed thousands of emails and documents related to SPE executives, employees, and movies. Among other issues, this leak revealed racial disparities. The scandal caught wind in media reports, which focused on how Sony executives devalued black talent, for instance believing that Academy Award winning actor Denzel Washington could not headline a global box office hit movie and suggesting that if President Barack Obama was a film producer, he would produce only black cast films (Erigha 2019). Many reporters labeled the comments racist, and Sony executive Amy Pascal resigned, a move that signaled the scandal had achieved a height of moral degradation that could only be mitigated in the eyes of the public with her removal from her leadership role at the corporation.

Online organizations Using racial projects to fight the racist status quo, marginalized groups employ digital technologies to: (1) push back against stereotypes and disparaging portrayals, (2) bring notice to race scandals, and (3) effect change in media representations. Through media activism, they assemble around harmful media and condemn images and statements that promote negative portrayals to deter scandalous images from materializing. As an example, the online activist organization ColorofChange.org runs media accountability campaigns and uses virtual petitions that have the capacity to gather volumes of signatories in a relatively brief time frame, in an attempt to foster awareness about scandals of racism and to quell racialized scandals or dissipate their narratives before they gain momentum. An online political organization with over 1 million members, ColorofChange.org was founded in 2005 by two social activists: software engineer James Rucker and environmental attorney (and now CNN political commentator) Van Jones. The two created the organization in response to a race scandal—the President George W. Bushled federal government’s lack of action regarding Hurricane Katrina, the natural disaster that 376

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displaced thousands of predominately black victims in New Orleans, Louisiana (Gonzales and Torres 2011). The grassroots civil rights organization aimed to use media, in the form of national online campaigns, to raise awareness about political, social, and racial injustices ignored by whiteowned media organizations—primarily concerning websites, newspapers, television, and film. Essentially, the internet age gave rise to new institutions with goals of using digital methods to address race scandals that for centuries have had debilitating effects on black communities. ColorofChange.org members actively mobilize around race scandals with media accountability campaigns that call out racist remarks, emails, cartoons, or incidents and condemn individuals or groups. During George Zimmerman’s murder trial, one campaign urged members to monitor the news and report biased media attacks on gun violence victim Trayvon Martin. In doing so, the organization discouraged media professionals and organizations from running smears about Martin’s life that would sway public opinion by promoting racial stereotypes of black men and boys. Compared to “post-media” reactionary responses, proactive “pre-media” measures aim to prevent unjust media portrayals before they become widespread, full-blown, racialized scandals. Sometimes campaigns deliberately call for moral transgressors to lose their platforms and advertising revenue or abdicate positions of influence. Among those entities involved in bringing awareness to former L.A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling’s racist comments, ColorofChange.org used online petitions to discourage advertisers from sponsoring Sterling’s team and to urge NBA Commissioner Adam Silver to enforce the toughest possible penalty on Sterling, who was forced to sell the team and was banned from the NBA. Digital media provide individuals and groups with the platforms and tools to raise awareness via race scandals and to advocate for social transformation.

The future of race scandals Furthering anti-black rhetoric characteristic of white supremacist doctrine, racialized scandals perpetuate ideologies that vilify blackness in mainstream media discourse, while scandals of racism illuminate the concerted ways that U.S. institutions and citizens hypocritically defy their own social norms of racial equality to express, enact, and enforce stark racial divisions and disparities. Meanwhile, black Americans who are depicted as “scandalous” or who are the perpetual victims of scandals of racism use digital media to call attention to and mobilize around scandals for social justice. Given the multiple sources of information the internet provides and the 24-hour news cycles that structure media coverage, one consideration for the future is how race scandals will evolve under competition for popular attention. Perhaps many small “micro-scandals” that happen and are resolved quickly will dominate media coverage compared to the conventional norm of fewer major “macro-scandals” that sustained heightened media attention over long durations. Another consideration is how persistent commercialism, the goal of maximizing profit, will continue to shape the presentation and prevalence of race scandals. Scandals sell newspapers, magazines, and advertisements; generate web traffic; and increase ratings and profits for media organizations. An estimated 93 million U.S. viewers tuned in to live television coverage of police cars chasing O. J. Simpson in his white Ford Bronco, while more than a thousand journalists traveled to Los Angeles from around the world to cover the murder trial. Television networks frequently capitalize on race scandals, since coverage gains viewership and increases advertising revenues. Ratings for the liberal news outlet CNN, for instance, increased around the airing of the O. J. Simpson trial. Over two decades later, spinoff books, television miniseries and docudramas, and tabloid publications continue to profit from the racialized media scandal following O. J. Simpson. Scandalous media commentary about race sustains ongoing audiences 377

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and helps some individuals and organizations to gain immense popularity. Rush Limbaugh’s race-baiting tactics help him derive a devoted following from politically conservative white audiences (Bisbort 2008: 168). In cable television, Fox News commentators are well-known race-baiters who make scandalous comments about race and racism with regularity (Deggans 2012); perhaps because of this racially polarizing strategy, they sustain the highest primetime ratings of all cable news networks. The economics of race scandals shows that so long as racism continues to be profitable, race scandals are likely to populate media coverage. Moral transgressors, even, profit from race scandals. After killing unarmed black men, George Zimmerman and Darren Wilson received substantial sums of money from online donors. On his Fox News program, white conservative political commentator Sean Hannity advertised a website for viewers to send money in defense of George Zimmerman, raising nearly half a million dollars for the man who shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. Similarly, Darren Wilson the police officer who shot to death 18-year-old Michael Brown raised more than $430,000 through donations on a Facebook page and more than $330,000 using GoFundMe, a website for crowdfunding. Because race scandals are profitable and serve racial ideologies of white supremacism that function to demean blackness and sustain racial inequality in the U.S., media scandals about race can be expected to appear as regular, everyday, recurring rituals. The ideological vehicle of mainstream media provides a tool for dueling racial projects— working to either entrench or redress centuries-long acts of racial wrongdoing. Yet only racial projects that challenge and prevent blatant and covert racism aim to move society towards the progressive goal of racial inclusivity and away from racial oppression. Exposing acts of racism and upsetting the narratives of racialized scandals are fundamental steps in striving towards eradicating the systemic scourge of racism in U.S. culture.

References Alexander, Michelle. 2010. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The Free Press. Bisbort, Alan. 2008. Media Scandals. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. Brock, Andre. 2012. “From the Blackhand Side: Twitter as Cultural Conversation.” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 56(4): 529–549. Conley, Tara L. 2014. “From #RenishaMcBride to #RememberRenisha: Locating Our Stories and Finding Justice.” Feminist Media Studies 14(6): 1111–1113. Deggans, Eric. 2012. Race-Baiter: How the Media Wields Dangerous Words to Divide a Nation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Dyer, Richard. 1997. White: Essays on Race and Culture. New York: Routledge. Erigha, Maryann. 2019. The Hollywood Jim Crow: The Racial Politics of the Movie Industry. New York: New York University Press. Feagin, Joe, Hernán Vera, and Pinar Batur. 2001. White Racism. New York: Routledge. Freelon, Deen, Charlton D. McIlwain, and Meredith Clark. 2016. Beyond the Hashtags: #Ferguson, #Blacklivesmatter, and the Online Struggle for Offline Justice. Washington D.C.: American University Center for Media & Social Impact. Gonzales, Juan and Joseph Torres. 2011. News for All People: The Epic Story of Race and American Media. London: Verso. Gooding-Williams, Robert, Ed. 1993. Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprising. New York: Routledge. Gray, Herman. 1997. “Anxiety, Desire, and Conflict in the American Racial Imagination.” In James Lull and Stephen Hinerman (Eds.), Media Scandals: Morality and Desire in the Popular Culture Marketplace (pp. 85–98). New York: Columbia University Press. Gross, Nora. 2017. “#IfTheyGunnedMeDown: The Double Consciousness of black Youth in Response to Oppressive Media.” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 19(4): 416–437. Hunt, Darnell M. 1999. O. J. Simpson Facts and Fictions: News Rituals in the Construction of Reality. Cambridge, UK. Cambridge University Press.

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Race scandals as racial projects Hunt, Darnell M. 1997. Screening the Los Angeles “Riots”: Race, Seeing, and Resistance. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Jamieson, Kathleen Hall. 1992. Dirty Politics: Deception, Distraction, and Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press. Lull, James and Stephen Hinerman. 1997. “The Search for Scandal.” In James Lull and Stephen Hinerman (Eds.), Media Scandals: Morality and Desire in the Popular Culture Marketplace, (pp 1–33). New York: Columbia University Press. McKay, Jim and Philip Smith. 1995. “Exonerating the Hero: Frames and Narratives in Media Coverage of the O.J. Simpson Story.” Media Information Australia 75: 57–66. Mendelberg, Tali. 2001. The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Omi, Michael and Howard Winant. 1994. Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s, (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. Taylor, Keeanga-Yamhatta. 2016. From #Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation. Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books. Walsh, Anthony. 2005. “African Americans and Serial Killing in the Media: The Myth and the Reality.” Homicide Studies 9(4): 271–291. Yuen, Nancy Wang. 2017. Reel Inequality Hollywood Actors and Racism. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.

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38 SCANDALS IN SCIENCE Heather Akin

Introduction Many science issues make headlines because of disagreements or conflicts: climate change, childhood vaccines, genetic engineering, and fracking are just a few. Two reasons explain the upsurge of science scandals in recent years. One, the nature of the science has changed such that new developments, for instance genetic engineering or nanotechnology, tend to raise moral questions: In what ways will these technologies be used? Are we overstepping moral boundaries? Second, the nature of modern media can allow controversies and scandals to be propagated to wider audiences much more quickly. Modern media tools like social media also give critics (or supporters) a platform, which can draw viral attention. In such cases, controversial science issues may be depicted as more controversial than they are among the scientific community, with a vocal minority appearing to have greater support for its opinion than it actually has (Scheufele 2007). Notably media also serve an important—if not primary—source of information for the public about these scientific issues (Pew Research Center 2017). It is often assumed that publics who are informed about scientific research and its implications have greater confidence in the benefits and value of science writ large or of particular applications. However, other personal characteristics tend to be more influential when it comes to public perceptions of scientific issues than knowledge or information. In particular, individual deference to scientific authority (Brossard & Nisbet 2007), religiosity (Akin et al. 2017), political ideology (Blank & Shaw 2015), sociocultural characteristics (Campbell, Bevc & Picou 2013), and cultural values or worldviews (Dake 1991) tend to have greater impact on attitudes toward science issues than knowledge. In short, social and cultural factors are typically what shape reactions to and perceptions of science issues, which can escalate them to scandal status—a point that will be described in more detail. This chapter elaborates on what can make science the matter of scandal, including the role of media, and examines the way two technologies—fracking and nuclear power—are matters of controversy or scandal. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the social implications of these problems while pointing to areas of research that could provide further insight into scandals and science.

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Defining scandal in the context of science Empirical work in areas of science communication, science and technology studies, sociology, psychology, and other fields do not always refer to controversial science issues as scandals. Scholars may instead rely on terms like risk, hazard, crisis, conflict, or controversy. However, scientific developments, events, and even scientists themselves have undoubtedly been privy to scandal as it is defined in other areas of scholarship. Scandal can be a difficult concept to define, and other chapters in this handbook do a more thorough job explaining this concept. For the sake of this chapter, it is useful to point briefly to how scandal is conceptualized in greater depth in political scholarship. Thompson (2000) describes political scandals as actions, events, or circumstances that demonstrate a transgression of values, norms, or moral codes, for which “non-participants” in a given scandal disapprove. This definition of scandal in politics applies to controversial science issues as well, and is particularly relevant as these issues may become a matter of scandal when they are seen as topics of import in social or political realms. For instance, the issue of stem cell research was not a topic high on the public’s agenda up until the early 2000s, when new advancements made it a topic of political interest, increasing discussion of this research in the forms of congressional testimonies and press releases, which were covered by the media. The coverage highlighted political disagreements and ethical questions, eventually making the public perceive it as a highly partisan issue. The culmination of this polarization was George W. Bush’s administration placing restrictions on any federal funding of stem cell research (Nisbet, Brossard & Kroepsch 2003; Scheufele 2014). In short, although stem cell research was originally non-partisan, news coverage of the political discourse about it, using dramatic framing and storytelling, may have overstated partisan positioning, which affected publics’ perceptions and attitudes about the issue as well (Nisbet, Brossard & Kroepsch 2003).

Common themes in science scandals Most scientific scandals could be classified into three broad categories. One, a novel scientific development or technological risk is publicized and arouses public concern or response, typically a discussion (taking place in the media or elsewhere) of the risks and benefits of the issue or technology. Examples of this type of scientific scandal may be the development of genetic engineering, stem cell research, nanotechnology, CRISPR, or the use of novel energy extraction techniques, such as hydraulic fracturing. A second type of scientific scandal may arise when a particular crisis occurs (which may be natural or human-caused and/or intentional or accidental). If the crisis was preventable, publics may raise concerns because appropriate protections or regulations were not put into place to stop it, for instance the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine or the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Even in the case of a natural disaster, publics may be outraged that not enough was done to prevent or reduce the toll on human or environmental health as in the case of the events following Hurricane Katrina, which hit the Gulf Coast of the United States in 2005. A third category of scandals would be those involving the process of science or scientists themselves. Some of these widely publicized instances have included scientists falsifying data or using inappropriate methods to produce desired results to a very different type of problem. Another type of controversy in some fields of scholarship have brought into question the reproducibility or replicability in research, although this type of controversy may not come about

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because of any act of maleficence. While these are important problems with significant social and scientific implications, these types of crises or scandals will not be the focus of this chapter (suggested reading on this type of scientific controversy include Azoulay, Bonatti & Krieger 2017; Open Science Collaboration 2015; Xin 2006).

Science scandals and the media Many science issues become an interest to the mainstream media because they are controversial. In addition, the substantive discourses about the safety or risks of particular scientific issues or technologies often play out in media coverage. In the reporting of controversial science issues, they are typically defined and framed in terms of the disagreement, morals, or values related to them, rather than presenting a discussion of their scientific merits (Shih, Scheufele & Brossard 2012). When certain attributes of an issue are emphasized in the media, even if they lack relevance to the social importance or implication, they influence how audiences later think about the controversy (Yioutas & Segvic 2003). Interactive and deliberative media (including online news and social media) have offered more opportunity and visibility for such controversial science topics. In his review of the history and definition of political scandal, Thompson (2000, 6) states that the rise of scandal as a significant feature of public life is symptomatic of this broader transformation in the nature and extent of visibility which has characterized the development of modern societies . . . [foremost] among these developments is the changing nature of communication media, which have transformed the nature of visibility and altered the relations between public and private life. What becomes controversial in the context of science does not typically occur in “private life,” though one could argue that, with the advent of new media technologies, processes of science are increasingly visible to larger publics.

Example cases: nuclear power and fracking To explore further how science issues can become a matter of scandal, it is useful to look more deeply at specific issues or controversies. The next part of this chapter will discuss how two specific issues—nuclear power and fracking—have been scandalous and why this is the case. Both are energy technologies that have over time become partisan issues, in part because both fracking and nuclear power have been highlighted in the media as issues of political import because of their environmental and economic relevance.

Nuclear power Nuclear power has undoubtedly been marked in the public consciousness by high-profile events, such as the disasters at plants in Chernobyl (1986 in the USSR) and Fukushima Daiichi (2011 in Japan). These incidents have undoubtedly harmed the long-term popularity of nuclear power as a major source of energy. Still, nuclear as a source of energy offers the advantage of not producing greenhouse gases, a desirable characteristic in the face of climate change. Yet individuals fearing the potential for accidents or who have concerns about disposal and storage of nuclear waste tend to factor alternative energy sources, including natural gas extraction and other modern renewables, rather than nuclear energy (IEA 2018). 382

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Following the Fukushima Daiichi accident, Germany led efforts to phase out nuclear energy dependence by committing to closing down all of its reactors, and several other nations in Europe vowed to do the same. These decisions suggest there could be a trend toward phasing out reliance on nuclear power entirely. What has distinguished nuclear energy use as particularly scandalous has to do with events related to and communication surrounding accidents involving nuclear power sites and reactors. The three events dominating the collective consciousness are the incident in 1979 in the U.S. at Three Mile Island, the Chernobyl disaster, and the Fukushima Daiichi accident. Interestingly, each of these incidents had a very distinct set of circumstances that affected how it was managed by risk assessment professionals and the media. One of the factors that has made nuclear energy as an industry susceptible to scandal or crisis is the fact that incidents have always included some element of human error—or some action, if taken, that could have prevented the incidents or disasters (Freudenburg 1988). These human factors may have amplified how the problem was perceived by the public, based on how local and federal officials conveyed the details of the incident and subsequently how it was communicated in the media. Another factor involving public negative and fearful perceptions of nuclear power has to do with two dualisms in the public consciousness. The first, as described by Freudenburg & Baxter (1985, 96), is “the tension between the private right to develop profitable ventures and the public right to be protected from undue risks,” acknowledging that “perhaps nowhere is the tension more evident than in the case of nuclear power.” This particular dualism made nuclear power a topic of debate and dispute, both in the popular media (e.g., in the 1979 movie The China Syndrome, released just 12 days before the accident at Three Mile Island, which arguably made the actual event more politically charged; see Dunaway 2015) and the mass media. In reference to the particular events at Three Mile Island, the media tended to frame its coverage of the events and the technology around issues of “public accountability” and “runaway technology,” and would even emphasize in its narrative examples poor and incompetent management and other structural problems that pose risks in other plants (not just at Three Mile Island) across the United States (Gamson & Modigliani 1989). The second dualism is that associating nuclear technologies with the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima (depicting images of sudden, mass destruction) and, simultaneously, the prospect of progress. Put another way, with nuclear technologies, “either civilization would vanish in a cataclysmic holocaust, or the atomic future would be unimaginably bright” (Boyer 1985, 125; cf. Gamson & Modigliani 1989). This dualism (which could include responses to the nuclear bomb and accidents that occur at nuclear reactors) may correlate with the “dread” factor that Kasperson (2012) argues makes any possible incident at a nuclear plant prone to social amplification and potentially scandal. While the images from Nagasaki and Hiroshima might be growing increasingly distant in the public mind, concerns about the safety of nuclear reactors and nuclear waste may have become more salient after the events at Three Mile Island. Surveys conducted after the events there indicated less than half of the U.S. public was content with the way the incident was managed by state and federal authorities (Nuclear Power in the Age of Uncertainty 1984, February). Other scholars noted that the communication practices used immediately following the problem at the plant failed to communicate effectively the scope and nature of the problems (Farrell & Goodnight 1981), as public opinion toward nuclear energy shifted following the accident, even though epidemiological studies found that the events did not result in any statistically significant increase in illness or other harm to human health. Hans Blix, the then Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency conveyed the inadequate crisis communication 383

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strategies of both the Soviet Union (regarding Chernobyl) and the U.S. (regarding Three Mile Island) when stating, “The Soviet reporting was late, meager but probably not untrue. The Western reporting was fast, massive and often misleading. Can there not be anything in between?” (cf. Rubin 1987, 52). When the accident at Fukushima occurred in 2011, the communication environment was vastly different since the events at Chernobyl, and the research reflects that change. The prevalence of social media sites that allow real-time responses to news events open a new window into the publics’ perceptions of these events and how sentiments change over time (Su, Akin & Brossard 2017). For instance, an analysis of Twitter posts immediately following the initial incidents at Fukushima showed that the tweets tended to convey information about the incidents, rather than speculation on the cause or effects; they also included links to more information, suggesting that users were vigilantly attending to each stage of the events as they unfolded and disseminated information accordingly (Binder 2012). Another study exploring public sentiments expressed on Twitter showed a spike in discussion about nuclear power, with dominant themes raising concerns about safety and the environment; however, the pessimism about nuclear energy tends to fade over time to be replaced by more neutral and uncertain sentiments (Li et al. 2016). More uncertainty about nuclear energy might be elicited by these events due to the potential for a renewed “renaissance” in nuclear power given the impacts of carbon energy sources on climate change (Kasperson & Ram 2013). However, empirical studies examining public opinion about nuclear power before and after Fukushima elicited varying results, depending on the study’s population of interest and the means of measurement. A longitudinal, three-wave study collected with individuals in Switzerland (before and after the events) found a slight decrease in support for nuclear power, but overall participants’ views about it were stable over time, suggesting that attitudes held prior to the Fukushima accident were a strong indicator of their support later. Another study conducted in Italy found that participants’ ecological values were enhanced following the accident, suggesting the events enhanced concerns about the environment (Prati & Zani 2012). A study with participants in China found a significant decline in support for nuclear power, suggesting that proximity may also affect perceptions of risks of the technology (Huang et al. 2013). In a study by Yeo et al. (2014), results indicated that when study participants reported being particularly attentive to news, their concern about nuclear power went down significantly following the incident, while the inverse occurred for individuals who paid little attention to news (with mass media attention attenuating respondents’ perceptions of the hazards of nuclear power). Each of these studies highlights how context, attention, and personal characteristics can explain how an issue becomes a matter of personal or collective concern.

Fracking Hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) is a newer energy technology that was controversial for some vocal opponents from the beginning, though in the early years (and as recently as 2012) most (American) publics reported knowing very little about it (Boudet et al. 2014). At the outset, fracking opponents expressed alarm about water contamination and pollution, as well concerns about other potential—even unknown—health and environmental hazards (Sangaramoorthy et  al. 2016). Research conducted at fracking sites later showed that the extraction processes can trigger “microearthquakes,” and disposal of wastewater from fracking can trigger larger earthquakes, posing risks to nearby communities, which current technology is not able to predict (Ellsworth 2013). Supporters of fracking point to the economic advantages for proximate communities (Howell et al. 2017), and it was originally believed that extracting natural gas by 384

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fracking was a viable alternative to carbon energy sources. However, recent research finds that far more methane (a potent greenhouse gas) is leaked during the fracking process than initially reported (EDF 2017), which suggests its emissions could be even worse in regards to climate change than coal-based options. Considering these findings that have emerged about the risks associated with fracking, opponents have become more outspoken. Research has depicted the details of contentious conflicts in local communities near fracking sites (O'Brien & Hipel 2016; Zilliox & Smith 2018). In some cases, industry is front and center which further politicizes debates about the technology, based on opponents’ perceptions of the trustworthiness and underlying interests of those particular stakeholders. For example, ExxonMobil attempted to engage in a formal discourse about fracking with concerned publics in Germany, though one study finds this did not achieve the company’s end goal of attenuating the controversy (Bornemann 2017). As with the nuclear disaster at Fukushima, analysis of social media can shed light on sentiment and discourse related to fracking. Analysis of Twitter content on fracking has shown it has been used widely by opponents and that particular sentiments are expressed based on certain hashtags (e.g., #fracking is widely used by activist opponents and #natgas typically used by industry) (Hopke & Simis 2015).

Conclusion This chapter has focused on three themes related to scandals in the context of science. First, scandals in science tend to be associated with scientific and technological risks and/or crises that have scientific elements, with examples provided and two issues (fracking and nuclear power) addressed in more detail. Second, I have discussed how the controversy of the scientific issue is in fact socially constructed—the controversy does not typically have to do with the validity of the scientific evidence, but rather because it resonates with individuals’ values, moral viewpoints, and/or worldviews. Lastly, I have also discussed how such issues draw media attention because of their focus on problems and conflicts, which may amplify or distort citizens’ perceptions of the issue, event, or controversy. The characteristics of the modern communication environment can enhance these effects. This review also provides some suggestions for scholars, including where future research about scandals is warranted and the policy implications for these issues. First, scholars who are interested in investigating scandals in science would benefit from looking at other bodies of literature and scholarship, some of which are thoroughly described in detail in this book. In particular, those interested in scientific controversies and political scandals could mutually benefit from each other’s scholarship, though they have often been seen as independent. In fact, issues relevant in political communication and science communication share more commonalities than ever, in part because science issues are increasingly politicized and polarizing. Scheufele (2014) describes these “blurred lines” between science and politics as occurring for several reasons. One, scientists are more often called to serve as advocates or advisors in political contexts, although this can be problematic if scientists are only allowed to restrict themselves to discuss the issue in a limited way (Pielke 2007). This problem was also noted in a study describing scientists’ involvement with disputes about the environmental impacts of fracking: some expressed concern about environmental impacts but felt compelled to “balance out” their statements by acknowledging the economic benefits (Edwards 2018). Second, the professional requirements of scientists increasingly require them to have more interaction with the media or communicate directly with the public themselves, as there can be reciprocal benefits for all 385

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involved (journalists, scientists, and engaged publics). And third, because modern science has advanced in a direction such that new technologies raise uncertainties and ethical challenges, making the issues more controversial and requiring more input from publics (Akin et al. 2017; Scheufele 2014). For each of these reasons, it would be worthwhile for those examining controversies in science and those investigating political scandals not to remain isolated within the boundaries of their discipline’s scholarship. Finally, this review of scandals in science points to at least two areas where further research would better inform understanding of why and how science is controversial and what the potential effects are of the controversy. One problem is that many scholars propose that a solution, particularly to distorted perceptions of scientific issues (e.g., when risks are unduly socially amplified and prevent effective decision-making), is promoting more open and public debate about science controversies and technological risks, potentially even before problems reach crisis or scandal levels (e.g., Randall 2009). Many strategies to enhance public participation and public engagement have been developed, including public debates, deliberation workshops, and consensus conferences (Delgado, Lein KjØlberg & Wickson 2010). However, many of these methods have not established the means to capture effectively the range of opinions about a controversial scientific topic that represents the population of interests. More specifically, these exercises and methods can offer rich opportunities for deliberation among the participants who volunteer, but they can exclude important but difficult-to-reach participants (Pidgeon et al. 2005; Scheufele 2011). Research should attempt to investigate better means to merge approaches that are representative of the broader population but also to promote public engagement and participation in the midst of or preceding risks, crises, or scandals (Renn, Webler & Wiedemann 1995). A second problem relates to an area that warrants future research but also has significant policy implications, which is the development of an intervention that can prevent scientific issues from becoming unsuitably scandalous or from becoming inappropriately polarizing. Undoubtedly there is some subjectivity to such a judgment, which would be problematic for any authority to determine when an issue should not raise public alarm, though there may be instances when expert consensus deems that the benefits offered to society would be great and far exceed the risks. One example, detailed by Kahan & Landrum (2017), compares the context in which the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine was highly politicized due to involvement by industry leaders and politicians (making the vaccine contentious and affecting citizens’ perceptions of it), while several years earlier a comparable hepatitis B virus (HBV) vaccine was recommended but not politicized. While most countries have institutions and regulatory bodies that advise on and communicate with the public about scientific advancements that could be controversial, they do not always have a profound impact on publics’ perceptions (and potentially publics cannot provide thorough feedback to institutions or regulators). Research should continue to investigate whether there is an information or regulatory structure that could intervene to allay undue controversy or scandal.

References Akin, H., Rose, K.M., Scheufele, D.A., Simis-Wilkinson, M., Brossard, D., Xenos, M.A. & Corley, E.A. 2017, ‘Mapping the landscape of public attitudes on synthetic biology’, BioScience, vol. 67, no. 3, pp. 290–300. Azoulay, P., Bonatti, A. & Krieger, J.L. 2017, ‘The career effects of scandal: Evidence from scientific retractions’, Research Policy, vol. 46, no. 9, pp. 1552–69. Binder, A.R. 2012, ‘Figuring Out #Fukushima: An initial look at functions and content of US Twitter commentary about nuclear risk’, Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture, vol. 6, no. 2, p. 268.

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Scandals in science Blank, J.M. & Shaw, D. 2015, ‘Does partisanship shape attitudes toward science and public policy? The case for ideology and religion’, The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 658, no. 1, pp. 18–35. Bornemann, B. 2017, ‘Private participation going public? Interpreting the nexus between design, frames, roles, and context of the fracking ‘InfoDialog’ in Germany’, Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 89–108. Boudet, H., Clarke, C., Bugden, D., Maibach, E., Roser-Renouf, C. & Leiserowitz, A. 2014, ‘“Fracking” controversy and communication: Using national survey data to understand public perceptions of hydraulic fracturing’, Energy Policy, vol. 65, pp. 57–67. Boyer, P. 1985, By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age. New York, NY: Pantheon. Brossard, D. & Nisbet, M.C. 2007, ‘Deference to scientific authority among a low information public: Understanding U.S. opinion on agricultural biotechnology’, International Journal of Public Opinion Research, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 24–52. Campbell, N.M., Bevc, C.A. & Picou, J.S. 2013, ‘Perceptions of toxic exposure: Considering “white male” and “black female” effects’, Sociological Spectrum, vol. 33, no. 4, pp. 313–328. Dake, K. 1991, ‘Orienting dispositions in the perception of risk’, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, vol. 22, no. 1, p. 61. Delgado, A., Lein KjØlberg, K. & Wickson, F. 2010, ‘Public engagement coming of age: From theory to practice in STS encounters with nanotechnology’, Public Understanding of Science, vol. 20, no. 6, pp. 826–845. Dunaway, F. 2015, Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. EDF 2017, Pennsylvania Oil and Gas Emissions Data, Environmental Defense Fund, https://www.edf.org/ pa-oil-gas/#/air-emissions Edwards, M.L. 2018, ‘“Just report the science”: How scientists frame their engagement in contested debates over fracking in the Barnett Shale’, Energy Research & Social Science, vol. 45, pp. 67–74. Ellsworth, W.L. 2013, ‘Injection-induced earthquakes’, Science, vol. 341, no. 6142. Farrell, T.B. & Goodnight, G.T. 1981, ‘Accidental rhetoric: The root metaphors of Three Mile Island’, Communication Monographs, vol. 48, no. 4, pp. 271–300. Freudenburg, W.R. 1988, ‘Perceived risk, real risk: Social science and the art of probabilistic risk assessment’, Science, vol. 242, no. 4875. Freudenburg, W.R. & Baxter, R.K. 1985, ‘Nuclear reactions: Public attitudes and policies toward nuclear power’, Review of Policy Research, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 96–110. Gamson, W.A. & Modigliani, A. 1989, ‘Media discourse and public opinion on nuclear power: A constructionist approach’, American Journal of Sociology, vol. 95, no. 1, p. 1. Hopke, J.E. & Simis, M. 2015, ‘Discourse over a contested technology on Twitter: A case study of hydraulic fracturing’, Public Understanding of Science, vol. 26, pp. 105–120. Howell, E.L., Li, N., Akin, H., Scheufele, D.A., Xenos, M.A. & Brossard, D. 2017, ‘How do U.S. state residents form opinions about “fracking” in social contexts? A multilevel analysis’, Energy Policy, vol. 106, pp. 345–355. Huang, L., Zhou, Y., Han, Y., Hammitt, J.K., Bi, J. & Liu, Y. 2013, ‘Effect of the Fukushima nuclear accident on the risk perception of residents near a nuclear power plant in China’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 110, no. 49, p. 19742–19747. IEA 2018, International Energy Agency, Paris, France, https://www.iea.org/, accessed July 1, 2018. Kahan, D.M. & Landrum, A.R. 2017, ‘Protecting the science communication environment: The case of vaccines’, in D.A. Scheufele, D.M. Kahan & K.H. Jamieson (eds), The Science of Science Communication Handbook. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Kasperson, R.E. 2012, ‘The social amplification of risk and low-level radiation’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, vol. 68, no. 3, pp. 59–66. Kasperson, R.E. & Ram, B.J. 2013, ‘The public acceptance of new energy technologies’, Daedalus, vol. 142, no. 1, p. 90. Li, N., Akin, H., Su, L.Y.-F., Brossard, D., Xenos, M. & Scheufele, D.A. 2016, ‘Tweeting disaster: An analysis of online discourse about nuclear power in the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident’, Journal of Science Communication, vol. 15, no. 5, p. A02. Nisbet, M.C., Brossard, D. & Kroepsch, A. 2003, ‘Framing science: The stem cell controversy in an age of press/politics’, The International Journal of Press/Politics, vol. 8, no. 2, p. 36.

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Heather Akin Nuclear Power in the Age of Uncertainty 1984, February, U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, Washington, DC. O'Brien, N.L. & Hipel, K.W. 2016, ‘A strategic analysis of the New Brunswick, Canada fracking controversy’, Energy Economics, vol. 55, pp. 69–78. Open Science Collaboration 2015, ‘Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science’, Science, vol. 349, no. 6251. Pew Research Center 2017, Science News and Information Today, Washington DC. Pidgeon, N.F., Poortinga, W., Rowe, G., Horlick-Jones, T., Walls, J. & O'Riordan, T. 2005, ‘Using surveys in public participation processes for risk decision making: The case of the 2003 British GM Nation? Public debate’, Risk Analysis, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 467–479. Pielke, R.A. 2007, The honest broker: Making sense of science in policy and politics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Prati, G. & Zani, B. 2012, ‘The effect of the Fukushima nuclear accident on risk perception, antinuclear behavioral intentions, attitude, trust, environmental beliefs, and values’, Environment and Behavior, vol. 45, no. 6, pp. 782–798. Randall, E. 2009, Food, risk and politics: Scare, scandal and crisis - insights into the risk politics of food safety. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Renn, O., Webler, T.N. & Wiedemann, P.M. 1995, Fairness and competence in citizen participation: Evaluating models for environmental discourse, vol. 10 Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Rubin, D.M. 1987, ‘How the news media reported on Three Mile Island and Chernobyl’, Journal of Communication, vol. 37, no. 3, p. 42. Sangaramoorthy, T., Jamison, A.M., Boyle, M.D., Payne-Sturges, D.C., Sapkota, A., Milton, D.K. & Wilson, S.M. 2016, ‘Place-based perceptions of the impacts of fracking along the Marcellus Shale’, Social Science & Medicine, vol. 151, pp. 27–37. Scheufele, D.A. 2007, ‘Opinion climates, spirals of silence and biotechnology: Public opinion as a heuristic for scientific decision-making’, in D. Brossard, J. Shanahan and TC Nesbitt (eds), The Media, the Public and Agricultural Biotechnology. Oxford: CAB International, pp. 231–244. Scheufele, D.A. 2011, ‘Modern citizenship or policy dead end? Evaluating the need for public participation in science policy making, and why public meetings may not be the answer’, Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy Research Paper Series, paper #R-34, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Scheufele, D.A. 2014, ‘Science communication as political communication’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 111, no. 4, pp. 13585–13592. Shih, T.-J., Scheufele, D.A. & Brossard, D. 2012, ‘Disagreement and value predispositions: Understanding public opinion about stem cell research’, International Journal of Public Opinion Research, vol. 25, pp. 357–367. Su, L.Y.-F., Akin, H. & Brossard, D. 2017, Research methods for assessing online climate change communication, social media discussion, and behavior, http://climatescience.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/ acrefore/9780190228620.001.0001/acrefore-9780190228620-e-492. Thompson, J.B. 2000, Political scandal: Power and visibility in the media age. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Xin, H. 2006, ‘Scandals shake Chinese science’, Science, vol. 312(5779), pp. 1464–1466. doi: 10.1126/ science.312.5779.1464. Yeo, S.K., Cacciatore, M.A., Brossard, D., Scheufele, D.A., Runge, K., Su, L.Y., Kim, J., Xenos, M. & Corley, E.A. 2014, ‘Partisan amplification of risk: American perceptions of nuclear energy risk in the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster’, Energy Policy, vol. 67, pp. 727–736. Yioutas, J. & Segvic, I. 2003, ‘Revisiting the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal: The convergence of agenda setting and framing’, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, vol. 80, no. 3, pp. 567–582. Zilliox, S. & Smith, J.M. 2018, ‘Colorado’s fracking debates: Citizen science, conflict and collaboration’, Science as Culture, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 221–241.

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39 SCANDALS, MEDIA AND RELIGION Paul A. Soukup

The idea of the news media’s reporting religious scandal carries more than a hint of irony. Scandal sells the news, attracting viewers and follow-up stories, but runs counter to a religious response to it. In popular usage, “scandal” typically refers to some, probably moral, wrong that causes a strong public reaction. In the words of Ingebretsen (2004, 30), “Scandal is, above all, a machinery of outrage.” And so, even attaching the term “scandal” to some behavior will most likely attract added attention and prompt the very reaction predicted by the reporting. And, since religion by definition upholds the moral order, it provides—depending on one’s perspective—either a tragic or a rich target for accusations of scandal. This review will begin with some general comments on the contrasting religious and media approaches to scandal and the frequency and impact of religious scandal in the news, before examining some themes identified by communication scholars as they have understood and evaluated key religious scandals in published studies over the last 25 years, illustrating the themes with examples from scandals cited in the scholarly writing. In brief, these researchers have noted that reporting religious scandals: does not have a lasting effect, follows predictable narrative structures, demands a particular rhetorical response from the religious groups, often misunderstands religion, and attracts news attention.

Religious and media understanding of scandal In the Judeo-Christian perspective where the term originates, “scandal” describes more than a moral failing. Miller (1999, 226) traces its history to the Hebrew Bible, which uses the term to describe the difficulties that people will have in accepting the promised Messiah: The Greek word skandalon or the Hebrew term mikshol, is frequently used to refer to Jesus through prophecy and narrative as a “stumbling block,” an “offense, or a “snare.” The force of both the Hebrew and Greek terms is that there is the intention to present an obstacle of some sort that prevents one from continuing in the same fashion. In the original religious use of the term, as applied to Jesus, a “scandal” prompted religious reflection or a change of ways. But the New Testament also uses the term to describe blocking the way of others to the messiah (Matthew 18:6), usually through conduct that causes others to 389

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stumble. This seems the immediate antecedent meaning of the contemporary use of “scandal” as it refers to public evil or moral wrong that offends sensibilities. Thomas Aquinas had defined the sin of scandal as “an unrighteous word or deed that occasions the ruin of another. The idea is that sinful activity, if known to others, begets more sin” (Silk 1998, 5). And that justifies religion’s prohibiting the spread of scandal. But the news media’s use of “scandal” takes the idea in an almost opposite direction: News wants to make known the sin of others. And, when it comes to scandal, the news industry has developed its own generic conventions, narrative style, and ritual presentation (Ingebretsen 2004). The genre of the news media’s religious scandal requires a religious figure acting against the dictates of religion or violating the moral expectations that the religious figure personally espouses. The generic quality of religious scandals emerges from the fact that much of this material is not new. Ingebretsen points out that the idea of a sexually active priest, for example, has been a trope in English literature at least from the time of Chaucer. Similar things apply to religious individuals (especially clergy) who might be greedy, drink too much, or do anything else that seems to violate an imagined ideal of religious behavior. These tropes have moved from literature and entertainment to news accounts.

Types, frequency, and impact of religious scandals In general two classes of scandal appear. The first, which we can call local scandal, generates interest mostly in small areas or regions. These include such things as a church secretary embezzling funds, a choir leader accused of sexual harassment, a rabbi arrested for driving while intoxicated, or a mosque operating without a proper building permit. Such things might make the local news but typically do not get much traction beyond that. While sad realities, they deeply trouble few people. On the other hand are the undeniably great scandals, those things which attract national or even international reporting. This chapter will concentrate on the latter. Very few researchers or scholars have considered the patterns of local scandals, with the exception of Buddenbaum (2009) who offers a fairly comprehensive overview of religious scandal as reported in the U.S. news media. The frequency of reporting religious scandal has changed in the United States. Lichter, Lichter, and Amundson’s (2000) report on media coverage of religion in America from 1969 to 1998 provides an in-depth analysis of the coverage of religion in major newspapers, news magazines, and television. They report about 5 percent of news coverage of religion in that period dealt with crime and wrongdoing—potentially scandalous material. However, the situation dramatically shifted after 2000. Since then a number of high-profile religious scandals emerged into the public view, most notably child abuse by Catholic priests. Mancini and Shields, describing the media coverage between 2000 and 2010, write, concerning reports of child abuse by Catholic priests: Recent accounts lend credence to the notion that it constituted “big news” across the country throughout the 2000s. For example, one study identified 172 relevant articles about the scandal published in four popular news magazines (U.S. News and World Report, Time, People, and Newsweek) from 1992 until 2004 (Cheit et al. 2010). Findings from a recent content analysis conducted by the Pew Research Center (2010) illustrate the continued salience of the scandal. These results indicate that the “Catholic priest abuse scandal” ranked 8th as “Top Stories in the U.S. in Spring 2010” . . . The same study identified nearly 13,000 news stories published in major national and world newspapers (e.g., New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today) that in some way discussed the clergy abuse scandal between January 2002 and April 2010. (2014, 224) 390

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While significant and extremely serious, the child abuse scandal represents only one of many scandals touching on religion that occurred in the last 25 years. Almost every study of religion in the news or the media coverage of religion has included at least a chapter on potentially scandalous material. Silk (1998) presents a chapter on hypocrisy; under that heading he discusses some of the scandals touching the television evangelists in the United States in the 1990s, which we will discuss below. Buddenbaum (2009, xi) provides much more detailed accounts of religious scandals in the United States and their press coverage. She divides her discussion into two overarching sections, the first dealing with “conventional scandals: violations of sacred and secular custom and law” and “scandals of conscience: challenges to secular custom and law.” The first section deals with things that most people would include in a list of religious scandal: sexual transgressions, questionable financial practices, hoaxes, or physical assault. Her second category describes issues that emerge from “people speaking or acting in accord with the dictates of their conscience”: criticism of church beliefs, criticism or protest against the government, religious involvement in politics, lifestyle choices that others may consider manipulative (the Branch Davidian group, for example). The first grouping fits easily into the media narrative of scandal, the kinds of material reviewed here. Claussen (2002) presents an edited series of essays on “sex, media, and religion.” Only two of the chapters deal with things considered as scandal, at least as reported in the news media. One of these deals with pedophilia within a Catholic community and the other with the Jewish media’s failure to report on sexual abuse within a Jewish community.

The impact of reporting religious scandal Given the widespread notoriety of religious scandals, does the reporting have an impact? Some clearly led to criminal prosecution (though on many occasions the reporting followed the legal actions). Fan, Wyatt, and Keltner (2001, 826) report that the General Social Survey showed that measures of confidence in “organized religion underwent a dramatic but temporary decline following scandals associated with televangelists Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart.” Because of their high profile, the scandals touching on television evangelists illustrate the temporary effect of such reporting. Communication research noted a number of these, with Jim Bakker implicated in both sexual and financial difficulties (1987–1988); Jimmy Swaggart, in a sex scandal (1988); Pat Robertson, in lying about his date of marriage and military service in his attempt to move into politics (1987); and Oral Roberts, in questionable fundraising tactics (Smith 1992, 362–363; in fact, Smith lists 12 scandals involving these ministers between 1987 and 1989). Like Fan, Wyatt, and Kelner (2001), Smith traces the impact of these scandals on religious belief and practice in the U.S., as measured by the General Social Survey and other polls, finding at least a short-lived decline (between 1987 and 1992) in levels of trust in religion, in the clergy, in the perceived influence of religion, and even in personal religious activities such as personal prayer, reading the Bible, and attending church (361). In an attempt to understand the temporary rather than permanent nature of the loss of confidence in religion, Abelman (1988a; 1988b) focuses on the audiences. He examines the impact of the Praise the Lord (PTL) scandal involving Jim and Tammie Bakker on three kinds of viewers (ritualized, instrumental, reactionary). Ritualized viewers consist of heavy media consumers who hold strong religious beliefs; instrumental viewers use television to gain knowledge or entertainment, including religious television; and reactionary viewers dislike non-religious television fare and seek religious devotion from the medium (1988b, 42). Abelman (1989, 62) applies the uses and gratifications theory to the PTL audience, trying 391

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to explain its reactions. He notes that the scandal has not led to decreased viewing for the ritualized group as they appear habitual viewers whose television activity fulfills a religious need; however, he found a drop off among the instrumental group, who most likely found other sources to fulfill their desire for religious information. To his surprise, he notes, “this article offers no evidence of the reactionary viewer of religious television in the post-scandal ‘PTL Club’ audience. It is likely that the PTL scandal has turned away the reactionary users” (63). Abelman (1988a) offers a more nuanced theoretical model of the scandal, more carefully highlighting the different components of the uses and gratification theory and including both minister credibility and financial accountability. Here again he finds a temporary loss of audience, which one can reasonably attribute to the extensive media coverage of the scandal. The impact of news coverage and theoretical explanations for shifting public opinion in matters touching religion show up in a number of other published studies about the various religious scandals. Mancini and Shields look at the impact of the Catholic child abuse scandal on public opinion in the U.S.: Contrasting with prior research, we uncovered a positive impact of media exposure. Catholics with greater media consumption about the scandal were significantly more confident in the Church’s ability to prevent sexual abuse. In addition, indicating a “boomerang” effect of coverage, Catholics who felt the media coverage unfairly targeted the Church held more optimistic views. Supporting the substitution thesis, religiosity mediated these effects among this group. This positive impact was not just limited to Catholics, however. Non-Catholics who perceived the media coverage to be biased felt more positively about the Church’s ability to address sex crime in the future. (2014, 221) The same phenomenon appears in relation to Islam. Press treatment of Islam seldom applies the term “scandal” to the religion, though the reality of the coverage implies it. Some of this results from the nature of the interaction between Islam and the West. Up until the attacks of September 11, 2001, much of the Western press reported very little about Islam except for political news or war reporting from Afghanistan or the Middle East. However, after the 2001 attacks, the Western press focused more and more on Islam, strongly implying the scandalous nature of a religious group that could condone the concepts of jihad or terrorism. Additionally, the U.S. reporting on Islam largely originated in foreign reporting, with stories about it referencing terrorist attacks in other countries. Ogan et al. (2014) explore the origins of anti-Muslim prejudice in the West, identifying anti-Muslim news coverage, political conservatism, and age as factors. However, as with some of the coverage of the other scandals, Bowe, Fahmy, and Wanta (2013) found no agenda-setting effect in the negative coverage of Islam in the U.S., something that Müller, van Zoonen, and Hirzalla (2014) attribute to a kind of inoculation effect of exposure to antiIslam propaganda. And, again like some of the studies of scandal within the Christian groups, Heeren and Zick (2014), examining the impact of the scandal frame on Islam, noted that some Muslims developed a stronger group identity after consuming the negative coverage. Others criticize the unbalanced coverage itself (Pearson 2017) as failing to follow the norms of good journalism. The overall pattern appears as a temporary loss of faith in religion after a reported scandal and then a recovery, with church members less likely to turn away than the general public.

