Media scandals,rumour and gossip: A study with an ear close to the ground

Literature review and theoretical strands

To date, international research has largely focused on discussing definitions of what a mediated scandal is. In some cases this has led to an almost essentialist understanding of the phenomenon, for example by evaluating its diverse terminology, determining its dramatic unfolding as a time-based event, creating typologies and matrices, and proposing new labels to describe it. Such labels include political scandal, which is subdivided into sex scandals, financial scandals and power scandals (Thompson, 2008); closely related, the mediated political scandal (Midtbø, 2007; Todal Jenssen, 2014); the ‘talk scandal’, with its subcategories of first-order and second-order talk scandals (Ekström and Johansson, 2008); the moral scandal (Djerf-Pierre et al., 2013); the SMS scandal (Laine, 2010); political wave-making (Wolfsfeld and Sheafer, 2006); media hype (Elmelund-Præstekær and Wien, 2008, 2009); and the media storm or media wave, with its subgenres of ‘wave storms’, ‘spike storms’ and ‘non-storms’ (Boydstun et al., 2014).

Scholars often argue that news media today not only report on scandals but also produce them, and thereby contribute to the establishment of moral codes and the definition of what constitutes a transgression or not – a media scandal, in other words. A media scandal ‘is not merely something that is revealed, but something that is shown, reported, staged and kept alive day after day’ (Ekström and Johansson, 2008: 72). It has been described as a ‘media event’, because it is constituted by mediated forms of communication (Cottle, 2006: 42). Thus, one often finds an implicit or explicit assumption that modern scandals can be distinguished from ‘classic’ or ‘traditional’ scandals in the way they are communicated:

What separates the modern political scandal from the classic scandal is that it no longer mainly gets its nourishment from discussions and conversations between people, but primarily from the media. (Nord, 2001: 20) ²

Like many others, Nord develops the idea of the classic scandal by drawing on John B. Thompson’s seminal work on political scandals (Thompson, 2005, 2008, 2011). Thompson, however, builds his influential theoretical contribution on the presumption that mediated scandals can, and should, be considered distinct from what he calls ‘localized scandals’ (Thompson, 2008: 61). Thompson explains the latter category as ‘commonly linked to the kinds of gossip and rumour, which are spread by word of mouth’ (2008: 62), and the medium of disclosure and disapprobation is face-to-face communication. The vehicle of the mediated scandal, on the other hand, is by definition mediated communication (Thompson, 2008: 62–3).

When I use the concept ‘media scandal’, I dovetail with the rich work of Thompson but also seek to challenge some of the assumptions on which it is based. I draw on previous research and understandings of media scandals with the ambition to also move beyond them. In my view, the cultural aspects of a scandal are often neglected in existing studies. Therefore, I see this article as a contribution to the rather few anthropological (Bird 1997, 2003), historical (Darnton 1997, 2000, 2004, 2005, 2010), social psychological (Wästerfors 2005, 2008), and emotional (Madianou, 2011) studies of mediated scandals.

In this study, I use empirical findings about the lived experience of those at the centre of mediated scandals to challenge the influential analytical and conceptual distinctions between mediated scandal and localized scandal, revealing in the process the historical continuities between oral communication and mass mediated communication. In addition, I strive to widen the narrow academic view of mediated scandals, which are almost exclusively associated with the political sphere. In fact, scandals affect public figures of all sorts today, as well as private individuals (Petley, 2013; Ronson, 2015). There is insufficient evidence to justify drawing firm distinctions between different types of scandals, especially when investigating the scandal as an experience in everyday life.

Instead, I consider the mediated scandal to be, above all, a cultural phenomenon, which audiences use to debate and negotiate transgressional acts, social norms and values in a symbolic and ritualized way. Rather than focusing on distinctions and categorizations, I pay analytical attention to what different scandals have in common. For example, they all represent moments of ostracism (Boehm, 1999; Williams, 2001), when, because of his or her acts, the centre of attention is to some degree involuntarily separated from the group in the short or long term by dint of collectively expressed emotions – indignation, condemnation, shame – which have been described as creating a certain kind of ‘scandal aura’ (Jenssen and Fladmoe, 2012: 64).