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Predictable framing and narrative structure In comparing how journalists reported religious scandal, communication researchers identified common elements in the ways they approached even complex stories. Given the extent of coverage, these commonalities appear first in the big scandals. As indicated above, the largest religion scandal reported by the news media in the last 25 years (with over 13,000 articles) addressed child abuse by Catholic priests. Right around the time that coverage increased, Jenkins (2001) offered a general history of clergy sex abuse, looking at cases from the 1990s. Jenkins also includes chapters describing the changing media response in its coverage and the use of different language as the media narrative of scandal developed. The scandal itself included not just the actions of abusers but the inactions of church authorities. Communication researchers have devoted a great deal of attention to the scandal: to the media framing, to the descriptions of the issues, and to various church responses. Maier (2005, 220) lists some of the issues that appear in the narrative frame: Though the uncertainty, the sense of betrayal, and the embarrassment may have been similar to other public relations crises, the clergy sex scandal was no average crisis. The gravity of the crimes, the depth of the mismanagement, and the outrage often left one speechless. The scandal was also incredibly complex. As Philip Jenkins (2001) has observed, sexual misconduct in the Catholic priesthood is a sociological, psychological, legal, theological, and ethical issue framed as much by anti-Catholicism and ideological disagreements with Catholic doctrine as by legitimate concerns over the safety of children. Maier and Crist extend this analysis as they describe the very difficulty of grasping this kind of scandal, since, as with all scandals (from the religious perspective), it deals with a web of evil with no simple solution. The sexual abuse formed only the first part of the scandal. They describe some of its other aspects: It arises from numerous causal factors, each of which individually can constitute a crisis in its own right: gross pastoral incompetence and insensitivity, yes, but also vast cultural shifts that left Catholic institutions feeling embattled, increasing theological and ideological polarization following Vatican II, a shrinking priesthood suffering from crushingly low morale, disastrously deficient and even abusive seminary formation, a frightening information deficit, and a weak institutional structure that continues to leave illinformed and unprepared bishops to their own devices . . . And we should be even less surprised at the anger, frustration, and cynicism of ordinary Catholics and non-Catholics at every level of American society—all of whom, unable to fathom the entire crisis in its complexity, grasp at the part that conveniently matches their ideological preferences. (2017, 171) Maier and Crist also provide a thorough bibliography of the coverage and of the debate within and outside of Catholicism on how best to respond. Dixon contextualizes her look at the church responses in terms of the media frames. In setting out her analysis, Dixon (2004, 70–71) reviews the scripts through which the media reported the scandal in Boston (accusations, local press accounts, legal filings, outraged church members, Cardinal Law’s responses, etc.) and then the break from this routine as evidence of more abusers emerged through the reporting of the Boston Globe. Ingebretsen (2004, 21–22)

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analyzes the news media’s “scandal narrative frame” in more detail, noting that the coverage uses a “conventional Gothic mode” that follows an almost predictable ritual of outrage over innocent victims and manipulative individuals or institutions. The coverage need not address complexity or even coherence in the narrative, so well known is the frame. Ingebretsen traces the development of the scandal narrative frame both to literary convention and to its adaptation from the Enron financial scandal that occurred shortly before the Catholic Church scandal. The same framing and narrative structure appeared in reporting of child abuse scandals in the Jewish community, with news items appearing in the New York Times, New York magazine, ABC’s Nightline, and in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports (Neustein 2009). The framing shaped the reporting: Reporters interviewed victims, tracked cover-ups, and described the religious communities’ attempts to resolve the issue internally through rabbinic courts. Neustein’s edited volume describes the press coverage, provides a more detailed account of accusations, examines community response, and offers suggested remedies—all fitted to the narrative developed in the Catholic scandal, with input from mental health professionals, legal advocates, rabbis, and pastoral counselors. Lesher’s (2014) investigation goes into more detail about the cases themselves within the Orthodox Jewish community, again situating the child abuse reporting in terms similar to those used in the Catholic community: abuse by trusted ministers, reporting, backlash against the victims, cover-up, and finally public recognition. Lesher offers additional cultural information that may have contributed to the problem. News reports dealing with Islam follow the narrative conventions and frames for scandals among other religious groups, but with one difference: Most stories about Islam treat the religion itself as scandalous, since some of its adherents and leaders accept violence. Mahoney’s (2010) comparison of Western reporting with that of a predominantly Muslim nation shows that the Australian reporting relied on stereotypes, associating Islam with terrorism, while the Indonesian press, reporting on events there, sought explanations within Indonesian politics rather than religion. Yusha’u (2012) found that the British press played up scandal and religion in reporting on the Boko Haram movement in Nigeria where it did not do so in similar stories about Christianity or Judaism. Similarly, Douai and Lauricella (2014) saw a greater likelihood of North American newspapers using a scandal frame when reporting on Islam and the war on terror. The narrative frame simplifies the reporting—religious figures acting badly, failed institutional responses, institutional cover-ups or defense of wrong doers, courageous victims and their advocates, and legal resolutions. Reporters need only to fill in names and details.

Rhetorical responses to scandal If the media coverage of religious scandal follows a narrative frame, so too do church responses. Here communication scholars turn to rhetoric to understand better successful and unsuccessful church communication strategies. After the initial PTL wrongdoing came to light, a compounding scandal appeared. Another television evangelist, Jerry Falwell (ordained as a fundamentalist Baptist minister and operating his own television ministry) took over the operations of the PTL programs, despite the fact that the Bakkers and the PTL group follow the Pentecostalist church—a group that Falwell had criticized on Biblical grounds. Moreover, several weeks after that announcement, Jim Bakker charged that Falwell had “stolen” the PTL ministry (Brown 1991, 9). Brown offers a rhetorical analysis of Falwell’s broadcast defending the take-over of the PTL—a classic instance of a rhetorical apologia in her view. Falwell had to address the various media reports, the publicity, and the issues of denomination and doctrine, while managing at least three audiences: his own 394

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congregation, the Pentecostalist denomination, and the general public put off by the religious scandals. Brown (1991, 16) sees the talk as marking a shift in the strategies of evangelical rhetoric: “In taking on the leadership of PTL, Falwell enlarged his spiritual/evangelical/pastoral role by suggesting that he also possessed expertise in secular matters, i.e., financial and legal concerns and the premise of fairness as it relates to both spiritual and secular governance.” Dixon examines some of the initial official Catholic responses to child abuse reports—that of Pope John Paul II and of the American cardinals—through the lens of rhetorical analysis, arguing that these church officials emphasized pastoral authority and orthodoxy over a rhetoric of image repair or even of care for victims. Using the work of Foucault and Cheney, she provides some explanation of why and how the Catholic Church leadership did not respond to the heart of the scandal and why the various news organizations could not understand that leadership’s responses. Catholic leaders merited even more coverage under the rubric of scandal for how they managed their own discourse and lack of accountability. Kaylor (2008) analyzes church leadership response to the Voice of the Faithful, a lay group, excluding them rather than seeing them as allies in a vain attempt to cling to one model of authority. The bishops’ rhetorical strategies actually muddied an already opaque situation. O’Keefe (2015) sketches out the impact that these rhetorical failures had on subsequent patterns of address by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which chose not to rely on its diminished authority in its teachings but to turn to citations from church history. The Church of Scientology, a new religious movement, also chose rhetorical strategies in the face of media scandal. It faced criticism in the public press that followed the general pattern of coverage of scandal, with a number of the articles featuring attacks on the church by former members. That church attracted additional media attention due to its many celebrity adherents. Strauss examines one such indirect attack on the church in Andrew Morton’s 2008 unauthorized biography of actor Tom Cruise. Strauss applies Kenneth Burke’s rhetorical analysis model to the church’s statement in response to charges in the biography. He notes how the Church of Scientology moved to defend its legitimacy by discrediting the reporter and by “access[ing] shared cultural symbols by portraying itself as a persecuted religion seeking sanctuary in the American tradition of religious freedom” (Strauss 2017, 39).

Misunderstanding of religion As noted above, the news media sees a duty in reporting scandal while religions see harm in the reporting, as spreading such stories damages people and religion (Silk 1998, 5), the first of a series of misunderstandings of religion. Other researchers have criticized the media’s shallow understanding of religion in general as something that leads reporters to depend too much on faulty narrative frames. Two scandals involving the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints (LDS or Mormons) provide an initial illustration. News outlets in the United States reported scandalous events, many of them arising from confusion between the LDS church and a small, break-away and isolated group, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which continued to practice polygamy. A 2008 raid on their compound—presumably to protect children—garnered headlines and confusion, with 36 percent of survey respondents thinking that the FLDS and the Mormon church were the same (Boyle & Campbell 2015, 77). A larger scandal, though, arose from the misapplication of the Mormon practice of proxy baptism of ancestors: News emerged that some Mormons had submitted names of Holocaust victims for such baptism. This outraged the Jewish community and a 1995 agreement between the LDS church and the Jewish community ended the practice. 395

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However, new evidence in 2012 showed that the practice continued (ibid., 75–76), resulting in extensive media coverage, coverage which gained national salience because of the presidential campaign of Mitt Romney, a member of the LDS church. Boyle and Campbell compared news coverage among the mainstream media, the Jewish press, and the Mormon press. Noting that “the initial [national] stories were framed from the angle of the Mormon Church apologizing for the unauthorized actions,” some later coverage focused on Helen Radkey, a self-appointed LDS critic (ibid., 79). The news narrative shifted then to a more controversial one featuring a whistleblower. The LDS media took a different approach: it “can be grouped into three different categories—traditional, objective reporting, often focusing on the LDS response to the public, often including clarification of misinformation; and defending the practice by citing both LDS officials and non-Mormon religion scholars” (ibid., 80–81). The Jewish media either ignored the stories or followed the initial national news framing. “While reporting was fairly straightforward and noninflammatory, the Jewish media’s editorials and opinion columns were largely conciliatory after the church issued an apology” (ibid., 82). Boyle and Campbell conclude that the style of the media coverage indicates “that there still remains a large public misunderstanding about the nuances of doctrine” (ibid., 84), something that seems typical of all coverage of religion. Misunderstanding similarly appears in news coverage of other religious scandals. In the child abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, some church leaders, while acknowledging the problems, objected that the news media did not cover Catholic Church attempts to help victims, change policies, and make reporting of accusations easier; or cover the extent of child abuse by other agencies (public schools, youth sports, etc.), more or less charging the news media with unfair treatment (Chaput 2017). This latter charge emerges most strongly in Pierre’s (2011) book length analysis of media coverage. If the child abuse scandals were not enough, news media reported at least two other Catholic Church scandals, both of which reflected some levels of misunderstanding. De Maioa, Alkazemi, and Wantac (2016) review the communication consequences of the Argentinian Catholic Church’s cooperation with military regimes in their study of the church’s inability to set the agenda in the Argentinian press. They note that church leaders’ support for oppressive governments in exchange for an embrace of traditional values cost them legitimacy after the end of the military regime. While correct, the news coverage ignored historical pressures on church leaders and cultural practices that prevented leaders from imagining other actions. Other stories also failed to take context into account. Pope Benedict XVI generated a good deal of negative news coverage for two events that the media reported as scandalous: his association of Islam with jihad in a talk to academics and his lifting of an excommunication on Bishop Williamson the same day as news emerged of Williamson’s Holocaust denial stance. Stohmeier (2009) analyzes the Vatican responses, arguing that the press reported both events without their context, even ignoring relevant story aspects that did not fit the desired narrative frame. Much of the coverage’s negative tone in reporting on Islam comes from associating the religion with jihad or struggle, with little attempt to understand religious teachings or practices or to separate political activities by Muslims from their faith. According to a content analysis by Sheikh, Price, and Oshagan (1995), reporting on Muslims featured negative portrayals, but usually linked it to specific events. Whatever the issue, news attention to scandals in religion indicates a generally skeptical approach to religious groups and a simplified understanding of the nature of religion, leading to a willingness to shift from a more balanced framing to one that emphasizes and exaggerates potential conflict, between religious groups and the larger society, between institutions and individuals, or between whistleblowers and church. 396

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News attention Media-defined scandals regularly appear in the news. Boyle and Campbell (2015, 76) note, In their coverage of religion, larger publications have tended to cover many of the more polarizing issues and events. The top 10 religion stories in 2011 included coverage of radical Islam, anti-Muslim sentiment in America, Westboro Church protests, the Catholic priest abuse scandal, and the burning of the Koran by Terry Jones. Almost all of the studies of religious scandal by communication researchers simply accept the fact that scandal “sells” papers and drives broadcast ratings. Because news coverage has developed a proven narrative frame, negative reporting has become both easier and less nuanced.

Conclusion Accustomed to their predictable narrative form, audiences find religious scandals both compelling and easy to provoke outrage, even if not easy to understand. However, people do not remain convinced. Communication researchers have shown that scandals have an immediate but short-lived impact on opinions about religion. The religious scandals that have attracted the most attention are those that have a more complex character, such as the Catholic Church child-abuse scandal, which combined several different issues and stayed longer in the news. Scholars also show that religious figures can successfully respond, usually with some form of apology or apologia. Finally, the researchers have also noted that scandals can trigger a backlash against the media sources when audiences feel that reporters have misunderstood religion or acted unfairly or disproportionately. Scandals dealing with religion will not go away, given the nature of religion and the nature of the news industry. The narrative frame of scandal remains powerful and successful for journalism even as it risks obscuring by simplification.

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Paul A. Soukup De Maio, M., Alkazemi, M. and Wanta, W. (2016), ‘An examination of the Roman Catholic Church’s agenda-setting function in Argentina’, Journal of Media and Religion, 15:1, pp. 15–28. Dixon, M.A. (2004), ‘Silencing the lambs: The Catholic Church’s response to the 2002 sexual abuse scandal’, Journal of Communication and Religion, 27:1, pp. 63–86. Douai, A. and Lauricella, S. (2014), ‘The “terrorism” frame in “neo-Orientalism”: Western news and the Sunni-Shia Muslim sectarian relations after 9/11’, International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics, 10:1, 7–24. Fan, D.P., Wyatt, R.O. and Keltner, K. (2001), ‘The suicidal messenger: How press reporting affects public confidence in the press, the military, and organized religion’, Communication Research, 28:6, p. 826. Heeren, J. and Zick, A. (2014), ‘Misleading images: Results from interviews with media producers, journalists and consumers on Muslims and Islam in German media’, Middle East Journal of Culture & Communication, 7:1, pp. 46–63. Ingebretsen, E.J. (2004), ‘Reading scandal: Civic gothic as genre’, Journal of Media and Religion, 3:1, pp. 21–42. Jenkins, P. (2001), Pedophiles and Priests: Anatomy of a Contemporary Crisis. New York: Oxford University Press. Kaylor, B.T. (2008), ‘From faithful to heretics: The Catholic Church’s response to the Voice of the Faithful’, Rocky Mountain Communication Review, 4:1, pp. 16–26. Lesher, M. (2014), Sexual Abuse, Shonda and Concealment in Orthodox Jewish Communities. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Lichter, S.R., Lichter, L.S. and Amundson, D.R. (2000), Media Coverage of Religion in America 1969–1998. Washington, DC: Center for Media and Public Affairs. Mahony, I. (2010), ‘Diverging frames: A comparison of Indonesian and Australian press portrayals of terrorism and Islamic groups in Indonesia’, International Communication Gazette, 72:8, pp. 739–758. Maier, C. T. (2005), ‘Weathering the storm: Hauser’s vernacular voices, public relations and the Roman Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal’, Public Relations Review, 31:2, pp. 219–227. Maier, C. and Crist, J.R. (2017), ‘From “Wicked Crisis” to responsive witness: Jean-Luc Marion and the American Roman Catholic sexual-abuse scandal’, Southern Communication Journal, 82:3, pp. 164–174. Mancini, C. and Shields, R.T. (2014), ‘Notes on a (sex crime) scandal: The impact of media coverage of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church on public opinion’, Journal of Criminal Justice, 42:2, pp. 221–232. Miller, B.A. (1999), ‘Seeing through a glass darkly: Religious metaphor as rhetorical perspective’, Journal of Communication and Religion, 22:2, pp. 214–236. Müller, F., van Zoonen, L. and Hirzalla, F. (2014), ‘Anti-Islam propaganda and its effects: Fitna, fearbased communication and the moderating role of public debate’, Middle East Journal of Culture & Communication, 7:1, pp. 82–100. Neustein, A. (2009), Tempest in the Temple: Jewish Communities & Child Sex Scandals. Hanover: University Press of New England. Ogan, C., Willnat, L., Pennington, R. and Bashir, M. (2014), ‘The rise of anti-Muslim prejudice: Media and Islamophobia in Europe and the United States’, International Communication Gazette, 76:1, pp. 27–46. O’Keefe, M.M. (2015), ‘Borrowed authority: The American Catholic bishops’ argument by citation’, Written Communication, 32:2, pp. 150–173. Pearson, M. (2017), ‘Lessons from reporting Islam—A case study of an Australian newspaper’s coverage of radicalisation’, Australian Journalism Review, 39:1, pp. 47–62. Pew Research Center (2010), The Pope Meets the Press: Media Coverage of the Clergy Abuse Scandal. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center. Pierre, D.F. (2011), Double Standard: Abuse Scandals and the Attack on the Catholic Church. Mattapoisett, MA: eBookIt.com. Sheikh, K.Z., Price, V. and Oshagan, H. (1995), ‘Press treatment of Islam: What kind of picture do the media paint?’, Gazette: International Journal for Communication Studies, 56:2, pp. 139–154. Silk, M. (1998), Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Smith, T.W. (1992), ‘The polls: Poll trends’, Public Opinion Quarterly, 56:3, pp. 360–380. Stohmeier, G. (2009), ‘The pope in the public eye: Distortions as a result of communication deficiency’, Journal of Media Research, 4, pp. 37–48. Strauss, J.R. (2017), ‘Making a case for religious freedom: The Church of Scientology responds to claims made in an unauthorized biography of Tom Cruise’, Journal of Media & Religion, 16:2, pp. 39–50. Yusha’u, M.J. (2012), ‘Representation of Boko Haram discourses in the British broadsheets’, Journal of Arab & Muslim Media Research, 5:1, pp. 91–108.

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40 CORPORATE SCANDALIZATION PROCESS Unpacking the corporate scandal W. Timothy Coombs and Sherry J. Holladay The news media are attracted to corporate scandals because they are unusual and draw audience interest. Consider these headlines as examples: “Dog Deaths, Flushed Hamsters and Booted Peacocks: All the Airline Pet Scandals of 2018” (Dog, 2018) and “The 10 Biggest Business Scandals of 2017” (Shen, 2017). Business researchers typically refer to financial improprieties as scandals (Markham, 2015). While there is interest in corporate scandals, the area is rather vague and ill-defined. Moreover, there is less written about this topic than the many others to be found in this volume. The purpose of this chapter is to clarify the conceptualization of corporate scandal and to emphasize the corporate scandalization process. We consider communication as central to corporate scandals. Communication is essential to the corporate scandalization process both in creating a sense of scandal and how managers respond to corporate scandals. The first section of the chapter unpacks the conceptualization of corporate scandal and the corporate scandalization process. The next two sections explore how corporate scandals emerge from self-inflicted and other initiated actions. In each process, the role of communication in creating the perception of scandal and responding to the scandal are examined.

Defining the domain of corporate scandal While the news media are often quick to label a corporate problem as a scandal, it is a mistake to assume a corporate behavior or action is inherently such. For instance, the VW emission evasion software was dubbed the VW emission scandal by news outlets like the BBC (Clemente and Gabbioneta, 2017; Hotten, 2015). Corporate misbehavior is not automatically a scandal. In fact, identical actions can result in one being declared a scandal but another not receiving that label (Entman, 2012). We must begin by unpacking the concept of a corporate scandal. This section begins by reviewing the general characteristics of a corporate scandal and how scandal is a process rather than an entity.

Characteristics of a corporate scandal Corporate scandal, like the term scandal in general, lacks a clear definition. Research articles frequently do not define it and assume we all agree on its character. It is problematic to assume 399

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people know what a concept is but a specific definition of scandal is difficult to establish. Instead of a specific definition, we offer a set of common characteristics of a scandal to clarify how we are conceptualizing it in this chapter. These characteristics help to establish the parameters for corporate scandals, which share three characteristics: (1) deviant behavior that violates morality or law, (2) the need to punish the immoral action that causes outrage, and (3) media interest in the immoral action. A corporate scandal is an action that violates the morality of law—it is a deviant behavior that is perceived as wrong. The critical point is the moral nature of scandals. A corporate scandal typically involves a moral wrong doing that violates the expectations of stakeholders. In the VW emission case, customers expect the software in their vehicles will provide accurate emission testing results. A corporate scandal occurs when stakeholders perceive the corporate behavior is immoral (De Maria, 2010). There are times when these moral violations are also legal violations, such as with the VW scandal. However, the key is the moral rather than the legal dimension of the violation. Corporate scandals create a need for punishment. Stakeholders feel the corporation should be punished for the moral violation (Grebe, 2012). Customers, potential customers, and news media are the common stakeholders seeking punishment. This desire for punishment is fueled by the outrage created by a scandal. Customers and potential customers pledge not to buy products and services from the corporation (economic punishment) while the new media create negative stories about the corporation (reputational punishment). As Brenton (2013) argued, not all deviant acts result in public outrage, but public outrage is necessary for a deviant act to be classified as a scandal. Finally, Entman (2012) posits that media coverage is essential to creating a scandal. The media (traditional and digital) create awareness of the deviant behavior and frame the event as a scandal. Consider how the news media framed the VW emission software as a scandal. If the media is uninterested in a behavior, it is unlikely to be considered a scandal. But how does a behavior or event become a scandal?

Scandalization: scandal as a process The characteristics of scandal suggest the simple existence of a deviant behavior does not mean it is a scandal. We should think of scandal as a process, what is termed “scandalization.” The first step in the process is an action that is perceived as a moral violation for stakeholders—the deviant behavior. The second step is the reaction by the stakeholders, who need a sense of outrage directed toward the event. Sass and Crosbie (2013) argued that “scandal is constituted in public outrage” (p. 857). Outrage motivates people to be interested in the deviant behavior and to demand punishment for it. Scandals should produce moral outrage because of the link to moral violation. Moral outrage can occur when people perceive an injustice from the violation of a moral standard (Hoffman, 2000). Cognitive appraisal theory, a cluster of theories that examine how certain elements in an event or situation affect an individual’s emotional response, argues that moral outrage is a form of anger and is a response to perceived injustice (Watson and Spence, 2007). Moral outrage is likely to emerge when the situation is marked by an attribution of blame, perceived to be motivated by greed, and perceived to be unfair (a violation of justice) (Antonetti and Maklan, 2016). Corporate scandals create a sense of moral outrage because they embody responsibility, greed, and injustice. Media coverage is helpful in creating awareness of and outrage toward the deviant behavior. Both traditional and digital media spread awareness of the corporate scandal to a wider audience and should increase the number of people outraged by the situation. Scandalization begins with a corporate action followed by stakeholder reaction. That process can continue as 400

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Corporate behavior perceived as moral violation Stakeholders react with moral outrage coupled with media interest Corporation responds to moral outrage Stakeholders react to the corporate response Figure 40.1  Corporate Scandalization Process

the corporation responds to the outrage and the stakeholders react to the corporate response. Figure 40.1 illustrates the basics of the corporate scandalization process. We will elaborate the third and fourth steps later in the chapter with a discussion of communicative responses to a corporate scandal.

Corporate scandals and crisis: the scansis A final point to consider when mapping the terrain of corporate scandal is the relationship between corporate scandal and organizational crises. Unfortunately, researchers tend to use the terms scandal and crisis interchangeably in the organizational crisis communication research (e.g., Arendt, LaFleche and Limperopulos, 2017). Organizational crisis is a much broader concept than corporate scandal. Organizational crises are violations of stakeholder expectations that can have negative effects on the organization and/or its stakeholders (Coombs, 2015). Examples of organizational crises include workplace violence, product tampering, product harm, industrial accidents, and management misconduct. Not all organizational crises are scandals because some will lack a sense of moral violation, outrage, and/or media attention. For instance, a company recalls bagged vegetables because of the possibility of Salmonella contamination detected after the product was shipped. This is unlikely to attract much media attention because food recalls are very common. Moreover, the product harm is unlikely to be viewed as a moral violation or to produce outrage. However, if the company knew about the contamination before shipping and decided to sell a contaminated product to its customers, that would be a moral violation, could produce outrage, and is likely to attract media attention. There are times when a crisis transmogrifies into a scandal, what researchers have termed a “scansis” (Coombs, Holladay and Tachkova, 2018). A scansis can emerge because of the nature of the crisis or the response to it. According to situational crisis communication theory (SCCT), crises can be placed into one of three classifications based upon attributions of crisis responsibility: (1) victim, (2) accident, and (3) intentional 401

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(Coombs and Holladay, 2002). Victim crises have very low attributions of crisis responsibility. External factors are believed to be the cause of the crisis, making the organization a victim of it. Common victim crises are natural disasters, product tampering, and workplace violence. Accident crises have low attributions of crisis responsibility. The crisis occurred but the organization had little ability to prevent its occurrence and did not intend for it to occur (Coombs and Holladay, 2002). Victim and accident crises have little potential to become a scansis because the low levels of crisis responsibility should not generate outrage. Intentional crises produce strong attributions of crisis responsibility and have the potential to become a scansis. According to cognitive appraisal theory, an attribution of responsibility is one of the requirements for producing moral outrage (Antonetti and Maklan, 2016). Management misconduct crises occur when managers knowingly place stakeholders at risk or violate the law. These crises have the greatest potential to become scanses (Coombs et al., 2018). Still, not all intentional crises will become a scansis. Stakeholders must perceive the crisis as an injustice (violates a moral standard) which is enhanced if the crisis attracts media attention. De Maria (2010) posited that a crisis becomes a scandal when the response is mishandled. Managers mishandle a response by failing to “morally and legally respond to a crisis” (ibid., p. 69). The failure to respond properly to the crisis is exposed publicly (media coverage) and reflects a violation of interactional justice (Coombs et al., 2018; De Maria, 2010). Interactional justice concerns the quality of interpersonal treatment and the need to treat people with respect and dignity (Skarlicki and Folger, 1997). The crisis response fails because it does not address the needs of the victims and is a violation of interactional justice because of the disrespect shown to the victims. Violations of interactional justice have the potential to create the moral outrage necessary for a scansis.

Summary This section has articulated the chapter’s main concepts of corporate scandals and scandalization. Corporate scandals are triggered by some cognitive appraisal of intentional injustice that ferments moral outrage among stakeholders. The trigger can be an action taken by the corporation or the corporation’s inappropriate response to a crisis. Traditional and digital media coverage can intensify this process. The next two sections expand upon the two different ways corporate scandalization occurs. We also explore the role of crisis response strategies in the facilitating or inhibiting of the scandalization process.

Self-inflicted corporate scandalization We typically think of a scandal as being caused by something a person does—the scandal is self-inflicted. The previous discussion of the connections between crisis and scandal serve as the foundation for understanding self-inflicted corporate scandals. As noted earlier, a corporate scandal can be self-inflicted either by a corporate action or by how the corporation responds to a crisis. This section will elaborate on self-inflicted corporate scandalization process and its relationship to crises.

Self-inflicted: the crisis itself Intentional crises have been identified as the most likely type to transmogrify into a corporate scandal because of the strong attributions of crisis responsibility. While necessary, crisis responsibility is not sufficient to create a corporate scandal. As noted earlier, cognitive appraisal theory 402

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argues that for a situation to evoke moral outrage, there needs to be an appraisal of the situation as unfair. Unfairness is a combination of injustice and greed. Stakeholders need to feel that there has been a violation of a moral code (injustice) and greed is motivating the action. Appraisals of injustice can be sufficient to produce moral outrage but greed increases the likelihood of the emotion emerging (Antonetti and Maklan, 2016). Intentional crises are a cluster of three crisis types including human-error accidents, humanerror-product harm, and management misconduct. Research has supported the belief that only management misconduct crises create the appraisals of injustice and greed necessary to generate high levels of moral outrage. Even among such crises, not all produce the appraisals necessary to transmogrify a crisis into a scansis (a corporate scandal) (Coombs and Tachkova, 2018). Management misconduct crises that seem to involve greed and an injustice and that seem to be a moral violation have the greatest potential to be viewed as a scandal. However, scandals are a social construction and other factors, such as fatigue from similar scandals, may preclude the emergence of a scandal (Entman, 2012). If there are a series of behaviors that could be considered scandals, people begin to tire of the events and may not view the latter violations as scandals. Corporations occasionally engage in behaviors that when known publicly draw the label of scandal. Typically, the news media reveal the scandalous behavior but, in the digital world, any stakeholder can expose a potential scandal. The key is that the behavior has inherent qualities that lead people to consider it a scandal. Examples include the earlier example of VW’s software designed to fool emissions testing, Mylan Pharmaceuticals drastically raising the price of its life saving Epipens, and the Peanut Corporation of American knowingly selling Salmonella-tainted peanut paste. (For more information on the Peanut Corporation of America see Coombs 2014 and for more information on Mylan see Kozarich 2016.) Such behaviors are crises that draw public attention and can be viewed as deviant acts that need punishment driven by the moral outrage the actions create. Again, a corporate scandal is a social construction, hence, two similar acts may not both be deemed a scandal. However, some behaviors have an obvious deviant aspect that could provoke moral outrage. A revelation corporate scandal is an event that generates an immediate sense of moral outrage when exposed.

Self-inflicted: the crisis response De Maria (2010) is the strongest proponent of self-inflicted crises being caused by an inappropriate response to a crisis. De Maria’s work builds on Frandsen and Johansen’s (2010) idea of a double crisis wherein the crisis response creates a second and perhaps even more damaging crisis. To appreciate the way an inappropriate response can create a crisis we need to understand what makes for an appropriate response. SCCT, one of the dominant theories within crisis communication, was developed to identify “appropriate” crisis response strategies (Coombs and Holladay, 2002). The term “appropriate” means the response is effective at protecting organizational assets that are threatened by a crisis (Coombs, 2007). SCCT posits that any time a crisis produces victims (harms others in some way), the ethical base response is required, which is a combination of instructing and adjusting information. Instructing information tells people how to protect themselves physically from the crisis while adjusting information helps people to cope psychologically with it (Holladay, 2009; Sturges, 1994). The ethical base response is appropriate because it makes victim concerns a priority. SCCT further proposes that reputational management strategies can be added to the crisis response as attributions of organizational responsibility for the crisis increase. Within the SCCT framework, management misconduct crises are located in the crisis cluster that produces the strongest attribution of crisis responsibility. When crisis responsibility is high, 403

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compensation and/or apology is added to the ethical base response. Compensation gives victims goods, services, or money above and beyond any financial burden the crisis has created for them. For example, if a person is hospitalized for a foodborne illness from a company’s product, compensation would be anything beyond just covering the victim’s medical costs. An apology is when management at the organization involved in the crisis takes responsibility for having caused it (Coombs, 2007). However, the ethical base response is the key to an optimal response because it follows the idea of interactional justice introduced earlier in the chapter. When an ethical base response is missing or only partially executed, stakeholders are likely to perceive a violation of procedural justice for the victims which could signal an appraisal of injustice prompting the crisis to become scandalized.

Communicative response to a scandal A scandal can be caused by inappropriate crisis communication that violates interactional justice that promotes feelings of moral outrage. The inappropriate crisis response is the action that is a moral violation, step one in the corporate scandalization process. If stakeholders are then morally outraged by the crisis response, the situation moves to step two. Now managers must re-evaluate their response strategy for step three of the corporate scandalization process and decide what their next communicative response should be. Step four is an evaluation of the crisis response to the scandal. If stakeholders accept the scandal response, the negative effects of the scandal begin to dissipate. Moral outrage, for example, should lessen along with more of a willingness to purchase from the organization. If stakeholders reject the scandal response, the negative effects of the scandal can escalate. Moral outrage may remain and intentions not to purchase from the organization could increase. Some corporate actions have a high potential for scandalization because people are likely to be outraged when they first hear of the behaviors. Sometimes managers must accept the scandal frame for their behaviors and work from within that frame. Managers will need to explain how they are correcting the behaviors and how they intend to prevent a repeat of such behaviors in the future. In step four, stakeholders evaluate the response, resulting in either a de-escalation or a continuation of the crisis. VW made the mistake of trying to blame a few employees for the emission scandal. Stakeholders, including the news media, rejected the response and the scandal lingered. It was not until VW management began to take responsibility for their actions and took measures to reform the organization that the scandal began to de-escalate. There are times when there is a presumption that the events happened and stakeholders accept them as a moral violation.

Outside-initiated corporate scandalization A second route for corporate scandalization is when an outside entity either reveals or attempts to construct a corporation’s behaviors as scandalous by exposing them to public scrutiny and condemnation. A scandal emerges when additional stakeholders begin to view the exposed behaviors as morally inappropriate—scandalous—thereby triggering a sense of moral outrage.

Construction: building the case for a scandal While a crisis or an inappropriate crisis response might produce a scandal quickly, construction involves the process where some outside agents (stakeholders) create and promote the idea that the corporation is involved in a scandal. The stakeholders seek to problematize and even to scandalize existing corporate behaviors. The concepts of corporate character assassination, 404

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challenge crisis, and paracrisis all relate to the idea of stakeholders trying to create the impression that a corporation is enmeshed in a scandal—efforts to scandalize organizational behaviors. Character assassination, like scandal, is strongly rooted in the political communication and political science literatures. Samoilenko (2016) defines character assassination as “a deliberate and sustained effort to damage the reputation or credibility of an individual” (p. 115). A variety of channels and tactics can be used to defame the character of a politician. The objective of character assassination in politics is to reduce the odds of political success or to destroy a target psychologically. While primarily found in politics, Samoilenko (2016) includes the possibility of corporate character assassination and Coombs and Holladay (in press) have advanced the argument along with exploring the process of corporate character assassination. Corporate character assassination is derived from the concept of the challenge in crisis management. Lerbinger (1997) was the first to articulate the concept of the challenge crisis, a situation where stakeholders argue that corporate management is acting in an immoral or irresponsible fashion. To be more precise, a challenge crisis is not a true crisis but a paracrisis. A paracrisis is a situation where managers must address a crisis risk in public. The digital media have allowed many once private crisis risks to now be viewed by interested stakeholders. If mismanaged or ignored, a paracrisis can evolve into an actual crisis (Coombs, 2012; Coombs and Holladay, 2012). As in politics, a corporate character assassination paracrisis (a distinct form or paracrisis) has objectives. For stakeholders, the objective is to reform organizational behavior and to make the organization more responsible. Consider how stakeholders in the 1990s became aware of and demanded change in the garment industry’s use of child labor and sweatshops. Corporations place a great deal of value on their reputations. Though intangible, the corporate reputation is an important asset that can enhance sales, recruitment, and stock valuation (e.g., Fombrun, Ponzi and Newbury, 2015). Hence, managers seek to protect reputations because reputational damage translates into financial losses. The Reputation Institute states that over 40 percent of the corporate reputation is now derived from perceptions of corporate social responsibility (Smith, 2012). If a corporate reputation is built in part on social responsibility, believable challenges that claim the corporation is irresponsible are credible threats that an organization must address. In essence, the need to be perceived as socially responsible creates a crisis risk because stakeholders can seek to reverse perceptions thereby damaging a reputation (Coombs and Holladay, 2015). We must remember that not all paracrises are character assassination attempts. Some are simply efforts to push an organization toward reforming certain practices the stakeholders feel are outdated and wrong. A paracrisis that is also a corporate character assassination effort has the potential to become a scandal if the behavior becomes perceived as a deviant act that violates moral principles, incites moral outrage, and attracts sufficient media (traditional and digital) attention. Unpacking the process behind corporate character assassination and a paracrisis helps to illuminate how a scandal might form via this route. The process of a corporate character assassination paracrisis is informed by Lange and Washburn’s (2012) model of corporate irresponsibility. Managers are interested in being socially responsible but should also fear the three-step process by which a corporation becomes perceived as socially irresponsible. Step one occurs when stakeholders learn that an undesirable social outcome exists. For instance, people living downstream of a cloth dying facility may be ill from the chemicals used in the facility. The second step requires that the organization is perceived as responsible for the undesirable social outcome. The management of the facility is considered the cause of the illnesses of the people downstream. The third step requires that the victims have not contributed to the undesirable social outcome through actions they have taken. The people living downstream have not ignored warnings or have not been using water 405

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from a different source that is known to be contaminated. Lange and Washburn’s (2012) model is based on attributions of responsibility and reflects the social construction nature of scandals. A paracrisis in the form of a corporate character assassination attempt creates a credible threat. If the situation escalates into a scandal, the reputational damage will be greatly magnified. There is the possibility that the corporate character assassination paracrisis could promote moral outrage thereby scandalizing the organizational behaviors. Only a small percentage of any type of paracrisis have the potential to become scandals (Coombs, Holladay and Tachkova, 2018). Consider the case of Green America and Hershey. For over five years, Green America sought to bring attention to the fact that Hershey was purchasing cocoa from suppliers that were using child slave labor. Green America used a variety of digital channels and in-person actions along with traditional media relations to create awareness of the situation. There was potential for moral outrage because child slave labor is widely accepted as morally wrong and its use would be considered a deviant act. The lack of media attention and stakeholder interest helped to prevent Hershey from facing a scandal. Eventually Hershey did begin to address the concerns of Green America and to reform its supply chain (Coombs, 2014). However, if the media had focused on the paracrisis and framed it as a deviant violation of moral values, the moral outrage necessary for a scandal might have emerged in the Hershey case. In contrast, Nike became the focal point for a corporate character assassination paracrisis concerning its use of sweatshops in its apparel and footwear manufacturing. Eventually the attack broadened to the entire garment industry but activists, such as United Students Against Sweatshops, tabbed Nike as the “poster child” for sweatshops (Arnold and Hartman, 2003; Greenberg and Knight, 2004; Segran, 2017). The activist stakeholders were able to generate the media coverage necessary to create a scandal. People did view sweatshops as a deviant moral violation. The media attention helped to foster moral outrage that inflicted some financial damage on Nike (Wilsey and Lichtig, n.d.). Nike was embroiled in a scandal over the use of sweatshops in its supply chain in part due to the media coverage of the corporate character assassination paracrisis effort. Research has demonstrated the power of news media coverage to influence how managers react to such paracrises. News media coverage increases the likelihood of managers conceding to the demands of the stakeholders (e.g., King, 2008).

Communicative response There are times when scandal is initiated by external stakeholders through the construction of a corporate behavior as scandalous or what we term the outside-initiated corporate scandal. If the outside efforts are successful at creating attention and moral outrage, managers then must decide how to respond to the scandal (step three in the corporate scandalization process). The communicative responses are shaped by the nature of the scandal construction. The construction of a scandal through a corporate character assassination paracrisis is an attempt to frame the behaviors as a moral violation. Managers have a variety of options for addressing the framing attempt (Coombs and Holladay, 2015). The response options include refuse (ignore the paracrisis), refute (reframe the situation as not a scandal), recognize/receive (acknowledge a problem but take no actions to change), revise (make some changes), and reform (make the changes requested by the challenging stakeholders) (Coombs, 2017; Coombs and Holladay, 2015). The response option selected is dependent upon the threat presented by the paracrisis, which is a function of stakeholder factors, organizational factors, and outrage potential. Stakeholder factors include whether the threat is long term or short term, the skill of the stakeholders at 406

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communicating their position, and the legitimacy of the stakeholder concerns. A paracrisis is a greater threat when it is long term (stakeholders are committed to making a change versus momentary anger), stakeholders are skilled at communication, and their concern is legitimate. When the threat from stakeholders is high, managers are likely to favor revise or reform responses. Organizational factors include strategy (consistent or inconsistent with business strategy) and cost/benefit ratio (do costs of changes outweigh the benefits of changes?) (Coombs and Holladay, 2015). Corporate managers are likely to refuse or refute when the changes are counter to strategy and/or the cost/benefit ratio is too high. Some paracrises have a greater potential for outrage because they are linked to highly provocative moral concerns such as racism. A high potential for outrage will push managers toward a revise or reform response (Coombs and Holladay, 2015). The revise and reform responses work within the emerging scandal frame and attempt to de-escalate the situation. The idea is that stakeholders will react favorably to revise or reform strategies and the negative effects of the scandal will begin to subside (step four in the corporate scandalization process model). The refuse response is used when managers feel there is no real threat from the paracrisis. Refute is used when there is a perceived threat but the changes requested by stakeholders are inconsistent with the business strategy or too expensive to adopt (Coombs and Holladay, 2015). When stakeholders attacked the Cheerios brand for using an interracial couple in a television advertisement, the brand managers refuted by saying the brand stood for inclusion (Italie, 2013). Sometimes a corporation must defend its current practices as morally right by refuting the stakeholders’ claim that the behavior is scandalous.

Conclusion Corporations, like politicians, can become embroiled in scandals. In this chapter we have made an effort to refine the conceptualization of corporate scandal and the corporate scandalization process. A scandal is characterized by a moral violation that is displayed publicly and results in moral outrage and a desire to punish the offender. But a corporate scandal is not simply a specific type of behavior such as financial misconduct. Rather, scandals are social constructed and the corporation scandalization process model details how a scandal can emerge and the communicative response it can trigger. Stakeholders must perceive the corporation as responsible for an intentional moral violation that provokes outrage over the behavior. The scandalization of corporate behaviors can be self-inflicted or other-initiated. Sometimes a crisis has the necessary characteristics to become a scansis—the crisis transmogrifies into a scandal. The scandalization is driven by the nature of an existing crisis. At other times, stakeholders initiate and even try to enhance the scandalization process. The construction of a corporate scandal involves stakeholders trying to convince others that the corporate behavior warrants the scandal frame, which does not emerge automatically but must be cultivated by the attacking stakeholders. Finally, we considered the way the communicative response to the scandal escalates or de-escalates the negatives associated with it. More research is necessary to unpack further and to refine the conceptualization of corporate scandals and the corporate scandalization process.

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41 CORPORATE SCANDALS AS DENIAL OF REPUTATION Daniel Vogler and Mark Eisenegger

Scandals can cause serious damage to the reputations of corporations, as the recent example of the Volkswagen case has once again demonstrated. The media play an important role in the emergence and dissemination of corporate scandals. They are the source from which people typically learn about the wrongdoings of corporations, and they constitute the arena wherein people evaluate, criticise and discuss the behaviour of corporations. Corporate scandals and the media are hence in a symbiotic relationship. Without the publicity fostered by the media, there is no scandal, since the wrongdoings of a corporation can only be referred to as a scandal when they become known. Yet, scandals also influence the headlines and the value of news for the media, and they are thus assets for publishers seeking to sell their newspapers. Furthermore, scandals represent the events by which the watchdog function of the media becomes evident. The role of the media in corporate scandals has therefore attracted significant research interest in various disciplines. The literature mostly includes research on firms and their management, although more recently there has also been a focus on other types of corporations, such as higher education institutions or sport organisations. This chapter will focus on how corporate scandals unfold in the public sphere as well as the role of the media in such scandals. It begins with a critical review of the existing literature concerning corporate scandals. We will then illustrate how the concept of the public sphere is valuable in relation to analysing the communicative dynamics of corporate scandals. Based on the theory of communicative action offered by Jürgen Habermas (1984) and the reputation theory introduced by Eisenegger (2005; 2016), we will subsequently present a conceptual framework for classifying and analysing corporate scandals, and we will suggest denial of reputation as the definition of corporate scandals. When we define scandals as the denial of reputation, the communicative dynamics that occur throughout the process of scandalisation, as well as how those dynamics relate to changes in the public sphere, move to the centre of interest. During the discussion, we further argue that digitisation, as the most recent transformative power of the public sphere, is changing the way corporate scandals unfold in the media. Social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, allow stakeholders to articulate directly their opinion on corporations without having to pass through the media as gatekeeper. The new communicative dynamics seen in the age of digitisation thus lead to more frequent and rapidly evolving scandals that are hence less controllable and predictable. This development poses challenges in relation to corporate reputation management, which we will discuss in the closing section of the chapter. 410

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From Enron to Volkswagen: research on corporate scandals and the media The wrongdoings of corporations inspire research in various disciplines related to business, including law, accounting, management as well as communication or public relations. The studied cases often relate to standardised practices within corporations, such as accounting (Levi, 2006; Zona et al., 2013) and the production of goods (Tse et al., 2018), but they also include wrongdoings on the part of management (Benediktsson, 2010) or breaches of norms related to corporate social responsibility (Eisenegger and Schranz, 2011) or the governance practices of firms (Dyck et al., 2008; Bednar, 2012). In particular, the cases of large multinational corporations attract significant attention from researchers. Among these cases, the accounting frauds perpetrated in the USA during the early 2000s, namely the Enron and WorldCom scandals, gave rise to many studies and much conceptual work (e.g. Kuhn and Ashcraft, 2003; Hannah and Zatzick, 2008; Benediktsson, 2010; Ailon, 2015). As arguably the most prominent recent example, the Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal is currently being studied extensively (e.g. Clemente and Gabbioneta, 2017; Markowitz et  al., 2017). Due to this focus on the scandals of large corporations, not all industries are equally well researched. The most commonly analysed cases include industries that are prone to scandals due to their production conditions (e.g. the fashion industry) as well as industries that produce goods that are harmful in general (e.g. the tobacco industry) or that can affect consumers’ health when instances of damage occur (e.g. the food, pharmaceutical or automotive industries). Following the events of the 2008 global financial crisis, the financial industry has also been studied to a significant extent (Vogler et al., 2016). While most research focuses on the causes and effects of corporate scandals at the organisational level, some studies place the spotlight on the role of the management. This includes research on fraudulent actions or misbehaviour on the part of managers (Hannah and Zatzick, 2008; Cohen et al., 2010; Ailon, 2015) or other elite actors (Jansson, 2016). The literature is dominated by a focus on US and European corporate scandals. However, it also includes a growing body of research concerning scandals in emerging economies in Asia (Liu and Maa, 2016; Kim et al., 2018). Due to the mostly unique nature of scandals, comparative research regarding corporate scandals is difficult to conduct. Among the few truly comparative designs found in the literature, the works of Coffee (2005) and Soltani (2014) on the cultural differences between the USA and Europe, as well as the contribution of Lloyd et al. (2014) concerning nursing home scandals in five countries, can be mentioned. Further research in this regard includes comparisons of the same scandals in two different countries, for example, the study by Feng et al. (2012) regarding the differences in newspaper coverage of the baby formula scandals in China and the USA. Moreover, a recent study focuses on the differences between national and international audiences in terms of their perception of the Korean Air scandal (Kim et al., 2018). Most research concerning corporate scandals refers to the media as an important factor in the dissemination of scandals. The influence of the media is mostly considered during discussion of the results or in the conceptual part of the work, but it is not always empirically analysed. Such studies reflect the watchdog function of the media or their role as a promoter for corporate governance (Miller, 2006; Brickey, 2008; Bednar, 2012). This includes the role of the media in cases of corporate fraud and whistleblowing (Dyck et al., 2010), as well as in implementing policies and regulations after scandals have taken place (Lloyd et al., 2014). Miller (2006) describes the press as an important factor in relation to rebroadcasting information derived from other intermediaries, such as analysts or auditors. Similarly, Greve et al. (2010) refer to the media as 411

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an intermediary that can impose sanctions in the form of public scrutiny or humiliation. The authors argue that, although the media cannot directly impose legally binding sanctions, they can place pressure on social-control agents to put such sanctions in place. Other research studies the role of the media in the wrongdoings of companies, such as product recalls in the toy industry (Zavyalova et al., 2012). Further, some studies investigate the role of scandals from a reputational perspective and, therefore, focus on the effect of the media coverage of scandals on the behaviour of the general public or stakeholder groups (Conroy and Emerson, 2006). The results of such studies show that the media play an important role in the loss (Vogler et al., 2016) and restoration (Sims, 2009) of reputation. When compared to research focusing on the function of the media during corporate scandals, studies analysing the content of the media coverage of scandals are less numerous. By using the content analysis method, the role of the media in socially constructing corporate violence as a crime (Wright et al., 1995; Machin and Mayr, 2013; Jansson, 2016) or the framing of corporate scandals (Feng et al., 2012; Clemente and Gabbioneta, 2017) can be examined. Due to their high news value, scandals are extensively covered by the media. Yet, according to the prior research, the amount and tone of media coverage depends on various factors. In a longitudinal study involving press data from 1998 to 2007, Zavyalova et al. (2012) show that the amount and tone of media coverage can be influenced by companies’ actions and peer behaviour. Benediktsson (2010) proves that the amount of media coverage depends on the political orientation of the examined newspapers. In their comparative study, Feng et al. (2012) provide evidence that the framing of authorities by the news media in the USA and China differs significantly. The increasingly digitised media environment and social media offer new possibilities for research concerning corporate scandals. Such technological developments allow scientists to look not only at media coverage, but also to analyse user generated content. This includes, for example, car owners’ responses to the Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal (Markowitz et al., 2017), customer behaviour during the horsemeat scandal (Tse et al., 2018), responses of football fans to the FIFA scandal (Hölzen and Meier, 2018) and the influence of social media in constructing racism (Baker and Rowe, 2013). Scholars are also starting to investigate how scandals spread on social media from a network perspective (Yilmaz et al. 2012). This includes studies of the effects of online firestorms on corporations (Pfeffer et al., 2013; Einwiller, 2016). The majority of prior studies have focused on firms as corporations. However, the general logic of the formation and dissemination of scandals also applies to non-economic organisations. Few studies so far have analysed the scandals of higher education institutions. The existing research concerning higher education institutions typically looks at cases in North America that mostly involve university sports teams (Lucas and Fyke, 2014; Teetzel and Weaving, 2014). One of the most studied events in this regard is the Duke University lacrosse scandal, which included false allegations of rape. In her paper on the case, Len-Rios (2010) shows that the local press affected the image restoration practices implemented by the university. The literature also includes research on media effects in cases of academic fraud or plagiarism. Such studies include, among others, the cross-cultural narrative analysis of newspaper coverage of the Hwang cloning scandal by Kruvand and Hwang (2007), as well as a study on the case of the German Federal Minister of Education and Research who resigned after the revocation of her doctorate due to plagiarism (Fähnrich et al., 2015). Another field that has recently attracted the attention of scholars is that of sports management and communication. Related studies analyse the effects of scandals on the part of athletes, teams or coaches on their sponsors (Hughes and Shank, 2005; Osborne et al., 2016; Kelly et al., 2018), as in the Tiger Woods case (Knittel and Stango, 2013). However, sports organisations 412

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themselves, for example, FIFA (Baker and Rowe, 2013; Bayle and Rayner, 2018) or football clubs such as Juventus Turin in Italy (Baroncelli and Fella, 2006) are also studied in the context of scandals. Referring to the role of the media, Osborne et al. (2016) show that the frequency of newspaper coverage of athletes’ off-field misbehaviour depends on the person involved, since scandals involving famous athletes produce higher news values and thus receive more frequent media attention than cases involving unknown athletes. In this literature review, we have highlighted the diverse and interdisciplinary interest in the role of the media in corporate scandals. Nevertheless, we would also like to point out some limitations in the existing research that we suggest as future research topics. We state that studies often focus on big scandals and are designed as case studies. Therefore, there is a significant amount of research available on easily accessible and obvious scandals, such as the Volkswagen and Enron cases. As a result, we know a lot about how specific scandals are covered in the media, but not very much about why certain corporate wrongdoings emerge as scandals and why others do not. Due to the very case-specific nature of scandals, comparative as well as longitudinal research is difficult to conduct. This leads to a lack of true comparative research and longitudinal studies. It is also important to note that more research is needed on the effects of digitisation and social media on the dissemination of corporate scandals. This should include conceptual and methodological work on how the changing media environment, for example the emergence of social media, affects the logic of corporate scandals. Although there is a growing body of research concerning firestorms on social media, the focus of such studies is mostly on social media itself, while the interaction between the different arenas (e.g. social media and legacy media) is neglected. Finally, we have identified a shortage of definitional work in the research concerning corporate scandals. Most prior studies do not use a clear definition of such scandals. The academic work on them is often related to research regarding the crisis communication of corporations. Often, the terms ‘crisis’ and ‘scandal’ are applied almost as synonyms without reflecting the specific natures of the two concepts. In the following section, we therefore suggest a framework for defining and analysing corporate scandals.

The public sphere: where corporate scandals unfold Our literature review shows that the role of the media is decisive in terms of the dissemination and unfolding of corporate scandals. Without public knowledge of corporate misconduct, there is no scandal (Imhof, 2005). The main definitory element of a scandal is, therefore, publicity. The media hence serves to generate the publicity that turns the wrongdoings of corporations or individuals into scandals. Yet, the role of the media can only be fully understood in light of the function that the media has in modern societies. What makes the media so important is the fact that its outlets constitute the public sphere and thus fulfil two major functions in mediated societies. First, the media functions as a mirror for the members of a given society. Indeed, the general public increasingly follow procedures of societal relevance exclusively through new and old media. Due to the role of social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, we argue that the importance of mediated procedures has increased dramatically. Second, the media also serves as a platform. That is, the media constitutes the arena wherein stakeholders articulate their ratings and judgements regarding corporations. Actors seeking to foster a corporate scandal will hence seek publicity in the media in order to disseminate their opinions. In the commercialised media, such actors find grateful recipients for their advances, since negativity serves as a main news value. When we position the public sphere and the media at the centre of corporate scandals, reputation becomes the principal measurement of such scandals, which we will demonstrate in the following section. 413

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Three dimensions of corporate scandals As stated in the literature review, relatively few studies concerning corporate scandals include a clear definition of a scandal. We hence attempt to fill this gap and suggest a definition based on reputation theory. Reputation can be simplistically described as the evaluation of a corporation by the public. Commonly, the concept of reputation is defined as the evaluation of a firm by its stakeholders (Fombrun, 1996) or in the media. The latter is usually referred to as media reputation, and it is defined as the overall evaluation of an organisation in the media (Deephouse, 2000). Reputation is, therefore, an indicator of how well respected (or otherwise) a particular organisation is. A scandal is an event whereby the reputation of a corporation is fundamentally at risk. We thus define a scandal as denial of reputation. Further, the term scandalisation refers to the communicative dynamics within the public sphere that lead to such a denial of reputation. According to most theories, reputation is a multidimensional concept. Eisenegger (2016) states that scandals are also multidimensional and distinguishes between the three dimensions of scandals that are related to a corporation’s reputation. This approach is based on Jürgen Habermas’s (1984) theory of communicative action. His theory postulates that actors must prove themselves in three different realms: the objective-instrumental, the moral-ethical and the expressive-emotional. In modern society, corporations, individuals or institutions can gain and lose reputation within these three realms. During a scandal, as our definition suggests, reputation is denied due to failures in at least one of these three realms. Initially, a corporation can be evaluated within the objective-instrumental realm. It is evaluated positively if it successfully fulfils the purpose that it was created for. In terms of modern firms, this means the production of high-quality products and the generation of stable shareholder value. We use the term functional reputation as an indicator of such professional competence. When a scandal threatens its functional reputation, the corporation is perceived as incompetent or lacking in professionalism. Examples of such scandals include product recalls in the food or automotive industries and medical malpractice. When a corporation is evaluated within the moral-ethical realm, it must act in such a way that it conforms to societal norms and values. This refers to formal, codified rules (e.g. in the form of a regulatory framework) as well as informal, non-codified rules. We refer to this type of reputation as social reputation. Such reputation is awarded when a corporation acts responsibly and fairly while pursuing its primary goals. Social reputation is denied when a corporation deliberately breaches the prevailing norms and rules of society. Examples here include fraud or tax evasion as well as cases of sexual harassment or racism within a corporation. Within the expressive-emotional realm, the profile or self-presentation of a corporation forms the basis for evaluations. The term expressive reputation refers to how emotionally attractive, unique or authentic a given corporation is. During a scandal related to its expressive reputation, the identity of a corporation is placed under scrutiny. A corporation discredits itself when it does not conform to what it has pretended to be. If a corporation does not ‘walk the talk’, then it is hence no longer perceived as trustworthy or credible. Therefore, a gap exists between the profile of a given corporation and the perception of others. Typically, a scandal concerning expressive reputation involves a lie, hypocrisy or deception. A complete scandal consists of the denial of reputation in all three realms. It is a combination of a perceived lack of professional competence (functional failure), breaches of formal or nonformal societal norms (social failure) and the questioning of a corporation’s trustworthiness or credibility (expressive failure). The intensity of a scandal increases in exactly that order. This can be explained by means of the attribution of responsibility. In his situational crisis communication theory, Coombs (2008) shows that the reputational threat posed by a given crisis depends on the 414

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attribution of responsibility. When applied to corporate scandals, we state that functional failure is the least severe type of failure. A bad professional move will generate headlines, but the outrage will be limited if no deliberate act can be identified. Social failures usually weigh more heavily on a corporation’s reputation and cause far greater outcry among the public. Misdeeds such as fraud, greed, sexual harassment or racism can usually be linked to the intentional actions of individuals. The attributed responsibility is thus stronger in the case of social failure. Finally, expressive failures threaten the reputation of a corporation most severely, since they include deception, which implies a strong attribution of responsibility. Due to the stronger attribution of responsibility, the social and expressive failures of corporations have higher news values. Hence, the media also allows more room for such failures in news coverage. Actors seeking to generate a corporate scandal thus always try to emphasise social and expressive failures. Big corporate scandals often involve a combination of all three types of failures. For example, during the global financial crisis, the banks were accused of having miscalculated their credit risks (functional failure), with greed being suggested as the main motive behind the miscalculation (social failure). Additionally, the promises of high returns with only low risks for investors turned out to be a deception (expressive failure). In recent years, however, the denial of reputation in all three realms has become more frequent due to the changing structure of the public sphere. Digitisation and the emergence of social media in particular have led to more emotional communicative dynamics that regularly trigger harsh public outcry about corporate failures. The management of scandals has thus become part of the daily business of corporations rather than an exception.

Corporate scandals in the digital age The combination of public sphere and reputation theories allows us to analyse systematically how scandals unfold in the media, as well as how changing conditions within the public sphere alter the logic of scandalisation. With digitisation, the public sphere is undergoing its latest transformation. Indeed, digitisation has fundamentally changed the way in which scandals evolve and disseminate. Further, it enhances already existing trends within media systems, for example, ongoing tabloidisation or personalisation. We identify two main aspects when it comes to scandals. First, due to the structural crisis within journalism, publishers are under increasing pressure to sell their products. Scandals with high news values hence represent valuable assets for the media. The media, especially tabloid newspapers but increasingly also other media types such as the subscription press, are therefore increasingly playing the role of the scandalising actor. This leads to a higher frequency of scandals, as well as a more aggressive and lurid tone in reporting. Second, in the ongoing process of platformisation of the web (Helmond, 2009) – i.e. the increased influence of global technology platforms on the logic of public communication processes – the role of the news media as gatekeeper is being challenged (Wallace, 2018). Although the legacy news media remain relevant as producers and disseminators of content, the processes of agenda building and agenda setting are changing. Digitisation changes the structure of the public sphere into a long-tail public sphere (Neuberger, 2009), wherein professional news producers are increasingly competing for attention with semi-professional news outlets, for example so-called alternative media or corporate public relations. By using social media, almost everybody can produce and distribute content without having to adhere to the professional principles of journalism or ethical guidelines and without clear accountability. Corporations themselves can potentially exert a direct influence on their audience and, therefore, they might have greater control over their reputation. However, this is just one side of the coin. It also means that pressure groups and the stakeholders of a corporation can directly influence the same audience, which actually leads to less control over reputation. During scandals, pressure groups 415

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can articulate and disseminate their positions via social media without having to pass journalistic selection procedures. As social media sites are designed to trigger emotions and provoke user reactions, the public outcry as well as the tone of the scandals become harsher due to the lack of counterbalance traditionally provided by professional journalistic guidelines. This principle of emotionality also leads to an even more augmented focus on the social and expressive failures of corporations in the public sphere. Scandals thus become more severe, but also more frequent; they evolve faster and are less controllable as almost everybody can at least try to provoke a scandal or join the process of scandalisation. The new unleashed scandal (Poerksen and Detel, 2014) no longer follows the linear and unidirectional logic of the traditional mass media. New actors using new channels with a new spectrum of topics generate public outcry that oscillates between extremes, with only restricted possibilities being available for corporations to control and manage scandals. Our framework is thus also of practical relevance. It highlights the necessity for communication managers to monitor, categorise and assess systematically the risk of their public exposure. During this process, reputation monitoring based on (social) media data can be key to the early detection and successful management of corporate scandals.

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PART V

Consequences and legacies of media scandals

42 SHAME AND SCANDAL Making the personal political Julian Petley

Skimmington rides again Across Europe, rituals used to be enacted against traditional targets of communal resentment or hostility – lechers, promiscuous women, nagging wives, adulterers, swindlers, misers and so on. These rituals, intended to shame and humiliate their victims, were known in different parts of England as skimmington rides, skimmity, rough music and riding the stang; in France as charivari; and in Germany as Katzenmusik. In a skimmington ride,1 the victim would be visited by a boisterous crowd, and in full cry the ‘Skimmington’ would parade an effigy of the ridiculed victim seated backwards on a donkey or a wooden pole; or the victim’s person would be hauled about and made to ‘ride the stang’, in which case he or she might be roughly treated or ducked into a convenient pond or dung-heap. (Pearson 1983, 197) In modern times, these functions have been largely taken over by forms of journalism, not least crime reporting. As Steve Chibnall has pointed out, crime news ‘illustrates most effectively the system of beliefs, values and understandings which underlies newspaper representations of reality . . . Nowhere else is it made quite so clear what it is that newspapers value as healthy and praiseworthy or deplore as evil and degenerate in society’ (1977, x). He continues: Crime news may serve as the focus for the articulation of shared morality and com­ munal sentiments. A chance not simply to speak to the community but for the community, against all that the criminal outsider represents, to delineate the shape of the threat, to advocate a response, to eulogise on conformity to established norms and values, and to warn of the consequences of deviance. In short, crime news provides a chance for a newspaper to appropriate the moral conscience of its readership . . . The existence of crime news disseminated by the mass media means that people can no longer need to gather together to witness punishments. They can remain at home for moral instruction. (Ibid., x–xi) 421

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However, such journalism is by no means necessarily confined to crime news, and thrives in particular on the circulation of scandal. In the national press in Britain it finds its most regular home in the red tops (the Sun, Star and Mirror), the up-market Telegraph, and the mid-market tabloids the Express and the Mail. It is a form of journalism particularly associated with the Mail.

‘Opprobrious discourse’ The term ‘scandal’ refers primarily to actions, events or circumstances which involve the transgression of certain values, norms or moral codes, which, as Anthony King puts it, ‘occupy a sort of middle ground of impropriety’ (quoted in Thompson 2000, 14). Scandals, especially when amplified by the media, seriously call into question the reputation of the individual or institution concerned, and do so through the employment of what John B. Thompson calls ‘opprobrious discourse’, a form of moralising which reproaches and rebukes, which scolds and condemns, which expresses disapproval of actions or individuals. It is discourse which carries the implication that the actions bring shame, disgrace or discredit to the individual or individuals who performed them. It is a discourse which can stigmatise. (Ibid., 20) However, scandalmongering is not only a means by which moral transgressors can be shamed before a potentially vast audience but is also, whether deliberately conceived of as such or not, a form of remoralisation which works to reinforce the validity of the values, norms or moral codes which have been transgressed. As James Lull and Stephen Hinerman argue: ‘The media scandal is but the most extreme example of how, in practice, individuals are held to an imagined, idealised standard of social conduct’ and ‘conventional morality is once again asserted as normal’ (1997, 5). As Angela McRobbie and Sue Thornton have pointed out, in Britain, most national newspapers play ‘the role of moral guardian, ever alert to new possibilities for concern and indignation’, although different papers have their ‘own style of in-house moralism’ (1995, 570). This style reaches its apogee (or nadir, according to taste) in the Mail, and is an absolutely crucial aspect of the paper’s ideological mission. As McRobbie and Thornton argue, during the 1980s the paper was in complete harmony with Thatcherism, daily ‘reaching out to win consent through endlessly defining and redefining social questions and representing itself as the moral voice of the newly self-identified middle class as well as the old lower-middle class’ (ibid., 569). Indeed, its attempts at maintaining Thatcherite hegemony have extended way beyond the Thatcher era, the paper not only acting as a form of unofficial opposition during the ‘New Labour’ years but also excoriating the Major and Cameron governments when it felt they were deviating from the true Thatcherite path. This was a process in which amplifying scandals involving its ideological foes frequently played a key role, as Cameron discovered to his cost when in 2015 the paper serialised Michael Ashcroft and Isabel Oakeshott’s unofficial biography, Call Me Dave, which alleged that whilst an undergraduate at Oxford he had put a ‘private part of his anatomy’ into a dead pig’s mouth as part of an initiation ceremony for the Piers Gaveston Society.

‘Public ridicule and contempt’ This particular conception of journalism found its most vocal champion in Paul Dacre, who edited the Mail from 1992 to 2018 and has been editor-in-chief of Associated Newspapers

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(now DMG Media), the publishers of the Mail, since 1998. In an extremely rare public appearance he explained the role of journalistic shaming in a speech to the Society of Editors: Since time immemorial public shaming has been a vital element in defending the parameters of what are considered acceptable standards of social behaviour, helping ensure that citizens – rich and poor – adhere to them for the good of the greater community. For hundreds of years, the press has played a role in that process. It has the freedom to identify those who have offended public standards of decency – the very standards its readers believe in – and hold the transgressors up to public condemnation. (Quoted in McNally 2008) Equally unsurprisingly it also features in one-time star Mail columnist Melanie Phillips’s endless jeremiads against human rights, for example in an article headed ‘The Law of Human Wrongs’, on 6 December 2006, in which she argued that: Scorn or shaming are important in reaffirming the boundaries of what is considered acceptable behaviour and helping ensure that people adhere to them. Centuries ago, this function was performed very effectively by the stocks. Today’s Press fulfils much the same function. It allows individuals to identify those who they feel have wronged them and hold them up to public ridicule and contempt. But perhaps rather more surprisingly, this idea of journalism’s purpose has also found an academic proponent in the shape of Tim Luckhurst, Professor of Journalism at the University of Kent. Thus in an article headlined ‘Read All About It: Britons Have Always Loved Scandal’, in the Guardian, on 25 May 2011, he claimed that: In the 115 years since the birth of professional, popular journalism ordinary readers have chosen to use their favourite titles to censure and regulate the conduct of people who have grown rich on their wages . . . The sanction of public opinion is being applied to hypocrisy of which millions disapprove. He expanded on this theme a few days later, in the Mail, on 31 May 2011, in a piece under the headline ‘Why Twitter Knows More about Morality than High Court Judges’, which was quoted at length by Paul Dacre when, to his very evident irritation and indignation, he was summoned to appear before the Leveson Inquiry on 6 February 2012. Luckhurst argued that: ‘We reserve the right to scrutinise and censure the conduct of people who have grown rich on our wages or claim authority over our lives’, and, in his view, ‘the community’s interest in private wrongdoing delivers an emphatic public good’ by exposing it to the sanction of public opinion and thus creating an incentive to behave responsibly. Such forthright declarations and endorsements of journalism’s role in shaming those in the public eye when they become involved in scandals are relatively rare outside the pages of the Mail, although the sentiments underlying them undoubtedly inform a great deal of writing about public figures of one kind or another in significant sections of the UK national press. And it is precisely because this kind of journalism is so common in so many national titles that it is worth examining its purpose, its underlying assumptions and its success or failure (in its own terms) more closely and critically.

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Sexual-political scandals The first, and perhaps most obvious, point to make is that attempting to shame people by putting them in the modern equivalent of the stocks doesn’t necessarily achieve the desired effect. Scandals can certainly be reputation busters, but certain types of reputations are far more vulnerable to the destructive effects of scandalmongering than others. In the political arena it certainly can and does seriously harm careers, although the damage is not necessarily terminal. For example, Cecil Parkinson was forced to resign in 1983 as both chairman of the Conservative Party and Secretary of State for Trade and Industry after it was revealed that he had made his former secretary, Sara Keays, pregnant. However, he returned as Secretary of State for Energy in 1987, was elevated to the Lords in 1992 and re-appointed as party chairman in 1997. Similarly David Mellor had to resign as Secretary of State at the Department of National Heritage in 1992 after the revelation that he had had an extra-marital affair with an actress, Antonia de Sancha, which was shortly followed by the news that in 1990 he had accepted an all-expenses-paid invitation for himself and his family to stay in a villa in Marbella rented by the daughter of a leading figure in the Palestine Liberation Organisation, with which the British government had just severed links because of its support for the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. He lost his parliamentary seat in 1997, but has since pursued a successful career in business consultancy and the media. This, ironically, included writing a column for The People, the paper which had done the most to propel the de Sancha scandal into the limelight. Even more ironic, given Mellor’s well-documented penchant for high society, was the column’s title: Man of the People. The Parkinson and Mellor cases illustrate the opportunities for public shaming offered not simply by revelations of sexual indiscretions, but also by behaviour which is perceived as hypocritical. As Thompson puts it: Many people may not be shocked by the activity which is disclosed, and they may not adhere (or adhere consistently) to the relevant norms and codes in the practical conduct of their own lives. But they may well feel a sense of resentment towards politicians who have the temerity to prescribe forms of behaviour for others to which they themselves do not adhere. (2000, 126) For example, such an attitude was forcefully expressed by the Mirror, on 3 June 1996: The Conservatives set themselves on a pedestal to lecture the rest of us on right and wrong. They appointed themselves the high priests of modern morality – not just sexual, but in relationships, finance and even how we live our lives. But they are not the party of morality, family values and sound money, but of adultery, hypocrisy and fat cats. Conservatives are particularly prone to accusations of hypocrisy when it comes to sex as they are widely (if mistakenly) regarded as belonging to a party whose members adhere to a strict moral code in sexual matters. Similarly Labour MPs are especially susceptible to the charge of hypocrisy when it comes to monetary scandals, as financial impropriety is perceived to be at odds with their socialist principles (again mistakenly, since many Labour MPs would not even claim to be socialists). Parkinson was especially unfortunate in that the 1983 election was fought particularly strongly on the theme of ‘family values’ – an offshoot of the ‘Victorian values’ (of a kind) whose return Mrs Thatcher had called for in an interview with Brian Walden on ITV’s Weekend World on 16 January that year. Similarly the John Major government (1990–1997) was 424

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marked by a whole series of sexual scandals which were given greatly added impetus by Major’s call at the 1993 party conference for the country to go ‘Back to Basics’. In point of fact there was little in the speech about sexuality, apart from a promise to deal with ‘the loathsome trade in pornography’, but as Debbie Epstein and Richard Johnson note: What proved critical, however, was the adoption of a moral traditionalist tone, including the usual references to ‘the family’ and ‘responsibility’, and the labelling of the Conservative Party as the party of morality. The party was now vulnerable to every personal moral disclosure, around financial and political corruption, but also, given the press’s own agenda, around sexuality. For editors and journalists, the high-profile espousal of morality offered additional justification for the papers’ risky stories, and a further defence against threats to introduce privacy legislation against press intrusion. (1998, 75) Thus the next few years saw, among many other things,2 the resignations of: Tim Yeo, Environment and Countryside Minister, who had criticised the number of single mothers in Britain but was revealed to have fathered a child during an extra-marital affair with a Conservative councillor; the Earl of Caithness, Minister for Aviation and Shipping (an extra-marital affair that had allegedly contributed to the suicide of his wife); Hartley Booth, Parliamentary Private Secretary and married Methodist lay preacher (an affair with a young researcher); David Ashby, Parliamentary Private Secretary (married, but going on holiday with a male friend and sharing a bed with him); Michael Brown, junior government whip (an affair with a 20-year-old man when the age of consent for same-sex relationships was 21); Robert Hughes, Minister responsible for the Citizen’s Charter (an affair with a constituency worker who had come to him for advice about an abusive relationship); Richard Spring, Parliamentary Private Secretary (‘threein-a-bed sex romp’ with a woman and another man); and Rod Richards, Welsh Office minister and staunch advocate of ‘Back to Basics’ (an extra-marital affair).

‘Baddest man on the planet’ However, in the field of popular culture, scandal, far from generating shame, can contribute greatly to a celebrity’s well-knownness, not to mention notoriety. Of course, how a scandal develops, and whether it succeeds as an act of public shaming, all depends on the particular circumstances of specific cases. As Ellis Cashmore puts it apropos cases involving celebrities: ‘Scandal is like an improvised explosive device, or IED: to some, a valuable, but extremely volatile resource. It can blow a nondescript figure to the stratosphere of fame in an instant, or it can wreak destruction’ (2014, 129). Whether or not a scandal works to enhance a celebrity’s image depends very much on the nature of the scandal. Scandals which involve serious law-breaking, such as the events which led to O. J. Simpson being tried for murder in 1994/95 and imprisoned for armed robbery and kidnapping in 2008, are almost impossible to live down, although it could be argued that these acts extended so far beyond the ‘middle ground of impropriety’ as not to constitute scandals at all. On the other hand, Mike Tyson managed successfully to resume his boxing career after being gaoled for rape in 1992. Far from appearing chastened by the experience, he behaved during his comeback, which began in 1995, in a way that only intensified his ‘baddest man on the planet’ image. However, the fact that he toned down his behaviour and demeanour very considerably once he retired from boxing in 2006 strongly suggests that he had been, at least to some extent, 425

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playing up to the scandal-ridden persona which the media had helped to create, and had done so for sound commercial reasons. Whether the career of the film producer Harvey Weinstein will survive the numerous accusations of shameful and scandalous sexual behaviour, culminating in his arrest in May 2018 on charges of rape and sexual abuse, remains to be seen. Given the right circumstances, and in particular astute media management, behaviour which could once be represented as so shameful as to ruin a show business career for all eternity can now not only be shrugged off but also, on occasion, put to creative, career-enhancing use. Take, for example, the Sex Pistols, whose swearing and general demeanour on Thames Television’s Today programme on 1 December 1976 catapulted them, and indeed punk as a whole, to national fame, greatly aided by a tabloid storm which lasted for days. Indeed, the Mirror headline, ‘The Filth and the Fury!’, was later used by Julien Temple as the title of his second film about the band. Ironically, while the programme did nothing but good for the Pistols, it effectively ended the television career of the interviewer, Bill Grundy, who had very clearly egged on the assembled punks. As McRobbie and Thornton observe: ‘Disapproving mass media coverage legitimises and authenticates youth cultures to the degree that it is hard to imagine a British youth “movement” without it’ (1995, 565). Other examples that spring to mind are: the early Madonna who, as Cashmore points out, ‘refined rule breaking into a form of career advancement’ (2014,141); Miley Cyrus, who attempted to throw off the wholesome teen idol image which she had garnered on the Disney Channel series Hannah Montana by, for example, smoking salvia with a bong, twerking and simulating sex acts with a giant foam finger at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards, and swinging naked on a wrecking ball in the video of the same name; Rob Lowe and Paris Hilton, who both managed to revitalise undistinguished acting careers on the back of the unauthorised distribution of home videos of themselves having sex; and finally Hugh Grant, whose arrest for having oral sex with a prostitute in a public place in Los Angeles in 1995 did his career no harm at all – indeed, as Cashmore states: His notoriety, though short-lived, enabled him to exchange his image as a Cary Grant epigone and suitor of Estée Lauder’s golden girl for that of a rakish libertine. Like a rebranding exercise, an indiscretion that might have ended a career in earlier times offered the chance to adjust the public image and renew fortunes. (Ibid., 134) The moral of these and many other similar cases is that journalists who wish to shame people by scandalmongering would do well to remember the line from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray: ‘There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.’

‘Moral bindingness’ What we have seen thus far is that certain kinds of people (particularly politicians) are more prone to scandalous stories being circulated about them, and to the attendant shaming, than are others. Certain norms are also more scandal sensitive than others, and the infringement of those that are also backed up by legal prohibitions tends to propel the action beyond the realm of mere scandal and into that of criminality. These considerations now bring us on to discussing the nature of the audiences for media scandalmongering, and their differing reactions to it. Cashmore argues that ‘reactions to scandal, especially sex scandal, form four main categories: condemnation; indifference; resentment; and approval’ (ibid., 140). These reactions vary 426

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between different historical periods and different societies, as well as within the same society. One thing, however, is absolutely certain, and that is that ‘readers, viewers, listeners and the various social groups categorised under the heading of public opinion cannot be read off the representation of social issues’ in the media (McRobbie and Thornton 1995, 572). This is particularly important to bear in mind in Britain, which, extremely unusually for a western European liberal democracy, has a predominantly socially conservative national press in whose right-wing populist discourse the amplification of scandals of certain kinds, and especially of sex scandals, plays a key ideological role. To put it crudely, just because the Mail represents something as scandalous and tries to shame those involved, this doesn’t mean that it represents the view of the population as a whole – or indeed of the entirety of its own readership. Thompson points out that, for a media scandal to ignite, the values or norms which have been transgressed ‘must have some degree of moral force or “bindingness” for some individuals or groups’ (2000, 15). However, this does not necessarily mean that the values or norms are ‘likely to elicit general or widespread consensus in a particular social-historical context’. This is particularly so in such a socially heterogeneous and diverse country as the UK. Indeed, the scandals which still populate the pages of much of the British national press tend to involve values and norms that are adhered to loosely (if at all) by most people, and may be adhered to more in principle than in practice. They are token values and nominal codes of behaviour to which many people pay lip service but which, when it comes to making key decisions, play a relatively marginal role in their lives. (Ibid., 19–20) This is particularly true of sexual-political scandals.

Autres temps, autres moeurs? As noted earlier, it is the view of the Mail (and also implicit in the manner in which many other UK national papers deal with scandals) that generally accepted moral standards should determine the extent to which scandalous private information can be published. In his above-mentioned articles, Luckhurst invokes ‘ordinary readers’, ‘most Britons’, and even ‘we’, but all the reliable evidence (e.g., that collected annually by the British Social Attitudes Survey) suggests that views about sexual morality vary greatly across the population and have generally become more liberal with the passage of time. Indeed, as the then Sir David Eady put it in a speech given at Gray’s Inn on 12 December 2002: There is no longer, if there ever was, a generally agreed code of sexual morality. Marriage no longer appears to have the particular status it used to be accorded. We are not courts of morals. Nowadays many people, particularly young people, lead lives which in the old days what [sic] would have been called ‘promiscuous’. Now it is simply known as a ‘sexually active’ or ‘fun loving’ lifestyle. If a sportsman or model does not presume to preach to the general public, why should he or she have imposed upon them by anyone, let alone judges or tabloid journalists, the standards which used to be applied from behind the twitching curtains of suburbia half a century ago—on pain of prurient exposure? No surprise, then, that this judge is a particular hate figure for the Mail. But it is surely also significant, in this context, that while the Mail sold two and a half million copies daily in 2003 427

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at the height of its Dacre-era success, it suffered an average annual loss of 82,000 sales between 2007 and 2012, and of 87,000 between 2012 and 2017. It now sheds at least 4 per cent of its readers every year, selling over 60,000 fewer copies a day. And for other papers, the situation is even worse. So how can the prevalence of highly moralistic scandal stories, aimed at shaming those who have infringed certain norms and values, particularly sexual ones, be reconciled with the facts that (a) those norms and values are far less dominant within society as a whole than once they were, and (b) the papers concerned have all suffered serious declines in readership in recent decades?

Targeting shame and scandalmongering There are at least three possible answers to this question. First, these stories may not appeal to the population as a whole (much of which anyway does not read newspapers, either online or in print), but they are most certainly designed to appeal to a particular newspaper’s readership. British national newspapers specialise in telling their readers what their editors believe they want to hear and in confirming those readers in their already existing beliefs and opinions, thus maintaining sales and ideological consistency at one and the same time. And as the need to hang onto readers becomes increasingly intense, so the motivation to give them more and more of ‘what they want’ becomes ever stronger. But, second, it is extremely important to understand that such stories, and especially sexual-political scandals, are frequently run not simply to appeal to readers but in order to shame political figures, sections of parties and indeed whole parties of which a newspaper disapproves. The political complexion of the British national press being what it is, Labour and Liberal Democrat politicians are particularly at risk of being fingered for allegedly scandalous behaviour, but because the Conservative press supports overwhelmingly the right wing of the party, Conservatives who are perceived as too socially liberal are also targets for shaming (vide Cameron again, who was never forgiven by papers such as the Mail for initiating the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013). Third, the motive for running a scandalous story may be political in a different way, namely to discourage a government from enacting a particular policy. Thus the shaming of David Mellor was not exactly unconnected with the fact that he had recently told the press that its intrusive behaviour meant that it was ‘drinking in the last chance saloon’, and they feared (quite wrongly, in fact) that the government was thinking of bringing in a privacy law. The scandal was thus used by the press (a) to make it seem as if politicians were contemplating a law which would make it much more difficult for the press to reveal their transgressions; and (b) to demonstrate the fate that awaited at the hands of the press any politician who had the temerity to contemplate measures which might curb its power. It is undoubtedly the case, though, that, as McRobbie and Thornton argue: The diversification of forms of media and the sophisticated restructuring of various categories of audience require that, while a consensual social morality might still be a political objective, the chances of it being delivered directly through the channels of the media are much less certain. (1995, 573) Since they wrote these words, the growth of the internet, and especially of social media, has made it far easier to challenge the stories which routinely circulate in Britain’s national newspapers, and in particular to show that many of the ‘scandals’ pedalled by them are in fact no such thing. Here websites and blogs such as Inforrm, Hacked Off, Zelo Street, Byline, 428

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openDemocracy, The Conversation, SubScribe and many others have done a formidable counter-hegemonic job. But it would be extremely unwise to underestimate or downplay the power of the press when it comes to amplifying scandals for political or ideological purposes. As I have argued elsewhere, contra McRobbie and Thornton, the vast majority of the national press has remained resolutely closed, and indeed bleakly hostile, to the critical incursions of the new media (whilst, of course, eagerly amplifying, within the limits of the law, the scandal stories which originate there), the political effectivity (in Westminster/Whitehall terms) of the new media is questionable, and, in terms of contemporary political reality, the inescapable fact is that . . . either politicians believe that the opinions expressed by the majority of newspapers do indeed reflect public opinion, or these are the opinions to which politicians are most highly sensitised and thus most liable to react to in policy terms. Consequently, what the public actually thinks counts for little. (Petley 2013, 95)

‘Stoking the fires of hatred’ For all these reasons, then, what appears in significant sections of the British national press, and especially scandalmongering in the interests of shaming its ideological and political enemies, should be a matter of considerable public concern. By devoting so much space and journalistic energy to such material, not only do such papers marginalise within their own pages issues of real importance, or indeed banish them altogether, but they also significantly influence the broadcasting agenda, and particularly that of the BBC. As is becoming ever clearer, if a story, however tendentious, dominates the national newspaper agenda, it will inevitably work its way onto the broadcast agenda, notwithstanding the broadcasters’ statutory commitment to impartiality. Mutatis mutandis, if the bulk of the press ignores an important story, which it routinely does in the case of those which don’t fit its political/ideological agendas (such as the infringement of electoral law by certain Brexit-supporting groups in the run-up to the referendum), then it is highly liable to find itself sidelined by the broadcasters too. (An honourable exception being Channel 4 News.) It really does have to be asked whether the shame-obsessed conception of journalism exemplified by, but by no means confined to, the Mail is desirable in a modern democratic society. In this chapter I have frequently stressed that Britain is now an extremely heterogeneous society in so many respects, but it also a very deeply divided one, and in the Brexit era it is becoming more riven by the day, although of course the vast bulk of national newspapers campaigned absolutely relentlessly for Brexit. In such a situation, constantly holding up to public shame and opprobrium certain groups of people, whether they be celebrities and politicians, or vulnerable Others such as immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, Muslims, travellers or any of the other numerous folk devils in the press hall of shame, seriously risks exacerbating already raw social divisions and fuelling profound tensions which threaten to rip the social bonds asunder. As Andrew O’Hagan argued in a particularly pungent review of the book Mail Men: The Unauthorised Story of the Daily Mail: Britain has become a place where a newspaper does best, in commercial terms, when it is stoking the fires of hatred. Show me a hatred and I’ll top it; show me a foreigner and I’ll ban him; show me a need and I’ll cast doubt on it; bring me a sensitive problem and I’ll crush it. (2017, 13) 429

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Peter Wilby (2014) followed a similar line in a New Statesman article about the Mail, although his remarks could apply equally well to the Sun, Express, Star, Telegraph and their Sunday counterparts, The Mail gives its readers a sense of belonging in an increasingly complex and unsettling world. Part of the trick is to make the world seem more threatening than it is: crime is rising, migrants flooding the country, benefit scroungers swindling the taxpayer, standards of education falling, wind turbines taking over the countryside . . . The Mail assures its readers they are not alone in their anxieties about this changing world.

Scandal sets the agenda This would matter far less if governments and political parties didn’t wake in fear each morning of what the Mail and Sun in particular have said about them, and if they didn’t simply read off ‘public opinion’ from right-wing newspaper editorialising. Confirmation that this is indeed the case was provided by the former Home Secretary Ken Clarke whilst testifying in 2017 to the Competition and Markets Authority Inquiry into the proposed merger of 21st Century Fox and Sky. Talking of the ‘rules’ which Blair and Cameron used to keep the press onside, he stated that: One was if you want to win an election you have got to have the Sun and if you want to keep in power you have got to have the Daily Mail. Constant communication to the proprietors trying to get the editorial line switched to your party was a key part of the struggle of recent years. Great deals were done. Speaking of the time when Theresa May was Home Secretary, he noted that ‘the Prime Minister, and Mrs May’s advisors, would tell her that she cannot possibly stop seeing those people. Gordon Brown used to prefer being on the phone to them all day’. In his view, politicians need to decide if it is really in the public interest for them to submit to the constant campaigning, sometimes of a hysterical kind, which has such an influence on the politicians because they think it has such an influence on the public and they need to defer to the media proprietors whenever they can, particularly Murdoch, who is by far the most powerful.3 Or as David Cameron put it in the debate on 13 July 2011 in which he announced the establishment of the Leveson Inquiry: ‘The relationship [between government and the press] did get unhealthy. It was too close and . . . too much time was spent courting the media and not enough time was spent confronting the problems.’4 The political bias of the national press in Britain would also matter less if the BBC in particular among the broadcasters did not allow national newspapers to set its own news agenda. That it does indeed do so was confirmed in 2014 by Robert Peston, then the Corporation’s economics editor, who stated that he found ‘most frustrating’ the way in which BBC News ‘is completely obsessed by the agenda set by newspapers . . . If we think the Mail and Telegraph will lead with this, we should. It’s part of the culture’ (quoted in Brown and Deans 2014). But the most dire consequence of such a skewing of the agenda is that it contributes significantly to shaping the public’s perceptions of the society, and indeed of the world, in which they are living. For example, a survey conducted by Ipsos MORI in 2013 showed that out of every 100 people in Britain, respondents thought that 28 were single parents, whereas the actual figure is 3. 430

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Similarly with Muslims (24 as opposed to 5), the unemployed (22 to 8), Black/Asian (32 to 11), and immigrants (31 to 13).5 Numerous other reliable surveys have produced similar findings. These are all groups that have repeatedly been the subject of scandalmongering and shaming in the press, and although one cannot of course prove that public perceptions are created by the press it would seem highly probable that, over the long term, endlessly repeated press stories about particular out-groups in society would have a degree of influence on public perceptions of and beliefs about them.

‘The age of contempt’ Of course, no-one would argue that the media should not scrutinise politicians in order to ensure that they are properly carrying out their democratic functions and to render them fully visible and accountable to the electorate. But when the stories disproportionately concern politicians of one particular party, then scandalmongering takes on a distinctly politically partisan complexion. And when a constant drip-feed of stories about political scandals, in which those genuinely in the public interest (MPs expenses and cash for questions, for example) endlessly rub shoulders with sheer character assassination (as in the case of Labour leaders Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn) and often heavily confected stories about MPs personal lives which are quite irrelevant to their public duties, this is a potent symptom of what Steven Barnett has called ‘the age of contempt’, in which ‘a relentlessly negative approach to both politicians and politics itself’ has meant that ‘a line has been crossed from detached scepticism to derision, cynicism and ridicule’ (2002, 404–405). A similar point has been made by John Lloyd, who claims that the contemporary media default position is that ‘politics is a dirty game, played by devious people who tell an essentially false narrative about the world and thus deceive the British people’ (2004, 20). In Barnett’s view, what we have witnessed is ‘a coarsening of political reporting which is in danger of undermining respect for democratic institutions and actors, and therefore democracy itself’ (2002, 406). As an example of such journalism, he cites an editorial from the Sun, on 1 February 1999, which had just engaged in a particularly vicious bout of scandalmongering about various figures in the recently elected Labour government and was now warning it not to contemplate retaliation: Too many politicians are sad, sordid, pathetic, inadequate wimps with private lives that make ordinary people’s stomachs churn. They are not fit to hold office. So, Mr Blair, get your tank off our lawn. Remember that we speak for millions of Brits who live cleaner lives than half of Westminster. We speak for the people who put you and your fornicating friends in power. (Quoted in ibid., 405) In the intervening years such reporting has only increased in quantity and its tone has become even more hectoring and vituperative. There are very strong parallels here with the manner in which in the USA Donald Trump and his supporters now habitually refer to the federal government as ‘the swamp’. There the ideological groundwork for this particularly virulent form of anti-political populism was laid for years by Fox News and the shock jocks of talk-radio, while on this side of the Atlantic it has been the work of much of the mainstream national press (although of course Rupert Murdoch is a common factor in both countries). In the UK this kind of journalism helped to galvanise the sentiments which reanimated UKIP, gave immense succour to the growing band of Tory ultras who loathe the EU and all its works, and ultimately played a key role in Brexit. Of course, it would be quite absurd to claim that all of this is entirely 431

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due to ideologically and politically motivated scandalmongering on the part of papers such as the Sun, Star, Mail, Express and Telegraph but, there again, it would be equally foolish to argue that long-term scandalmongering and attempts at public shaming have played no role at all in those newspapers’ attempts to render certain politicians and certain policies beyond the ideological and political pale. Such scandals are frequently about utterly trivial matters, and many have the most tenuous relationship with the truth, but their consequences for all of us are about as far from trivial as it is possible to get.

Notes 1 Chapter 39 of Thomas Hardy’s 1884 novel The Mayor of Casterbridge features a skimmington ride, and a modern-day version occurs in a 2006 episode of the ITV series Midsomer Murders entitled ‘Four Funerals and a Wedding’. 2 For further details see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/202525.stm. 3 https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a169fec40f0b627df214222/politicians-transcript-hearing011117.pdf 4 https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmhansrd/cm110713/debtext/110713-0001.htm 5 https://www.slideshare.net/IpsosMORI/ipsos-mori-great-britain-the-way-we-live-now

References Barnett, Steven (2002), ‘Will a crisis in journalism produce a crisis in democracy?’, Political Quarterly, 73(4), pp. 400–408. Brown, Maggie and Deans, Jason (2014), ‘Robert Peston: BBC follows the Daily Mail’s lead too much’, Guardian, 6 June. Cashmore, Ellis (2014), Celebrity Culture, 2nd ed., Abingdon: Routledge. Chibnall, Steve (1977), Law and Order News: An Analysis of Crime Reporting in the British Press, London: Tavistock Publications. Epstein, Debbie and Johnson, Richard (1998), Schooling Sexualities, Buckingham: Open University Press. Lloyd, John (2004), What the Media Are Doing to Our Politics, London: Constable and Robinson. Lull, James and Hinerman, Stephen (1997), ‘The search for scandal’, in James Lull and Stephen Hinerman (eds), Media Scandals, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 1–33. McNally, Paul (2008), ‘Paul Dacre attacks Mr Justice Eady over privacy curbs’, Press Gazette, 10 November. McRobbie, Angela and Thornton, Sue (1995), ‘Rethinking “moral panic” for multi-mediated social worlds’, British Journal of Sociology, 46(4), pp. 559–574. O’Hagan, Andrew (2017), ‘Who’s the real cunt?’, London Review of Books, 22 June, pp. 13–14. Pearson, Geoff (1983), Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears, London: Macmillan. Petley, Julian (2013), ‘“Are we insane?” The “video nasty” moral panic’, in Chas Critcher, Jason Hughes, Julian Petley and Amanda Rohloff (eds), Moral Panics in the Contemporary World, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 73–100. Thompson, John B. (2000), Political Scandal: Power and Visibility in the Media Age, Cambridge: Polity Press. Wilby, Peter (2014), ‘Paul Dacre of the Daily Mail: The man who hates liberal Britain’, New Statesman, 2 January, available at https://www.newstatesman.com/media/2013/12/man-who-hates-liberal-britain

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43 SCANDAL, MEDIA EFFECTS AND POLITICAL CANDIDATES Clarisse Warren and Dona-Gene Barton

Public and media fixation on political scandals is not new, and yet the rise of candidate-centered campaigns, the evolution of journalistic norms, and rapid changes in today’s media environment have intensified the media’s spotlight on the moral mishaps of politicians (Allern et al. 2012; Sabato, Stencel, and Lichter 2000; Thompson 2000; Tumber 2004; Tumber and Waisbord 2004). Sabato, Stencel, and Lichter emphasize that “new technologies and competitive forces have turned the pressure cooker of daily news decisions into a microwave oven, especially when it comes to sensational and sensitive stories about the private lives of political figures” (2000, 34). These dynamics are amplified as journalists and the public struggle to keep up with what seems like a revolving door of scandals that are often initiated at the tweeting hands of politicians. Given the accelerated growth of scandal coverage, it is even more important to understand how media attention to the moral and at times legal line-crossing of political representatives impacts citizens’ evaluations and vote choices. In this chapter, we provide an overview of existing knowledge as to how scandal coverage impacts the electoral fate of political candidates. Early research on scandal effects focused on documenting the negative, immediate, and varied electoral consequences faced by politicians linked to scandal. We begin by reviewing some of the most widely documented electoral effects associated with media attention to political scandals. Building on these important contributions, later research has offered more nuance to our understanding by investigating how various characteristics of the scandal, the candidate, the electoral context, and the media environment condition voters’ reactions to scandal coverage. We survey some of the prominent streams of research in these areas. Next, we examine scandal fatigue which can occur when the public becomes desensitized to ongoing scandal coverage. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of some areas where future research has the potential to enhance significantly our understanding of the intersection of scandal, media effects, and political candidates.