The lived experiences are not completely absent from the academic literature on media scandals (Bjerke, 2012; Brurås, 2004; Johansson, 2006) but a book written by a journalist, namely Jon Ronson’s popular So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (2015) provides, in my view, a more urgent and keen understanding of what it is like to be at the centre of massive, negative media attention. In line with Ronson, I will try to emphasize the way in which the reach of the media narrative extends beyond the immediate context of the media sphere and interferes with people’s everyday lives. The phenomenological concept of the lifeworld serves to highlight the way in which the lives of the individuals concerned are affected on an existential level by a media scandal. I take the description by Schutz (1970, 1973, 1989) of the lifeworld as being the reality we live in and take for granted, the world as immediately or directly experienced in the subjectivity of everyday life. Schutz uses the phrase ‘social, natural attitude’ to denote the original relationship between the subject and the world, meaning the daily routines that constitute the often overlooked prerequisite for all actions, all relations and all reflections (Schutz, 1973: 59).

What I examine, then, is how a media scandal is manifested as experience. This approach also makes it harder to relapse into a one-sided victim narrative, which is a risk in studies of this type. Yet it must be acknowledged that the very nature of the experience inevitably leads to a sense of being stigmatized through different modes of communication. Therefore, Goffman’s (1990) theory of social stigma is used to shed light upon the actions and reactions of those affected, as is Carey’s (1998) perspective on these types of media events as shaming rituals.

These theories have their limits, of course. They can help us understand the individual’s personal account of events better, but they are less useful when trying to address the historical durability that characterizes a media scandal. To be able to reach deeper and to some extent problematize the notion of mediated scandal as a typically modern phenomenon, I draw upon the work of historian Robert Darnton (1997, 2000, 2004, 2005, 2010). He shows how scandals in the longue durée have been intimately connected with news and journalism, to the extent that they were treated as synonyms in the French language in the eighteenth century. Darnton’s mapping of the communication circuits in Paris at that time, which were mainly oral, offers clues as to the power of the spoken word when a scandal plays out in public, through various forms of journalism – then and now (see also Hartley, 1996, 2008).

Building on these perspectives, I shed light on the concept of media circuits, as described by Darnton (2010). I would suggest that mediated scandals are in fact the product of complex media circuits, where the concept of the ‘media’ is open, and something that the researcher would ideally discover through his or her empirical work (Harvard and Lundell, 2010: 7–25). The idea of circuits should be seen as a methodological tool, reminding us of connections between phenomena that might not be evident at first glance. It is something much more far-reaching than the obvious, traditional forms of mass media, encompassing social, spatial and temporal dimensions, where the idea of established hierarchies, for example between the written and the oral, is questioned (Harvard and Lundell, 2010: 16–21). ³

In the present context, the social dimension would include the tension between different actors involved in the creation of a scandal, both individuals (elite people and ordinary citizens) and organizations or institutions and the like. The spatial dimension refers to the various spaces – literal and symbolic – where the scandal takes shape, which are intertwined with the social dimension.

I bring this into dialogue with the approach proposed by the anthropologist Elizabeth Bird:

Indeed, in many ways, the notion of ‘scandal’ is more firmly embedded in the oral, interpersonal dimension of our lives, rather than the media dimension (although these are closely intertwined). The media play the role of the storyteller or town crier, but the scandal gains its momentum from the audiences. (Bird, 2003: 31)

The analysis of the stories of the subjects of mediated scandals in this article also says something fundamental about journalism and its historical heritage, which is often neglected by researchers within the field. ‘Modern political journalism was founded as much in scandal, gossip, and sensationalism as it was in reason and truth’, as Hartley ( 2008: 681) puts it. He points to the fact that journalism not only reports on popular culture, as object, but also constitutes popular culture, as subject. This underlines the staying power of the gossipy, oral dimensions of journalism even in the context of the so-called serious journalism of today. The staples of popular culture are the very propellant of modern journalism and therefore of modern political ideas, such as celebrity, scandal and bedroom antics, Hartley (2008: 687) argues. He concludes that these critical perspectives on journalism have had ‘remarkably little impact’ on the study of journalism, in research as well as in the teaching at journalism schools, where you tend to shed light on what counts as journalism in relation to the ‘rational’ democratic process, the development of policy and the business cycle (Hartley, 2008: 688–9).

The circumstances that have only been briefly touched upon in the literature include the far-reaching and long-term social and cultural impact of mediated scandals and their consequences for the everyday lives of the people most closely involved.

Material and method

The analysis is an outcome of a three-year research project (2011–14), which builds on an extensive data set of 1000 news items, social media activities, and qualitative interviews, all in a Swedish context. ⁴ For the purposes of this article, I focus on one of these sources of empirical material, namely interviews.