Electoral effects of political scandal coverage Not only is media attention to a politician’s perceived or actual wrongdoings required to create a scandal (Gamson and Lowi 2003; Waisbord 2004), but there are serious consequences from voters and political elites that are well documented. On the voters’ side of the equation, candidate evaluations suffer (Doherty, Dowling, and Miller 2011; Funk 1996; Peters 433

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and Welch 1980; Welch and Hibbing 1997) and vote share is depressed (Abramowitz 1988; 1991; Basinger 2013; Brown 2006; Hendry, Jackson, and Mondak 2008; Praino, Stockemer, and Moscardelli 2013) following news linking a politician to scandalous behavior. In terms of candidate response, incumbents embroiled in scandal are more likely to retire strategically (Groseclose and Krehbiel 1994; Jacobson and Dimock 1994; Praino, Stockemer, and Moscardelli 2013; Swearingen and Jatkowski 2011) especially when they are high-profile targets of media coverage (Graffin et al. 2013). Political elites also play an important role in the aftermath of scandal. Much like sharks smelling fresh blood in the water, high-quality challengers are more likely to surface in the subsequent primary and general elections (Basinger 2013; Lazarus 2008) and, consequently, scandal-ridden incumbents are more likely to be defeated as early as the primaries (Praino, Stockemer, and Moscardelli 2013). Additionally, the hint of scandal can make campaign fund raising more difficult (Rottinghaus 2014). It should come as no surprise that potential donors and party elites are less willing to invest in a candidate who is perceived as high risk because of the shadow of scandal. Beyond the immediate effects of scandal, Praino and his colleagues (2013) critically show that there are lingering effects of scandal that can take multiple election cycles to dissipate entirely.

Contextualizing political scandal effects As with any political phenomenon, context matters. Below, we review some of the major streams of research that have assessed how factors such as scandal type, candidate characteristics, electoral context, and media coverage characteristics influence the way voters react to politicians embroiled in scandal.

Scandal type We begin by reviewing how the type of scandal conditions voter reactions. A great deal of research explores how voters react to specific types of scandal. Although there are some minor conceptual differences in the literature on how to categorize scandal types, below we discuss three broad categories: sex scandals, financial scandals, and corruption scandals. Sex scandals. Tennessee politician and doctor Scott DeJarlais found himself in the middle of a sex scandal that rocked the pro-life, conservative U.S. Congressman’s 2014 reelection campaign and nearly cost him his House seat in a solidly Republican district. DeJarlais faced accusations that he forced his former wife to have two abortions, and attempted to persuade his mistress, who was also his patient, to have an abortion as well (Sullivan 2012). During an investigation launched by the Tennessee Board of Health, DeJarlais admitted under oath to having six extramarital affairs with three co-workers, two patients, and a drug representative (Carroll and Harrison 2012). He pled guilty and was fined (Carroll 2013). Despite running on a pro-life platform, DeJarlais was able to retain his seat in the House by winning his 2014 and 2016 elections. Although a tidal wave of negative press surfaced, DeJarlais weathered the storm. This case provides a unique glimpse into the world of sex scandals and their impact on political actors or, in examples like this one, the lack thereof. It is often assumed that politicians who find themselves embroiled in a scandal will either retire, as did U.S. Congressmen Anthony Weiner (D-NY) (Barrett 2011) and Al Franken (D-MN) (Fandos 2017), or lose their election bid, as did U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore (R-AL) (Yglesias 2017). Although cases of electoral demise following a sex scandal are common, there are plenty of examples, from that of DeJarlais in Tennessee to the high-profile case of U.S. President Bill Clinton, where voters are willing to forgive or overlook sexual indiscretions. 434

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Electoral consequences often are less severe in the case of “moral” or sex scandals, compared to “financial” scandals (Carlson, Ganiel, and Hyde 2000; Doherty, Dowling, and Miller 2011; 2014; Funk 1996). Sex scandals, unlike the other types of scandals mentioned in this chapter, are often not illegal. Rather, they are a violation of social norms that govern what is sexually acceptable within a society (Gamson and Lowi 2003; Thompson 2000). These norms may vary to some degree, but it is generally accepted that a married political actor is expected to remain faithful to his or her spouse. Additionally, sex scandals may include claims of sexual harassment, the distribution of provocative pictures, viewing pornography on state computers, soliciting prostitutes, and even in rare instances, serious accusations of child pornography or solicitation of a minor. Sex scandals are also unique in the variability of public and candidate response. Some scandals spurn outrage, while others get swept under the rug and forgotten. Research has shown that the public tends to have more tolerance for sex scandals when politicians blame the accusations on partisan tactics employed by the opposing party (Summers 2000). By claiming to be a victim of partisan rhetoric and dirty politics, politicians can more easily dismiss accusations of scandal. Even support for Bill Clinton following the Lewinsky affair has been attributed to reframing the scandal as a Republican political tactic that wasted taxpayer dollars (Miller 1999; Shah et al. 2002; Thompson 2000;). When scandals cannot be framed as a partisan tactic to turn a private act into a public issue—wasting public time and resources in the process—they become tales of morality with deeper societal implications (Gamson 2001). It is this introduction of a societal morality-based narrative that facilitates public scorn against the transgressor. To complicate the situation further, Thompson (2000) explains that there are three elements that can take an already negative sex scandal and amplify public outcry. These are hypocrisy, potential conflicts of interest, and second-order transgressions, such as denial. Although these three elements are easily transferrable to the other types of scandal, they are especially useful in understanding how a private matter can demolish political careers. Hypocrisy may manifest itself in many forms, but within the context of sex scandals, it is most likely to occur when a political actor professes to stand for traditional family values yet has an affair. Politically conservative candidates may suffer more severe consequences of a sex scandal while in office due to voter perceptions of hypocrisy (Basinger and Rottinghaus 2012; Rottinghaus 2014; Welch and Hibbing 1997). Rottinghaus (2014, 384) points out that rank and file members of the Republican Party, especially more conservative primary voters, are more critical of their potential nominee’s illegal or immoral actions because the voters and activists in the Republican Party are more conservative and adhere to more traditional values than other party members. If a candidate’s involvement in a scandal is framed by the media as an example of hypocrisy, this can negatively affect a candidate’s reputation (Gamson and Lowi 2003). The second element that amplifies the negative impact of sex scandals is potential for conflicts of interest. It is easier to recognize a conflict of interest when it comes to financial scandals or corruption scandals; however, sex scandals can provide political actors with the ability to favor their romantic interest at the expense of third parties. Sexual relationships can also lead to appointments, misuse of taxpayer funds, and even payoffs (Thompson 2000). Finally, Thompson’s (2000) conceptualization of second-order transgressions (as any response except full disclosure) adds to the weight of the charges. Denial or only telling partial truths can lead to further degradation of the political actor’s reputation, and it often extends the amount 435

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of news coverage a scandal attracts. If a political actor is caught lying—either by commission or omission—and new information slowly trickles out, then the negative effects of the scandal can last longer (Mitchell 2014). This suggests that if a candidate embroiled in a scandal—especially a sex scandal—has to eat crow, he or she would do well to eat it while it’s hot and to eat the whole thing. A sex scandal need not end a political actor’s career. It is possible for politicians to survive scandal by choosing between two viable options. The first is to reframe the scandal in terms of partisan political tactics. If the other party is using this as a tactic to distract from bigger, more important issues or as a means to gain power, then the spotlight can be at least partially taken off the embroiled politician. The second option is that the politician can admit to the sexual indiscretion and fully disclose any other elements that could leak out and prolong the negative effects. Mitchell (2014) has demonstrated that scandal effects decay rapidly, especially when new details are not released. Vonnahme (2014) found that the decline of scandal effects over time is especially pronounced among candidate supporters. Thus, it may be advantageous for a scandal plagued politician to admit to the allegations and move forward. Reflecting on the case of DeJarlais, it is possible that, by admitting to his extramarital affairs and seeking forgiveness from his constituents, he could have avoided these second-order transgressions, thereby shortening the lifespan of the scandal and saving his career. Financial scandals. Far less salacious but also prolific are financial scandals. Unlike sex scandals, financial scandals are more likely to involve breaking the law and constituents’ trust. Thompson characterizes financial scandals as the “illicit interlacing of money and power” (2000, 160). Money drives American politics, with the average cost of campaigning for a state-wide Senatorial seat in 2016 costing approximately $1.5 million, with variability by state (Kim 2016). Money and political power are inextricably intertwined, but it is not the mere interconnection of power and money that is the cause of concern. Instead financial scandals emerge when either money or power are used illegally to gain the other. Bribery, electoral corruption, misappropriation of funds, and the misuse of power for personal financial gain are some of the more prominent types of financial scandals (Thompson 2000). U.S. Congresswoman Corrine Brown (D-FL) found herself in the middle of a financial scandal in relation to her non-profit, One Door for Education Foundation. This foundation’s stated intentions were to provide scholarships to underprivileged students, but allegedly served as a personal slush fund (Bohn 2016; Dearen and Anderson 2016). Despite Brown pleading not guilty to several counts of mail and wire fraud, concealing facts on financial disclosure forms, theft of government property, obstruction of the Internal Revenue Service laws, and filing false tax returns, she was convicted on 18 counts out of a 22-count federal indictment (Dwyer 2017). Despite being caught in a financial scandal, Brown, a 12-term incumbent, sought reelection in 2016, but lost in the Democratic primary. Citizens are more willing to forgive political actors for moral indiscretions as opposed to financial scandals (Carlson, Ganiel, and Hyde 2000; Doherty, Dowling, and Miller 2011; 2014; Funk 1996). As Sabato and his colleagues state, “The public and the press are far more comfortable rummaging through a candidate’s checkbook than his or her bedsheets or liquor cabinet” (2000, 4). In accounting for which type of scandal is worse (financial or sex scandals), Doherty, Dowling, and Miller (2011) examined the impact of abuse of power on scandal effects through an experiment that measures response to sex scandals and financial scandals with and without an apparent abuse of power. With no apparent abuse of power, they find that individuals involved in financial scandal are judged more harshly when considering vote choice and job evaluation; however, sex scandals promote a more negative judgment on personal evaluations. When there is an obvious abuse of power, these negative judgments are amplified such that financial scandals 436

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with abuse of power have the most negative effect on personal evaluations, followed by job evaluations, and vote intent (Doherty, Dowling and Miller 2011). When abuse of power is present, financial scandals can be especially damaging to political careers. In Brown’s case, there was a clear abuse of power. Additionally, two of the three elements that amplify public reaction to scandal were present: conflicts of interest and the second-order transgression of denial (Thompson 2000). These factors may explain why she did not survive a bid for reelection, like many politicians involved in financial scandals. Financial scandals are typically accompanied by legal ramifications, which makes individuals less likely to admit their involvement. For political candidates involved in a financial scandal, there are usually no favorable outcomes, which provides them with only two options: retire or face likely defeat at the ballot box. Corruption scandals.  The third and final type of scandal highlighted in this chapter is corruption scandal. Although corruption scandals often involve money, they are different from financial scandals in their use of power. Watergate and the Iran-Contra scandals have been marked in history as the quintessential corruption scandals, as they shed light on previously undisclosed hidden forms of power that had been concealed to the public (Thompson 2000). It is important to understand that political scandals often conflate the phenomenon of the act of corruption with its effects of subverting the public interest for personal or private gain. It is this public interest dimension that is unique to corruption scandals, as these violate the public norms of those in power (Philp 1997). Corruption scandals blur the lines between what is politically proper and what is improper. They may include nepotism, cronyism, extortion, bribery, trading in influence, and embezzlement (Thompson 2000). Similar to financial scandals, corruption scandals are also more prone to illegal activities than are sex scandals. Corruption scandals can involve money, but they do not have to involve financial impropriety. Corruption scandals are often more difficult to spot, as it is more difficult to provide evidence of impropriety (Philp 1997; Thompson 2000). A particularly extreme case of political corruption scandal is that of former Democratic Governor of Illinois, Rob Blagojevich. In 2011, Blagojevich was impeached and later convicted of 17 charges which included wire fraud, attempted extortion, and conspiracy to solicit bribes (Long and Pearson 2009). The Blagojevich case involved allegations that he engaged in pay to play and influence peddling for Barack Obama’s Senate seat following the 2008 presidential election (Coen, Pearson, and Kidwell 2008). As Governor of Illinois, Blagojevich was responsible for appointing Obama’s Senate replacement and solicited bribes for this appointment (Justice Department Briefing on Blagojevich Investigation 2008). The Blagojevich case shows just how intertwined money and power can become. This case also demonstrates that corruption scandals involve more than just financial impropriety. They involve an abuse of power. As Governor, Blagojevich was within his duties and responsibilities to appoint a replacement for a vacant Senate seat, choosing someone he favored would not constitute corruption. However, by asking aspiring politicians to pay for the chance to be appointed he engaged in corruption. When scandal involves an abuse of power, a less-informed electorate may lack the knowledge necessary to hold a corrupt politician accountable (Klašnja 2017). Citizens with greater political knowledge are more likely to understand the charges of corruption and should therefore be more willing to hold the politician accountable for his or her bad behavior. Klašnja (2017) finds that political knowledge does promote citizens’ desires to hold a corrupt politician accountable, but partisanship mitigates this difference, as strong partisans are more politically knowledgeable and are therefore motivated to endorse their co-partisans despite corruption. In addition to voter characteristics, media coverage can moderate the impact of corruption scandals. Ferraz and Finan (2008) provide evidence that media coverage of government corruption 437

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can enhance voter accountability. Research also suggests that public reaction to political corruption is especially impacted when there is extensive media coverage and there is evidence that the corruption charges are founded (Costas-Pérez, Solé-Ollé, and Sorribas-Navarro 2012).

Candidate characteristics In addition to the type of infraction, candidate characteristics can also amplify or dampen the effects of scandal. Given the rise of candidate-centered campaigns it should come as no surprise that who is the subject of political scandal and how that individual responds matters greatly for public reaction. For example, both Bill Clinton and John Edwards faced allegations of sexual impropriety during U.S. presidential bids and yet Clinton survived largely unscathed whereas Edwards’s political ambitions were quickly extinguished. Not only were Clinton and Edwards different people with different personalities and traits but they also responded differently to the scandal allegations. Empirical efforts to understand better how candidate demographics such as gender and race moderate the effects of scandal have been limited (Barnes, Beaulieu, and Saxton 2018; Berinsky et al. 2011; Schwindt-Bayer, Esarey, and Schumacher 2018; Smith, Smith Powers, and Suarez 2005; Żemojtel-Piotrowska et al. 2017). Conversely, scholars have paid relatively more attention to the role of candidate messages and response to allegations of scandal. Although candidates may not be able to control the release of scandal information, very much within their control is how to respond to scandal. Candidate response strategy can play a powerful role in shaping public reactions. As previously mentioned, any response other than full disclosure and accepting responsibility can backfire on a candidate. By quickly repenting of their missteps, candidates not only provide themselves with the emotional equity necessary to rebuild the trust of their constituents, they also remove potential ammunition from opponents. Although candidates cannot often change their characteristics and traits, it is possible to use these traits to overcome scandal. If a candidate involved in scandal can tailor a message that resonates with the voters and have a genuine connection to the voters, it is possible for them to rebuild the voters’ trust (Smith, Barth, and Nir 2013). Additionally, incumbents can attempt to focus media attention on substantive issues that play to their established strengths (Bianco 1994; Druckman, Kifer, and Parkin 2009).

Electoral context Electoral success following scandal is highly context dependent. Although the characteristics of a candidate play a role, we would be negligent to ignore the electoral characteristics that moderate the effects of scandal. Perhaps one of the most obvious electoral characteristics is incumbency. Is the scandal-clad candidate a challenger or an incumbent? Although many scholars contend that scandal most often compels incumbents to retire by dissuading them from seeking reelection (Alford et al. 1994; Kiewiet and Zeng 1993; Grossclose and Krehbiel 1994), others suggest that scandal is becoming less disqualifying than ever before (Smith, Barth, and Nir 2013). Being politically stymied by scandal makes retirement an attractive option. However, it is important to recognize that scandal survival is quite common (Basinger 2013; Peters and Welch 1980; Welch and Hibbing 1997) and if there are no viable challengers, an incumbent involved in a scandal may still win reelection based on the lack of a qualified challenger and the numerous incumbency advantages. Conversely, if scandal erupts during a challenger’s campaign, the outcome is far different than that of an incumbent. Challengers are especially sensitive to vulnerabilities that result 438

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from implications of scandal (Krasno and Green 2008). Often challengers have yet to build up emotional equity with their voting base, so constituents are less likely to forget and forgive. Challengers have an uphill battle when attempting to overtake an incumbent, with the many advantages of name recognition and past experience. Not surprisingly, few studies have examined how challengers involved in scandal fare politically, so little is known regarding this dynamic. It isn’t that challengers do not have scandals that rock their campaigns. Rather, their campaigns simply matter less in the grand scheme of things because they are not generally breaking the trust of constituents—they are simply not building trust. Rottinghaus (2014) suggests that, in addition to incumbency, there are institutional, political, and economic factors that can ameliorate or deteriorate the negative consequences of political scandal. One such factor is the type of office held by the individual involved. Rottinghaus examines scandal at the executive branch and finds that presidents and their staff are more likely to survive a scandal when there are more partisans in the legislature but are less likely to survive when there is greater overall political opposition among Congress and the public. Interestingly, these results do not hold for state level executives, suggesting that federal office holders are less susceptible to scandal effects than lower-level politicians. Although the political environment shapes the duration of an executive scandal, economic growth and public approval appear to have no effect on surviving a scandal at either the national or state level (Rottinghaus 2014). The partisan composition of a candidate’s district is also important given the well documented finding that voters are less affected by scandals committed by a candidate who is a fellow partisan (e.g. Cortina and Rottinghaus 2017; Peterson and Vonnahme 2014).

Media coverage characteristics Given the critical role media play in disseminating scandal information, not only is the study of scandal effects, the study of media effects (Gamson and Lowi 2003; Waisbord 2004) but important research has looked explicitly at how characteristics of media coverage influence the effects of scandal information. For instance, media framing of scandal can have implications for how voters evaluate political candidates. Owen (2000) argues that an entertainment news frame can explain the bifurcated evaluations that voters held of U.S. President Bill Clinton who maintained higher personal evaluations compared to his job approval ratings that were more susceptible to the scandal coverage. Also, some argue that the Clinton campaign’s framing of scandal coverage as a partisan witch-hunt contributed to Clinton’s ability to survive electorally (Shah et al. 2002). Additionally, the sheer quantity of scandal coverage is important. As Waisbord articulates, “Media coverage is the barometer that indicates the existence (or absence) of a scandal. If splashed in headlines, scandals seem present and relevant; if buried inside or ignored, scandals may be considered over” (2004, 1079). When the media’s spotlight on scandal is strengthened, the electoral paths of implicated politicians can be more constrained. For instance, politicians involved in scandal who received more intense media scrutiny were more likely to retire strategically (Garz and Sörensen 2017; Graffin et al. 2013). Conversely, the lack of media attention can contribute to a politician’s ability to escape an electoral boot from office. Adding to a host of advantages incumbents have each election cycle, Fogarty (2013) found that in non-competitive districts, scandal coverage in local papers was almost nonexistent. Besides coverage amount, the timing of scandal coverage can significantly impact electoral fortunes. Political candidates attempt to avoid a dreaded October surprise when a scandal breaks the month before Election Day leaving insufficient time for the candidate to rebound. Mitchell (2014) provides evidence from the 2006 U.S. House races that late breaking scandals were the 439

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most devastating for voter support levels and early breaking scandals that received media attention prior to September had voter support levels that were indistinguishable from candidates in scandal-free districts. Garz and his colleagues (2017) show that German newspapers may strategically wait until closer to Election Day to release news stories of a political candidate’s involvement in scandal in order to maximize the impact of the salacious reports. Similarly, Doherty and his colleagues (2014) find that in the case of moral scandals, more recent indiscretions were more severely punished by voters than those occurring in the more distant past. Critically, the rise of social media has opened the floodgates (see Williams and Delli Carpini 2004 for a broader discussion) when it comes to the way citizens and new media platforms can influence the electoral impacts of political scandals. Whereas news outlets were once the source for breaking scandal information, scandal is now often propagated by digital media and traditional mass media functioning in tandem (Chadwick 2011). Even when scandal first erupts online, it is the amount of coverage given by the mass media that gives the story legitimacy (Toepfl 2011). With fewer official gatekeepers of political information, citizens now have the ability to do a great deal of damage to political actors’ credibility and reputation by advancing specific narratives and political frames surrounding the scandal (Chadwick 2011).

Scandal fatigue and the absence of media effects As the media’s coverage of political scandal drones on, one possible response or nonresponse from the public is “scandal fatigue.” Drawing on Keith Tester’s (1994) theories pertaining to the desensitization of media audiences, Waisbord (2004, 1091) writes that “the media do not motivate people to act; instead, it has an anesthetic effect. The result is scandal fatigue, a permanent sense of déjà vu among overstimulated and bored audiences inattentive to new images of suffering.” Thompson (2000, 117) similarly observes that the cycle of scandal gives to a kind of weariness, a kind of “scandal fatigue”, on the part of many people. New scandals appear with predictable frequency, but gradually they lose their novelty value and even, in some respects, their capacity to shock and surprise, as readers and viewers become increasingly inured to the spectacle. These words have never been truer than today. When the public is or eventually becomes unaffected by scandal coverage one reason for this could be scandal fatigue. If scandal becomes normalized to the point that moral missteps and corruption charges are expected of political candidates, then the public can become desensitized or immune to breaking news of yet another politician embroiled in yet another scandal. If scandal coverage fails to present details that are new or deviate from what is known or expected of politicians, then continued scandal coverage may have diminished effects (Mitchell 2014). A few studies including Thompson’s (2000) and Waisbord’s (2004) own have been at the forefront of empirically documenting the effects of scandal fatigue. Kumlin and Esaiasson (2012) argue that as scandals become more prevalent there should be observable differences in the electorate’s reactions due to scandal fatigue. Using Eurobarometer data, they show that in the past scandals negatively affected satisfaction with democracy measures but as scandals became a more permanent feature of the election cycle these negative effects diminished. Mitchell (2014) provides additional evidence that repeated scandal coverage eventually produces diminished effects. In a series of panel experiments, she shows that voters have what she terms a “saturation threshold” after which repeated scandal coverage fails to affect candidate evaluations. Although initial news that a political candidate is linked to scandal lowered 440

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candidate evaluations, after individuals incorporated this information into their impressions, subsequent coverage of scandal involvement failed to lower further candidate evaluations. A notable exception to this pattern of results emerged when subsequent coverage revealed new details of the scandal. In such cases ongoing coverage did extend the lifespan of the scandal and the ability of the coverage to lower candidate evaluations. Media attention to political scandals resembles a revolving door where old skeletons in the closet are continuously being pushed aside by new dirt that gives renewed life to a stagnant scandal. The growth of cable news and the new media environment have produced a pace of scandal reporting unmatched by prior news cycles. Consequently, the question is not if but rather when and under what conditions will scandal fatigue occur. Given the importance of this phenomenon, this is an underdeveloped area of research awaiting further study. Given the increased attention to political scandals in today’s media environment, greater understanding is needed of the conditions and factors that lead the public to become desensitized to scandal coverage. More research is needed to assess how the nature of the scandal coverage conditions the likelihood of public fatigue. Apart from the number of scandals and the duration of coverage, it is possible that certain types of coverage are more likely to lead to desensitization. Also, it would be helpful to understand better which types of individuals are more prone to scandal fatigue and if certain electoral contexts are more conducive to exhausting the electorate. These are just a few of the areas that could benefit from further study.

Future directions in political scandal research For some politicians, scandal coverage equals the kiss of electoral death. And yet for others, breaking news of scandal may have initial effects and yet not be fatal. Thanks to a growing body of literature on political scandals, we now have a more nuanced understanding of a wide range of factors that can alleviate or accelerate the negative consequences of being linked to scandal. Despite advances in our knowledge of scandal effects, there remain significant gaps in the empirical record that await future scholarly exploration. Throughout this chapter we have discussed areas where additional research is needed. This is important not only to provide new understanding but to test the generalizability of existing findings in various electoral, cultural, and national contexts. Before finishing we offer a brief discussion of some additional research areas and questions where further investigation could illuminate our understanding of the intersection of scandal, media effects, and political candidates. The rapid changes in today’s media environment have produced a pace of scandal coverage never seen before. We still know relatively little about how voters react when they are constantly bombarded by scandal coverage. When and under what conditions does the most recent news story displace an old scandal story? How do voters react when a politician is involved in multiple scandals that unfold over time? How does increased media choice influence the magnitude of scandal effects and how do those effects differ based on individual differences such as partisanship? For instance, are voters able to lessen the impact of scandal coverage of a fellow partisan simply by avoiding news that raises allegations against their candidate? Or is there a point where voters are unable to deny the severity of the charges even if it is against their preferred candidate? Also, given the increasing ability of political candidates to launch successful comebacks from scandal, greater understanding is needed of the conditions that facilitate the likelihood of a successful rebound. How do candidate characteristics, scandal type, and electoral context contribute to a successful comeback story? Are certain candidates because of their charisma and popularity levels more likely to be accepted back into the political fold? Are there certain scandals that the public are more willing to forgive after enough time has elapsed? 441

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There is also an opportunity to expand our understanding of how media coverage of scandals at different levels of office (e.g. federal vs. state vs. local) and across different types of political office (e.g. executives vs. legislators vs. bureaucrats) influence voter reaction. For instance, does scandal information matter more in low-information elections? Do certain types of scandal carry greater weight for certain political offices? Political scandal research is even more essential amidst the rapid changing media environment at a time when political polarization and claims of misinformation as a standard political strategy are on the rise. Research over the past two decades has significantly advanced our understanding of the dynamic intersection of these changes and we anticipate that a host of new studies will explore these yet unanswered questions in the field along with many others to shape a new generation of scholarly knowledge.

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44 SCANDALS, MEDIA EFFECTS AND PUBLIC OPINION Francis L. F. Lee

By definition, political scandals involve the revelation of political or moral transgressions committed by politicians in their public or private lives. The revelation of misconduct is typically followed by public condemnation. Political scandals thus always threaten to undermine the reputation or even derail the careers of the implicated politicians. However, political scientists have long noted that not all scandals result in the same extent of reputational damage. Numerous factors can shape the impact of scandals on public opinion. In this regard, the media’s role can hardly be overstated. For some scholars (e.g., Esser & Hartung 2004; Thompson 2000), scandal refers to not so much a politician’s misconduct and its revelation than the communicative event following the revelation of misconduct. Hence the public is essentially reacting to the scandal event as it plays out in the media arena. Meanwhile, digital media have provided new platforms for the communication of political information and citizen participation in political events. They thus introduced new possibilities into the interrelationships among media communication, political scandals, and public opinion. This chapter reviews research on the impact of political scandals on public opinion and the role of the media in shaping such impact. I begin by discussing social psychological and political science research on public reactions to scandals. This provides the broader background against which media impact on public opinion in political scandals can be understood. Review of research on the role of the news media will explicate how media coverage, through agenda-setting, framing, and other means, can significantly shape whether and how a revealed misconduct of a politician would influence public opinion. Extant research and possible research directions of the impact of digital media will then be discussed. This chapter ends with a brief discussion of the possibilities of comparative studies and the use of “digital methods” to address the topic.

Public responses to political scandals There is no question that, in democratic societies, scandals can have substantial impact on people’s attitudes toward the implicated politicians and thereby the politicians’ careers. Beyond exemplary cases such as Watergate, Basinger (2013) collected information about 173 scandals involving U.S. Congress members between 1990 and 2010. He found that while 88% of incumbent representatives and 70% of incumbent senators not involved in any scandals were reelected, the percentages became 67% and 42%, respectively, for those who were involved in scandals. 445

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Praino, Stockemer and Moscardelli (2013) found similar effects of scandals on incumbents’ margins of victory in U.S. Congressional elections. They added that the scandal effect could linger and persist—though diminished in size—in the second and third elections after a scandal. However, the above studies also showed that many scandal-tainted politicians did survive. In fact, research has shown that the impact of scandals can be weak and short-lived. Pattie and Johnston (2012) found that the 2009 UK parliamentary expenses scandal did affect people’s evaluation of politicians, but that the impact was not huge and had largely dissipated by the time of the 2010 general election as both politicians and voters shifted their attention to other matters. Studying the electoral impact of corruption scandals in 215 parliamentary elections in 32 European countries between 1981 and 2011, Bagenholm (2013) concluded that “there are evidently many elections in which the electorate has thrown out the rascals . . . but there is also ample evidence to the contrary” (p. 607). The fact that not all scandals have the same impact on public opinion led political scientists to look for the factors shaping the impact of scandals. What emerges from the literature is that the impact of scandals is dependent on a complex configuration of contextual conditions, scandal characteristics, and individual level variables. On societal level conditions, Carlin, Love and Martinez-Gallardo (2015) examined 84 presidential scandals from 18 Latin American countries and found that the impact of the scandals on presidential approval appeared only when the economy was bad. They argued that people were willing to “trade corrupt or illicit practices for the prospect of favorable policy outcomes” (p. 113). Choi and Woo (2012) reached a similar conclusion in their study on public reactions toward official corruption in South Korea (though the study was strictly speaking about how individuals’ perceptions of the economy shaped their responses). For another example, Riera et al. (2013) found that corruption scandals influenced voting in the 2007, but not the 2011, Spanish local elections. They argued that local corruption was a less prominent issue in the 2011 elections because the elections were dominated by national issues related to the ongoing economic crisis and austerity measures. Other studies focused on how characteristics of the scandals affect public reactions. Since scandals can involve transgressions ranging from corruption to moral improprieties in private lives, people may react to different types of misconduct differently. Indeed, Doherty, Dowling and Miller’s (2011) survey experiment showed that, compared to moral scandals and scandals not involving abuse of power, financial scandals and scandals involving abuse of power affect people’s evaluations of the politicians’ job performance and voting intentions more substantially. Nonetheless, this does not mean that transgressions in private lives are necessarily seen as less serious. Another factor to consider is whether the transgression violates the values publicly professed by a politician, that is, whether the transgression leads people to think that he or she is hypocritical (Bhatti, Hansen & Olsen 2013; McDermott, Schwartz & Vallejo 2015). McDermott et al. (2015), in particular, found that when a scandal about a politician’s private behavior leads to perceptions of hypocrisy, the scandal could influence people’s judgment of not only the politician’s personality but also his or her competence. They argued that perceptions of hypocrisy may lead people to question a politician’s ability to keep a promise. Beyond the characteristics of the transgressions, Smith, Powers and Suarez (2005) found that people evaluated a politician more negatively when he or she uses the strategy of excuse (i.e., acknowledging the misconduct but shifting the blame to something/someone else) as compared to justification (i.e., articulating an argument of why the “misconduct” should be seen as acceptable) or denial (i.e., denying the factuality of the accusation). This is consistent with the observation by Thompson (2000) that the implicated politician’s inappropriate responses to a scandal may constitute “second-order transgressions” aggravating the negative impact of a scandal. Meanwhile, Stewart et al.’s (2013) experimental study showed that people evaluate 446

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a politician in a sex scandal less negatively when he or she receives backing from a third party (i.e., not his or her own political party). It is clear from such studies that the conduct of the protagonists and stakeholders can shape public response to scandals. Public reactions vary not only across scandals but also across individuals facing the same scandal. One well-established finding in the literature is that partisans tend to judge a scandalized politician on one’s side less negatively (e.g., Anduiza, Gallego & Munoz 2013; Miller 1999). This phenomenon is usually explained through motivated reasoning (Fischle 2000; Lee 2015). According to the theory, people process information with either an accuracy goal or a directional goal. In public affairs, the directional goal typically prevails, that is, people are motivated to process information in a biased manner so as to derive a conclusion that would protect their existing views. Motivated reasoning can explain not only the impact of partisanship but also the impact of political cynicism and (dis)trust. Dancey (2012) found that politically cynical people do not pay more attention to scandals than non-cynical citizens do, but they tend to interpret scandal information more negatively because doing so would confirm their negative views of politicians. Wroe, Allen and Birch (2013) also found that political distrust could lead people to regard corruption as present when the presented scenario is actually ambiguous. One distinctive contribution made by studies following the motivated reasoning perspective is their identification and conceptualization of various scandal-related perceptions. Summarizing from various studies, a distinction between transgression perceptions and process perceptions can be made. The former refers to perceptions about the alleged transgression, including its factuality (Did it occur? Was it intentional?), seriousness (Is it a major or minor transgression?), and relevance (Is it pertinent to the politician’s public role?). Process perceptions are those concerning the scandal event, including its nature (Is it a matter of political persecution?), procedural fairness (Is the accused treated fairly?), and response appropriateness (Does the politician respond appropriately?). These perceptions hold the key to understanding the impact of scandals at the individual level, that is, pre-existing attitudes would lead people to hold different perceptions about a scandal, which in turn influence their attitudes toward the scandalized politician (e.g., Lee 2015). Other scholars have examined how informational level and political awareness shape people’s response to scandals. Klasnia (2017) analyzed decades of U.S. election data and showed that politically aware individuals were less likely to vote for politicians involved in corruption scandals. More interestingly, research has produced contrasting findings regarding how political awareness shapes partisan bias in responses to scandals. Anduiza et al. (2013) found that partisan bias disappeared among the politically sophisticated. In contrast, Wagner, Tarlov and Vivyan’s (2014) UK study found that partisanship has stronger influence on opinions toward corrupted politicians among the more knowledgeable people. Wagner et al. (2014) argued that the politically involved citizens have invested more effort in constructing their political views and hence are more motivated to protect their existing views. This puzzle created by the contrasting findings remains unresolved. Up to this point, this chapter has reviewed studies about how scandals influence public opinion toward the scandalized politicians. But studies have also examined how scandals may “spillover” and influence people’s attitudes toward other politicians, political parties, and/or the political system at large (e.g., Bowler & Karp 2004; Ulbig & Miller 2012). Maier (2011), for instance, contrasted the functional and dysfunctional theories of scandals. The former sees scandals as a means for a system to single out the “bad apples.” The latter sees scandals as dampening people’s confidence in politicians and the political system in general. His findings support the dysfunctional view: a scandal could negatively impinge on people’s attitude toward both the implicated politician’s party and other political parties. 447

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Psychologically, spillover effects may be understood by an assimilation and contrast model. Schwarz and Bless’s (1992) classic study showed that a scandal negatively affects people’s trust in “politicians in general,” yet increases their trust in specific politicians other than the implicated person. The theoretical rationale is that the scandalized politician belongs to the broader category of “politicians in general.” Hence assimilation effects occur. But other specific politicians are distinctive from the scandalized politician, resulting in contrast effects (also see Regner & Le Floch 2005). However, it is unlikely for all specific politicians to benefit from a scandal surrounding another person. When a scandal arises, politicians closely tied to or perceived to be the same as the implicated politician may also suffer. Lee (2018) showed such findings in Hong Kong, where recall of scandals surrounding the head of the government was associated with more negative evaluations of two other top government officials, but not a third one. He explained the findings in terms of an associative-diagnostic framework that has been used in research on commercial scandals (e.g., Gao, Zhang, Zhang & Knight 2015). In this framework, positive or negative spillover effects arise depending on the linkages between the scandalized politician and other political objects in the associative networks in people’s minds. The associative-diagnostic framework has the advantage of allowing the possibility of negative spillover effects to other specific politicians or political objects. It also allows researchers to develop hypotheses about how other variables may moderate the spillover effects. For instance, Lee (2018) found that political cynicism—the tendency to see all politicians as similarly selfish—leads to stronger negative spillover effects of scandals.

Media effects in scandals The previous section has reviewed the work done mainly by political scientists and social psychologists. In most of the studies discussed, a scandal was implicitly defined merely as the revelation of misconduct. With the exception of the few studies that took into account how politicians respond to scandals, the identity of the person or organization revealing the misconduct and the way the misconducted is communicated in the public arena are not factors incorporated into the analysis. However, to the extent that people may develop various kinds of perceptions regarding a scandal, how the media cover a revealed transgression can significantly shape people’s perceptions and responses. More fundamentally, the presence of media coverage of scandals cannot be taken for granted. There is no simple equation between the presence of a revealed transgression and substantial press coverage. As Nyhan (2015, 436) put it, “when the political and news environment is unfavorable, scandals may erupt in the press despite thin evidentiary support. By contrast, under more favorable conditions, even well-supported allegations can languish.” It is therefore important to examine the determinants of media coverage of scandals and whether size of coverage matters. For example, Nyhan (2015) found that the U.S. media were less likely to focus on a presidential scandal when the president received strong support from opposition party supporters, which reduced the incentives for oppositional party members to attack the president, and when there was “news congestion” caused by other major social or political events. Nyhan (2017) reported similar findings about governor scandals in the U.S. For another example, Galvis, Snyder and Song’s (2016) study of U.S. newspapers between 1870 and 1910 found that market competition reduced partisan bias in scandal reporting: when competitors were present, newspapers were less likely to focus selectively on covering scandals affecting politicians “on the other side.” In a study in Argentina, Di Tella and Franceschelli (2011) measured the extent of government advertising on four newspapers and the extent to which the four papers covered government corruption scandals on their front pages. A negative 448

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correlation was found, suggesting that the Argentinian government was successful in exerting financial pressure on the press. Other studies directly or indirectly illustrate the impact of scandal coverage on public opinion. Costa-Perez, Sole-Olle and Sorribas-Navarro (2012) examined press coverage of corruption between 1996 and 2009 in Spain and found that the amount of coverage did influence the impact of scandals in elections. In the 2007 elections, the average vote loss following a corruption scandal was 4% for cases with fewer than 10 news reports. When there were more than 10 reports and the judiciary decided to investigate, the vote loss became 14%. Graffin, Bundy, Porac, Wade, and Quinn (2013) found that, in the 2009 UK parliamentary expense scandal, scandalized MPs “on the frontbench” received more press coverage than other scandalized MPs. Press coverage in turn influenced the probability of the MPs leaving Parliament through resignation or losing the 2010 election. Shea’s (1999) and Song’s (2016) U.S.-based studies showed similar effects of media coverage on the impact of scandals. Interestingly, beyond the sheer amount of coverage, one recent experimental study shows that public reactions to a politician’s misconduct can be more negative when the press disseminates information about a political scandal through a series of reports instead of in one single report (von Sikorski & Knoll 2018). Obviously, media coverage of scandals may have “agenda-setting effects” on people. Palau and Davesa’s (2013) Spanish study found that variation in the amount of media coverage of corruption scandals over time was related to the extent to which the Spanish public saw corruption as an important problem. Moving a step further, one may ponder if a priming effect exists, that is, if persistent media coverage of scandals would alter the criteria underlying people’s evaluation of political leaders. Gilens, Vavreck and Cohen’s (2007) analysis came closest to tackling this question. They analyzed U.S. election data and found that, over the years, people’s evaluations of presidential candidates have actually become more reliant on policy issues than personal characteristics. Their study, however, was not concerned only with scandals. Their key argument is that the rise of issue-based campaign ads has compensated for the decline of issue content in the news, thus leading to the rise of issue-based evaluation despite common perceptions of the rise of personality-based news coverage, including a focus on scandals. Whether scandal coverage itself could lead people to emphasize personal integrity when evaluating politicians has yet to be directly tested. Several scholars have employed the framing perspective to examine how media portrayal of a scandal may influence public opinion. In the U.S., the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal in the 1990s was a classic example of a scandal having seemingly no effect on the approval rating of the protagonist. Shah, Watts, Domke and Fan (2002) suggested that media framing can be a core explanation of the phenomenon. They differentiated among the Clinton behavior frame, the Conservative attack frame, and the liberal response frame. The former centered people’s attention on Clinton himself, whereas the latter two focused on partisan politics. Combining content analysis with longitudinal poll data, their analysis showed that the two frames centering on partisan politics did lead to a more positive appraisal of Clinton. Nevertheless, it is not entirely clear if the media always employ coherent frames when covering scandals. Kepplinger, Geiss and Siebert (2012) constructed a theoretical framework which emphasizes the possibility of “fragmentary framing” of scandals by the media. They argued that the media rarely see a scandalized politician as guilty in all possible senses (e.g., having advanced knowledge of the matter, having self-interested motivation, and having freedom of action simultaneously). Their model posited that the media typically offer fragmented frame components to the audience, while the audience’s biased information processing leads to the formation of consistent audience frames. That is, people end up seeing a politician as either completely guilty or completely not guilty. The audience frames then shape people’s emotional 449

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and cognitive responses to scandals. Part of the value of this framework resides in its applicability to various scandals. Indeed, the core propositions of the framework were supported by evidence derived from content analyses and surveys surrounding four different scandals in Germany. There are studies tying the analysis of media coverage of scandals to other well-established media effects theories, such as third-person effects (Huge & Glynn 2015; Joslyn 2003). But those studies arguably have stronger implications on the media effects theories themselves than on the understanding of the effects of scandals on public opinion. Meanwhile, as the previous section has pointed out, political scandals may influence not only the reputation of the implicated politicians but also people’s attitudes toward other politicians and the political system. One might wonder if a regular stream of scandal coverage would relate to political distrust or cynicism. Jebril, Albaek and de Vreese (2013) provided an interesting study that indirectly addressed this question. They differentiated the notion of privatization from personalization. Privatization refers to a focus on the private lives and scandals of politicians, whereas personalization refers to a shift in journalism towards a news form in which public issues are discussed from the viewpoint of the ordinary citizens. While both are related to the trend of infotainment, their study showed that privatization increases political cynicism, whereas personalization has the opposite effect. For this chapter, the findings mean that persistent media coverage of scandals can indeed lead to political cynicism, keeping in mind the caveat that scandal coverage was only one of the indicators of privatization in the study. More studies are therefore needed to ascertain the impact of media coverage of scandals on general political distrust. Besides, there has also been a lack of study tying the analysis of media coverage to the spillover effects of political scandals. As discussed in the previous section, the effects of a scandal may spillover to public evaluations of other politicians, political groups, and the political system at large depending on how people understand the linkages among the politicians, political groups, and the system. Here, the possibility that the media can shape public understandings of the linkages among political objects deserves consideration. In recent years, the idea of “network agenda-setting” was proposed by media effects researchers to refer to the power of the media to shape the salience of the network relationships among political objects in people’s minds (Guo & Vargo, 2015; Vu, Guo & McCombs, 2014). No matter whether it should be considered an issue of “agenda-setting,” the method and arguments in that emerging literature may be employed to examine how media coverage shapes the spillover effects of scandals.

Digital media and political scandals The advent of digital and social media has several important implications on the politics of scandals. First, the popularization of digital and mobile media technologies further enhances the visibility of public figures, blurs the distinction between the public and private realms, and thus solidifies the techno-social conditions that have led to the proliferation of political scandals (Thompson, 2005). Second, digital media provide the platforms for people other than professional journalists to break a scandal (Toepfl, 2011; Trottier, 2017). They undermine, though not eliminate, the gatekeeping role of journalists. Third, digital media quicken the flow of information and the news cycle. This can influence the dynamics of scandals as communicative events. Fourth, digital media allow ordinary people to take a more active part in the scandal process. People’s sharing behavior on social media directly influences the reach of scandal-related information, and how people talk about a scandal online provides new types of “evidence” about public opinion toward the scandal. There has not been much published research on how digital media influence public opinion toward scandals. A study of the contaminated milk scandal in China has shown that the Internet 450

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can serve as an information channel through which people outside the country acquired information about the scandal and consequentially altered their behavior (Seror, Amar, Braz, & Rouzier 2010). But the study concerns merely the transmission of information about the scandal instead of how it was portrayed and/or discussed. Suffice it to note that, given the sheer size and likely fragmentary nature of online materials, Kepplinger et al.’s (2012) “fragmentary framing” model can be a useful framework for analyzing the impact of online discourses on people. That is, different themes and “frame components” surrounding a scandal may be present in the online arena to different extents, whereas individual users are likely to create more coherent frames by themselves based on the fragmented materials derived from the Internet. The user frames would then determine people’s attitudes toward the scandal and the implicated parties. Digital media are not only channels of information. As just noted, digital media allow people to express their views and participate in the communication of scandals. They are therefore platforms through which “images of public opinion” emerge, and such images may influence the judgment and actions of politicians and citizens. Seeing images of public opinion as influential is not new. In their classic study of Watergate, Lang and Lang (1980) argued that the news media served as the “looking glass” in which politicians can see how they appear to the public. But in the contemporary mediascape, while the mainstream press continues to construct images of public opinion, such images also emerge on the Internet through a more bottom-up and decentered process. A couple of recent studies have demonstrated the impact of online public opinion expressed through reader comments associated with news stories. Von Sikorski and Hanelt (2016) conducted an experimental study in which the valence of reader comments under a news story was manipulated. They found that predominantly positive reader comments would lead people to perceive the opinion climate to be favorable to the scandalized politician, perceive him or her to be less responsible, and hold a less negative attitude toward the politician. In a second study, von Sikorski (2016) examined whether the valence of comments and status of the commenting readers would affect the perception of scandals. The participants were asked to respond to a fictitious news article about a food scandal. While the story framed the transgression as scandalous, reader comments were manipulated so that they were either supporting or opposing the framing of the story, and the commenting readers were either portrayed as high status or low status. The results showed that reader comments did influence reader perceptions, but the impact was largely restricted to participants encountering comments from high-status readers who opposed the framing of the story. Interestingly, a finding consistent across the two studies is that reader comments matter only when they predominantly favor the scandalized person. It seems that people tend to react negatively to the scandalized person by default. Further negative comments do not matter. Yet comments favorable to the scandalized politician may alleviate the impact of the scandal. In any case, such findings point to the significance of the online opinion climate. The formation and impact of the online opinion climate is a promising area for future studies. Internet users can engage in activities beyond simply commenting on public affairs. Digital media have led to the emergence of a “participatory culture” (Jenkins 2006), and users can generate various kinds of contents related to public matters. For instance, social media users in Hong Kong produced and circulated a large number of satirical movie posters addressing several ongoing candidate-related scandals during the Chief Executive Election in 2012. Lee (2014) examined the impact of this online satirefest on university students’ political attitudes. He found that the satirical materials had different impacts on students depending on the presence or absence of interpersonal political discussions. Among students who discussed politics with others, exposure to the satirical materials was related to more critical attitudes toward the 451

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electoral system. Among those who did not discuss politics with others, exposure to the satirical materials was related to perceptions of the election as a farce. In either case, exposure to online satire about the scandals led to more negative attitudes toward the politicians and the election, but interpersonal political discussions seemingly allowed the students to develop a more substantive critique of the undemocratic political system. That is, interpersonal communications may help people elaborate on the significance of a scandal. This possible role of interpersonal communication was also examined in Lee (2018), who found that social media communication—presumably including people discussing with each other—can strengthen the spillover effects of scandal recall. In sum, digital media have brought about a wide range of new possibilities and phenomena. For instance, Trottier (2017) developed the notion of scandal mining to refer to “practices where individuals or organizations actively search targeted political actors on open or otherwise accessible data sources, including but not limited to popular social media platforms” (p. 2). In the 2015 Canadian election, 39 candidates were forced to repent or resign because of publicization of materials derived from digital media. Scandal mining is one way through which ordinary citizens can proactively engage in the revelation of politicians’ misconduct. Beyond existing studies, we may take the “#MeToo campaign” that swept the world in late 2017 as another example. A revelation of sexual abuse committed by a powerful Hollywood producer was turned into a worldwide campaign. It led to sex scandals surrounding major politicians in several countries and resulted in multiple resignations. The #MeToo campaign is an exemplar of an online campaign in which ordinary people played the role of the “citizen marketer” (Penney 2017). It is also a case where digital activism meets political scandals. How digital activism shapes the dynamics of scandals and people’s responses constitutes another important research question. More broadly speaking, the evolution of digital media practices will continue to reshape the questions that we can pose about the relationship between scandals, media, and public opinion.

Concluding remarks This chapter has reviewed studies about how political scandals influence public opinion, and the role of the media in shaping the influence. On the one hand, scandals do not always affect people’s attitudes toward the implicated politician substantially. But on the other hand, under certain conditions, scandals can affect people’s attitudes toward not only the implicated politician but also other political figures and the political system at large. Scandals do not always have the same impact on public opinion because the effects of scandals can be conditioned by contextual factors, scandal characteristics, and individual-level variables. Media coverage—both quantity and quality—constitutes another set of factors that could shape the impact of scandals. Moreover, digital media have led to new ways for people to engage in scandal-related communication. The online expressions and activities of ordinary citizens can in turn influence the attitudes of each other. Given the complexities of the relationships among media, scandals, and public opinion, there are certainly gaps in the literature that need to be filled. But beyond the issues already discussed, it is worth giving some brief remarks on two other directions of future research, namely the adoption of digital methods and the development of comparative analysis. As the previous section suggested, the advent of digital media allow people to continuously express their views and reactions to ongoing political events. In other words, instead of having snapshots of public opinion derived from polls, researchers should be able to register the rise and fall of online sentiments over time. Tying the presence of the continual stream of online public 452

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sentiments to the conceptualization of political scandals as communicative events, it is possible for researchers to examine how various moments of the scandal event, for example, the original revelation of the misconduct, the implicated politicians’ responses, institutional intervention, and so on, influence public sentiments in real time. Put more generally, researchers can attempt to examine the interactive and dynamic relationships between online public opinion and the evolution of the scandal event. This, of course, entails the employment of various “digital methods” to capture online public sentiment. For comparative analysis, although every scandal is unique with its own protagonist, transgression, and context, it is worth noting that different countries can have their own “scandal cultures” (Hondrich 2002). For example, people from different societies may perceive the seriousness of different kinds of misconduct differently and have different value preferences, such as the priority between honesty and competence (Allen & Birch 2011). Reflecting media norms and prevailing conceptions of what is regarded as publicly relevant, media in different countries may cover different types of scandals to different extents (Esser & Hartung 2004). In media coverage of political scandals, different frame components may also appear with different frequencies across counties. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to construct a formal framework for comparative analysis of media scandals and their impact on public opinion. Suffice it to note that there are several dimensions along which comparisons can be made. The rise of political scandals is a worldwide phenomenon, and comparative studies would be highly useful for enhancing our general understanding of the impact of media scandals on public opinion.

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45 THE POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES OF CORRUPTION SCANDALS Main findings and challenges Macarena Ares, Sofía Breitenstein and Enrique Hernández Introduction1 Political corruption subverts basic democratic principles. In fact, the absence of corruption is considered paramount for high-quality governments, and numerous scholars have identified the negative social and economic effects of corruption (Jain 2001). These undesirable effects, together with its negative moral implications, make corruption one of the most relevant sources of political scandals. This chapter focuses on the political consequences of corruption scandals. There is an increasing number of studies that analyze the political consequences of corruption on citizens’ political attitudes and behavior. However, while there is a growing consensus about the negative effects of corruption on individuals’ political attitudes, the debate is not settled as to whether these are further reflected in electoral behavior. Through a critical review of the most relevant literature on this matter, this chapter elaborates some of the reasons why citizens might not punish politicians involved in corruption scandals: (i) because they don’t know—for example they do not receive information about corruption, they question the credibility of this information, they cannot clearly attribute responsibilities for corrupt practices, or they forget about scandals that have taken place long before an election; (ii) because they don’t want to—for example because punishing corrupt politicians conflicts with previously held attitudes like partisanship, or because voters receive side benefits from corrupt acts; and (iii) because they can’t—for example there are no non-corrupt alternatives to vote for, or the ones available are too different from voters’ preferred parties.

The attitudinal consequences of corruption scandals Institutional theories contend that political support and attitudes towards politicians are endogenous to the performance of political institutions (Mishler and Rose 2001). In other words, the political attitudes of individuals, such as their trust in institutions or their confidence in politicians, depend to a large extent on the performance of political institutions and on what political authorities do (or do not do). Hence, citizens are expected to update their political attitudes rationally according to their evaluations of politicians’ performances. 456

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Following institutional theories, multiple studies have addressed the impact of corruption scandals, and corruption more generally, on political attitudes. Corruption provides a clear example of negative performance of political authorities, since procedural performance and fairness are undermined by the authorities’ misuse of public office. Moreover, corruption represents a clear breach and violation of the power entrusted to political authorities. While institutions and politicians that perform well and produce desirable outputs should be evaluated positively, corruption—as a clear violation of some of the fundamental procedural principles of democratic accountability, equality, and openness—should reduce political support and lead to negative evaluations of politicians and institutions. Studies conducted across different contexts have found considerable support for these propositions. Corruption, and especially individuals’ perceptions of it, have been linked to: negative attitudinal reactions such as lower trust in politicians, political parties, and representative institutions (Mishler and Rose 2001); negative evaluations of the performance of the political system and government (Anderson and Tverdova 2003); or dissatisfaction with the functioning of democracy (Villoria et al. 2013). These negative effects of corruption have also been observed when, instead of focusing on corruption generally, studies have assessed the attitudinal consequences of specific scandals. These scandals, which frequently attract wide media coverage, provide a clear instance for citizens to learn about the wrongdoings of politicians. Bowler and Karp (2004) conclude that the U.S. House Bank scandal had a negative impact on individuals’ approval of representatives and the US Congress.2 Similarly, Pattie and Johnston (2012) find a negative impact of the UK MPs’ expenses scandal, which not only affected the evaluation of these politicians, but also respondents’ emotional reactions (i.e. the scandal made respondents very angry). Similarly, Ares and Hernández’s (2017) quasi-experimental study reveals that the Bárcenas scandal in Spain had a corrosive effect on individuals’ trust in politicians.3

The electoral consequences of corruption scandals Following a logic similar to that of institutional theories of political support, we would expect voters to punish corrupt politicians at the polls (corruption voting). Electoral support should be based on what politicians do while in office. This is precisely the logic of the performance voting model, developed mainly to explain the punishment/reward of incumbents for bad/good economic performance. If voters punish bad performance in office they should also punish politicians involved in corruption, since—as in the case of the economy—corruption has a clear valence component (Ecker et al. 2016). Moreover, when evaluating a candidate, honesty and integrity rank among the most important traits that individuals take into account (Allen et al. 2016). Hence, even beyond performance considerations, the punishment of corruption should be accentuated by the clear signal that politicians’ involvement in corruption scandals sends about these traits. While the evidence on the attitudinal consequences of corruption scandals is clearly in line with institutional theories, the findings on the electoral punishment of corruption are more ambiguous. Although in surveys citizens express a clear rejection of corruption and state their low intentions to vote for corrupt candidates (Pattie and Johnston 2012), the punishment of corruption at the polls ranges from null to moderate. Voters appear only mildly to punish corrupt politician in elections. In different U.S. congress elections, between 57 and 91 percent of candidates involved in corruption scandals were reelected (Welch and Hibbing 1997). Similarly, studies have documented the mild electoral consequences of recent corruption scandals, as for example the UK expenses scandal 457

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(Vivyan et al. 2012). This null to moderate punishment of corruption is replicated across different countries such as Germany (Kauder and Potrafke 2015), Italy (McNally 2016), or Spain (Riera et al. 2013). Comparative analyses also indicate that the impact of corruption scandals on the fortunes of corrupt politicians is limited (Jiménez and Caínzos 2006; Bågenholm 2013).

Why do citizens vote for corrupt politicians? While one could normatively argue whether the punishment of corrupt politicians at the polls is too mild or just about right, it is undeniable that there are many citizens who do vote for corrupt candidates. This circumstance is paradoxical for two reasons. First, because the evidence about the negative effects of corruption scandals on political attitudes is quite clear. Second, because global surveys such as the World Values Survey indicate that in most countries citizens consider that corrupt acts, as for example receiving a bribe, are never justifiable. Voters might support candidates in spite of their involvement in corruption scandals for different reasons that operate both at the institutional and at the individual level. Voters might support corrupt politicians because at the time of the election they don’t know about their corrupt actions or who should be held accountable, because they don’t want to punish them due to partisan loyalties or the reception of side benefits from these corrupt acts, or simply because they can’t punish corruption at the polls due to the absence of adequate alternatives.

Information availability In consolidated democracies the media plays a key role in making corrupt acts known to the wider public (Tumber and Waisbord 2004). In fact, corrupt acts will only become scandalous when they are publicly disclosed, which most often occurs through the mass media (Balán 2011). Therefore, information availability is a key factor for citizens to hold politicians accountable. A competitive media market and a minimum level of media independence that facilitates the disclosure of corruption scandals are, therefore, of the utmost importance. A greater news coverage of corruption scandals has been shown to depress the vote share of local corrupt politicians (Costas-Pérez et al. 2012). In fact, through a quasi-experiment in Brazilian municipalities, Ferraz and Finan (2008) indicate that the electoral consequences of the corrupt practices revealed by random audits of municipalities are magnified in those where local radio divulged information about the audit. While there is no doubt that information is crucial for holding politicians accountable, it cannot account for why, even when information is available and voters are aware of the involvement of politicians in scandals, a substantial number of citizens tends to forgive corrupt politicians at the time of voting. This was, for instance, the case in the UK parliamentary expenses scandal which exposed members of parliament from different parties. Even if information was available and voters were aware of the implication of an MP in the scandal, they were only marginally less likely to support that MP (Vivyan et al. 2012).

Clarity of responsibility An underlying assumption for the electoral punishment of corruption is that voters know who to blame for corruption. Institutional settings provide differential opportunities and incentives to monitor and punish corrupt behavior (Xezonakis et al. 2015). To study how the institutional context favors or impedes the attribution of responsibilities, one line of research has drawn on the notion of clarity of responsibility. This is a property that captures the extent to which 458

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citizens can single out responsibility for politicians’ actions. A low clarity of responsibility allows politicians to shift the blame to other actors for their actions. Different factors—such as the characteristics of the electoral and party systems, or the number of veto players—usually determine the clarity of responsibility of a given institutional system. Although the moderating role of clarity of responsibility has not been addressed for the specific case of corruption scandals, studies suggest that this property of the institutional setting does influence the extent of corruption voting. When clarity of responsibility is high—when the government has been in power for a longer time and it is controlled by a single majority— there is a stronger negative effect of generic measures of corruption on the likelihood of voting for the incumbent, while when clarity of responsibility is low—in proportional electoral systems and contexts of higher party fragmentation—the impact of corruption on the vote for incumbents is weaker (Xezonakis et al. 2015; Schwindt-Bayer and Tavits 2016). The moderating role of the institutional context should be addressed by future studies focusing on particular corruption scandals. Contexts of lower clarity of responsibility should provide more opportunities for politicians or institutions involved in scandals to shift the blame to other actors. Moreover, other characteristics of the institutional context, like party fragmentation, could also moderate the impact of scandals on voting. The dynamics of party competition and the extent to which parties need to rely on others to form a government will provide different incentives for competing or opposition parties to capitalize on the scandals affecting other parties.

Information credibility and partisanship Once a corruption scandal is disclosed by the press the politicians involved in it are likely to react. Since other politicians can use corruption scandals instrumentally to discredit their opponents (Bågenholm 2013), those involved in a scandal often react by casting doubts about the credibility of the accusations (Balán 2011). This reaction by the politicians involved in a scandal is guided by the idea that the credibility of the information disclosed plays an important role in the electoral consequences of corruption. Accusations have a greater impact on the support for corrupt politicians when they originate from a trusted source (Botero et al. 2015; Weitz-Shapiro and Winters 2016). For example, in the Brazilian case analyzed by Weitz-Shapiro and Winters, corruption accusations had a greater impact when they originated from official federal audits. Similarly, in the Colombian case analyzed by Botero et  al., the most credible source of information was a respected nonpartisan newspaper. These sources are considered more credible because they have fewer incentives to distort strategically reality or lie. In media systems with a high degree of political parallelism and audience segmentation, media outlets will offer different, or even contrasting, images of corruption scandals, which will be targeted to the preferences of their particular audience (Mancini et al. 2017). This is likely to reduce the credibility of the accusations, since citizens could be more prone to question the objectivity of the information. This should be especially prevalent in countries where journalists respond to particular and partisan interests instead of defending the public interest (Mancini et al. 2017). Even when credible information is available, individuals’ prior beliefs can distort how they process this information. Supporters of a political party filter and interpret the information they receive through a partisan lens, which is likely to bias the reception, interpretation, and acceptance of political information (Zaller 1992). Party identification can, therefore, bias individuals’ assessments of the credibility of the information they receive, how they judge the severity of the actual cases of corruption, and, ultimately, the extent to which they tolerate corruption scandals. 459

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All these partisan biases weaken the electoral punishment of corruption precisely because those who should withdraw their support from corrupt politicians are those who already voted for them. Experimental evidence supports the idea that partisanship biases the consequences of corruption, since individuals judge the same corrupt acts less harshly if they are committed by members of the party they support (Anduiza et al. 2013).

Availability and perception of alternatives Confronted with the involvement of politicians in a corruption scandal, party supporters can either ignore the scandal or punish the politicians involved by switching to another candidate or abstaining. This decision will be influenced by the availability of non-corrupt and viable alternatives. Where corruption is widespread citizens might perceive that all politicians are involved or benefit from corrupt activities. Focus groups conducted in Brazil confirm the expectation that citizens will tend to either abstain or overlook corruption when casting a vote, precisely because they tend to perceive all politicians as equally corrupt (Pavão 2015). Moreover, providing information about the corrupt behavior of incumbents does not only reduce the vote share of incumbents, but also of the main opposition parties (Chong et al. 2015). Therefore, in contexts of widespread corruption, information about the incumbent’s malfeasance can lead voters to question additionally the integrity of all mainstream political elites. Even when citizens do not perceive corruption to be widespread, the available alternatives might still not be appealing for them. The decision to vote for a party is largely driven by ideological proximity between the voter and the party. Non-corrupt parties that do not share the ideological leaning of voters might, therefore, not be an attractive alternative. In line with this idea, analyses of 24 European countries indicate that voters will defect from a party involved in a corruption scandal when they can find an alternative that is close to their own ideological position (Charron and Bågenholm 2016). In the absence of such an alternative, voters might either vote for the corrupt party or abstain.

Trade-offs and side benefits Informed voters might also vote for corrupt candidates when, in exchange, they receive compensation such as goods, money, or any other direct benefit (see Mares and Young 2016). Vote buying implies an explicit exchange between voters and politicians that might only be possible under certain circumstances. However, this exchange between corrupt politicians and voters can also be implicit. Corruption might generate some side benefits for constituents, as, for example, in the construction of new infrastructure that is built as a result of briberies received by politicians. Fernández-Vázquez et al. (2016) reveal that these implicit trade-offs of corruption explain why mayors who engaged in corrupt behaviors that brought benefits for the local economy were reelected in Spanish local elections. Voters can, however, knowingly vote for corrupt candidates without the need of an explicit or implicit inducement, since corruption is just one of the many factors affecting voter decisions. Voters can implicitly trade a candidate’s integrity for other more valued characteristics like policy positions (Rundquist et al. 1977) or management record and performance (Muñoz et al. 2016). Among these characteristics, the economic performance of incumbents plays a prominent role due to its relevance for voting decisions. In line with this idea, both observational and experimental research indicates that incumbents involved in corruption scandals are only likely to be punished in negative economic contexts (Klašnja and Tucker 2013; Zechmeister 460

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and Zizumbo-Colunga 2013). These analyses suggest that voters might be willing to trade competence for honesty. In fact, a good management record raises the probability of voting for a corrupt politician, and citizens would rather vote for a corrupt but competent candidate than for an honest but incompetent candidate (Esaiasson and Muñoz 2014; Muñoz et al. 2016).

Time and the electoral cycle Time should be a relevant moderating factor for the attitudinal and behavioral implications of corruption. Time dynamics appear as particularly important for the electoral consequences of corruption, since elections are only held periodically and corruption scandals can happen at any time during the electoral cycle. The weak impact of corruption on voter behavior could be attributed to voters’ short-lived memories, since citizens tend to take into account the events that occurred closer to election day when deciding their vote (Achen and Bartels 2004). This line of argument hence suggests that corruption scandals uncovered close to the day of elections should have a stronger impact. Yet, timing effects have not been addressed in analyses of the electoral consequences of corruption. There are, however, studies that have addressed the long-term attitudinal consequences of corruption that can provide some initial clues about these time dynamics. Focusing on local corruption scandals, Solé-Ollé and Sorribas-Navarro (2017) propose that the attitudinal impact of corruption takes place through different mechanisms, and that only some of them entail a sustained impact of corruption in the long term. By relying on variation in the time elapsed between different local corruption scandals and the timing of a survey, these authors identify a more persistent effect of corruption scandals on trust in local politicians than in perceptions of corruption. Their explanation for this differential persistence of corruption effects revolves around the negative “side-effects” of corruption, which they judge as having longer-lasting implications. Corruption can lead to policy gridlock and to a deterioration of public finances. These two developments reduce political trust and, thus, sustain the negative effect of corruption scandals over time. The evidence about the long-term impact of corruption is, however, not univocal. In fact, there are different reasons to believe that the political implications of corruption scandals might be short-lived. Firstly, citizens tend to base their political attitudes on top-of-the-head considerations (Zaller 1992). As a consequence, scandals should have a stronger effect on citizens’ political attitudes shortly after they are uncovered, and these effects should decline over time. The study of the Spanish Bárcenas scandal involving the incumbent government indicates that its negative effect on citizens’ trust in politicians was stronger just after the scandal was uncovered, and these effects decayed over time (Ares and Hernández 2017). These time dynamics of weakening effects over time could be further reinforced by shorter news cycles (Patterson 1998), which may reduce the number of days that a particular corruption scandal is covered by the media.

Conclusion: the way ahead A burgeoning literature about the political consequences of corruption scandals has developed over the last two decades thanks to greater data availability, methodological innovations, and growing concerns about the deleterious effects of corruption. This literature has provided many answers about the attitudinal and behavioral consequences of corruption. However, many questions remain unanswered or require further scrutiny. The literature that has tackled the discrepancy between the attitudinal and the behavioral consequences of corruption 461

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highlights the complexity of the mechanisms underlying the relationship between corruption scandals and citizens’ reactions to them. In this sense, mixed-method studies combining quantitative and qualitative methods, as well as interdisciplinary approaches, could be the strategies that provide the highest returns. One of the main methodological challenges for the study of the consequences of corruption is related to the measurement of corruption itself. Corrupt acts are an undesirable, unethical, and, in many cases, illegal behavior. Therefore, the actors involved have incentives to conceal them. This makes the measurement of corruption an extremely complex task. Objective measures, such as the amount of corruption charges being prosecuted, can be greatly biased by the willingness or capacity of states to fight this phenomenon. We, therefore, require more comparative databases on the occurrence of corruption scandals and the prevalence of corruption worldwide, which could be, for example, gathered through media analyses. The frequently used subjective measures based on survey respondents’ perception of malfeasant practices can be biased by social desirability and endogeneity biases. In this regard, list experiments appear to be a potentially fruitful method to understand who is more likely to hide undesirable behaviors such as paying a bribe or voting for a corrupt politician and why. Addressing the consequences of corruption is particularly challenging because some factors (such as the institutional context or voters’ partisanship) intervene at different points in the chain linking corruption to behavior. This entails the need to overcome the threats imposed by possible problems of endogeneity and omitted variable biases. In light of these hurdles, studies have increasingly drawn on experimental methods, especially on lab and survey experiments. While, in comparison to observational studies, these methods are usually more effective for disentangling the causal effects of corruption, they are not free of challenges. For example, most survey experiments tend to concentrate on a single case (country) and their treatments and manipulations are adapted to the specific case under examination. Therefore, when the results of these experiments diverge it is not easy to determine whether the differences are related to contextual factors or to the different experimental protocols. Comparative, and probably collaborative, experimental studies should, therefore, be the way ahead for experimental analyses of corruption. However, experimental studies face further limitations. Most of them are based on fictitious scandals due to the difficulty of introducing experimental manipulations based on real-world scandals. A way to overcome these limitations is to combine experimental studies with quasi-experimental approaches that focus on real-world corruption scandals. In any case, in order to understand fully the political consequences of corruption and disentangle the causal mechanisms linking corruption scandals to attitudinal and behavioral changes, quantitative evidence must be combined with the insights that can be provided by qualitative and ethnographic methods. Interviewing citizens and conducting focus groups among them is a fruitful way to understand the reasons why some people vote for corrupt politicians (Pavão 2015), or why some corrupt behaviors are considered less acceptable than others. Moreover, ethnographic methods could provide new insights as to how political elites perceive the consequences of corruption and how they respond to public disaffection generated by corruption scandals (Boswell et al. 2018). Our review of the political consequences of corruption also points to different substantive questions that future research could address. Future studies should aim to distinguish between the short and long-term consequences of corruption. Introducing a temporal dimension in the analysis would allow us to unpack the long-term implications of corruption scandals (see e.g. Doherty et al. 2014). This could offer new insights into the perennial question of why most citizens do not punish corrupt politicians. Addressing temporal dynamics could reveal differences in the timing of attitudinal and behavioral effects as some of the implications might only 462

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become visible in the long term. The importance of timing is an under-researched topic that could be addressed by studying panel individual-level data in combination with information on corruption scandals and their coverage in the media. Dynamic effects appear as particularly interesting for the study of corruption and partisanship. As we discussed above, partisanship is an important moderating factor in how voters process and react to corruption scandals. Future research could assess whether recurrent exposure to corruption has an updating effect on voters’ partisan identification, and whether this has further effects in reducing bias or motivated reasoning at later points in time. Future research should assess the implications of increasing political polarization for the electoral punishment of corruption. In highly polarized contexts, voters tend to base their vote decisions on ideological rather than performance considerations (Green and Hobolt 2008). Moreover, in these contexts voters place lower value on information and rely largely on party endorsements (Druckman et al. 2013). Future research should, therefore, address how information about corrupt practices affects public opinion and electoral behavior under different contexts of polarization. Initially we would expect polarization to depress corruption voting further. Given this troubling expectation, future studies should also focus on how to promote electoral accountability related to corrupt acts. Studies could assess how information about the negative social and economic effects of corruption could be effectively transmitted to citizens. In a similar vein, researchers could analyze whether and how civic education in schools might be an effective instrument to raise the awareness of young citizens about these pernicious effects. Finally, future studies should not only focus on the negative consequences of corruption scandals, but also on the potentially positive consequences of the prosecution and punishment of corrupt behaviors. As we have discussed previously, in a context of widespread corruption voters might develop cynical attitudes which can lead them to overlook corruption. These skeptical attitudes could easily transform into dissatisfaction with the democratic system. Knowing whether and how anti-corruption efforts can translate into a reversal of the negative attitudinal effects of corruption could therefore be essential for the future health of democracies.

Notes 1 This work was produced in the context of Sofia Breitenstein’s PhD in Politics, Policies and International Relations at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, funded through an FPI grant (BES-2015-072756) from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity and the European Social Fund. 2 This scandal revealed that some members of the House of Representatives had received interest-free loans from the House Bank. In 1992 the House disclosed a list of all members that had overdrafts and the amount of unfunded checks they had received. 3 The Bárcenas scandal is one of the most relevant corruption scandals in Spain in the last decade. In 2013 the main national newspapers leaked documents written by Luis Bárcenas, accountant of the Partido Popular (PP), that indicated that the party had received illegal contributions that were used to pay cash bonuses to members of the party.

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46 MEDIA PRIMING EFFECTS AND ETHICAL AMBIVALENCE IN CORRUPTION SCANDALS Roberto de Miguel Pascual and Rosa Berganza

Empirical evidence demonstrates that the media impact of political scandals does not always determine election results. Even though, according to surveys, the general public appears to be preoccupied with corruption scandals, a considerable portion of voters tend to forget or forgive the inappropriate behavior of politicians when they cast their vote at the polls. In this chapter, we explore this inconsistency in attitude measurements, which tend to be based on the questions about one’s personal beliefs regarding corruption. Empirical evidence shows that the use (or abuse) of surveys to measure citizen’s perceptions of corruption leads to prejudiced inferences. Such interpretations are commonly proposed by global corruption watchdog organizations as well as by national and transnational public opinion research institutions. Our goal in this chapter is to evaluate the importance of measurements of implicit association as additional instruments for observing the effects of political scandals on public opinion. Many social scientists have displayed bewilderment at the frequent, paradoxical reelections to office of politicians who are well known to the general public as participants in corruption, involved in criminal prosecutions, or who have even been convicted of a crime. For instance, in the U.S. Congress, being caught up in a corruption scandal does not necessarily mean one’s political career is over, since 60 percent of Congress members involved in such scandals win reelection. In his examination of more than 130 Congressional corruption cases over the course of 35 years, Marko Klasnja (2017) found that the key to the resilience shown by corrupt politicians is, at least in part, that voters are simply not paying attention. Whereas voters with high levels of political awareness punish corrupt officials more than ethical ones, voters with lower levels of political awareness do not. Despite accusations of bribery, false accounting, false testimony, tax fraud, misappropriation, mafia connections, and money laundering, Silvio Berlusconi served three full terms as the prime minister of Italy. The coalition of parties that ran Italy under his government won elections in 1994, 2001, and 2008, and was the second most powerful political force during the elections of 1996, 2006, and 2013. McNally (2016, 976) has claimed that “social norms that justify corruption in one’s peer group extend to voting and increase the likelihood of supporting Berlusconi at all points on the ideological spectrum.” In their research report on the ways that the same phenomenon appeared in the Spanish municipal election held between 2003 and 2007—a period marked by an economic upturn and a real estate bubble unprecedented in the country’s history—Rivero-Rodríguez and 466

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Fernández-Vázquez (2011) found that a not insignificant number of mayors accepted bribes and granted development permits, operating within various networks of corruption whose most immediate effect was to create jobs and improve short-term economic indicators. Given such benefits, according to these authors, people were quite happy to turn a blind eye to what was happening behind the scenes: “it’s a paradox . . . in a place where corruption is more widespread, even voters who are aware and concerned about corruption might not have the incentive to punish” (ibid., 116). Indeed, these authors found that voters are far more lenient towards corruption when it directly benefits them. Along with these cases, examples documented in the United States (Peters & Welch 1980; Dimock & Jacobson 1995; Welch & Hibbing 1997; Klasnja 2017), the United Kingdom (Eggers & Fisher 2011), India (Kapur & Vaishnav 2017), Japan (Reed 1999), Italy (Chang, Golden & Hill 2010), Mexico (Del Castillo 2003), and Spain (Rivero-Rodríguez & Fernández-Vázquez 2011; Riera et al. 2013; Anduiza et al. 2014), among many other countries and regions, confirm that electoral immunity in the wake of political scandal constitutes a phenomenon worthy of detailed explanation. Regardless of the political or electoral system, the compared literature provides sufficient evidence that citizens’ indulgence towards corruption deforms the basic democratic principle of accountability inasmuch as “the unpopularity of corruption and the popularity of the corrupt” (Kurer 2001, 63) invade the political arena.

Why voters support corrupt politicians One of the most intriguing features of this puzzle relates to the heterogeneity of electoral outcomes. The effects of corruption scandals seem to vary widely according to the type of incumbent (major, deputy, president), as well as according to the differing electoral and political systems, political cultures, and so on, concerned. Some corrupt majors, members of Congress, or MPs lose the bulk of their share of votes, while many others are able to retain or even increase their electoral support. Thus, the paradox of corruption tolerance appears to be deeply perplexing for political scientists. Scholarship in this area provides a whole repertoire of explanatory factors (Jiménez & Caínzos 2006; Riera et al. 2013), generally organized according to one of two general approaches: (a) those focusing on the contextual level of analysis, based on the individual features of each corruption scandal, the specificities of the denounced politician (Fernández-Vázquez & Rivero 2011; Chang et al. 2012), or the institutional setting (Tavits 2007; Ferraz & Finan 2008); and (b) those which place greater emphasis on the individual variables that determine the impact of political corruption on vote choice (Anduiza et al. 2014). Due to the limitations of cross-national research, the micro-level approach to corruption and voter behavior has become the form of analysis used most extensively. Such analysis operates at the individual level, concentrating on the (ir)rational nature of unethical/irresponsible polling. Electoral behaviorists have gathered evidence suggesting that both partisanship and political awareness play a significant role in explaining why people do not systematically throw corrupt politicians out of office (Anduiza et al. 2014). According to these researchers, partisans are less likely to perceive and punish corruption (Dimock & Jacobson 1995; Anduiza et al. 2014). At this point one may easily infer that the political science literature provides no definitive answer to the conundrum posed by ethical ambivalence towards corruption. Neither the microlevel perspective nor the macro-contextual level of analysis delivers an even tentatively operational solution to the puzzle of the null electoral costs of political scandals: when controlling for contextual or structural conditions, this paradox equally disrupts most democratic systems, wherein a citizen’s party loyalty is nothing but a relic of the past and freedom of information is fully guaranteed. 467

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The problem of who is observing what and how, when measuring perceived corruption Assuming that all human beings are essentially rational, that most people understand that political corruption endangers both general and private prosperity, and that most of the electors make systematic use of all the information available to them before deciding whom to vote for, the enigma of why political scandals do not ruin political careers leads us to the question of how to measure the public’s perception of political misbehavior itself. Is the general public capable of assessing with any precision the degree to which corruption inheres within a social system? It is difficult to gauge the public’s perceptions of corruption. Political misconduct is carried out in secret and most bribes pass by unnoticed by the media, so the citizenry is forced to assess the extent of such activities mainly by the “tip of the iceberg,” as portrayed by the press (since experiences with personal corruption remain anecdotal and becoming a victim or an actor in unethical events is demographically rare). Until recently, neither longitudinal studies nor cross-national aggregated data analyses existed. Indeed, it has been widely acknowledged that cases of corruption are easily observed but hard to quantify, since selecting comparable cases in cross-national political research and drawing inferences about such an ambiguous phenomenon is quite difficult (Dogan & Kazancigil 1994; Del Castillo 2003). Given the impossibility of measuring corruption directly, due to its clandestine nature, researchers have turned to survey methods to carry out their examination of the topic. Currently, comparative studies analyzing corruption by survey focus on social judgments about a general belief, the degree to which the agreement or disagreement with the data by those making such judgments are, if not entirely accurate, at least recognizable to the general public (Clausen et al. 2011). International organizations dedicated to analyzing social perceptions of corruption draw upon a wide range of methodologies. Some formulate their questions within the framework of national or transnational surveys. Others do so by compiling indices and interviews with national experts on personal perceptions of corruption. Such indices include: the International Country Risk Guide, which culls from opinion surveys aimed at experts and journalists; the Index of Business International, based on a worldwide opinion survey; and the Corruption Perceptions Index, published by Transparency International, the only international NGO dedicated specifically to investigating and combating corruption throughout the world, which combines various opinion surveys carried out by different private organizations, alongside interviews with analysts and experts from several countries. Leaving aside the controversy about sampling procedures in corruption indices (see Del Castillo 2003; Golden & Picci 2005), corruption surveys, like any other observation instrument involving participant self-reporting, are susceptible to a wide range of biases. The most common of these appears when researchers ask respondents to rate the extent and severity of corruption (Ko & Samajdar 2010). Examples of ambiguous questions include “Is corruption a problem in your country?” and “Is corruption in government widespread?” which are used by the World Bank Corruption Index (World Bank Group 2014). Questions such as these and others like them have caused researchers to doubt the reliability and validity of indices measuring corruption. In general, the problem lies in using perception measurements as if they were accurate indicators of corruption levels. It is sufficient to note that, in the absence of a universal definition of the nature of the phenomenon, there is a strong possibility that some of the interviewees might be directly implicated in cases of corruption, while others may lack any sophisticated knowledge of the problem. Both situations result in there being measurements of corruption by means of surveys that have as an intrinsic weakness a notable lack of consistency and stability (reliability) and a null capacity of generalization (validity) (Golden & Picci 2005, 39). 468

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Still, the methodological fragility of such an instrument is especially exacerbated when questions are not formulated on questionnaires about personal experiences of corruption but rather about the degree to which the interviewee agrees with a general statement about the behavior of third parties. Therefore, the perceived ratings of corruption registered on surveys exhibit the discrepancy between actual and perceived levels of corruption. This is largely the result of the biases in respondents, which may be driven to some extent by principle but even more notably by prejudice (Donchev & Ujhelyi 2014). Corruption indices based only on surveys may thus be neither valid nor reliable (Lee 2004; Lambsdorff 2006; Doncheve & Ujhelyi 2014; Park & Lee 2016), at least while people’s perceptions of corruption are informed by “opinion rather than experience” (Treisman 2007, 213). Putting to one side the chimerical goal of capturing objective corruption perceptions, other factors that may determine the validity and reliability of evaluations of political corruption include the quantity, quality, and availability of political information. The omnipresence of electronic technologies in people’s daily lives, together with continuous access to media news and social networks, undoubtedly heightens awareness of the honesty, or lack thereof, of politicians, the judiciary, and local and central administrators. But in order to correlate objective political awareness and polling behavior, researchers still need to subscribe to the well-known practice of including knowledge and policy issue questions in surveys (Zaller 1992; Delli Carpini & Keeter 1996; Althaus 2003). Among other items, respondents should answer questions pertaining to their factual knowledge about politics and institutions (e.g., “Who holds the majority in the Parliament?”), their ability to recognize important political figures (e.g., “Name a member of the presidential Cabinet”), or the proper placement of parties and candidates on a left–right scale of policy issues. These items have been proven to be more effective at measuring differences in political awareness than other alternatives, such as education, self-reported media use, or political participation (Klasnja 2017). Yet, what is wholly lacking is empirical evidence comparing subjective voters’ evaluations and objective criteria based on their factual knowledge of the effects and extension of corruption (Kurer 2001). These concerns have encouraged researchers to develop alternative corruption indices with the goal of more accurately gauging the impact and extension of corruption. The World Bank, for instance, has proposed an index which would combine information from multiple surveys, the values of which would more precisely correlate with others from the same country, under the assumption that a statistical association among diverse sources leads to greater reliability (Kaufmann et al. 1999a; 1999b). Different Latin American institutions have decided to utilize instruments that both sample large numbers of individuals and ask a battery of questions focused on first-hand experiences with corruption rather than solely on perceptions of it (Seligson 2002). One example of such an initiative is the Index of Corruption and Good Government from Transparency in Mexico, which measures the rates and extent of bribery within public administrations by means of data gathered from a sample of citizens who have experienced such situations first-hand, along with data aggregated from 38 public service organizations considered to be “critical” by the Transparencia Mexicana (TM) (Del Castillo 2003). Other international corruption-monitoring organizations have tried to mitigate perceptual biases by capturing either the real incidence of experience with corruption among the interviewees or by assessing the respondents’ levels of awareness about different forms of bribery. For instance, Gallup World Poll questions (2008) included “Was there at least one instance in the last 12 months when you had to give a bribe or present, or not?” Here, again, empirical evidence shows that very few respondents have had first-hand experiences with corruption, leading numerous scholars to voice their skepticism regarding people’s inferences about corrupt behaviors given their inaccuracy (Andersson & Heywood 2009; Heywood & Rose 2014), even 469

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though such evidence is still commonly used. Instead, The World Economic Forum’s Executive Opinion Survey (2016) posed the question: “In your country, how common is it for firms to make undocumented extra payments or bribes?” This formula offers another peculiarity: people’s perceptions of the corruption problem may be influenced by the communications media’s coverage of political scandals, regardless of the degree to which scandals can be generalized or the real rates of corruption in the social system as a whole. In fact, Transparency International asked expert members of a sample chosen to calculate the Bribe Payers Index (2006) to name which news sources had most deeply influenced their perceptions of corruption. Eighty percent of the interviewees cited the print as their first choice, whereas first-hand experience came in at third place. This last point is of fundamental importance, given that much of society’s judgment about corruption is influenced by the ways political scandals are treated by the media as well as by the public’s selective perception of this type of information.

External influence on perceptions: media contents and media priming effects To determine if greater knowledge of political reality determines one’s beliefs, attitudes, and behavior with respect to corruption, it is necessary to analyze the quantitative aspects of the information one receives as well as the process leading to the formation of opinions after exposure to coverage of political scandals. With regards to the qualitative features of political information, models suggest that the news media may either influence or increase biases in the ways one perceives corruption. Primarily, the regularity and salience of news stories about corruption may distort one’s vision of reality or cause one to make inaccurate or faulty interpretations of the phenomenon, leading one to believe that, for instance, we live in a political system that is more corrupt than it really is (Tversky & Kahneman 1973). Secondly, the media tend to exaggerate the negative consequences of corruption, given that they normally are more interested in reporting about a government’s failures than its successes (Duffy et al. 2008; Birkland 2011; Park 2012). Thirdly, the media’s selection of the daily news agenda tells “audiences what to think about, which inherently guides perceptions of what they [the public] ought to think” (Singer 2011, 100). With respect to content, Entman (2007) has claimed that there are three general types of biases in the way media represent political reality: distorting biases (news that deliberately distorts or lies about reality), biases of content (news that favors a partisan point of view), and decision-making biases (referring to the subjectivity of journalists, which tilts content inadvertently). With regard to biases in news coverage, this last subtype integrates at least five other factors: personalization (falsely attributing the cause of a problem to a person or social group); dramatization (giving special relevance to crises and conflicts as well strategically focusing political news on winners and losers); fragmentation (isolating stories from the larger context in which they take place); biases of attribution centered around authority figures (distrust toward the behavior of governing authorities); and negativity (showing a preference for negative facts) (see Patterson 1994; Cappella & Jamieson 1997; de Vreese & Elenbaas 2008; Berganza 2009; Bennett 2009; Adriaansen et al. 2011; 2012; Park & Lee 2016; and many others). All of the above brings us to the main point of whether and/or how these biases affect the ways receptors perceive unethical politics. Scholarship on media priming has long registered the residual, often unrecognized, consequences of media exposure on subsequent judgments and behaviors. As a matter of fact, generally speaking, the external-influence process results in media stereotypes of politicians that are frequently paired as a group concept with specific attributes 470

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(i.e., corruption). Over time, regular exposure to these stereotypes in the media may create biased memory traces, which can be reactivated (primed) by successive exposure to the media coverage of scandals (Roskos-Ewoldsen et al. 2009; Arendt 2013; Arendt & Marquart 2015). According to the social-psychological “hot cognition hypothesis,” the basis of any political reasoning, such as that informing judgments about corruption scandals, is a dual process in which citizens inertly couple pre-existing knowledge and preferences with affects (Morris et al. 2003). Arendt and Maquart (2015) have demonstrated that media priming effects on corruption are only noticeable to members of the public when these have already established strong automatic associations between “politicians” and “corruption” in their long-term memory (LTM) prior to exposure to media scandals (“politicians are corrupt”). Priming demands the activation of LTM for storing facts, beliefs, and predilections, as well as a method for redirecting one’s knowledge about leaders, parties, and issues from LTM to working-declarative memory, where it can be attended to (Rumelhart & Norman 1988). As attention is very limited, stereotypes from the media fulfill the need for heuristics (cognitive cues) and other simplifying mechanisms for thinking and reasoning about corruption which, if needed, become expressions of affiliation/detachment in surveys, for example. This directly contradicts the claims of many political scientists who hold that there is a strong correlation between an increase in voter information (or political awareness) and a lower tolerance for corruption (see e.g., Stapenhurst et al. 2006). Social-psychological research has also shown that stereotypical associations can become automatically activated when they appeal to a social group concept (Arendt & Marquart 2015, 187): the automatic activation of specific attributes (e.g., “corrupt” when thinking of “politicians”) happens regardless of whether or not citizens perceive the specific attribute as accurate. These automatic group-attribute associations are formally known as implicit attitudes (Greenwald et al. 2002), and may or may not accompany an explicit ethical judgment (e.g., when someone automatically declares that a politician should be severely punished after an economic scandal, even as that same individual perpetrates tax fraud). So, regardless of the type of stimulus concerned, media priming should always be considered from both sides: the explicit-stereotyped level, and the implicit level, which operates beyond consciousness. In terms of our enigma, whereas explicit attitude scales (i.e., surveys) measure the degree of conformity with a fixed (propositional) statement founded on the effect of published political misbehavior, there are complementary observation instruments based on the measurement of non-conscious feelings, such as the implicit association test (IAT) (see Greenwald et al. 2002), by which it is possible to determine the strength of the beliefs about corruption of candidates, parties, or the political system as a whole. The IAT ultimately allows researchers to illuminate why some citizens manifest explicit attitudes that are clearly against political corruption but certain implicit weak attitudes toward the same phenomenon.

A reasoned (re)action: social priming and corruption tolerance Nevertheless, electoral tolerance of political corruption cannot be explained only by way of the correlation between what people explicitly say and what they actually feel, given media priming. The famous theory of reasoned action might be of some assistance in definitively clarifying the paradox posed by voters’ ethical ambivalence. According to this theory, an individual’s behavior is determined by his or her behavioral intention (BI) to execute that behavior, which may be considered the most accurate prediction of behavior (Fishbein & Ajzen 1975). BI is a function of two elements: an individual’s attitude toward the behavior (A) and a subjective norm (SN). A is defined as “a person’s general feeling of favourableness or unfavourableness for that behaviour” (Ajzen & Fishbein 1980), which, in our case, is consistent with the idea that 471

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a series of implicit remnants regulates the verbal expression of ideas about political corruption or voting decisions. SN, on the other hand, is defined as a person’s perception that most of the people who are important to him or her think he or she should or should not perform the behavior in question (Ajzen & Fishbein 1980) along with his or her motivation to comply (MC) with those referents. Moreover, according to the theory of reasoned action it might be argued that if people perceive toleration of corruption to be a general pattern of behavior, voters will be socially primed, that is, they will become more tolerant of corrupt politicians in turn; if a voter believes corruption to be common among his or her peers, he or she “is more likely to consider corrupt actions acceptable, and to be tolerant of a corrupt politician” (McNally 2016, 983). Theories of pro-social behavior have already demonstrated that the conduct of significant others makes its effects felt in several ways; complying with taxes (Frey & Torgler 2007), obeying of traffic rules (Fernández-Dols 1993b), or engaging in criminal behavior (Kahan 1998) are examples of unethical social-driven conduct. Consequently, the mechanism by which a voter believes that corruption is unacceptable but, at the same time, experiences a cognitive dissonance on this topic because of his or her perception that his peers and acquaintances systematically violate anti-fraud social norms may provide a plausible solution to the puzzle of corruption tolerance. Fernández-Dols (1992; 1993a; 1993b) and Fernández-Dols & Oceja (1994) have empirically demonstrated this social-psychological phenomenon under the perverse norms hypothesis: “Perverse norms are those formal or informal norms that are universally infringed by a social group, even though they can result in sanctions” (Fernández-Dols 1992, 3). According to this hypothesis, persons who believe (or feel) the perversity of a norm (e.g., abusive taxation in a context of systematic corruption scandals) become more tolerant towards forms of behavior that involve corruption (i.e., the transgression of laws or norms for personal gain). Thus, such an approach would make an important contribution to our understanding of whether voters end up choosing to punish corrupt politicians.

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47 PROTECTING PUBLIC PERCEPTION Responding to scandal using Benoit’s image repair theory Kenon A. Brown, Qingru Xu and Melanie Formentin It may seem to the general public that we are in an “age of scandal.” With abundant allegations of sexual harassment among prominent figures, corruption abounding in politics in multiple countries, and massive security breaches and violations of privacy from multiple companies that are portrayed in the media, we are exposed to scandals almost every day. While the number of scandals we see may not be any different from decades ago, there are several reasons why it may seem more abundant. First, social and digital media has put news right at the public’s fingertips, which has contributed to the “24-hour news cycle” (Rosenberg & Feldman 2008). This has significantly contributed to the speed at which we receive information. Social and digital media has also contributed to the globalization of communication. It is much easier for people to communicate cross-culturally, which means more exposure to international scandals (Block 2004). Another significant reason that it seems like we’re in the “age of scandal” is because the public has the power to affect a person’s or company’s image at their fingertips (Brazeal 2008). As we saw with the viral spread of the video of a passenger being dragged off an overbooked United Airlines flight (Zdanowicz & Grinberg 2018), scandal can affect a person’s or company’s image in a matter of minutes. Because of this, it is imperative that accused parties not only respond in a timely manner, but also give an appropriate response that will minimize the damage caused by the scandal to one’s image (Benoit 1995; Coombs 2014). Since William Benoit wrote his seminal work, Accounts, Excuses and Apologies (1995), IRT (formerly image restoration theory) has been used by multiple scholars to examine the form and impact of accused parties’ response strategies during times of scandal. Although IRT is primarily a rhetorical approach to examining response to transgressions, recent studies have seen the theory used in more empirical research, including content analysis (e.g. Len-Rios 2010) and experiments (e.g. Brown 2014). As an attempt to synthesize the research conducted using this theory, this chapter will begin with a brief summary of IRT, followed by a discussion of the two approaches that have been used to examine the theory: the source-oriented (rhetorical) approach and the audience-oriented (empirical) approach. Then, after a summary of some of the prominent contextual perspectives that have been studied using the theory, the chapter will conclude with some generalizations gathered from IRT research and directions for future research.

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Conceptualizing image repair theory Benoit and Hanczor (1994) defined image as “the perception(s) of a person, group or organization held by the audience, shaped by the words and actions of that person, as well as by the discourse and behavior of other relevant actors” (p. 40). Benoit (1995) provided two reasons why maintaining a favorable image is important. First, a favorable public image can contribute to a healthy self-image. A negative public image can cause anxiety, stress, and guilt, which can be detrimental to one’s health. Negative sanctions from audience members (e.g. prison sentences for crimes) also can contribute to the decline of a healthy self-image. Second, a positive public image can be helpful when attempting to persuade audiences effectively because audiences frequently call a speaker’s credibility into question when they are presented with persuasive material. From a public relations perspective, it is important to respond to an attack on the image of a person or organization that a practitioner represents because the profession exists to crystallize and support a positive reputation for individuals and organizations through the management of that entity’s image, especially during times of scandal (Fearn-Banks 2007). IRT is a theoretical framework that was derived from several theories, including Ware and Linkugel’s (1973) apologia theory, which posits that it is human instinct for a person to respond to an attack on his or her morality, motives, or reputation, and the theory of reasoned action (Fishbein & Ajzen 2010), particularly pertaining to the notion of beliefs and values. IRT is designed to provide guidance for responding to persuasive attacks on one’s image. A persuasive attack has two components. First, some action occurred that is perceived by many to be offensive or undesirable, which can violate one’s values. Second, an entity is believed to be responsible for the offensive or undesirable act, which creates one’s belief that that entity is the aggressor. Grounded in the theory of reasoned action (Fishbein & Ajzen 2010), IRT proposes that, in order to repair one’s image, the accused must respond to the act in one of two ways. First, the accused can attempt to reject or reduce one’s responsibility for the actions in order to alter the public’s beliefs about one’s involvement. Second, the accused can reduce the offensiveness, possibly by even admitting responsibility or proposing to correct the issue, which helps to reduce the violations of the public’s values. The foundation of IRT has two key assumptions. First, communication is a goal-directed activity. Communication is motivated by one’s intentions, beliefs, and goals, and it is used to achieve these goals through various forms of communication, whether interpersonal, rhetorical, or mediated. Clark and Delia (1979) gave three universal motives for a person to use communication: (1) to respond to a particular obstacle or problem that he or she is facing; (2) to create and maintain relationships; and (3) to establish and maintain a desired self-image, which is the second key assumption of IRT: maintaining a favorable image is one of the key goals of communication. As stated previously, not only is maintaining a desirable image important for a healthy self-image, but from a persuasive standpoint, maintaining a desirable image is important for the credibility of a speaker (Benoit 2015). Image repair strategies. A primary function of IRT is to provide a typology of responses that an accused party can use to respond to persuasive attacks. Benoit (1995) provides a typology of five strategies that one can use to repair one’s image after a persuasive attack. Table 47.1 provides a complete list of these strategies. First, a person can choose to deny the fact that he or she performed the act in question. The denial strategy has two variants. A simple denial just states that the person in question did not perform the offensive act. The accused party can also shift the blame. This is a form of denial because if someone else performed the act, then obviously the person accused cannot be held responsible. 476

Protecting public perception Table 47.1  Image Repair Theory Response Strategies Categories

Strategies and explanations

Denial

•• Simple denial (stating that the organization or individual did not perform the act in question) •• Shifting the blame •• Provocation (scapegoating, claiming the actions were provoked by the actions of another person or organization) •• Defeasibility (claiming the action was provoked by lack of information or misinformation) •• Accident •• Good intentions •• Bolstering (stressing the positive traits of the organization or individual) •• Minimization (claiming the crisis is not as serious as the public or media perceives) •• Differentiation (making the act seem less offensive than the public perceives) •• Transcendence (places the crisis in a more favorable context) •• Attack the accuser •• Compensation •• Corrective action (promising to correct the problem) •• Mortification (admitting the crisis was the organization’s or individual’s fault and asking for forgiveness)

Evading responsibility

Reducing offensiveness

Corrective action Mortification

A person could attempt to evade responsibility for his or her actions. There are four variations of this strategy. A provocation approach, also known as scapegoating, proclaims that the person accused of the offense performed the act in response to someone else’s wrongdoing. The accused can claim he or she performed the negative behavior because of a lack of control, lack of information, or misinformation—known as defeasibility. The person accused can also claim the act was caused by an accident or that the person had good intentions when performing the act in question. A person can also attempt to reduce the offensiveness caused by the party’s actions. This strategy has six variations. Bolstering involves referring to positive acts performed in the past by the accused that will help mitigate the negative perception. Minimization involves making the audience believe that the offensive act is not as serious as perceived. Differentiation involves comparing the act in question to other, more offensive acts to make the current accusations seem less offensive. Transcendence involves placing the act in a broader, more favorable context to mitigate the negative perception. The accused can also attack his or her accusers to reduce the credibility of the opposing party or provide compensation for the victims of the offensive act. The final two strategies have no variations. The accused can perform corrective action in order to show commitment to preventing the problem from occurring again. This can occur in two forms: the accused can restore the situation to its state before the incident or promise to prevent the reoccurrence of the incident. Finally, the accused can admit that he or she is responsible for the action and ask for forgiveness, called mortification, or apology. Beyond Benoit’s (1995) initial response strategies, several scholars have suggested other strategies through their analysis of accused parties’ responses to allegations. For example, Liu (2008) suggested that using humor and endorsements from third parties were response strategies used to reduce offensiveness, and that claiming misinterpretation was a response strategy used to evade responsibility. Hambrick, Frederick & Sanderson (2015) suggested strategies of confirming and retrospective regret as ways to reduce offensiveness, and Bruce and Tini (2008) suggested diversion as a way to evade responsibility. 477

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Studying image repair theory: two perspectives The vast majority of studies that examine IRT have been conducted from the point of view of the party accused of scandal. This source-oriented approach typically involves case studies of the image repair attempts of the accused party in a specific scandal, mainly through a textual analysis of the documents used to communicate the accused party’s image repair efforts (e.g. Brinson & Benoit 1999; Zhang & Benoit 2004), a rhetorical analysis of interviews and speeches made by accused parties (e.g. Benoit & Hanczor 1994; Furgerson & Benoit 2013), or a content analysis of statements in mass media sources, like social media posts or news articles (e.g. Harlow, Brantley & Harlow 2011; Len-Rios 2010). Each of these approaches involves a critique of the strategies used by the accused parties to react to allegations. While this approach provides the opportunity to analyze critically the responses used by accused parties to react to scandals and transgressions they face, it suffers from a lack of guidelines or evidence to determine if those strategies used by accused parties were successful, which reduces the predictive power of IRT and makes findings less applicable to similar scandals (Burns & Bruner 2000; Sheldon & Sallot 2008). Because of this limitation, several scholars have recently begun to examine IRT from an audience-oriented approach, using experimental design to examine the effects of IRT strategies on participants (Brown, Dickhaus & Long 2012; Brown 2014; Coombs & Schmidt 2000; Dardis & Haigh 2009; Haigh & Brubaker, 2010; Sheldon & Sallot 2008). This has allowed scholars not only to examine the impact of certain image repair strategies on audience perception, but has also allowed scholars to examine the influence of other contextual variables, including prior reputation and performance history (Sheldon & Sallot 2008), race and gender (Brown, Billings, Mastro & Brown-Devlin 2015), fandom (Brown, Dickhaus & Long 2012), occupation (Len-Rios, Finneman, Han, Bhandari & Perry 2015), and relationship history with stakeholders (Haigh & Brubaker 2010). Although this approach does provide evidence of the effectiveness of IRT strategies, it suffers from the artificial nature of experimental research, which typically involves staging scandal situations and the responses from accused parties. In addition, however, Benoit (2016) pointed out that most experimental studies only test a few image repair strategies, which cannot guarantee a comprehensive understanding of the image repair discourse; also, the existed experimental studies have applied a variety of dependent variables to measure the audience reaction, making the comparison of results across studies problematic.

Contextual approaches to image repair research IRT has been used primarily to examine image repair discourse in three areas: politics, sports and entertainment, and corporate (Benoit 2015). According to Benoit (2015), there are two elements that make the study of political image repair unique. First, the partisan nature of politicians means that the opponents of accused politicians will repeatedly attack and remind the public of scandals. Second, politicians make decisions on a daily basis that can affect the lives of millions of people. Because of this, a politicians’ constituents typically hold politicians to a higher level of morality compared to others. Typically, from a political standpoint, IRT is used to examine statements involved in scandals, beginning with the first study of IRT that investigated statements made by President Ronald Reagan in response to his involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal (Benoit, Gullifor & Panici 1991). These statements are usually not in response to criminal accusations, but rather (for a significant number of them) examine scandals involving unethical and questionable behavior. For example, previous studies conducted have examined responses to racially charged statements made by politicians, specifically Sheldon and Sallot’s (2008) experimental examination of an incident 478

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similar to Trent Lott’s racial remarks during Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party, and Liu (2008)’s analysis of statements made after multiple allegations of racial remarks by then-Senator George Allen using content analysis and interviews with former staffers. Previous studies conducted by Benoit and Nill (1998), Len-Rios and Benoit (2004), Garcia (2011), and Benoit (2017) have examined response strategies used after various allegations involving sexual misconduct. IRT has also been used to examine response to backlash following controversial political decisions, similar to Benoit, Gullifor and Panici’s (1991) study on the Iran-Contra scandal. President George W. Bush’s decisions have been the focus of several studies, particularly in response to questionable decisions made during the Iraq War (Benoit 2006a; 2006b) and in relation to Hurricane Katrina (Benoit and Henson 2009; Liu 2007). Barack Obama engaged in image repair strategies after his health care initiative, HealthCare.gov, went live and faced major infrastructural issues (Benoit 2014). Kenneth Starr’s responses to criticism during the Bill Clinton investigation has also been studied (Benoit & McHale 1999). Corporate image repair is unique because corporations also have the responsibility and capacity to manage scandals while serving a wider set of audiences compared to politicians and other individuals (Benoit 1997). Corporations are generally responsible to these various audiences, and reputation is often built by carefully balancing “the expectations of employees, investors, government, activist groups, and society as a whole” (Oliveira 2008, p. 230). It goes without saying that the needs and expectations of government regulators are different from those of employees, stockholders, and societal groups. Furthermore, when facing a scandal, corporations often have to balance the needs and expectations of legal teams, whose goal is to encourage (or even discourage) communication strategies that could lead to litigation. In addition, corporations have the advantage of having multiple people speak on their behalf through multiple platforms. Organizations such as BP (Schultz et al. 2012), Findus Nordic (Falkheimer & Heide 2015), Dow Corning (Brinson & Benoit 1996), and Texaco (Brinson & Benoit 1999) all had opportunities to respond to media criticisms through press releases, speeches, and statements. Even organizations such as The New York Times have used their stature and platform to respond to internal scandals (Hindman 2005). Corporate crises and scandals have been examined multiple ways, often considering the impacts of strategies on audience responses through case studies and retrospective analyses. Longterm examples, such as Philip Morris’s responses to public and government criticisms, show how crises and scandals can change and endure over time (Oliveira 2008). Studies examining the Husi Food Company’s food-safety scandal (Xie & Yao 2016), Australian supermarket crises (Grimmer 2017), and Findus Nordic’s horsemeat scandal (Falkheimer & Heide 2015) illustrate how IRT can be used to respond to international corporate scandals. Scholars have even considered how the image restoration typology can be applied in financial reporting (Erickson, Weber & Segovia 2011). However, scandals often play out in the media; to this end, specific cases have highlighted the impact that media can have not only on bringing crises and scandals to light, but in serving as a vehicle for organizations to communicate their positions (e.g. Benoit & Brinson 1994; Falkheimer & Heide 2015). Compared to political and corporate image repair, image repair from a sports and entertainment perspective also has some key conceptual distinctions. First, compared to politicians, entertainers’ scandals usually do not have as serious an impact on people’s lives, which makes their image repair attempts easier to be accepted by the public (Benoit 1997). However, it is difficult for an entertainer or an athlete to distance themselves from scandals, unlike executives or employees of corporations (Benoit 2015). Typically, politicians and corporate officials are also less likely than entertainers and athletes to use the mortification strategy to repair their images because the prices of admitting mistakes tends to be higher (Benoit 2015). 479

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The majority of studies devoted to sports and entertainment image repair are usually about individual athletes and entertainers that are facing high-profile scandals, beginning with the initial study in sports image repair conducted by Benoit and Hanczor (1994) that examined the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan scandal. Previous studies have examined the saga between Terrell Owens and the Philadelphia Eagles (Brazeal 2008), doping accusations and admissions from Lance Armstrong (Hambrick, Fredrick & Sanderson 2013), Floyd Landis (Glantz 2010), and Roger Clemens (Sanderson 2008), and the sexual transgressions of Kobe Bryant, Ben Roethlisberger, Tiger Woods, and Hugh Grant (Benoit 1997; Meng & Pan 2013). While many of these studies are from a source-oriented perspective, many have been conducted from an audience-oriented perspective, not looking at a factual case involving an individual, but rather staging scenarios to test the effectiveness of response strategies and the influence of intervening variables (Brown 2014; Brown, Dickhaus & Long 2012; Brown et al. 2015; Len-Rios, Finneman, Han, Bhandari & Perry, 2015).

Generalizations and future directions for image repair research Based on previous research, there are a few generalizations that have been made regarding the effectiveness of IRT strategies. First, and perhaps the most universal generalization, is the widespread acceptance of mortification and corrective action as successful strategies. Rhetorical (e.g. Benoit & Brinson 1994; Brinson & Benoit 1996; Glantz 2013; Walsh & McAllister-Spooner 2011) and empirical studies (e.g. Brown et al. 2012; Haigh & Brubaker 2010) have provided support for both mortification and corrective action as effective strategies to use when attempting to repair one’s image after a scandal. Previous research also provides evidence that mortification also makes evading responsibility and reducing offensiveness strategies more effective (e.g. Benoit 2015; Glantz 2013; Utsler & Epp 2013). Benoit (2016) recommends using the mortification and corrective action strategies in combination when appropriate. Another generalization is that the denial strategy is typically ineffective, particularly when evidence contradicts the accused party’s claim (e.g. Benoit & Hanczor 1994; Glantz 2010; Hambrick, Federick & Sanderson 2015; Kennedy 2010). The denial strategy has mainly been examined in rhetorical image repair literature; however, Haigh and Brubaker (2010) also found empirical evidence supporting the claim that the denial strategy is the least effective strategy in a hypothetical scenario. Because the vast majority of image repair studies approach IRT from a source-oriented perspective (Burns & Bruner 2000), future research should consider testing IRT strategies from a more empirical, audience-oriented approach. For example, when considering the evading responsibility and reducing offensiveness strategies, future research should test the differences in effectiveness among the variants for each strategy. Benoit (2016) suggests that testing only a few strategies in empirical studies provides an incomplete comparative analysis of the effectiveness of strategies, particularly when discussing the evading responsibility and reducing offensiveness strategies. Because typically one of these strategies are tested in previous empirical research (e.g. Brown 2014; Haigh & Brubaker, 2010), generalizations are haphazardly made for all evading responsibility and reducing offensiveness variants. Benoit (2016) found difference among the specific forms of each of these strategies, but future research should test their effectiveness in other specific contexts. In addition, while most rhetorical studies reveal that accused parties usually respond to scandal using multiple IRT strategies, empirical IRT research usually tests single strategies. Future research should test strategies in combination to examine their effectiveness compared to standalone strategies. From a contextual standpoint, there are two particular areas of image repair that warrant more research. First, image repair should be studied from a more international perspective. While there 480

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have been a few studies that examine international image repair, the majority of studies have examined image repair efforts in the United States (Benoit 2015). Benoit and Brinson (1999) was the first study that examined international image repair efforts, rhetorically investigating the controversy surrounding Princess Diana’s death and responses from the Royal Family. Despite this, very few studies have been conducted from an international context, including the investigations of image repair strategies used by Israeli political figures (Kampf 2008) and corporate image repair in China (Meng 2010). In order to examine the effectiveness of IRT strategies across cultures, more studies should be conducted from a non-U.S. standpoint. In addition, more comparison of the use of IRT strategies in similar U.S. and non-U.S. settings would be ideal, similar to Low, Varughese and Pang’s (2011) comparison of government responses made by the U.S. and Taiwan to defend similar issues in their responses to natural disasters. Also, more research should examine third-party image repair, defined by Benoit (2015) as image repair efforts offered on the accused party’s behalf by someone not involved in the scandal. Benoit (2015) discussed two types of third-party image repair: historic third-party image repair and contemporary third-party image repair. Historic third-party image repair focuses on attempts to repair an image due to past offensive acts, such as Carmack, Bates and Harter’s (2008) examination of President Bill Clinton’s repair efforts for the Tuskegee syphilis experiments. Contemporary third-party image repair focuses on third-party attempts to repair another party’s image for recent acts, such as Wen, Yu and Benoit’s (2009) analysis of image repair efforts by Taiwanese newspapers defending Chien-ming Wang’s subpar performances as a member of the New York Yankees, a very rare instance of international third-party image repair. Brown and Billings (2013) introduced a form of third-party image repair in their discussion of fan-enacted crisis communication. Despite these efforts, more research should be devoted to the image repair efforts on behalf of accused parties by third-party sources in order to investigate the effectiveness of those efforts. IRT research also suffers from a lack of comparative research. Typically, in both rhetorical and empirical research devoted to IRT, a single scenario is examined. For a basis of comparison among IRT strategies in different contexts, more studies should examine multiple scenarios. Rhetorically, Meng and Pan (2013) compared three sex scandals involving athletes: Tiger Woods, Ben Roethlisberger, and Kobe Bryant. This allows the authors to make comparisons among the three accused athletes’ image repair efforts, which can lead to more generalizable assumptions that can be tested with empirical methods. Empirical studies should include multiple conditions regarding the type of scandal an accused party faces, similar to Brown’s (2014) investigation of the effectiveness of image repair efforts during a criminal and non-criminal scandal. No matter the approach to examining responses to scandal using IRT, it is evident that maintaining a positive image is important during a 24-hour news cycle. Attacks on one’s image can happen and become widespread in a matter of minutes, so crafting an appropriate, timely response is important to one’s personal, and possibly financial, well-being. Living in an “age of scandal” means that there will be abundant opportunities for scholars to use IRT as a framework to study these instances, and there is a significant number of opportunities for future research in this area.

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48 THE ROUTINIZATION OF MEDIA SCANDALS Maria Grafström and Karolina Windell

Introduction This chapter highlights the role of rituals, interrelatedness and temporality in the workings of a media scandal and discusses those aspects in relation to routinization. As the work of journalists depends highly on common norms and values within the professional field of news journalism, routine is obviously a central aspect (e.g. Tuchman 1973; Cook 1998). For instance, the question of what is considered newsworthy – what is considered to be legitimate and appropriate news content – has been extensively studied by scholars in journalism and media studies. Cook (1998, 61) argues that “when reporters make choices on who and what to cover and how to cover it, these choices are governed . . . by a ‘logic of appropriateness’ based on their professional craft-related roles as journalists”. While routines play a salient role in news work, and as such also in the journalistic crafting of media scandals, our ambition is to extend the understanding of routines by also suggesting that who and what are in the focus of single media scandals can take on a routinized character. Whereas media scandals often are studied as single events, we build our argument on a growing scholarly interest in the interrelated nature of scandals since they often come in waves (Adut 2005; Kantola and Vesa 2013). Single scandals need to be placed in broader contexts and to be understood in relation to other scandals. Understanding scandals as a social phenomenon with historical roots challenges ideas on what ingredients are needed in the making of a news media scandal. A transgression of norms that are repetitively covered by media may over time make the narrative of the media story rather predictable with a predefined set of questions, a storyline and suitable actors to play lead roles – as villains, victims and heroes. Even though both the logic of media and the character of a scandal suggest some kind of novelty and norm breaking aspects, our analysis suggests that the media trajectory of a scandal over time can be rather repetitive with predefined roles and scripts for the actors involved to play. We base our argumentation on extant studies on media scandals as something characterized by rituals, temporality and interrelatedness, and we use a case study of the Swedish textile company H&M as an illustration. The case study is based on a content analysis of news media coverage about “responsibility” and H&M, and covers a period of 18 years, from 1995 to 2012. During the period, H&M was recurrently accused of misconduct and irresponsible behaviour. The chapter is concluded with a discussion on how the routine perspective of scandals in the media inform the present literature in the field and how it can be used and researched in future studies. 485

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Rituals, temporality and interrelatedness Scandals are suggested to be closely related to and play a salient role in “the professional ideology of journalism” (Allern and Pollack 2012, 9) as they legitimize news organizations and journalists’ roles as the “fourth estate”. Kantola (2012, 73) even calls scandals “a strategic ritual of journalism” in the sense that they provide formative experiences for younger generations of journalists. However, scandals are not mirrored events in the media, but created through the professional handicraft of journalism. In this way, journalists are not only performing roles as news reporters, but “they also interpret and – to varying degrees – direct the progress of the scandal” (Allern and Pollack 2012, 9). The professional routines for journalistic work, often summarized in the umbrella term “media logic” (Altheide and Snow 1979), set boundaries for what events or social phenomena will be picked up in the first place and how it later develops in terms of a scandal in media narratives. This means that we to a large extent can predict the key ingredients and rhetoric of a media scandal. Jacobsson and Löfmarck (2008, 207) argue that we need to understand scandals as rituals, because they have a “predictable pattern of behaviour with a symbolic and expressive dimension”. We can therefore expect scandals to contain certain types of behaviour such as “angry letters” and “heated websites debates”. According to Jacobsson and Löfmarck this also implies that the scandal will follow certain moments: at first emotional energy which then fades away and thereafter a more reflexive phase follows. In this way, mediated scandals are suggested to follow similar cycles as they start with some kind of transgression of societal norms that come into the limelight of the media, and thereafter follow a “market-driven media logic in living a life of its own” (Herkman 2017, 4). The scandal-as-ritual perspective suggests, according to Jacobsson and Löfmarck, a type of drama containing a set of key actors, an audience and a corresponding script. In these social dramas narratives are generated and familiarities are constructed. The person or organization being criticized “becomes part of a story about The Good and The Bad, the Perpetrator and the Victim” (Allern and Pollack 2012, 187). The professional routines are powerful in deciding the frames of the story in a media scandal, and according to Allern and Pollack (2012, 187) the frames tend therefore to limit the scope and understanding of social phenomena: “reality is observed from one and the same perspective”. We take the existing literature on the roles of routines in news work and media scandals as the point of departure for our analysis, and suggest that the routine perspective can be further elaborated and extended by adding two more aspects: temporality and interrelatedness. First, while the existence of routines implies a temporal aspect in understanding news work, only recently has the role of history been emphasized in analyses of media scandals and how they perform. As with all social phenomena, scandals are also to a certain extent historical products. In line with Pettigrew (1990, 270), “history is not just an event in the past but is alive in the present and may shape the future”. One recent example is a study of political scandals in Finland, in which Kantola and Vesa (2013) show how their temporal approach allows for not only understanding whether the phenomena of media scandals are becoming more common or not over time, but also how their focus and character may change. Their longitudinal media study shows that what was considered appropriate behaviour during the 1970s – such as drinking alcohol during political negotiations and decision-making in the sauna or even having personal drinking problems – was criticized during the 1980s and 1990s and unacceptable in the 2000s (Kantola and Vesa 2013). While historical analyses of media scandals tell us about how topics and ideas about appropriate and legitimate behaviour change over time, we can also expect the routine aspect of media scandals to show repetition over time. For example, and as illustrated in the case 486

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of H&M, organizations given a villainous role in the media may repetitively play that role and be used as an illustration of the “bad example”. Second, the understanding of media scandals as rituals and as historically rooted highlights also the interrelatedness of media scandals. The narrative frames set by the media logic bring also ideas concerning what kinds of actors are suitable to include. As research shows that journalists tend to reuse source and expert voices who meet the communicative requirements of the media logic, we can also expect topics, organizations and individuals that are being criticized in scandals to be “reused”. Vasterman and Ruigrok (2013) show for example in their study on media coverage of the swine flu how a few experts were recurrently used as commentators. In particular, two experts were given opportunities to make statements over and over again – and both of them were more alarmist in their statements in comparison with other expert voices. The media logic may therefore enhance certain types of messages and images of social phenomena and at the same time other perspectives may entirely fall outside of the radar. In addition, Kantola and Vesa (2013) state – drawing on a large pile of scholarly work on media scandals – that certain types of scandals tend to come in waves. Single media scandals therefore tend to influence other scandals, directly or indirectly. In sum, we argue that an understanding of media scandals from the perspectives of rituals as well as temporality and interrelatedness stress the routine aspects of why and how social phenomena are turned into scandal narratives in the media. We use the empirical case of the Swedish textile company H&M to illustrate the nature of media scandals from a routine perspective. The case illustrates how once an organization has been in focus for a critic, the critic may pop up in subsequent occasions as the organization is used as a negative example.

To play the leading role in an ongoing media scandal This section builds on an analysis of media texts of the large Swedish stock exchange company H&M in relation to issues concerning corporate responsibility over a period of 18 years, from 1995 to 2012.1 Initially, the coding of media texts in the largest newspapers in Sweden included four Swedish stock exchange companies, all in retail business to consumers (Grafström et al. 2015). The results demonstrate that three of these four companies were continually discussed in relation to one type of responsibility issue over the years. In other words, the results indicate that these three companies were given certain scripts and roles in the media narrative of corporate responsibilities over the years. In this chapter, we develop the case of H&M further in order to illustrate our argument about routinized, temporal and interrelated media scandals. H&M was selected due to its long history of being publicly debated as to whether or not it was an (ir)responsible organization. With the use of a set of keywords we searched for print articles that explicitly addressed issues about corporate responsibilities – and mentioned in relation to H&M. The articles are complemented with other media sources from TV and radio broadcast programmes when relevant. Our analysis demonstrates that the company has been involved in what we understand as an ongoing media scandal; a scandal that stretches over several years. The character and focus of the scandal appear to be recurrent and strengthened over time. The main focus of the media critique of H&M relates to working conditions in the textile factories in which the company’s products are manufactured.

1997–1998: starting point of the ongoing scandal The starting point for the media attention on H&M and its working conditions was a documentary by the Swedish public television at the end of 1997. The documentary revealed bad working conditions and even child labour in the factories that manufactured H&M products: 487

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Hennes & Mauritz celebrates its 50th birthday this year. The company is today one of the largest clothing chains in Europe and one example of a company that successfully takes advantages of the global economy. The business idea behind the profitable development on the stock market, latest fashion to the lowest price, has offered the customer cheap clothes and the owners billions in profit. (SVT 1997, our translation) In the publicity that followed, H&M was held responsible for the child labour that had been found in the suppliers’ factories. The media attention was intensified by the fact that the CEO at the time, Stefan Persson, at first did not comment on the disclosures. In one of the first articles published after the TV documentary – with the headline “Stefan Persson refuses to make a statement” (Aftonbladet, 29 December 1997) – it was stated that the CEO had tried to stop the documentary and that he was not interested in being interviewed about the challenges that H&M were facing in their operations abroad. One day later, the CEO, the purchase manager and the communication manager made comments stressing that H&M took the critique seriously and by no means accepted child labour, as for example in this quote: I think that this is as disgusting as everybody else, [the CEO of H&M] says about the TV disclosures about child labour among the suppliers . . . It is absolutely not true that I’m hiding, he says upset and as a reaction to the information that he has earlier refused to comment on the film. We would under no circumstance allow child labour and we follow the UN declaration about human rights. This is an important issue for us. (Persson 1997, our translation) The programme also led to a fierce debate among journalists, politicians and consumers about the morality of the market. Opinions were expressed about how profit-seeking companies were allowed to act. The Minister of Labour at the time, Margareta Winberg, criticized the company in a newspaper article with the headline “Winberg: I will never go shopping there again”. The announcement from the Minister gave impetus to consumers as well as other actors to express their opinions and stakes in the debate. For example, The Swedish Trade Union Confederation considered selling its share of stocks in H&M (Svenska Dagbladet, 31 December 1997) and the Minister of Agriculture declared in an interview that “I will think once or twice before I walk into that shop again” (Expressen, 31 December 1997). The Minister of Consumption at the time, Leif Blomberg, also reacted to the TV documentary and announced that he himself did not believe in boycotts. Instead he urged key actors within the textile industry to get together to combat jointly child labour (Göteborgs-Posten, 31 December 1997). At the end of January 1998, a meeting between H&M and the Minister of Labour and the Minister of Consumption was arranged. The media reported that the Minister of Labour – now when she had more information about the efforts made by H&M to deal with the situation – regretted that she had urged a boycott against H&M (Aftonbladet, 28 January 1998; Dagens Industri, 28 January 1998). All through 1998, H&M continued to play a paramount role in the media narrative about multinationals in a global world; a narrative that raised questions and spurred a debate about the morality of companies – and what is reasonable to expect in terms of social responsibility – in an increasingly globalized market economy. The media scandal during this first phase was created out of and strengthened by a conflict between different ideas and norms about the moral order of the market economy. The key media story was about the big company H&M manufacturing their products in low-wage economies and thereby transgressing norms about how far a company should go in its striving for profits. The media story thus triggered, and was given impetus 488

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by, questions both on business conduct in a global economy and on corporate responsibility along its value chain. The story had a very clear casting in which H&M was given the role of the villain, people who worked in the factories were victims, and the investigative journalists perceived as the heroes.

1999–2011: the media scandal is kept alive In the following years, H&M was targeted in the media on several occasions regarding working conditions in textile factories. The majority of the articles contained some kind of criticism towards H&M, but there are also some, even though they are few, examples in which H&M was praised. The media scandal from late 1997 was kept alive over the years as working conditions continued to be in focus – and often with the reference to what was revealed about child labour in 1997. In addition, H&M also figured in publicity about problems in the textile industry even though the company was not directly involved itself. H&M was mentioned as an example of companies in the industry that ought to take a greater responsibility. We take the year 2006 to illustrate the media coverage of H&M over this period: it was an average year when it comes to publicity about responsibility issues and included several different media stories about H&M and its working conditions in different countries and within different areas. For example, the Swedish radio broadcast programme Kaliber revealed deficient working conditions in the jewellery industry in China (23 April 2006). Several companies – among them H&M – were accused of poor working conditions in their suppliers’ factories. The day after the radio broadcast H&M’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) manager was interviewed on the morning show on Swedish radio, where she explained that H&M already had taken action to improve conditions. While some of the critics of the jewellery industry did not relate to H&M but to other Swedish companies, H&M was still asked questions on prime time Swedish radio about the situation. Recurrently in the media coverage, references are made to earlier accusations of H&M violations of human rights in the late 1990s. The media audience is not only reminded about earlier negative publicity but is also presented with a continuity – a pattern of behaviour that signals what is reasonable to expect from H&M. References made to negative publicity from the 1990s is not only made in critical articles but also in those concerning H&M’s efforts to improve working conditions at the suppliers’ factories. One example: H&M has a large part of its production in Bangladesh. It was one of the companies that during the early 1990s was pursued by the media, when the labour conditions in the textile factories of the third world suddenly became world news. Since then, it has invested heavily to change its image and the standard among its suppliers. (Svenska Dagbladet, 26 April 2006, our translation) The majority of the analysed articles from the year 2006 cover protests by workers in factories in Bangladesh. Even though H&M was not using any of the suppliers facing criticism from workers, the company was recurrently brought up in the media coverage. H&M is basically used as an example of a company that used textile factories in Bangladesh for manufacturing its products. H&M also appears in articles about competitors. For example, when another textile company is accused of lack of control of their suppliers, H&M becomes part of the story as an example of both bad and good practices. The media scandal about labour conditions is not isolated to the very peaks of media attention but rather lingers and gives impetus to the media framing of labour conditions in general 489

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within the textile industry during the years from 1999 to 2011. It is evident that H&M is used as an example when the newspapers are reporting on issues with poor working conditions where other companies are involved, but H&M is not part of this story. As the media narrative lingers and even continues to develop, H&M – from a responsibility perspective – increasingly begins to stand for poor working conditions. In this sense, H&M’s media scandal is in this phase turned into what Jacobsson and Löfmarck (2008) argue is a drama in which the roles as well as the script are predefined and, moreover, where a certain familiarity is created – coverage on poor working conditions easily brings H&M into the story.

2012: the media scandal is reinforced In 2012, the scandal was again reinforced as TV4 and its programme Kalla Fakta (Cold Facts) broadcast two documentaries. In both of them H&M is accused of not paying fair salaries to workers in the factories. The programmes resulted in intense media attention and a public debate between H&M and Kalla Fakta. A month before the first TV programme was broadcast, H&M received positive publicity for its ambition to influence politicians in Bangladesh to raise minimum wages as well as collaborating with UNICEF to start schools for children in that country (e.g. Expressen, 5 September 2012; Dagens industri, 6 September 2012). In October 2012, Kalla Fakta broadcast the first of the two documentaries and accused H&M of not paying the workers fair wages. The TV programme started with a number of rhetorical questions that raised the moral dilemmas of how wealth and welfare ought to be distributed. Who in Sweden has never worn H&M clothes? Who has never heard about this company’s fantastic success or the owner family’s enormous fortune? Kalla Fakta tonight is about those who sew clothes and those who gain the profits. On the one side, tens of thousands of poor sewers in Asia earning a few crowns an hour, and on the other side one of the world’s richest owner families. We really take a social responsibility, as much as one can ask for, says H&M. (Kalla Fakta, 24 October 2012, our translation) H&M responded to the programme in an article in which the CEO, Karl-Johan Persson, refuted the criticism: “We do not recognize ourselves in the accusations. We struggle for higher salaries and better conditions for the factory workers in Cambodia,” he tells Expressen. (Expressen, 24 October 2012, our translation) In the TV documentary, information from 2011 about workers that were fainting in the textile industry was repeated and reused. Hence, the link to previous episodes of the critique towards H&M was strengthened; and in that sense the ongoing scandal was reinforced. Directly after the programme, H&M sent an email to Kalla Fakta with responses to the criticism. The email was published by Kalla Fakta and they, in turn, responded to H&M’s criticism of the programme. The email correspondence initiated and spurred a public and hot-tempered debate, and it continued with new letters in December the same year. Part of the communication regarded the role that H&M plays in the global society and how the company can defend the fact that it makes profits on cheap labour in developing countries.

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Critics call it “economic freeriding” and make parallels with the colonialism of the nineteenth century – that H&M in principle gains but does not give anything back to the poor countries as you don’t pay company tax in for example Bangladesh and Cambodia. What do you say? (Question posed by Kalla Fakta, see TV4 2016) There are probably extreme opinions and critics with a number of ideas, but the majority of all organizations – probably more than 90 per cent – argue that trade is paramount to eliminate poverty and there is clear evidence that proves that this has happened and happens. In our opinion, it is Kalla Fakta’s task, in a serious journalistic manner, to balance different extreme opinions and to provide a nuanced picture of reality. We have clearly explained how our company structures work in several of our answers – but it is probably always possible to find those that are critical. (Answer provided by H&M, see TV4 2016) In December 2012, the second part of the Kalla Fakta documentary was broadcast with a focus on the income of the owner family of H&M, in which was discussed their earnings in relation to the workers in the production countries. Even before the programme was broadcast H&M reported Kalla Fakta to the Broadcasting Commission at the Authority for Print Media, Radio and TV (Aftonbladet, 10 December 2012). In its online newsroom H&M explained that Kalla Fakta did not give a nuanced or correct image of the company or their effort to create better working conditions and that Kalla Fakta thereby had not followed the rules of press ethics. H&M also published all the information about the ongoing media story online. To sum up, the analysed news flow of H&M shows that the company was recurrently presented in relation to and tied to the moral issue of the working conditions in the textile industry. Media scandals concerning H&M during the late 1990s appear to have set the stage for subsequent scandals by both zooming in on working conditions and at the same time excluding other possible areas and issues for scrutiny and criticism. In addition, it has given H&M a role as a representative of the “villains” within the textile industry in a broader sense. A media scandal concerning H&M today thus needs to be understood in relation to previous ones. We have shown that when for example poor working conditions in the textile industry are the focus of a media story, H&M is often mentioned or even interviewed, regardless of whether the actual transgression in the specific story has anything to do with the company. In this way, media scandals over time appear to develop some kind of continuity and predictability – more or less the same story builds up the base of an ongoing media narrative of H&M. New media stories and public outbursts about the organization are created based on previous news stories – making links between new and old information and resulting in a blurring of time. Hence, one could argue that over time less and less information is actually needed to create an outburst – or a media scandal – as it simply adds to previous stories.

Concluding remarks In this chapter, we have argued that media scandals take on a routinized character in particular via three aspects: media scandals have the character of being (1) rituals; (2) temporal; and (3) interrelated. While the first aspect – the scandal-as-ritual (e.g. Jacobsson and Löfmarck 2008) – has been paid extensive scholarly attention, the two other aspects have been less

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researched. In this chapter we set out to provide a first attempt to highlight the role of history and the interrelated nature of scandals, aspects that we argue are much in need of future study within the field. The illustrations presented from the media coverage of H&M are only one story among many others and should be both further developed and challenged. Media scandals concerning working conditions have a very strong moral message and involve a clear set of cast members of villains (H&M), victims (the workers) and heroes (most often the journalists). Even though there would be many companies that could have played the role of the villain, H&M is recurrently used as the example – even when it is not involved at the time. And even though H&M since the late 1990s has launched a number of initiatives in the area, the scandal story would not gain from including and discussing them. A routinized perspective of media scandals suggests that a scandal never really closes: instead it is open to more information, interpretation and action. As long as something new can be added to the story, they remain important for journalists to keep investigating and reporting about. The interrelatedness further emphasizes that, even though there might be an end to a current scandal, it can rather easily be revived with slightly new ingredients. We suggest that the character of routinized media scandals is self-reinforcing as it brings with it rather predefined roles and scripts for the actors involved to play and to follow. For example, journalists that cover the area of sustainability and the textile industry would likely turn to H&M when new issues or possible scandal situations appear – maybe they have already previously reported on H&M and are familiar with the history of the company or, if not, H&M will easily pop up as the key example when for example searching online and discussing with colleagues. Our results for the other companies included in the analysis (Grafström et al. 2015) indicate a similar picture of a rather narrow and one-dimensional focus on one issue, and one organization, at the time – and once an organization is tied to one particular responsibility issue, there seems to be a tendency for it to be related with the same issue over time. For example, the Swedish telecom company TeliaSonera was during the years 1995 to 2011 very much tied to issues concerning corruption. In 2012, the publicity on corruption concerning the company exploded as it was criticized for its business in Uzbekistan. We can also rather easily think of other equivalent organizations in other industries – with other key problems in focus – such as for example the big oil companies BP and Shell and questions about the environment and greenhouse gases. This in turn reminds us that the “leading roles” in ongoing media stories are few and only a very limited number of organizations would be suitable for those roles, regardless of whether it is to play the villain or the hero. While our analysis very much has focused on journalistic norms as the foundation for and explanations of the routinized character of media scandals, we would also like to stress the need for going beyond the editorial offices and discuss the dynamics of scandal in a broader sense. The self-reinforcing character just discussed may be partly explained by activities outside of the media – not least by the companies themselves. For example, the way H&M responded to the scandals may have contributed to turning itself into a recurrent point of reference in the ongoing media narrative. H&M has an extensive, like most large publicly traded companies, narrative about its role in society and the responsibility that it takes (e.g. sustainability reports, information on the website and the launch of a sustainable collection). In this way, the focus of certain responsibility issues is something that develops over time in the interplay between media, companies and other stakeholders. In addition, we know from previous studies that media content does not only shape opinions, values and perceptions of audiences, but also of the organization or individual in the focus of the media (Kjaergaard et al. 2011). The recurrent focus on H&M in the media has for example likely shaped internal ideas, perceptions and practices of not least 492

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how to minimize the likelihood of possible new public criticism. Such an internal focus may in itself also have an influence on the overall scandal narrative in the media. We would also like to underline that we are not arguing for less scrutiny of H&M – or any other company – but our argument concerns the need to problematize how scandals unwrap over time, and how news of yesterday plays important roles in shaping the news of today. If the routine perspective is taken seriously, it therefore suggests a kind of inertia in ongoing media stories which makes it less likely that the topic and castings of an already set story will change. This in turn raises questions for future scholarly investigation concerning to what extent such inertia exists, how it is created over time, and its impact on the dynamics and nature of scandals in the media.

Note 1 We would like to thank Emelie Adamsson for assistance with coding work in parts of the data collection.

References Adut, A. (2005) A theory of scandal: Victorians, homosexuality, and the fall of Oscar Wilde. American Journal of Sociology, 111(1): 213–248. Allern, S. and Pollack, E. (2012) Mediated scandals. In S. Allern and E. Pollack (eds.) Scandalous! The Mediated Construction of Political Scandals in Four Nordic Countries. Gothenburg: Nordicom, pp. 9–28. Altheide, D.L., and Snow R.P. (1979) Media Logic. Beverly Hills: Sage. Cook, T.E. (1998) Governing with the News: The News Media as a Political Institution. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Grafström, M., Windell, K. and Adamsson, E. (2015) Normerande bilder av ansvar – en studie av hur fem börsföretag framställs i svenska medier 1995–2012, Score report no. 2015:4, Stockholm University. Herkman, J. (2017) Old patterns on new clothes? Populism and political scandals in the Nordic countries, Acta Sociologica, onlinefirst. Jacobsson, K., and Löfmarck, E. (2008) A sociology of scandal and moral transgression: The Swedish ‘Nannygate’ scandal. Acta Sociologica, 51(3): 203–216. Kantola, A., and Vesa, J. (2013) Mediated scandals as social dramas: Transforming the moral order in Finland. Acta Sociologica, 56(4): 295–308. Kantola, A. (2012) Warriors for democracy: Scandal as a strategic ritual of journalism. In S. Allern and E. Pollack (eds.) Scandalous! The Mediated Construction of Political Scandals in Four Nordic Countries, Stockholm: Nordicum, pp. 73–85. Kjaergaard, A., Morsing, M., and Ravasi, D. (2011) Mediating identity: A study of media influence on organizational identity construction in a celebrity firm. Journal of Management Studies, 48(3), 514–543. Persson, S. (1997) Aftonbladet, 30 December. Pettigrew, A. (1990) Longitudinal field research on change: Theory and practice. Organization Science 1(3): 267–292. SVT (1997) Two World Companies, documentary, 29 December. Tuchman, G. (1973) Making news by doing work: Routinizing the unexpected. The American Journal of Sociology, 79(1): 110–131. TV4 (2016) Läs själv: H&Ms svar till Kalla Fakta (Read by yourself: H&M’s answer to Kalla Fakta), 12 December, https://www.tv4.se/kalla-fakta/artiklar/l%C3%A4s-sj%C3%A4lv-hms-svar-till-kalla-fakta50c5ed9704bf726dde0001da Vasterman, P.L., and Ruigrok, N. (2013) Pandemic alarm in the Dutch media. European Journal of Communication, 28(4): 436–453.

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49 SCANDAL AND THE LAW Gavin Phillipson

I start this chapter with a tale of two scandals that resulted in very different legal responses. As this chapter was being completed, media coverage in the USA and beyond was dominated by accusations of sexual assault made by several women against conservative US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Plainly all the allegations were seriously defamatory, but no libel threats were issued by the nominee (even in respect of allegations not aired in the hearing itself): it is likely that, as a public figure, he would have to have shown that such allegations had been published by the media with ‘actual malice’ – knowledge of their falsity or with reckless disregard for their truth – under the famous decision in New York Times v Sullivan (1964), something that is extremely hard to establish. The episode has obvious echoes of the series of allegations of various forms of sexual misconduct made against President Donald Trump by numerous women; again, no defamation proceedings have been forthcoming. The scandal did not prevent the nomination of Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court but may haunt him for years; the law, withdrawn from the scene, has played no part. Now contrast this episode with a scandal involving a prominent British Conservative politician, Lord McAlpine. In 2012, the BBC’s flagship Newsnight programme mistakenly linked the former senior Conservative politician to child abuse allegations. Despite not actually naming Lord McAlpine, rumours linking him to the allegations promptly took off on social media, fuelled by a badly misjudged ‘ironic’ tweet by the wife of the speaker of the House of Commons, Sally Bercow: ‘Why is Lord McAlpine trending? *Innocent face*’. As one commentator observed, that emoji was to cost Bercow £20,000 (Pelletier, 2016, p. 247). Bercow had over 56,000 followers on Twitter, some of whom retweeted her tweet, only to subsequently receive letters from McAlpine’s lawyers, threatening defamation proceedings for their republication of the libel; several apologised publicly, deleted their tweets and paid sums to charities (ibid.). But this episode, while showing the potential legal dangers of repeating scandalous innuendos on social media, ended very differently. Not only did McAlpine seek and obtain prompt retractions and redress from those who had libelled him, under threat of imminent legal proceedings, but the scandal then turned abruptly to pursue a different target: not the accused politician, but the media body concerned, the BBC. Despite the Corporation promptly publishing an apology and full retraction, its Director General resigned; the Head of News and her deputy ‘stepped aside’; and it was reported that senior editors at Newsnight faced disciplinary proceedings and possible dismissal (Guardian, 2012). All of this was at least partly due to the fact that McAlpine, who might 494

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well have been effectively blocked from bringing a defamation case by Sullivan had he been American, was able to make swift and effective use of the law of libel in England. Thus, the emerging scandal was not only rapidly knocked on the head as far as McAlpine was concerned, it was turned back against the main media body that had started it off. The scandal that mattered turned out to be, not the allegation, but the making of it.

Law and scandal: a complex relationship This pair of contrasting episodes highlights a key theme of this chapter: that law can play very different roles in relation to scandal and that its role may often differ because of key differences between media law in the USA and in other Western democracies.1 As we saw from the Trump and Kavanaugh examples, the law may play no role at all in relation to a scandal. In the McAlpine case, in contrast, we saw how law acted as a fire-fighter, rapidly putting out the fires of scandal before they could properly take hold. But there are numerous other roles that law can play when resorted to by a scandal-beset public figure. It may help fuel a scandal via the well-known ‘Streisland effect’: when Max Mosley and Naomi Campbell, to take two wellknown examples, sued British newspapers for publishing scandalous stories about their private lives (concerning a sadomasochistic encounter with sex-workers and treatment at Narcotics Anonymous respectively), their temerity in taking on the press in court, resulted, predictably, in a still greater fire-storm of publicity in which much of the press became all the more determined to shame and ridicule their targets in retaliation. Both celebrities eventually won their cases,2 with the legal costs payable by the papers far outweighing the damages awarded; this might have made the press more cautious in publishing such stories in future but hugely ramped up the publicity given to the stories in question. This neatly illustrated the role that many accused of scandalous behaviour would like the law to play but which it did not in this case, namely a preventive one, stopping the press from publishing the story at all. Under the US First Amendment, such injunctions are practically impossible to obtain; in the UK and many European countries they may be granted depending on the merits of the individual case and the strength of any competing public interest arguments. Here the difference between law in the USA and other liberal democracies is perhaps at its strongest: injunctions, and court-ordered retractions and apologies, are nothing out of the ordinary outside the USA, but all-but unknown within it. If we consider the case of a scandal involving criminal activity from which prosecution results, the contrasts continue. In the USA, the First Amendment seemingly prohibits any restrictions on what the press may publish before, during and after the trial (Nebraska Press Association, 1976). If the defendant or victim are high profile, the resultant press frenzy can result in what one criminal-defence lawyer has described as a ‘looking-glass world’ in which witnesses routinely sell their stories to the press; ‘every scrap of . . . evidence, inadmissible or not,’ is leaked, stolen, or otherwise ferreted out and repeatedly published or broadcast; blatant and hugely damaging falsehoods are endlessly recycled in the news coverage; and ‘[t]he only consistent winners are those who feed public appetites for scandal and profit from the frenzy. (Phillipson, 2008, p. 16) In the UK, and many other Commonwealth countries, in contrast, there is widespread support for the notion that in certain cases some restriction of the press may be both legitimate and necessary in order to protect the presumption of innocence and the fairness of trials. In the UK, 495

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once a suspect has been charged or arrested, publication of material that creates a substantial risk of serious prejudice to the forthcoming proceedings is a criminal offence under the Contempt of Court Act, 1981. Such an approach has also been endorsed by the European Court of Human Rights, which draws on the common traditions of the European democracies and is in turn responsible for setting standards across all 47 states of the Council of Europe. The Court has said that: the limits of permissible comment [in the media] may not extend to statements which are likely to prejudice, whether intentionally or not, the chances of a person receiving a fair trial. (Worm v Austria (1997), para. 50) Hence, while in the USA the criminal trial becomes simply part of the scandal-story – allowing the firestorm of speculation to rage unabated during the entire trial – in Commonwealth countries and many in Europe, not only during the trial itself but for the whole period from arrest up to the verdict, the presence of formal criminal proceedings acts as quite a strong restraint upon scandal-mongering in the media, putting a kind of temporary stay on direct discussions of the defendant’s guilt or innocence. The law here functions to put a kind of cordon sanitaire around the trial, discouraging the tendency for a case to end up being tried as much in the ‘court of public opinion’ as in the more formal legal proceedings. Even in the USA, however, there is one legal tool commonly used to try to suppress scandalous stories that can be squared with the First Amendment: the confidentiality agreement. Because a confidentiality agreement represents, formally at least, a voluntary promise by an individual not to speak about a given topic, they are not regarded as a means whereby the state prevents an individual from speaking, contrary to the First Amendment. Rather the courts are seen as simply enforcing the individual’s own agreement not to speak (Volokh, 2000, pp. 1057–1063). However, as Donald Trump’s recent travails over Stormy Daniels show, at some point the public pressure to know can result in the full or partial frustration of even legally binding confidentiality agreements: instead the agreements may become a fresh source of scandal, as with the recent guilty pleas of Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, to the charge of improperly using campaign funds to pay off Daniels, shortly before the 2016 US Presidential Elections. Moreover, while no Western country comes close to matching the sweeping exemptions from libel law that the press enjoys in relation to public figures in the USA, there are narrow but absolute exemptions in Commonwealth countries that correspond to those in the USA. For example, if the British Parliament held public confirmation hearings for its top judges, then, like anything said during ‘proceedings in Parliament’, they would enjoy absolute privilege from legal liability (Article 9, Bill of Rights, 1679); thus, any Kavanaugh-like allegations made during such proceedings would be privileged and could be reported. Similarly, New Zealand grants Sullivanstyle protection to the media – but only in relation to a very narrow class of potential plaintiffs: elected public officials and candidates for such office (Lange v Atkinson, 1997). Having sketched these initial points about the various roles law can play in relation to the reporting of scandal, and how that role differs markedly in the USA, in this chapter I go on to discuss four further, related points about the law and scandal which I also consider through a comparative lens: first, the changing function of the law when it comes to protecting privacy in the online era; second the question of whether court orders can still realistically keep ‘private facts’ secret in that era; third, the broader impact of the law on public discourse in an era of ‘fake news’; and finally the advent of a remedy specifically tailored to the crucial contemporary role the internet plays in ‘remembering’ scandals: the ‘right to be forgotten’. 496

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Privacy law and scandal: preserving elites or protecting privacy? We have already noted that US law demonstrates marked hostility to any privacy claims that would affect press freedom. A particularly striking example – shocking to European eyes – is Florida Star (1989), in which the US Supreme Court held that the revelation in a newspaper report of a rape victim’s name and address, resulting in her further terrorization by her assailant, was protected against a civil action by the First Amendment. But this hostility does not only manifest in the law: a recent collection of essays on scandal carries one by J. R. Stevens (2016), telling the story of the birth of US privacy law – the famous article by Warren and Brandeis (1890). Stevens, expanding on ideas postulated by literary scholars Brooke Thomas (1992) and Law Professor Dean Prosser (1960), argues that the original impetus behind the creation of US privacy law was the desire to protect class privilege against democratic pressure. Under this account, since it was the middle and working classes who were reading the new ‘yellow press’ with its celebrity gossip and photographs, Warren and Brandeis’s famous argument for the ‘right to be let alone’ becomes nothing more than an attempt ‘to legally insulate the eroding class structure by privileging the values of the upper class’, a turn to law in the attempt to ‘reinforce the existing social boundaries’ (Stevens, 2016 p. 22). This could be contested purely as historical analysis, but Stevens insists the episode is not merely of historical interest, arguing that ‘the core conditions that produced the original seminal arguments about how we consider those [privacy] boundaries appear to be occurring again (ibid., p. 25). Thus, just as, back in the nineteenth century, ‘technology changed the way personal information was disclosed by enabling the lower classes to participate more in the public surveillance process’ (via the new mass-circulation popular newspapers), the same is ‘occurring again’ now so that current arguments about privacy and publicity ‘strongly resemble the nineteenth century concerns’ of Warren and Brandeis (ibid.). Especially in a book about scandal in the contemporary digital age, this seems a surprisingly inapposite analysis. It assumes that those concerned about privacy protection are invariably members of the elite, seeking to shield their embarrassing activities from the gaze of the mob. But one of the key changes that the online era has brought – a distinctive feature of scandal in the contemporary age – is that anyone can now be the target for intrusive mass publicity. Nowadays, images of ordinary citizens in embarrassing or compromising situations can be captured by the smartphones of other ordinary people, be placed online and go ‘viral’ within minutes in what is known in the literature as ‘lateral’ or ‘peer to peer surveillance’ (Kuehn, 2016, 120). Thus, Stevens’s argument (2016, p. 25), that technological changes have fuelled ‘a greater appetite for the surveillance of media elites . . . but . . . at the expense of the control afforded elites’, strikingly misses what is most distinctive about our era. An essay in the same volume as Stevens’s piece provides a fascinating case study of such ‘lateral surveillance’ in the service of such ‘mediated voyeurism’: the story of the New Zealand ‘office sex romp’, in which patrons in a local pub ‘recorded and distributed photos and videos of two office co-workers’ whom they happened to observe ‘having sex inside an adjacent insurance building after business hours’ (Kuehn, 2016, p. 119). The unlucky lovers were ordinary private citizens, hitherto wholly unknown to the public, but not only did the posts ‘go viral’ on Facebook and YouTube, but the story was picked up by mainstream media ‘and viewed by millions of people worldwide’ (ibid.). This was a powerful example amongst many of what may be termed the ‘democratisation’ of ‘the production of celebrity, information and news and culture’, something made possible in turn by ‘the democratization of surveillance’ primarily via the use of networked smartphones that turn all citizens into potential paparazzi, able to turn ‘surveillance footage into entertainment’ via our ubiquitous social media (ibid., p. 123). This renders those unlucky enough to catch public attention liable to ‘intense monitoring and judging’ (ibid.) by a public 497

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that can be simultaneously prurient and censorious. That this is a global phenomenon is demonstrated by the example of a scandal in China again involving private citizens: a wife caught her husband having sex with her sister in the car; the pair leaped out of the car naked and she drove off, leaving them ‘to stand before a gawking crowd armed with smartphones’. The result was predictable: ‘photos of the philanderers went viral in minutes’ (Mandell and Chen, 2016, p. 7). It might be argued that at least the unfortunate couples in the New Zealand and China cases had taken a risk by having sex in locations in which they should have realised they could be observed. But there are still darker sides to such online ‘shaming’ in which images taken of unarguably private occasions are turned into public spectacle. As Amy Gadja notes (2015, pp. 132–134), numerous misogynistic websites in the USA openly invite the posting of ‘revenge porn’, including fully nude pictures of women, together with their name, age, city, and Facebook and Twitter account details. The literature also notes examples of those who have suddenly become the object of privacy-invading public attention in even more mundane circumstances. An extreme and notorious example is the overweight 16-year-old boy who became known as ‘Little Fatty’: a picture taken of him in the street by chance went viral in Asia with ‘hit’ rates in the tens of millions and eventual coverage in Reuters and the UK’s Independent newspaper (Cheung, 2009, p. 191). The mass media’s involvement – which tends to boost massively the publicity given to such events – comes about because cost-cutting measures and staff reductions render many media companies eager to latch on to free content (Gadja, 2015, p. 13), often gained through mining social media platforms (Kuehn, 2016, p. 126). For example, the UK’s Daily Mail (5 November 2007) published Facebook photos of drunken ‘girls’ nights out’ to a mass audience under the headline: ‘The ladettes who glorify their shameful antics on Facebook.’ Of course, such stories may also still originate in the mass media: one of the most notorious media feeding frenzies in Britain recently surrounded the disappearance on holiday of a little girl, Madeline McCann; the relentless, wall-to-wall coverage included repeated, gross libels aimed at her parents by several British newspapers; most notably, the Express papers, over a series of more than 100 stories, alleged that her parents had themselves been involved in the murder of their child or had organised her kidnapping. Once again, the McCanns were purely private citizens, thrust into the limelight only by an appalling tragedy; once again the real scandal was the media coverage, rather than the (false) stories themselves. It may be noted in passing that this episode, amongst others, casts grave doubt on the claim that English libel law was, as some newspapers argued, to blame for their abject failure to report on the Jimmy Savile sexual abuse scandal for so long (see Chapter 20 in this volume). Since the press were happy to publish hundreds of stories that they later admitted were ‘completely untrue’ about the wholly innocent McCanns, paying hundreds of thousands of pounds in libel damages to them as a result (Cathcart, 2008), it rather strains credulity to assert that it was libel law that deterred them from reporting on the amply evidenced criminal activities of Savile. In short, the notion that privacy or libel law nowadays serves to uphold class privilege or class barriers simply misses one of the key characteristics of scandal in our digital age. Rather, the fact that lateral surveillance may now capture quite ordinary people as well as celebrities illustrates the need for a similarly internet-tailored remedy – the right to be forgotten – discussed below.

Defamation law, scandal and public discourse While privacy law is relevant given that scandals often involve sex or other aspects of private life, the essence of scandal is generally seen as the outing of a disreputable secret. Thompson’s seminal work argued that scandal concerned breaches of ‘values, norms and moral codes’ by hitherto concealed behaviour of a kind likely to provoke public disapproval or even outrage, resulting 498

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in damage to the reputation of those involved once the incident was publicised (Thompson, 2000, p. 13). Hence, as noted above, defamation is the area of law most obviously relevant to scandalous coverage in the media. The primary purpose of defamation is clearly to vindicate the reputation of the person falsely slurred – and to compensate them. However, both the action itself and the fact that truth is a complete defence to it arguably serve a broader societal purpose: enabling the truth of scandalous accusations to be publicly tested and decisively resolved, thus contributing towards the search for truth in public discourse – a classical rationale for free speech itself (Barendt, 2005, ch. 1). Particularly where the scandal concerns a politician or other important public figure, libel law, at least in theory, may contribute to the truth-seeking quality of public discourse more broadly. We noted above the sharp contrast between the approach of US and English law to the libelling of public figures.3 What then is the broader significance of these different approaches? US law proudly celebrates the Sullivan ‘actual malice’ approach, which makes it almost impossible for public figures to maintain actions in defamation, as a key aspect of America’s ‘profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust and wide-open’ (Sullivan, 1964, p. 721). However, while the defence is designed to avoid ‘chilling’ the willingness of the media to report on allegations important to such public debate, the essence of Sullivan is that, if a public figure is the target of the libel, the media body will nearly always win, even where the allegation is clearly false. This is because, as one critical commentator has put it, under Sullivan, ‘falsity is treated as the legal equivalent of truth and is accordingly endowed with protective power’ (Watson, 2002, p. 5). Particularly where the scandal involves a politician or otherwise concerns a partisan matter – as with the recent Brett Kavanaugh accusations – the danger then is that the withdrawal of law may contribute to the facts of the matter becoming very largely a matter of partisan public opinion. It was striking how in the USA and elsewhere, the degree of credibility and seriousness attributed to the various allegations against Kavanaugh correlated strongly to party affiliation: Republicans, led by Trump, downplayed the allegations and treated them sceptically at best; Democrats treated them as serious and credible. Of course, this is not unique to the USA, far from it. But the suspicion is that the Sullivan rule may exacerbate this tendency: where the scandal involves a public figure, there is no authoritative, formal means of determining the truth about a given allegation in court; hence, whether it is believed or not, may be more likely to become largely a product of partisanship. Moreover, the fact that public figures cannot, practically, hope to succeed in a libel action means that, where they claim that a given story is false, their accuser cannot even use their failure to sue in defamation as an indication that the story is probably true. Both tendencies may help deepen the rancorous partisan divide which so many observers pinpoint as a worrying feature of current US society. The inability of public figures to use libel law may also contribute to the prevalence of ‘fake news’ scandals, such as the notorious (and grossly defamatory) conspiracy theory that Democratic presidential candidate Hilary Clinton ran a pizza-restaurant child-sex ring (Robb, 2017). In contrast, in English law, media bodies do have a form of ‘public interest’ defence where accusations turn out to be false, but to avail themselves of it, they must be able to show, not only that the relevant article concerned a matter of public interest, but that it was responsibly published. In other words, such publishers must show that they took reasonable care in researching and verifying the allegation before making it, something that generally includes contacting the subject of the allegation for comment before publication and including a summary of their side of the story. This defence, generally known as Reynolds (1999) (now codified in section 4 of the UK’s Defamation Act 2013), is a commonly accepted standard in Commonwealth countries. As a leading comparative scholar of defamation law points out, recent reforms in countries, including 499

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Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the UK itself . . . mean that, where material is published to a wide audience, defamation defendants can establish a [defence] if they show that the publication concerned a matter of public or political interest and was made responsibly or reasonably. (Kenyon, 2010, p 711, emphasis added) This is also the approach of the European Court of Human Rights, which has clearly pursued the Commonwealth, rather than the US approach, by holding that even major public figures are entitled to reasonable protection for their reputations (Lingens v Austria, 1986). Hence the mere fact that the subject matter of a publication relates to a politician, or other topic of legitimate public interest, can never per se justifiably afford it blanket protection from defamation law if it makes false and damaging allegations. Instead, the Court has repeatedly held that journalists benefit from protection under Article 10 only where defamatory allegations are supported by an adequate factual matrix, based upon reasonable attempts to investigate their reliability (Radio France v France, 2004). This applies even where the allegations relate to ‘public figures’, including politicians (Europapress Holding, 2009), an approach that implicitly but necessarily rejects the US Sullivan approach. Such an approach appears to place a higher value on protecting properly researched stories, which are therefore, so the argument goes, more likely to be true: it could therefore be said to place a higher value on the search for truth in public discourse, as opposed to ensuring that such discourse is ‘uninhibited’ by fear of legal liability as under Sullivan and relying on the (unregulated) ‘marketplace of ideas’ to arrive at the truth. And it is undoubtedly the case that Reynolds-style defences are much harder to prove and that politicians like Lord McAlpine can make successful use of libel law in a way that would be impossible in the USA. However, the difference is not quite as strong as first appears. For if a newspaper concedes that it cannot show the allegation it made is true, but successfully runs a Reynolds-style defence, it and the rest of the press will likely then report the outcome of the case simply as a ‘win’ for the newspaper. If members of the public learn little more than that they may well then assume simply that the allegation was true, whereas it may have become apparent during the trial that the allegation was false, or probably false, but that the paper had taken reasonable care in verifying it, and that it clearly concerned a matter of public interest. In other words, the accurate factual message that should go to the public would be that the allegation was false – or at least that the newspaper couldn’t show it to be true. But this factual message will very likely be drowned out by the legal message that the newspaper won and the claimant lost – which may have a distorting effect on public discourse. It is for this reason – as well as the fact that many claimants do not want long and costly libel proceedings but rather a swift and cheap apology and retraction – that there has been increasing calls for what are known as ‘discursive’ or speech-based remedies (such as court ordered retractions) as an alternative to the traditional reliance on damages (Kenyon, 2014). Indeed, the codification of Reynolds in the UK’s Defamation Act was originally intended to include a provision stating that the defence would not succeed if a claimant had: asked the defendant for the publication of a correction of the statement complained of and . . . the request was unreasonably refused or granted subject to unreasonable conditions. (Hansard, 2012) This provision, however, disappeared from the final form of the defence adopted. 500

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Injunctions: still keeping secrets? When the revelation of scandal involves an invasion of privacy, the traditional remedy of choice for someone seeking to keep a story out of the news was the injunction, preventing publication of the private facts in question. However, in the online era, in which secrets can be spilled by anonymous tweeters, or those outside the jurisdiction of national courts, can injunctions still keep a secret? Following the failed attempt by various British celebrities to keep various sex scandals secret using anonymous injunctions that were eventually rendered futile (Wikipedia, 2011), many believed injunctions to have become a useless and discredited tool in the internet age. However, a recent old-fashioned sex scandal case in the UK, involving a famous entertainment artist, showed that injunctions are still valued by those seeking to keep their private lives out of the news, albeit that their purpose has arguably shifted somewhat. The case, which went up to the Supreme Court, concerned an injunction prohibiting the reporting of the identity of the persons involved in, and intimate details of, a three-way sexual encounter between a famous celebrity married man and another couple. Some publicity was given to the case in the USA and on social media and, as a result, it was very easy to discover the identity of the celebrity online; however the mass media in the UK was barred by injunction from disclosing his identity. After a complex set of decisions, the Supreme Court overturned the judgment of the Court of Appeal that the injunction was no longer worthwhile (PJS, 2016) given that the secret was now out, at least online and in the USA. The Supreme Court, however, rebutted the notion that ‘injunctions really have no sensible place in an internet age’; while agreeing that ‘if the purpose of this injunction were to preserve a secret, it would have failed’, the court observed that, insofar as its purpose is to prevent intrusion or harassment, it has not failed (ibid., para. 62). The Court was, in particular, concerned that the couple’s young children, who had not yet learned of the publicity surrounding the incident, would certainly do so if it was subject to the firestorm of publicity that would result from the lifting of the injunction and would very likely suffer harm, in the form of bullying and teasing at school. Hence, the Supreme Court concluded that the Court of Appeal had not given due weight to the qualitative difference in intrusiveness and distress likely to be involved in what is now proposed by way of unrestricted publication by the English [mass] media. (ibid., para. 35) PJS thus may be seen as reorientating privacy law decisively away from the traditional confidentiality-based notion of keeping a secret as the sole purpose of an injunction, towards the notion of preventing a firestorm of publicity with all the intrusion and harassment that can entail. The emphasis was not on preventing the scandal seeing the light of day, but on ameliorating the worst effects of its coverage. The British press, however, bitterly protested the fact that some forms of media could publish the information with effective impunity (anonymous tweeters for example, or those outside the jurisdiction) while they could not. They argued in particular that publication in the USA rendered protection in England futile: as the Daily Mail put it, ‘British justice descended into farce last night after the identity of a celebrity who cheated on his spouse was revealed in the US but blocked here’ (6 April 2016). Had such an argument been accepted, it would have been a significant development. Since injunctions can’t generally be obtained under US law, even where a celebrity obtains a privacy injunction in the UK, they cannot prevent reporting of the story in the USA and subsequent discussion there on social media, which then immediately crosses 501

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national borders. Were the British press to be able to claim that it is unfair or ‘farcical’ to then prevent them from reporting it, not only would the effect of other countries’ legal protection for privacy in the face of scandal-mongering be rendered less effective, but courts accepting this argument would be allowing US law, albeit indirectly, to determine the outcome of an English case. US law – with its stark priority for free speech over both reputation and privacy – would thereby be on its way to becoming a global standard setter. PJS was thus a fascinating instance of a national court resisting this attempt to leverage the First Amendment so as to give the press in the UK greater freedom to cover a sex scandal. For now, at least, European and Commonwealth countries are maintaining their own, rather different balance between media freedom and privacy.

‘Forgetting’ a scandal: a new role for the law online We noted above the critique of privacy law as merely an elite tool intended to maintain the privileges of the ‘upper classes’, old and new, shielding their scandalous behaviour from the judgement of the mob. One limited way in which that may be correct is in the area of access to justice: an ordinary person subjected to the kind of ‘lateral surveillance’ that we noted above will usually lack the resources to take costly legal proceedings. Alternatively, the subject of a scandal may get their injunction but still find many internet sites and hence search results that give full details of it. Or they may win damages only, or be a public figure in the USA, and thus unable to obtain any form of redress at all: while US celebrity wrestler Hulk Hogan did eventually win massive damages against Gawker over its publication of his notorious, explicit ‘sex tape’, several courts that heard the case – astonishingly to European eyes – solemnly intoned that it revealed ‘matters of public concern’ and was thus protected by the First Amendment; the injunction initially granted preventing publication of the explicit video was overturned (Gadja, 2015, p. 5). Alternatively, an individual may become concerned about personal information they themselves decided to share, and which was then shared and retweeted all over the Web. What happens if, months or years later, they want to try to ‘move on’ from the scandal or embarrassment the information may still cause? Mayer-Schönberger, author of the seminal Delete (2009), wrote of the risks of a ‘loss of forgetting’ in our online age, where huge quantities of our personal data are perfectly recalled online, turning up for years afterwards in Google searches of our names. As privacy scholar Dan Solove has put it, people want the option of ‘starting over, of reinventing themselves’, but are nowadays hampered in doing so by their ‘digital baggage’ (Solove, 2010, p. 18). In this regard, search engines of course play a crucial role, rendering information on incidents that happened years ago instantly retrievable worldwide. Further, there is a further distinctive feature of US law that hampers those wishing to contribute to the ‘forgetting’ of a scandal covered online: it grants sweeping exemptions against legal liability for the content carried by online intermediaries, so that platforms like Facebook and Twitter broadly enjoy immunity in respect of content posted by third parties.4 Hence even if the subject of a scandal in the USA were to win a rare privacy or libel case, they would be wholly unable to procure the removal of coverage of it from all over the Web, which would remain retrievable in search results for an indefinite period. It was precisely to address this problem that European Union data protection law has developed the notion of ‘the right to be forgotten’, or ‘right to delete’. The now-famous Google Spain judgment of the EU’s Court of Justice (2014) – brought by a Spanish citizen aggrieved that Google searches under his name still returned a minor financial scandal from years ago – has generated (at the last count) 680,000 requests for certain results to be delisted. This has led to (at the last count) over 1.8 million URLs being removed from search results amidst considerable 502

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controversy, especially in the United States (Keller, 2017, p. 25). However, Google Spain itself limited the right to requesting Google and other search engines to de-list certain search results – it did not extend to deleting actual content, like Facebook posts, or media reports. This is where the new-style ‘right to be forgotten’ – Article 17 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (2015) comes in. Like Google Spain, the GDPR will apply to at least some US companies that provide services to EU citizens involving the processing of their personal data. The right is broadly formulated and can be based not on the ground that the data targeted for removal is inaccurate or especially private, but simply that the person who had originally consented to its publication has now withdrawn their consent (GDPR, Article 17(1)(b)). Particular protection is given to certain categories of ‘sensitive’ personal data, including information relating to health, sex-life or sexual orientation. Crucially, especially in the US context, it seems clear that the new right will apply to intermediaries, such as Facebook and Twitter5 as well of course as the mainstream media – a position that cuts sharply across the specific US law protection such bodies enjoy, as just discussed above. The right must be balanced against freedom of expression of either or both of the data controller and (if the two are not the same) the original poster of the data (GDPR, Article 17(3)(a)). As well as its application to intermediaries, the crucial point about this action is that, unlike traditional suits in privacy or defamation, which are typically available only to the wealthy celebrities who can afford them, the ‘right to delete’ is a remedy that anybody can use – hundreds of thousands of people have already. It is this law, above all, that may have the greatest impact on the ability of the internet to provide instant recall of a former scandalous, or merely embarrassing, episode; it may therefore turn out to be the most important legal development for decades in giving the individual a usable tool to deal with the sometimes unfairly enduring power of scandal.6

Notes 1 The contrast drawn is between the USA on the one hand and the countries of Western Europe, together with other common law countries, such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa. 2 Mosley v NGN [2008] EWHC 1777 (QB); Campbell v MGN [2004] 2 AC 457. 3 For a systematic (strongly pro-US) comparison, see Vincent R. Johnson, ‘Comparative Defamation Law: England and the United States’ 24 U. Miami Int’l & Comp. L. Rev. 1 (2016). 4 This has been achieved by a speech-friendly interpretation of the Communications Decency Act, § 230; see e.g. Almeida v. Amazon.com, 2006 and Pelletier (2016). 5 See the 2018 decision of the EU Court of Justice – Unabhängiges Landeszentrum für Datenschutz SchleswigHolstein v Wirtschaftsakademie Schleswig-Holstein GmbH (C-210/16) – holding Facebook to be a ‘data controller’ for the purposes of EU data protection law. 6 For a full discussion of Article 17, see Fiona Brimblecombe and Gavin Phillipson, ‘Regaining Digital Privacy? The New “Right to be Forgotten” and Online Expression’ (2018) 4(1) Canadian Journal of Comparative and Contemporary Law 1-66, available at https://www.cjccl.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/ CJCCL-Vol-4-Privacy-website-with-Covers.pdf and Keller (2017).

References (all websites last visited 12 October 2018) Cases, legislation etc. Almeida v. Amazon.com Inc. (2006), 456 F.3d 1316, 1321 (11th Cir. 2006). Bladet Tromso v Norway (1999) 29 EHRR 125. Communications Decency Act of 1996 47 U.S.C. § 230 (2012). Defamation Act 2013 c. 26 (UK). Europapress Holding D.O.O. v. Croatia, App No. 25333/06 (2009).

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Gavin Phillipson EC, Data Protection Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data [2016] OJ, L 119/1. Florida Star v BJF 491 US524 (1989). Google Spain SL and Google Inc v Agencia Española de Protección de Datos (AEPD) and Mario Costeja González (13 May, 2014), C-131/12, ECLI:EU:C:2014:317 (CJEU). Hansard, HL, col 954 (9 October 2012), Lord Lester. Jones v. Dirty World (2014) Entertainment Recordings, LLC, 755 F.3d 398 (6th Cir. 2014). Lange v Atkinson [1997] 2 NZLR 22 (HC), [1998] 3 NZLR 424 (CA), [2000] 1 NZLR 257 (PC), [2000] 3 NZLR 385. Lingens v Austria (1986) 8 EHRR 407. Nebraska Press Association v. Stuart, 427 U.S. 539 (1976). New York Times v Sullivan 376 U.S. 254 (1964). PJS v News Group Newspapers [2016] UKSC 26. Radio France v France, App no. 53984/00 (30 March 2004). Reynolds v Times Newspapers [1999] 4 All ER 609. Unabhängiges Landeszentrum für Datenschutz Schleswig-Holstein v Wirtschaftsakademie Schleswig-Holstein GmbH (2018), C-210/16. Worm v Austria App no. 22714/93 (29 August 1997).

Academic and media Barendt, Eric (2005) Freedom of Speech, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cathcart, Brian (2008) ‘The Real McCann Scandal’, New Statesman, 23 October, available online at https://www.newstatesman.com/law-and-reform/2008/10/madeleine-mccann-daily-british Cheung, Anne S.Y. (2009) ‘Rethinking Public Privacy in the Internet Era: A Study of Virtual Persecution by the Internet Crowd’, Journal of Media Law 12, 191. Doughty, S. (2013) ‘Why the Law Is an Ass!’, Daily Mail, 6 April, online at https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ news/article-3526916/American-publication-goes-UK-injunction-report-known-celebrity-extramarital-threesome.html Gadja, Amy (2015) The First Amendment Bubble, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press). Guardian (2012) ‘BBC Executives Could Face Disciplinary Action over Newsnight Error’, available online at https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/nov/12/newsnight-executives-face-disciplinary-action Keller, Daphne (2017) ‘The Right Tools: Europe’s Intermediary Liability Laws and the 2016 General Data Protection Regulation’, Social Sciences Research Network, 22 March, online: SSRN https://papers.ssrn. com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2914684 Kenyon, Andrew (2010) ‘What Conversation? Free Speech and Defamation Law’, Modern Law Review 73, 697. Kenyon, Andrew (2014) ‘Protecting Speech in Defamation Law: Beyond Reynolds-Style Defences’, Journal of Media Law 6(1), 21. Kuehn, Katherine M. (2016) ‘An “Office Sex Romp” and the Economic Motivations of Mediated Voyeurism’ in H. Mandell and G. Masullo Chen (eds), Scandal in a Digital Age. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Levy, Andrew (2007) ‘The ladettes who glorify their shameful drunken antics on Facebook’, Mail Online, 5 November, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-491668/The-ladettes-glorify-shamefuldrunkenantics-Facebook.html Mandell, Hinda and Gina Masullo Chen (2016) ‘Scandal in an Age of Likes, Selfies, Retweets, and Sexts’ in H. Mandell and G. Chen (eds), Scandal in a Digital Age. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor (2009) Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pelletier, Nicole (2016) ‘The Emoji That Cost $20,000: Triggering Liability for Defamation on Social Media’, Washington University Journal of Law and Policy 52, 227–254. Phillipson, Gavin (2008) ‘Trial by Media: The Betrayal of the First Amendment’s Purpose’, Law and Contemporary Problems 71(4), 15. The extract quoted Hal Haddon, ‘Representing a Celebrity Criminal Defendant’, 33 LITIG. 19, 19 (2007). 9. Id. 10. Prosser, Dean (1960) ‘Privacy’, California Law Review 48, 383. Robb, Amanda (2017) ‘Pizzagate: Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal’, Rolling Stone, 16 November, available online at https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/anatomy-of-a-fake-newsscandal-125877/

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50 WHY SCANDALS (MIGHT) BE GOOD FOR DEMOCRACY Brandon Rottinghaus

The 1919 baseball World Series in the USA saw the heavily favored Chicago White Sox fall to the Cincinnati Reds in an improbable 10–5 win in game 8 (of a best of nine series) of the annual game. After the series ended, discussion emerged that gamblers had paid off several White Sox players (termed “Black Sox” thereafter) – including slugger “Shoeless” Joe Jackson and star pitcher Eddie Cicotte. The eight accused big leaguers were indicted by a grand jury, put on trial for conspiracy, admitted to the crime, but were found not guilty on nine counts of conspiracy after the official records of their grand jury confessions mysteriously vanished. Capturing public sentiment about the heartbreaking scandal called the “Big Fix” was an article in the Chicago Daily News with the headline “Say, It Ain’t So, Joe” (Mitchell 2015). One day after the acquittal, Judge Kenesaw “Mountain” Landis, recently appointed as baseball’s first commissioner, permanently banned the accused eight “Black Sox” from baseball for life for “selling out baseball.”1 Commissioner Landis was appointed to lead baseball through its roughest inning: accusations of price fixing in 1919 shocked the public and crippled faith in the nation’s nascent sports pastime. Baseball’s National League club President John Heydler expressed at the time a desire for a chairman to “rule with an iron hand” and proclaimed that “baseball has lacked a hand like that for years. It needs it now worse than ever.”2 The scandal and the actions of the former federal judge known for taking on corporations turned firebrand commissioner afterwards helped to cleanse the young sport in the darkest moment. Over the next several years, the shock-ofwhite-hair commissioner made it his mission to rid the game of crooks and gamblers who had found their way into the pockets of players and owners, including increasing accountability of the major league teams association with minor league teams and the process for funneling upand-coming players to the big leagues (Pietrusza 2001). The indelible effect of baseball’s first major scandal was a pivot point in how scandals were handled by major league sports and had ramifications for similar future events. Scandals in the political world, especially in the United States, are no different. Political scandals are frequently treated as a stain on the political system, resulting from poor personal judgment, lax rule enforcement, or bald political corruption. Media coverage treats these as unwelcome hiccups in an otherwise routine series of events. Yet, as a forest fire germinates and renews a field, political scandals may help the public and the media enhance accountability, renew trust in government, and focus on key issues of concern. In this chapter, I review the literature on the legacy and impact of political scandals and underscore the ways in which scandals have a potentially positive 506

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effect on institutional accountability and voter attentiveness. In a concluding segment, I pose a series of future research questions, outlining an agenda for renewing our study of political scandals as an instrument of media and institutional systemic recalibration.

The effect of scandals on democracy Political scandals can have impacts that are minor and short lived or major and long term, depending on the issues and players involved. The character of political officials as revealed through scandal is consequential to democratic politics and can inform us about the governing style and public accountability of these elected officials. For the American president in particular, Pfiffner (2004: 6) argues that “there is a widespread consensus in American politics that presidential character is just as important as intellect, organizational abilities, television presence, or effective public speaking.” Variations and violations of the implicit oath of reasonable harmony and clean governing are not tolerated by voters. Fousek and Wasserman (2010: 2) argue that “the public has continued to demand ethical leadership from its elected representatives. This is particularly true of the president, who sits at the pinnacle of government and sets the moral tone for the executive branch.” Such character issues are associated with political responsiveness to the public, political judgments, fidelity to one’s convictions, and democratic legitimacy (Galston 2010). Scandals, and the events that precipitate or follow them, have the potential to damage these often delicate relationships, especially in the aftermath of major violations. As the most visible and central political figure in American politics, most politicians must deal with some form of political scandal while in office, either involving them directly, implicating them indirectly, or for executives, those that involve their appointees, nominees, or staff. Political cynicism may shape an individual’s responses to these scandals (Dancey 2012). Certain types of scandal may affect public support differently than others, and scandals that happened longer ago in time may have fewer consequences in declining approval than those that happened more recently (Doherty, Dowling and Miller 2011). There is clearly a negative effect of scandal on the public’s attitudes toward political actors; and individual-level predispositions often moderate this negative reaction. A president’s vulnerability to scandal (or the negative coverage relating to the scandal) is shaped by political context and is related to low approval among party identifiers, and a lack of congestion in the news agenda. Partisan politics plays a major role in the survival of scandal. Scholars have shown the key to surviving these affairs include public support and the ability to withstand an impeachment process as indicated by the co-partisan base of legislative support (Hinojosa and Perez-Linan 2006; Rottinghaus 2014). Partisan politics clearly affects the arc of a scandal as favorable partisans provide a soft cushion of support for a candidate embroiled in wrongdoing (Ginsberg and Shefter 1999; Shah et al. 2002; Puglisi and Snyder 2011). Prior support of an official in scandal has been shown to be a strong predictor of support during a scandal (Fischle 2000). The good news for presidents is that they can more easily maintain support of their fellow partisans (Edwards 2003) and, if necessary, persuade their fellow partisans to believe what the president says is correct (Ponder and Moon 2005) especially if the president’s actions are viewed as more partisan (Kriner and Schickler 2016; Cortina and Rottinghaus 2017). What are the effects of scandals on the institutional side of things? Collectively, political officials do change their calculations when confronted with scandals involving different individuals. Strategically, scandals affect the capacity and political strength of individual officials differently, as administrations alter their institutional reactions by reasserting political strength (governors) or by narrowing opportunities for confrontation (presidents). Presidents tend to 507

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be risk averse. Scandals cause presidents to veto less frequently, not to request more policy positions in the State of the Union, and, in some cases, to use fewer unilateral orders (for administration scandals not involving the president) (Rottinghaus 2015a). Presidents retreat from conflictual interbranch actions in their public and political strategies, even as their administration battles through scandals. Although they often shield themselves and their associates from scandal, presidents are realistic about their political situation in the midst of scandals (Rottinghaus 2015b; Nyhan 2017). On this point, they are more likely to come clean when the allegations that arise from the scandal are true, when they are involved personally in a scandal, or when government is divided. Hoping not to be netted in a larger scandal, presidents tell the truth in some cases. U.S. governors are similarly resilient in the face of scandals but are actually more likely than presidents to use the powers of their office to divert attention from the scandal. For instance, Rottinghaus (2015b) finds governors are more likely to turn to unilateral executive strategies when confronted with scandals. With the occurrence of more state-level scandals in a given year, there were fewer bills enacted, more unilateral orders (of several types) issued, more frequent use of the executive veto in both regular and special sessions, and an expanded political agenda (especially when state executives are personally involved in scandal). When confronted with divided government, governors are more likely to stonewall when confronted with scandals. Governors also use their institutional and personal powers to navigate their way free of scandals. What explains this? Governors have more local influence over the politics of their states, and often with the media, allowing them to be more aggressive when confronting scandals than presidents. Indeed, governors were also found to succeed more on their agenda items, including tax policy and budget requests, after scandals. This is not to claim that governors are uniformly aggressive in responding to scandal; they focus less on contentious issues (education, welfare, and children) but more on consensual issues (tourism). They also avoid issues that may draw attention to their circumstances, such as moral issues. Scandals also affect Members of the U.S. Congress whose scandalous actions can negatively affect public perceptions of political institutions (Bowler and Karp 2004). For instance, for Members of Congress who had one or more of their actions referred to the House Ethics Committee, these Representatives were less likely to be reelected (49%) than those Members who did not have a case referred (87%) (Praino et al. 2013). Members involved in scandals were also significantly more likely to be defeated in a primary (14%) than those not involved (4%). In general, Members who had cases heard by the House Ethics Committee, and likely used as an issue in the campaign, reduced their margin of victory by 14%. Others have found similar patterns (Dimock and Jacobson 1995). Basinger (2013) also found that the specific type of scandal matters: corruption scandals led to an 8% reduction in vote share, sex and financial scandals led to a 5% reduction in vote share. Republican incumbents are more strongly affected than Democratic incumbents (Welch and Hibbing 1997). The public may forgive a politician for a past indiscretion, but the effect in the short term can be costly (Doherty, Dowling and Miller 2011).

The potentially positive effects of scandals on democracy This broad literature on scandals, ethics investigations, and corruption explains the scope and scale of the effect of scandals and outlines the contours of politics as the system grapples to respond. Although scandals often have negative consequences for the individual players and scuff up the integrity of the political system, the aftermath of scandals can have potentially positive effects on the political system. 508

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Fostering partisan unity Although partisan rancor surrounding scandals has been argued to exacerbate the friction in the system, partisanship also helps executives by coalescing their party around the White House’s policy goals after scandals (Rottinghaus 2015a). Partisanship, then, both helps and hurts executives embattled by scandal. The President’s co-partisans are more likely to approve of the President and less likely to desire to impeach the president, even after being informed about illegal activity. In contrast, out partisans are more likely to demand the President’s impeachment for both illegal and not illegal activity (Cortina and Rottinghaus 2017). This provides evidence of how partisanship persists (and even expands) during presidential scandals and how partisan linkages are important to surviving scandal. In effect, partisanship may serve as a backstop to a hasty reaction to a scandal and may prevent a rapid and unevaluated response to events that politicians find themselves in. For instance, Miller Vonnahme (2014) finds that exposure to scandalous information about a candidate had an immediate negative effect on evaluation, but the magnitude of this negative effect declined over time, especially among the candidate’s supporters. Partisanship was a ballast against further slippage in the polls. Similarly, President Clinton was able to maintain his approval ratings (and his job as president) by persuading his supporters that he was still a credible and active political figure and the general public that the fervor surrounding the Lewinsky scandal was politically motivated (Sonner and Wilcox 1999). This may be because partisans are less likely to be attentive to the events of a presidential scandal (Dancey 2012). Partisan cues help in this phenomenon where presidential approval during scandal is strongly affected by elite partisan cues in addition to a priori public support from partisans (Woessner 2005). Politicians who are seen as more “hypocritical” (for instance, running on family values but being caught in an extra-martial affair) are more likely to be seen negatively in general and as incompetent in office (McDermott, Schwartz and Vallejo 2015). Parties who don’t learn the lesson about party orientation and partisan blame, especially after a scandal, may find themselves struggling politically. The scandal involving Mark Foley’s improper behavior towards several congressional pages contributed substantially to the Democratic tide in the 2006 midterm elections. Disapproval of the Republican leadership’s seeming indifference to Foley’s immorality not only aided Democrats running for Congress, but it also helped Democrats running for Governor (Cobb and Taylor 2014). Specific reform proposals following scandals are often mired in partisan conflict; however, Congress has been shown to be willing to engage in institutional maintenance when necessary, but even non-ideological issues like “good government” reforms become mired in ideological and partisan conflict in a polarized era (Dancey 2014). Party commonality allows for the public to understand more easily and punish (potentially) a party for wrongdoing. This phenomenon improves accountability.

Directing attention to issues The American public is notoriously inattentive to politics, often even being unable to answer basic questions about the players, politics, or the process. Scandals may change that. Public attentiveness to some accused public wrongdoing is heightened during scandals. For instance, in polling from CNN after the break of the Lewinsky scandal, only 10% of those polled reported that they “never” discussed the Clinton sex scandal with other people, where 35% responded every day or nearly every day, and 21% a few times per week.3 Two decades after Watergate, almost all of the polled public (91%) was able to identify Richard Nixon as the president who had to resign because of scandal.4 This is partially driven by media coverage. 509

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Major scandals receive a bulk of the coverage (Basinger and Rottinghaus 2012) but even minor scandals receive some coverage. Scandals may also help to change public discourse about issues and candidates. Scandals are argued to increase the quality of discourse in the media about issues or about the role of citizens (Thompson 2000: 238). Governors and president are more likely to address issues of concern to the public, such as pocketbook issues like health care, the economy, and welfare issues (Rottinghaus 2015a). Schudson (2004) argues that major scandals like Watergate offer a language and framework for public discourse that helps to set in motion an understanding about future scandals. These corrections are necessary in democracies that “encourage distrust of authority.” However, others challenge the assertion that scandals blossom the media’s protective role in American politics. Williams and Delli Carpini (2000) argue that the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal represented the virtual elimination of the gatekeeping role of the mainstream media because there are no “discrete gates” through which information passes. They conclude, if there are no gates, there can be no gatekeepers (p. 61).

Purging wrongdoing from inside The shelf life of individuals involved in scandals varies, but cabinet officials have a shorter time than most. For instance, appointees and cabinet and subcabinet officials are more likely to be shown the door as a result of involvement in scandal. Executive branch nominees are a unique case clearly more sensitive to the onset of scandal than other offices as the effects are more pronounced for these offices. Presidential nominees are also much more likely to have their scandals end in their nominations being removed (Rottinghaus 2015b). This end is especially likely when there are more scandals in an administration, when the president’s approval is higher, or when the economy is better. In these cases, congressional scrutiny of the president’s nominees is likely to be greater, especially by the opposition party, making these factors an increased risk for nominees. Likewise, divided government increases the risk of a failed nomination; this is not surprising since nominees face greater scrutiny when the president faces more opposition in Congress. This scrutiny helps to promote an external accountability.

Systemic corrections The system as a whole is attentive to political scandals, even small ones. This is true of both external and internal actors and actors over whom the chief executive has varying degrees of control. The executive branch internally responds to more scandals by looking for the manifestation of corruption in other parts of government, causing a larger footprint of scandal than just on the office or the individual. The U.S. Congress responds to more national scandals by holding more hearings to investigate malfeasance, wrongdoing, or corruption (Kriner and Schickler 2016). Each of these reactions is meaningful and reasonable: There are both internal and external checks on the aftermath of executive administration scandals allowing for the system to recalibrate. At the state level, economic growth, government spending, or looser ethics laws signal more gubernatorial scandals (Rottinghaus 2014). In prosecuting corrupt officials, prosecutors are more willing in general to initiate additional cases involving public corruption when there are higher level executive scandals in the White House (especially involving federal officials) and the governor’s mansion (especially involving state and local officials). This is consistent with how states react legislatively to scandal—Witko (2007) finds that initiative at the state level, a liberal government, strong good government groups, legislative professionalism, and scandal increase the likelihood of a state increasing the 510

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stringency of their regulations. The findings suggest that the rise in prosecutions only occurred after record high numbers of executive scandals at the national level, suggesting a high threshold before concerns about systemic corruption arose. Inspectors general also increase their audits and overall investigatory activity in the wake of more administration scandals, responding positively to signals about possible systemic corruption. The ripple effect of scandals, then, has a longer-term effect than presumed, one that often is unseen but creates a favorable outcome for accountability. Watergate, the most notorious scandal, serves as a good example of a scandal that corrected the system in multiple ways (Olson and Holland 2003). The consequences of Watergate included the birth of investigative journalism, judicial limits to the power of the president (especially related to extra-constitutional matters not related to national security), campaign finance reform, and expanded Congressional oversight. These changes, in addition to the political changes, made Watergate the standard by which all other political scandals are judged.

Future research questions Scholarship on scandals at all levels has demonstrated these events to be consequential and impactful on the political scene. However, there are still critical questions about the ramifications of scandal, media coverage of the events, and the consequences to the political system. Do scandals increase trust in other institutions not involved in scandals? The rash of sexual harassment scandals involving the U.S. Congress in 2017—many leading to high profile resignations—may have the effect of increasing support for other political institutions like the executive or judiciary or the media. Scholars have addressed how citizens view government more favorably following the introduction of campaign finance regulations (Primo and Milyo 2006) but have less clear understanding of how the public views other governmental and social institutions. How and in what capacity do scandals produce new rules to address wrongdoing in the future? We know that ethics laws have changed the occupational makeup of state legislatures (Rosenson 2006). We also know that ethics reforms do not necessarily make government “scandal proof” (Mackenzie 2004; Rosenson 2009). Ethics Commissions are also found to reduce occurrences of political corruption at the state level (Crider and Milyo 2013). The connection between scandals and the emergence of specific laws to address the law breaking or ethical infractions of those scandals is not, however, well understood (see Witko 2007). What does post-scandal coverage by the media look like? Do the media focus more on accountability by public officials or institutions? How quickly does this coverage fade? Basinger and Rottinghaus (2012) find just four scandals—Watergate, Iran-Contra, Whitewater, and Monica Lewinsky—are responsible for over 60% of news coverage of scandals. Overall, 15 scandals (and 23 subjects of those scandals) received more than 50 front page stories in the New York Times. Mitchell (2013) argues that voters eventually reach a saturation threshold after which additional repetition of scandal information has negligible effect on evaluation in the absence of ongoing coverage. The longevity and content of this post-scandal coverage is not well known. Does this media coverage on scandals encourage public engagement or clearer public understanding of party ideologies? There is debate about how much and what type of coverage scandals generate. Brody (1998) and Brody and Jackman (1999) argue that the public were fully engaged and attentive to details about the Lewinsky scandal, while Bennett (2002) argues that the scandal was only followed by segments of the public (blacks, those with higher education) but not others (age and gender had no effect). Miller (1999) argues in reference to the Lewinksy–Clinton scandal that the media did not fulfill their role as “watchdogs.” 511

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Conclusion: the (positive?) impact of scandals The media, executive branch officials, legislators, and prosecutors all have a responsibility to protect their interests and the political system. In the aftermath of scandals, the media investigate charges of corruption, malfeasance, or lying. Executive branch officials often withstand scandal by expanding their political muscle. Legislators probe individuals and events, evaluate the evidence, and use this information in political ways to sanitize the system or, if necessary, to impeach or remove an official. Prosecutors and other investigators determine whether laws have been broken and the severity of these infractions. Thus, while the public may quickly tire of scandal, forgive the participants, and return to routine political activity, the system plays a longer game. The extent of the impact, especially positive effects as the system attempts to recover, is less well understood. This chapter has provided a clear roadmap for exploring the beneficial aspects of scandals for the political system.

Notes 1 http://www.history.com/news/the-black-sox-baseball-scandal-95-years-ago 2 https://baseballhall.org/hof/landis-kenesaw 3 Survey by Time, Cable News Network. Methodology: Conducted by Yankelovich Partners, September 16–September 17, 1998 and based on 1,020 telephone interviews. Sample: national adult. 4 Survey by Times Mirror. Methodology: Conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates, May 12–May 15, 1994 and based on 1,206 telephone interviews. Sample: national adult.

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INDEX

Page numbers in italics denote an illustration, bold a table, n an endnote Abelman, Robert 391–392 Abu Ghraib prison scandal 37–40, 38, 38–41, 354, 357–358 ACORN 363–364, 368n4 African Network of Centers for Investigative Journalism (ANCIJ) 227 agenda setting: disinformation, bots and partisan politics 59–62, 118; internet age changes 57, 166–167, 282–283; investigative journalism 57; media priming 470–471; participatory publics and social media 57–59, 167–171, 284–286, 363, 415–416, 451–452; partisanship and social media 58–59, 190; theory development phases 55–56; Trump and Twitter 60–61, 87, 151, 190, 375 aid sector scandals: foundational reports 350; institutional accountability sought 347–348; #MeToo movement, linked with 348–349; misconduct neutralization attempts 343–344; newspaper exposés 342, 345; press coverage rises 349; Select Committee report (UK) 342, 348, 349; trial by media and consequences 345–347 Alcibiades 25 Alexander, Jeffrey C. 25, 27–28 Allardyce, Sam 247–248 Allen, Neal 277 Allern, Sigurd 148–149, 486 Altheide, David L. 52, 67, 68 Altschull, Herbert 158 Anderson, Chris 265 Apple 300 Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ) 227 Arbuckle, Roscoe 310

Archetti, Cristina 35 Arendt, Florian 471 Argento, Asia 78–79, 81, 309, 312n1 Armstrong, Lance 203, 204, 205–206 Ash-Shiraa 227 Asp, K. 68 Assange, Julian 229, 274–275, 278, 279 audience metrics 88 Australia 49, 79–80, 328, 329–330 authoritarian states: Bo Xilai scandal, Chinese state control 71, 72–74, 81, 82–83; gatekeeping coercion 90–91; media’s role 139; Panama Papers, news suppression 81, 83; Russian history of politized scandal 139–141; Russian internet scandals, reaction to 71; Russian scandal regulation 198–199; social media’s disruptive access 71, 84 Bagenholm, Andreas 446 Bakhtin, Mikhail 81 Bakker, Jim 391, 394 Bancroft, Cameron 329 Barnett, Steven 431 Barr, Roseanne 91, 367, 375 Basinger, Scott 445, 508 Baxter, Rodney 383 BBC: entrapment explanation 247–248; Jimmy Saville revelations 206–207, 208; journalistic interviewing 346; libel threats, a concern 206; Newsnight libel case 494–495; press led agenda 429, 430; scandal’s newsworthiness 77, 202 Becker, Howard 47 Beckett, Charlie 259 Benghazi scandal, case study 37–40, 38, 38–41 Bennett, W. Lance 358

515

Index Benoit, William 476–477, 478–481 Benson, Rodney 203 Ben-Yehuda, Nachman 46, 49, 52 Bercow, Sally 494 Berger, Peter 47 Berkman-Klein Center 118 Berlant, Lauren 169 Berlusconi, Silvio 80, 158, 162, 466 Berners-Lee, Tim 264 Best, J. 52 Bird, Elizabeth 237 Bird, S. E. 29 Blach-Ørsten, Mark 356 #BlackLivesMatter 91 Blagojevich, Rob 437 Bless, Herbert 448 Blix, Hans 383–384 Blum-Kulka, Shoshana 248, 258 Blumler, Jay G. 68 Bonner, Michelle 98 Bookman, Zachery 220 bots, media applications 61–62, 88, 118 Bourdieu, Pierre 194 Bowe, Brian J. 392 Bowman, Barbara 309 Bo Xilai 71, 72–74, 81, 82–83 Boyle, Kris 396, 397 Bradlee, Ben 160, 250 Brandeis, Louis 195, 215–216, 497 Brazile, Donna 60 Breitbart 61, 118, 364 Breit, Rhonda 251 Brenton, Scott 400 Bromander, Tobias 134 Brooks, Rebekah 334–335 Brown, Corrine 436, 437 Brown, Gwen 394–395 Bruns, Axel 57 Bucher, Rue 268 Buddenbaum, Judith M. 390, 391 Buress, Hannibal 308 Burke, Tarana 165 Burnham, David 265–266 Bush, George W. 41, 58, 357, 381, 479 Camaj, Lindita 220 Cambridge Analytica 71–72, 255–256, 295 Cameron, David 198, 226, 334, 336, 337, 422, 430 Campbell, Joel 396, 397 Campbell, Naomi 495 Campbell, W. Joseph 246 Canel, Maria Jose 156, 158 Carey, James W. 117 Carlin, Ryan 446 Carr, David 310 Cashmore, Ellis 425, 426

Castells, M. 19–20, 174, 278 Catholic Church, abuse cases 79, 390, 392, 393–394, 395 celebrity scandal: Bill Crosby 308–309, 310, 311; career damage or enhancement 425–426; film studio led 305; insider tipping points 310; Jimmy Saville 203, 204–208; #MeToo movement 311–312; post-Weinstein investigations 308; public shaming and Schadenfreude 306–307; social media, victims’ platform 311–312; trivialized journalism 304, 305; Weinstein accusations and suppression tactics 307–308, 309, 310, 311 Chadra, Kalyani 70–71 Chadwick, Andrew 285 Chalaby, Jean 69 character assassination 405 Chernobyl disaster 383, 384 Chibnall, Steve 421 ‘chilling effect’ 202 China: baby formula scandal 411, 450–451; Bo Xilai scandal, state control 71, 72–74, 81, 82–83; journalistic suppression 225; online shaming 498 Chomsky, Noam 338 Chung, Connie 249 Church of Scientology 395 citizen journalism 13–14, 269–270, 285–286, 375 citizen witnessing 14 Clandinin, D. Jean 319 Clark, Anna 26 Clarke, Kenneth 339, 430 Claussen, Dane S. 391 Clinton, Bill: entrapment journalism 248; media framing effects 439, 449; Monica Lewinsky affair 57, 70, 77, 166, 177, 434, 509; morality, opponent’s framing 36, 435; political access accusations 60; scandal management 438, 509 Clinton, Hillary: Bill’s scandals, shadow of 77–78; disinformation scandals, election 2016 41, 42, 60, 62, 144, 162; Obama birther scandal 59; Pizzagate conspiracy 367, 499; private email scandal 215; social media, campaign tool 58 CNN 295, 310 Cobrapost 239 Coddington, Mark 269 cognitive appraisal theory 400 Cohen, Michael 80, 496 Cohen, Stanley 46, 47, 50–51, 52–53, 327 collective values/morals 25, 26–27, 31 ColorofChange.org 376–377 computational propaganda 56, 61–62, 118 Connew, Paul 205 Constand, Andrea 308 Coombs, W. Timothy 414–415 Cooper, Kent 217

516

Index corporate scandal: character assassination paracrisis 404–407, 489–491; characteristics 400; denial of reputation actions 414–415; research focuses and media’s influence 411–413; role of media 413; scandalization process 400–401, 401, 487–489; scansis 401–402; self-inflicted deviance and response impacts 402–404; social media’s exploitation 415–416 corruption scandal in politics: clarity of responsibility 458–459; credibility and partisanship 459–460, 467; electoral tolerance theories 471–472; electoral response 437–438, 446, 457–458; media coverage effects 448–449, 458; media priming 470–471; perception analysis and validation issues 468–470; public negativity and trust issues 456–457; re-election phenomenon 466–467; research challenges and future study 462–463; time dynamics 461; viable alternatives 460; voter trade-offs 460–461 corruption scandals: authoritarian reactions 71; corruption indices 468–470; global 15; image repair strategies 479; journalist’s social responsibilities 159–160, 163; market-driven 157–159, 163; politically orientated 160–162, 163 Cos, Grant 170 Costas-Pérez, Elena 449 Couldry, Nick 68 Coulson, Andy 334, 335, 340n1 Cox, Brendan 344, 345, 347 Crigler, Ann N. 236 Crist, Jonathan 393 Critcher, Charles 52, 327 Crosbie, Thomas 355, 356, 357, 358, 359, 400 Crosby, Bill 308–309, 310, 311 cross-border networks 15, 19, 225–231, 255 Cucciniello, Maria 218 Curran, James 156 Cyrus, Miley 426 Dacre, Paul 422–423 Dagiral, Éric 265–266, 268, 269 Daily Mail 422–423, 427–428, 429–430, 498 Daily Mirror 81 Daily Telegraph 160, 247–248 Dancey, Logan 447 Daniels, Stormy 60, 80, 168, 496 Darnton, Robert 297 data journalism: accountability function 264; citizen involvement 269–270; data provider agendas 267; epistemological foundations 267–268; evolvement 265–266; professional status/values debate 266–267, 269; whistleblowing cases 259 Davis, Lanny 35 Deen, Paula 372 DeJarlais, Scott 434, 436 delegative democracies 96–100

Delli Carpini, Michael X. 57, 169, 178, 260, 285, 510 De Maio, Mariana 396 De Maria, William 402, 403 Demirhan, Kamil 277 democracies: delegative 96–100; power and process issues 29, 507–512; scandal prevalence 11–12 Democratic National Committee (DNC) 60, 275 Depp, Johnny 79 Der Spiegel 227, 229, 274 Deuze, Mark 124 deviance, sociology of 47, 48 digital revolution 13–15, 19 Dijck, José van 151 Dillon, Andy 372 Di Tella, Rafael 448–449 Dixon, Maria A. 393, 395 Doherty, David 436–437, 440, 446 Dolezal, Rachel 372–373 Dowler, Millie 69, 77 Drone Papers 255 Drudge Report 57, 77 D’Souza, Dilip 242 Dubied, Annik 306 Durkheim, Émile 25, 26–27, 28, 30–31 Duterte, Rodrigo 118–121 Eady, David, Sir 427 Edelman Trust 338 Edwards, John 170 Eisenegger, Mark 414 Ekström, Mats 149 electoral politics: ACORN sting and smear tactics 363–364; active publics and social media 58, 440; Canadian elections 2015, scandal mining 286–288; corruption, political consequences 446, 457–461; global scandals 15; incumbency benefits 438–439, 460–461; organizational pressures 87–88; partisanship and social media 58–59; Pizzagate conspiracy 367; political scandal coverage 433–434, 438–440; Presidential elections 2016, scandal generation 59–62, 87; racialized ads 374; scandal matching 41–42; Trump–Russia scandal 42, 61, 82, 142–143; Trump’s partisan support 41; Trump, Twitter and agenda setting 60–61, 87 Ellsberg, Daniel 160, 258, 260 Engesser, Sven 151 Entman, Robert: bias and agenda setting 240, 333, 470; calibration in coverage 158, 159, 162; media framing 107, 108; mediatization of deviance 400; partisanship influences 68, 70, 91, 156–157, 340; scandal endurance 340, 359–360; scandal taxonomy 256; silenced scandals 357 entrapment journalism: concept and reasons behind 245–247; emic and etic perspectives 249–251; methods 247–249; tabloid-led 246

517

Index Epstein, Debbie 425 Erikson, Kai 47 Esaiasson, Peter 440 Esser, Frank 106 Ettema, James 187, 226 European Court of Human Rights 496, 500 European Investigative Collaboration (EIC) 227 Evans, Harold 229 Facebook: Cambridge Analytica scandal 71, 255–256, 295; disinformation and gatekeeping 90; disinformation tactics, Philippine elections 119–120; politics and fake news 116; populist exploitation 151; Sanford disclosures 168, 190; scandal mining, Canadian elections 2015 286, 287–288; trending suspension 89–90 factitious information blends (FIBS) 58 fake news: bots and agenda setting 61, 118; computational propaganda 118; constructed, reactive narratives 117–118, 120–121, 124; electoral politics, use of 116; emotional, aesthetic and visual features 116–117, 118–119; Philippine elections 2016, disinformation tactics 118–123; producer justifications and their origins 121–123; public susceptibility impacts 59–60; Trump’s reframing of criticism 40–41, 43; US Presidential elections 2016 61–62, 90 Falwell, Jerry 394–395 Fan, David 391 Farage, Nigel 187–189 Farah, Joseph 58–59 Farrow, Ronan 307, 309, 312 Feng, Miao 107, 411 Ferraz, Claudio 437–438, 458 Fidesz Party 153 Financial Times 203, 248 Finan, Frederico 437–438, 458 Fini, Gianfranco 162 Finland 152, 167, 175, 176–177; see also Nordic media and political scandal Flinders, Matthew 342–343 Flores, Priscilla H. 231 Flynn, Michael 61 Fog, Agner 36 Foges, Claire 17 Foley, Mark 509 Ford, John 339 Foreman, Amanda 81 Forsyth, Justin 344, 345, 347 Foucault, Michel 123 Fowler, Mayhill 58 Fox News 39, 41, 43, 50, 143–144, 310, 378 Fox, Richard L. 316 framing theory 105–106 France 69, 162, 175, 193, 228, 363 Franken, Al 169, 317, 434 Freedom House 139

freedom of information laws: definition 216; investigative journalism 218–219; openness opportunities 220–221; scandals exposed 215; societal benefits 217–218; transparency variable 219–220; US and national evolvements 216–217, 219 Freudenburg, William R. 383 Fukushima Daiichi incident 383, 384 functional scandal theory 129, 135 Furedi, Frank 51 Galloway, Stephen 310 Galtung, Johan 76–77, 344 Galvis, Ángela 448 Gamson, Joshua 28, 166, 169, 363 Garland, David 48, 50 gatekeeping, legacy media: audience metrics 88; individual and routines 86–87; social responsibilities 88, 158, 159–160, 194; value of scandal 91–92 gatekeeping, social media: algorithms and trending 89–90; cross-national networks 90–91, 259; individual 89; responsibility conflicts 90; value of scandal 91–92, 285–286 Gawker 310, 312, 502 Germany 106, 107–111, 108–109, 111, 175 Gilens, Martin 449 Giles, Hannah 364 Gingrich, Kathleen 249 Glasser, Theodore 187, 226 Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN) 225, 227, 228 Gluckman, Max 25, 29, 30 Gmür, Mario 133 Goldring, Mark 346, 347 Goode, Erich 46, 49, 52 Goodman, Clive 69, 198 Goodwin, Fred 13 Gorbachev, Mikhail 140 Gorin, Valérie 306 Goslett, Miles 208 Graffin, Scott 449 Grant, Hugh 426 Gray, Herman 370, 374–375 Green America 406 Greenslade, Roy 207, 250 Greenwald, Glenn 229 Greer, Chris 343, 345, 347 Guardian: aid sector scandals 344, 346, 349, 350; Cambridge Analytica 71, 255–256; citizen involvement 270; investigative journalism 70; litigation reports 206; Panama Papers 83; Paradise Papers 226; phone hacking scandal 69, 337; WikiLeaks based collaborations 229, 255, 274 Gunnlaugsson, Sigmundur Davíð 226 H&M scandal 487–492 Habermas, Jürgen 167–168, 414

518

Index Haider, Jörg 148 Halperin, Mark 42 Hamilton, James T. 219 Hanczor, Robert 476 Harrison, John 251 Hauwermeiren, Roland van 343–344, 345 Hayden, Michael 298 Heep, Andreas 68 Heft, Annett 229 Herkman, Juha 148, 149 Herman, Edward 338 Hermida, Alfred 268 Hershey 406 Hill, Daniel 246 Hillsborough disaster 339 Hinerman, Stephen 258, 325, 364, 365, 372, 422 Hirschman, Albert O. 257 Hirsch, Paul 310 Hitchen, Brian 205 Hochschild, Arlie 117 Hornnes, Elin Strand 134 Horsfield, Peter 49 Horten, Gerd 355 Horton, William Robert 374 Hoskins, Andrew 354, 356, 359 Huertas, Carlos E. 231 Hunt, Alan 51 hybrid media system 147, 152, 259–260 hypocrisy, scandal element 79–80 #IfTheyGunnedMeDown 375–376 image repair theory: analytical perspectives 478; conceptual framework 476; future research 480–481; response strategies 476–477, 477; scandal context 478–480; strategy effectiveness 480 Imus, Don 373 Independent Press Standards organization (IPSO) 338 Indian media and scandals: normalization of stingbased news 240–242; press monopoly 237; scandal fatigue 242; televised stings and media economics 237–240 India TV 240, 241 Infowars 61, 143 Ingebretsen, Edward J. 389, 393–394 Ingram, Richard 202 Intercept, The 255 International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) 83, 225–226, 228, 255, 265 investigative journalism: celebrity scandal challenges 309–310, 311; data journalism advantages 264–265; entrapment practices 247–248; freedom of information laws 218–219, 221; Latin American initiatives 231; market-driven competition 157–159; networked alliances, benefits of 228–230,

300–301; partisanship influences 34–35; professional recognition 69–70; scandal creators and judges 130–131, 486; support organizations 226–227, 228; transnational cooperation 225–232; transnational topics 230; Watergate crisis 17, 57 Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) 226–227 Italy 80, 159, 162, 466 Iyengar, Shanto 37 Jacobsson, Kerstin 257–258, 486, 490 Jacquet, Jennifer 307 Jansson, André 68 Jebril, Nael 450 Jenkins, Philip 50, 393 Jenson, Klaus B. 69 Johansson, Bengt 149 Johnson, Ben 328 Johnson, Richard 425 Johnston, Ron 446, 456 Jones, Meirion 207, 208 Joyce, Barnaby 79–80 Judd, Ashley 312 Just, Marion R. 236 Kahan, Dan M. 386 Kanerva, Ikka 167, 177 Kantola, Anu 486 Kantor, Judi 307, 309, 312 Karppinen, Kari 194 Kavanagh, Dennis 68 Kavanaugh, Brett 195, 494, 499 Kavannagh, Trevor 335 Kennedy, Edward M. 170, 195 Kennedy, John F. 77, 80, 166, 195 Kepplinger, Hans M. 107, 449–450, 451 Kerry, John 58 King, Anthony 422 King, Rodney 371, 375 Klasnia, M. 447 Klašnja, Marko 437, 466 kompromat, scandal operations: international efforts 142–143; key elements 140–141, 143, 160–161; Putin challenges dismissed 141–142, 144; Trump’s parallel actions 143–145 Kreiss, Daniel 269 Kristensen, Nete 355 Kuhl, Steven 358 Kumlin, Staffan 440 Kuper, Simon 203 Landis, Kenesaw 506 Lange, Donald 405–406 Lanosga, Gerry 218 Latin American democratization 95–97, 100–101 Lawless, Jennifer L. 316

519

Index law, role in scandal: defamation and public discourse 498–500; injunctions 501–502; media law, national variations 494–496; privacy boundaries and violations 497–498; ‘right to delete’ and GDPR 502–503 Lee, Francis L.F. 448, 451–452 legal context, scandal reporting: American fitness for office 196; editorial independence 194; French standards 193; Leveson Inquiry 197–198; Russia’s authoritarian control 198–200; UK legalization 197; US fitness for office 194–195; US legal justifications 195–196 Le Monde 162, 228, 229 Lerbinger, Otto 405 Lesher, Michael 394 Lester, Marilyn 49, 267 Leveson Inquiry 69, 197–198, 208, 334, 336, 430 Levy, Neil 251 Lewinsky, Monica 57, 70, 77, 509, 511 Lichter, S. Robert 390 Liebes, Tamar 248, 258 Limbaugh, Rush 373, 378 Lippmann, Walter 34, 265 Liu, Brooke 477 Lloyd, John 431 Löfmarck, Erik 257–258, 486, 490 Logue, John 28, 30, 32 Louis, C. K. 308 Luckhurst, Tim 423, 427 Luckmann, Thomas 47 Lull, James 258, 325, 364, 365, 372, 422 Lund, Anker 356 Luxembourg Leaks 225, 255 Luzhkov, Yuri 141–142 Lyon, David 297 MacKean, Liz 207, 208 Maddison, Angus 47 Madonna 426 Mahler, Matthew 30 Maier, Craig 393 Maier, Jürgen 447 Mail on Sunday 342, 344, 345 Major, John 424–425 Maltby, Sarah 355 Manafort, Paul 61 Mancini, Christina 390, 392 Mandell, Hinda 166 Manning, Chelsea 229, 255, 258 Markle, Meghan 78 Markovits, Andrei 28–29, 135 Martin, Jason 218 Martin, Joanne 319–321 Martin, Trayvon 371, 377 Matikainen, Janne 148 McAlpine, Alistair, Lord 494–495 McCain, John 363

McConnell, Allan 53 McCurdy, Patrick 260 McDermott, Monika 446 McDermott, Vanessa 327 McDougal, Karen 60, 80 McLaughlin, Eugene 343, 345, 347 McNair, Brian 358 McNally, Darragh 466 McRobbie, Angela 422, 426, 428 media framing: framing theory and forms 105–106; guilty/attack and excuse/defense 107; institutional divergence tactics 37; journalistic practices 104–105; political sex scandals 36, 57; Presidential elections 2016 60–61; religious scandal 393–394; research expansion 112; scandals as a generic frame 106; transparency, perspectives of 275–279; trial by media (TBM) 345–346; Trump’s accountability detractions 43, 60–61; zu Guttenberg scandal, case study 107–111, 108–109, 111 media logic 12, 68, 150, 486–487 media populism 150 media priming 470–471 mediatization and scandal: Bo Xilai’s ideological politics 72–74; commercial and reputational advancement 130–131, 486; contemporary factors 67; data-driven political marketing 71–72; H&M exposé and recurrent framing 487–491; infotainment, detrimental effects 69; institutional logic 68–69; investigative journalism 69–70; network logic 70–72; News of the World and phone hacking 69; partisan coverage 70; political logic 72–74; predictive rituals and narratives 486–487, 491–492; social media as disruptive source 70–71 Meehan, Patrick 317, 318–322 Mellor, David 424, 428 Meraz, Sharon 58 #MeToo movement: hashtag activism 165, 316, 452; linked with aid sector scandals 348–350; newsworthiness criteria 78, 91; Weinstein and celebrity accusations 168–169, 307–308, 311–312 Meyer, Philip 265–266 Miceli, Marcia P. 257 Milano, Alyssa 165 military scandals: Abu Ghraib prison scandal 354, 357–358, 359; collateral murder video 358, 359; David Petraeus sex scandal 358–359; indexing hypothesis 355, 359; mediated war phases 354, 356, 359; mediatization of the military 355; rarity factors 357, 359–360; security focus 356–357; sexual assault, U.S. military 37–40, 38, 38–41, 358 Miller, B. A. 389 Milner, Daniel 310 Mitchell, Andrew 344

520

Index Mitchell, Dona-Gene 436, 439–440 Moe, Hallvard 194 Molotch, Harvey 49, 267 Moore, Ray 170, 434 moral panic: definition 46–47; judging proportionality 49–50, 53; media’s manufactured news 50, 365; negativity reappropriated 49, 53; reactions, analytical concerns 52–53; research findings, validity issues 50–52; scandal comparison 365; sociology of deviance 47; sport and scandal 327–328; victimless crimes and corruption 48; youth, stereotyped excesses 46, 48, 52 Mosley, Max 495 Moss, Kate 81 MPs expenses scandal 160, 215, 446, 449 Mulcaire, Glenn 69, 198 Murdoch, Rupert 334, 335, 430, 431 Nadler, Anthony 88 National Enquirer 309 Navalny, Alexei 142 Near, Janet R. 257 Neckel, Sighard 28, 29, 30, 135 neo-populist scandals 149 networked journalism 259 Neustein, Amy 394 News of the World: entrapment journalism 246; phone hacking scandal 69, 77, 197–198, 334–337, 338, 340 news organizations: exposure motivation 11, 19, 35, 69, 157–158; Leveson Inquiry response 336; partisanship influences 17–18, 34–35; political scandalmongering 428–431; power elites and scandal management 333–340, 430–432; public mistrust 338–339; rhetoric of ‘freedom’, regulation manipulation 336–338 news values: authoritarian states, scandal control 82–83; commercially led accountability 80–82; elite figure scandals, public appeal 77–78; journalistic freedom 80–81; journalistic remoralisation 422–423; key elements and selection 76–77; scandal, key transgressive actions 78–80, 334 New York 309, 310 New York Times: arms-for-hostages scandal 227; Cambridge Analytica 71, 255–256; investigative journalism 70, 87; political affiliations 118; racialized scandals 375; Thorpe scandal 202; Trump coverage 60; US military sexual assault 40; Weinstein, accusations against 168, 307; WikiLeaks collaborations 229, 274 Nicholson, Kristin 318 Nike 406 Nixon, Richard 57, 82, 195, 217, 248, 509 Norbert Zongo Cell for Investigative Journalism 227

Nordic media and political scandal: commercialization impacts 130–131, 135, 148; gender differences 134; personal/institutional effects 133–134, 135; scandal types and incidences 131–133, 132, 148–149; source origins and framing 131 NSA/Snowden leaks: case study 37–40, 38, 38–41; global impacts 256; intelligence community reaction 298; post-political dynamics 298–299; tech industry’s defensiveness 299–300; whistleblower case 255; WikiLeaks involvement 15, 229 nuclear power incidents 382–384 Nyhan, Brendan 36, 90, 448 O´Donnell, Guillermo 96–100, 101 Obama, Barack 58, 58–59, 144, 363–364, 479 OCED 228 Oehlkers, Peter 179 Ogan, Christine 392 O’Hagan, Andrew 429 O’Keefe, James 364, 368n5 O’Loughlin, Ben 354, 356, 359 O’Neill, Sam 345, 350 Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCR) 227, 228 Ørsten, Mark 355 Ortega, Félix 25, 31–32 #OscarsSoWhite 376 Otto, Lukas 178–179 Owen, D. 439 Oxfam GB scandal 17–18; initial misconduct neutralized 343–344; institutional accountability sought 348; political and public backlash 347; Times exposé 342, 345, 350; trial by media and consequences 345–347 Palau, Anna 449 Panama Papers: Chinese news suppression 81, 83; multi-agency investigations 15, 225–226, 231, 255; newsworthiness 79 Papacharissi, Zizi 167, 169 Papadopoulos, George 61 Pappa, Evdokia 327 Paradise Papers 15, 225–226, 255 Parasie, Sylvain 266, 268, 269 Parker, Alan, Sir 348 Parkinson, Cecil 424 Park, Myung-Jin 156 Pasek, Josh 58 Pattie, Charles 446, 456 Pearlman, Mitchell 217 Pentagon Papers 160, 260 Pepper de Caires, Alexia 348 perverse norms 472 Peston, Robert 430 Petersen, Anne-Helen 312

521

Index Petraeus, David 358–359 Pfiffner, J.P. 507 Philippine elections 2016 and fake news 118–123 Phillips, Melanie 423 Pizzagate conspiracy 367, 499 Plows, Alexandria 280 Podesta, John 60, 62, 275, 367 Poell, Thomas 151 Poitras, Laura 229 policy scandals, case studies: attribution of blame 40, 40; data collection and methods 37–38, 38; negative tone of coverage 38, 38; sensationalism 39, 39 political scandal and media coverage: agenda setting and the internet 57, 166–167, 282–283; candidate characteristics 438, 507; corruption scandals 437–438; electoral impacts 433–434; financial scandals 436–437; framing theory and its application 105–107; future research 441–442; hierarchical appeal 36; image repair strategies 478–479; incumbency benefits 438–439; institutional divergence tactics 36–37; media framing, case study 107–111, 108–109, 111; nature/scope of coverage, effects of 439–440, 448–450, 452–453; Nordic media, incidence rise and impacts 131–135, 132; participatory publics and social media 57–59, 284–286, 450–452; partisanship influences 34–35, 41, 162, 422, 431–432, 439, 509; policy scandals, case studies 37–40, 38, 38–40; Presidential elections 2016 59–62; scandal fatigue 440–441; scandal mining, Canadian elections 2015 286–288, 452; selective pursuance 35; Trump’s accountability detractions 42–43; see also political sex scandals political scandal and social order: politician’s duality 30, 166; power and process issues 28–29, 277–278, 362–363, 507–508; public response, contextual factors 445–448; public sphere, mediated visibility 31–32, 277, 282, 509–510; violation of social norms 129; Watergate crisis and ‘ritual renewal’ 27–28 political sex scandals: Clinton–Lewinsky affair 57, 70, 77, 166; congressman’s letter, harassment analysis 318–322; Donald Trump, media and public reaction 60, 80, 168, 170–171; journalistic moralization 424–425; Kanerva’s sexting 167, 177; male-dominated indiscretions 315–317; Matti Vanhanen, coverage justification 176–177; media appeal 36; misconduct distinctions 317–318; national differences in exposure 174–176; normalization of 179–181, 426–427; political consequences vary 177, 434–436; press scandalmongering 428–429; social media, impact on coverage 167–171; tabloidization and softening boundaries 178–179

Pollack, Ester 486 Pollard, Nick 207, 209n4 Praino, Rodrigo 446 Press Recognition Panel (PRP) 337–338 produsers 57 ProPublica 88, 215 Prouty, Scott 58 Pruitt, Scott 42 public shaming: celebrity scandal 306–307, 425–426; crime reporting 421; journalistic remoralisation 422–423; mixed reaction to scandal 426–427; partisanship influences 431–432; political sex scandals 424–425; press scandalmongering 428–431 Putin, Vladimir 141, 144, 199, 200 quality of democracy approach (QDA) 96–97 race scandals: anti-black media narratives 373–374; corporate and individual racism 372–373; digital platforms and exposure 374–377; Flint Water Crisis, US 372; ideological representations 370; market-driven 377–378; O.J. Simpson trial 374, 377–378; online accountability 376–377; social media campaigns 375–376; US police and judiciary racism 371, 375, 377 Radia, Niira 71 Ranganathan, Maya 239 Ratner, Gerald 16–17 Reagan, Ronald 227, 478 reasoned action theory 471–472 religion and scandal: anti-Muslim coverage 392, 394, 396; biblical and media understanding 389–390; Catholic Church, abuse cases 79, 390, 392, 393–394, 395; churches’ rhetorical responses 394–395; framing and narrative structure 393–394; impact on congregations 391–392; Jewish child abuse 394; media misrepresentation 395–396; Mormon practices 395–396; Praise the Lord (PTL) 391–392, 394–395; types and reporting frequency 390–391, 397 Riera, P. 446 Riffe, Daniel 180 right-wing populism: key features 149–150; neo-populist scandals 149; scandal as provocation strategy 147–149, 150, 152, 187–189; social media, exploitation of 150–152; tolerance concerns 153 Rippon, Peter 207 Ritzer, George 26–27 Rivero-Rodríguez, G. 466–467 Robredo, Leni 119–120 Rogers, Everett 240 Rojecki, Andrew 58 Romney, Mitt 58, 396 Romson, Åsa 134, 136n3

522

Index Rose, Matthew 250 Rottinghaus, Brandon 435, 439, 508 Roudakova, Natalia 199 Rowe, David 305 Roy, Prannoy 242 Rudd, Amber 186 Ruge, Mari H. 76–77, 344 Russia: corruption, blame deflection 71; elites scandal 83, 84; journalistic repression 194; kompromat, scandal operations 140–143, 144–145; politized scandal, Stalin to Putin 139–141; state-controlled media 139, 198–200; Trump election scandal 42, 61, 82, 142–143 Sabato, Larry 436 Samoilenko, Sergei A. 405 Sanders, Karen 156, 158 Sanford, Mark 168, 190, 315 Sass, Jensen 358, 400 Save the Children UK scandal 342, 344, 345, 347, 348, 350 Saville, Jimmy 203, 204–205, 206–208 scandal and media commercialization: marketdriven scandals 158–159, 163, 377–378, 415; ‘media populism’ 150; news values 76–77, 88, 104, 236; Nordic media and political scandal 130–131, 148–149; political and power elites 334–336, 336; sustainability factors 67–68, 237; tabloidization 69, 106, 175–176, 242; trial by media (TBM) 345–346 scandal fatigue 242, 440–441 scandal legacies 16–17 scandal matching 41–42 scandal mining: Canadian electioneering and social media 286–288, 452; political scandal, coverage changes 282–284; social media barriers 288–290; social media as source 285–286 scandal, positive function 25, 26–27, 29–30, 31 scandal repression: challenging editorial decisions 206–207, 208; Jeremy Thorpe affair 202; Jimmy Saville’s abuses 203, 204–208; Lance Armstrong’s doping 203, 204, 205–206; libel law threats 202, 204–206; lone reporter, role of 207–208; ‘national treasure’ status 204, 209; power and influence factors 202–203, 206 scandals: consequences 16–19; contextual definitions 35, 78, 135, 138, 156–157, 193; digital revolution 13–15, 19; frequency factors 12; globalization effects 15–16, 19; moral outrage and punishment 400; news organization motivations 11; original sources 10–11; partisanship influences 17–18, 19; scandalsaturated societies 11–13; violation of social norms 11, 34, 166, 277 scansis 401–402 Schauer, Frederick 196 Scheufele, Dietram A. 385–386

Schleinov, Roman 199 Schlesinger, Philip 227 Schudson, Michael 31, 32, 70, 265, 510 Schwarz, Norbert 448 science scandals: categories 381–382; controversies and politics 381, 385; fracking opposition 384–385; media and public engagement 382, 385–386; nuclear power, incidents and perceptions 382–384; stem cell research 381 Sciorra, Annabella 309 Scott, Norman 77, 202 second-order scandal 34, 184, 435–436, 446 Sewell, William 297, 302 Sex Pistols 426 sex trafficking scandals: ACORN sting and electioneering 363–364, 368n4; generation of ‘surplus scandal’ 366, 367–368; mediatization and moral panic 365–366; Pizzagate conspiracy 367; US reform law 367, 368n10 Shah, Dhavan 57, 107, 449 Sharif, Nawaz 226 Shields, Ryan 390, 392 Shoemaker, Pamela J. 91 Siebert, Frederick S. 88, 139, 158 Sifry, Micah 275 Sikorski, Christian von 451 Silk, Mark 391 Silverstein, Mark 28–29, 135 Simpson, O. J. 374, 377–378, 425 situational crisis communication theory (SCCT) 401–402, 403–404 Sjøvaag, Helle 180 Skuratov, Yuri 141 Smith, Elisabeth 446 Smith, Steven 329 Smith, Tom W. 391 Snowden, Edward: criminal charge 258; Facebook denouncement 295; NSA leaks, case study 37–40, 38, 38–41; NSA leaks, press articles 255; WikiLeaks involvement 15, 229 Snow, Robert P. 68 social accountability: civic initiatives, operational processes 97–100; formal mechanisms 96–97; new democracy deficits 95–96; political scandals and civic movements 100–102; quality of democracy approach (QDA) 96 social media: agenda setting and participatory publics 57–59, 167–171, 284–286, 363, 451–452; attention economy 151; corporate scandal, reveal/response 412, 413, 415–416; disruptive access, authoritarian states 71, 84; gatekeeping 89–92, 428–429, 440; hashtag activism 165, 168–169, 311–312, 316, 375–376; partisan agendas, fake news and bots 59–62; partisanship and politics 58–59; political scandal, public response 450–452; populist exploitation 151–152; privacy boundaries and violations

523

Index 497–498; racial scandals 375–376; ‘right to delete’ laws 502–503; scandal mining, Canadian elections 2015 286–288; self-management and privacy barriers 288–290; sexting scandals 167; talk scandal exposure 189–190, 283; see also Facebook; Twitter Solé-Ollé, Albert 461 Sorribas-Navarro, Pilar 461 Southwell, Brian 59 Spacey, Kevin 78, 308 Spain 449, 457, 461, 463n3, 466–467, 502–503 Sparks, Colin 161 Spielberg, Steven 310 sport and scandal: Australian cricketer’s ball tampering 329–330; baseball’s ‘Big Fix’ impact 506; corporate context 412–413; cultural/social investment, disruptive challenges 325–329; image repair strategies 480; individual racism 373; mediatization of transgression 324–325; social media’s exploitation 330–331 sports journalism 305 Stalin, Joseph 139 Stanyer, James 174, 175, 176, 181n1 Starbucks 372 Stead, William T. 226, 366 Sterling, Donald 373, 377 Stetka, Vaclav 162 Stevens, J.R. 497 Stocking, Barbara 344, 346 Strauss, Jessalynn 395 Süddeutsche Zeitung 107–108, 229, 255 Sun, The 335, 339, 431 Sundaram, Ravi 238 Sunday Times 205, 206, 226, 339 surveillance scandals: institutional actors 297–298; intelligence community’s legitimacy 298, 301; journalistic tensions 300–301; post-NSA political dynamics 298–299, 301–302; privacy paradox 296–297; tech industry’s defensiveness 299–300; transparency’s role 296; Zuckerberg’s apology 295 Swaggart, Jimmy 391 Sweden 189–190, 487–491; see also Nordic media and political scandal Swiss Leaks 225, 228, 255 tabloidization 178–179 Taitz, Orly 59 talk scandal: media dynamics, changes to 186–187, 190–191; Nordic politicians 132–133, 134; norms destabilization and populism 187–189; right-wing populism 149; social media’s exploitation 189–190, 289; statements and reaction 183–184, 283; types, origins and journalistic retrieval 184–186, 185 Tarantino, Quentin 310 tax evasion, ICIJ led exposés 225–226, 255 Tea Party Movement 59, 117

Tehelka.com 237–238 Texaco 372 Thatcher, Margaret 422, 424 Thompson, John: Abu Ghraib prison scandal 354, 357; Clinton-Lewinsky affair 70; hypocrisy intolerance 424; mediated visibility of scandal 31–32, 123–124, 189, 258, 277, 382; mediatization of modern culture 68, 283; moral ‘bindingness’ 427; political scandal types 356, 436; politics of trust 72, 161, 296; public denunciation 338, 422; scandal fatigue 440; scandal, key transgressive actions 282, 334, 381, 498–499; scandal, prevalence factors 67, 135, 157, 283–284; second-order scandal 34, 184, 435, 446; talk scandal influence 186 Thornton, Sue 422, 426, 428 Thorpe, Jeremy 77, 202–203 Three Mile Island 383, 384 Times, The 342, 345, 346–347 Tocqueville, Alexis de 195 Toepfl, Florian 71 Toffoletti, Kim 328 transparency: concept and usage 275–276; data journalism and accountability 264–266; freedom of information laws 215–221; scandal politics 278–280; WikiLeaks, framing of 275, 276, 277 Transparency International 468, 470 Trump, Donald: affairs and payoff scandals 60, 80, 168, 496; Cambridge Analytica scandal 71; ‘fake news’ claims 40–41, 43; ‘locker room talk’ 60, 168, 186; multi-scandals, damage limitation factors 168, 170–171; Obama birther scandal 59, 144; open agenda, no hypocrisy 82, 84; Panama Papers 226; partisan news outlets 41, 143–144, 431; politized scandal, use of 42–43, 143–144, 152–153, 162; presidential character 194; sexual morals, supporter acceptance 60, 80; Trump-Russia scandal 42, 61, 82, 142–143; Tweeted talk scandals 190; Twitter and agenda setting 60–61, 87, 151, 190, 375 Tumber, Howard 30, 178, 237, 339 Turnbull, Malcolm 329 Turner, Fred 300 Turner, George Kibbe 366 Twitter: disinformation, US election 2016 90; hashtag activism 165, 168–169, 311–312, 316, 375–376; politics and fake news 61, 116; populist use and reactions 151, 152; Radiagate scandal 71; Roseanne Barr 375; science scandals 384, 385; Trump and agenda setting 60–61, 87, 151, 190, 375 Twohey, Megan 307, 309, 312 Tyson, Mike 328, 425–426 Umbricht, Andrea 106 United Kingdom (UK): Cambridge Analytica scandal 71–72; editorial independence in law 194; elite

524

Index figure scandals 77, 79; entrapment journalism 246, 247–248; Farage’s populist rhetoric 187–189; law, role in scandal 494–496, 499, 501–502; Leveson Inquiry 69, 197–198; MPs expenses scandal 160, 215, 446, 449; News of the World phone hacking scandal 69, 77, 180, 197–198; politicians and privacy 175, 176, 180; Poulson Affair 226; press scandalmongering 422–425, 427–432; Ratner scandal 16–17; scandal reporting, legal rights 197; sex scandal consequences 177; sex slavery and reform law 366; Thorpe scandal, libel threat 202; Windrush scandal 70, 186 United States (US): Abu Ghraib prison scandal 37–40, 38, 38–41, 354, 357–358; ACORN sting and electioneering 363–364; arms-forhostages scandal 227; Clinton–Lewinsky affair 57, 70, 77, 166, 177; corporate and individual racism 372–373; criminal trial coverage 495, 496; defamation law and scandal 494, 499; editorial independence in law 194; entrapment journalism 248, 249; fake news, reactive narratives 117–118; First Amendment, scandal reports justified 195–196; freedom of information laws and applications 216–219; GDPR compliance issues 502, 503; infidelity, voter tolerance 60, 80, 177; Iraq’s WMD, silenced scandal 357; leadership morality 194–195; male-centric political sex scandals 315–317; media as Fourth Estate 195; #MeToo movement 168–169; newsworthiness criteria 91–92; Obama birther scandal 58–59, 144; participatory publics and social media 58; Pizzagate conspiracy 367; political corruption 447, 457, 463n2, 466; political scandal, coverage changes 166–167, 170–171; political status and scandal survival 507–508, 510; politicians and privacy 175, 176, 180; privacy law 497; public record law reveals 215; racialized scandals 373–374; religious scandal reports 390; sex slavery and reform law 366, 367, 368n10; sexual assault, U.S. military scandals 37–40, 38, 38–41, 358; state and federal racism 371–372; Three Mile Island accident 383; Watergate scandal 27–28, 32, 36, 57, 82, 160, 217; see also Trump, Donald; US Presidential election 2016 scandal Ünker, Pelin 226 Uson, Mocha 119–120 US Presidential election 2016 scandal: agenda setting and scandal generation 59–62, 77–78, 87; disinformation and Clinton 42, 60, 62, 144; fake news 61–62, 90; global complicity 15; Trump and Russia 42, 61, 82, 142–143; WikiLeaks involvement 16, 60, 275 Van der Haak, Bregje 259 Vanhanen, Matti 176–177

Variety 308, 311 Vasterman, P.L. 487 Verbalyte, Monika 187 Vesa, Juho 486 victimless crimes and corruption 48 Vonnahme, B.M. 436, 509 VW emission scandal 399, 400, 404 Wagner, Markus 447 Waisbord, Silvio R. 30, 101, 237, 258, 339, 439, 440 Walsh, David 206 Walters, Simon 344, 350 Warner, David 329 Warren, Samuel 195, 497 Washburn, Nathan 405–406 Washington Post: Bill Crosby scandal 309; NSA/ Snowden leaks 255; Pentagon Papers 160; political affiliations 118; political sex scandals 316; Trump coverage 60, 145, 168; US military sexual assault 40; Watergate scandal 160 Wasserman Schultz, Debbie 60 Watergate scandal: agenda setting and politics 57; journalist’s social responsibilities 81–82, 160; legal reform legacy 217, 511; media framing 36, 437, 451, 509; theorist interpretations 27–28, 32 Weaver, David H. 57 Weber, Max 30 Webster, Frank 355 Weeks, Brian 59 Weiner, Anthony 78, 167, 170, 367, 434 Weinstein, Harvey: media articles and accusations 307–308; #MeToo scandal 78, 168–169; scandal suppression tactics 309, 310, 311 Welch, Edgar 367 Welch, Stephen 284 Wells, Chris 87 whistleblowing cases: internal/external definitions 257; megaleaks 2010–2018 255–256; publicity and scandal evolvement 257–259; scandalization impacts 256–257, 260–261; scandal taxonomy 256, 256 WikiLeaks: Afghan/Iraq War Logs 255, 274; authenticity challenges 279–280; Cablegate 229, 255, 274–275; Chelsea Manning’s downloads 255, 260; Collateral Murder video 255, 274, 358; Democratic campaign scandal 60, 275, 367; early revelations 274, 279; global scandal involvement 16; hybrid journalism 259–260, 265; journalist’s criticisms 269; NSA/Snowden leaks 229; transparency advocacy 275, 276–277 Wilby, Peter 430 Willems, Leon 227 Williams, Bruce A. 57, 169, 178, 260, 285, 510 Wilson, Darren 378 Windrush scandal 70, 186 Winseck, Dwayne 275

525

Index Wizner, Ben 301–302 Wodak, Ruth 148, 149 Wojdynski, Bartosz 180 Wollaston, Sam 203 women in politics: disinformation campaigns, Philippines 119–120; Hillary Clinton, scandal coverage 41, 42, 60, 62, 144, 162; Nordic scandals 134 Woods, Tiger 167 Wright Monod, Sarah 52 Wylie, Christopher 71, 255–256 Xi Jinping 83–84

Yeltsin, Boris 140, 141 Yeo, Sara K. 384 York, Jillian C. 275 Young, Jock 47, 48, 50, 52 Young, Mary L. 268 youth culture 46, 47–48 Yusha’u, Muhammad 394 Zidane, Zinedine 324, 325 Zimmerman, George 371, 377, 378 Žižek, Slavoj 258 Zuckerberg, Mark 71, 90, 295 zu Guttenberg, Karl-Theodor 107–111

526