I conducted in-depth, qualitative interviews with twelve people who have been at the centre of mediated scandals in Sweden, six women and six men: five top politicians (two women and three men); ⁵ one professor who, at the time of the scandal, was also working as a part-time politician (female); one state secretary to a government minister (male); one prize-winning author (female); one acclaimed newspaper journalist (female); one television journalist who hosts a show on current affairs (male); one leader of an influential non-governmental organization (NGO) (female); and one person who is normally not in the public eye (male). ⁶ In addition, I interviewed the partners of the last two interviewees (the husband and wife respectively).

This article’s source material is thus a total of 14 qualitative, in-depth interviews. The group represents both genders, the interviewees are of various ages and from different working backgrounds. With the exception of one, the common denominator of the ‘victims’ of scandal is that they can be regarded as belonging to what we could call a social elite: 11 out of the 12 have held influential positions in political and cultural institutions in Sweden.

All of those affected came under fire as a result of what have been identified as transgressional, norm-breaking actions or utterances. By ‘transgression’, I mean to capture and describe people’s ability – willingly or involuntarily – to challenge the unwritten rules of society. To that end, transgression is about power; contested power relations between people, and between people and the media. Mediated scandals also encompass the painful loss of power.

The respondents were first contacted by telephone or email, and the interviews were conducted at their workplaces or homes, with the exception of three; of these one took place in a café, one in a hotel room, and one at my office. All of them were conversational in tone. I prepared questions as a guide, but sought to maintain loosely structured interviews in which their narratives were the priority. They varied in length from one to three hours; all were recorded and subsequently transcribed in full. For ethical reasons, the interviewees have been anonymized for present purposes, and will be presented by fictitious names.

The search for thematic strands is a tried and tested means of scanning the hidden horizon in texts or interviews (Jensen, 1995: 114–21). Accordingly, all interview data have been coded for common themes. In the inductive-analytical process of working through the comprehensive empirical material, I started out by mapping recurring tropes, adverbs and adjectives, which, after some time, led to categorization and thematization. One might say that this involves an interpretative process in which, addressing the factual content, an attempt is made to find topics and categories of a more trans-contextual nature, which project the specific material so that it reverberates in a wider socio-cultural context. To this end, the sound files were listened to repeatedly and the transcriptions read very closely.

Transgression and stigmatization – scandal experiences

Without moral contravention there would be no mediated scandals (Allern and Pollack, 2012a; Bird, 1997, 2003; Lull and Hinerman, 1997; Thompson, 2008). However, the cause of specific scandals is not my concern here, meaning that I will not dwell on the question of presumed guilt. In the context of this study, it suffices to note that the transgressive acts that the interviewees were accused of were firmly in the ‘moral midrange’, for while they had challenged common values, unwritten rules and norms in society, they had not broken the law. ⁷

The pressure in the initial phase of a media scandal is enormous. Telephones ring incessantly. Journalists and photographers occupy stairwells, ring doorbells, and peer through letterboxes. They sneak into gardens and wait in cars outside houses for hours, day in, day out. To all intents and purposes it is a physical hunt. The twelve interviewees who were directly affected, as well as the two spouses, described how sickened this made them feel. They expressed deep feelings of guilt, sleeping difficulties, loss of appetite, fear, and anxiety, and also reported physical symptoms such as migraines, muscular pain, stomach cramps, palpitations, skin rashes, nausea and vomiting.

However, it was surprising to find that the interviewees testified to a kind of prolonged suffering that did not end when the news media stopped reporting on the incident. It continued far beyond that point – sometimes for years. For example, Frederick, a popular television host, lost 18 kilos. Not a big man to start with, he weighed only 56 kilos one year after the scandal unfolded. Rumours spread at his workplace that he was suffering from cancer. He explained the physical transformation as being the result of his constant self-loathing.

When describing their experiences, several of the interviewees compared themselves with vulnerable or persecuted groups in society. Karin, who at the time of the scandal was the head of an influential NGO, said that she was like a rape victim and that ‘the media was the perpetrator’. Lisbeth, a professor and part-time politician, said that, like ‘Frankenstein’s monster’, she was described by journalists as the personification of evil, while Ingmar, the state secretary, explained that he was portrayed as ‘someone who eats little children for breakfast’. Several of the interviewees described feeling defiled, dirty, contagious and branded, and that some people around them quite literally avoided them ‘like the plague’. These recurring metaphors and adjectives call for further investigation.

Of the various types of stigma described in Erving Goffman’s classic Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1990), one in particular tallies with the interviewees’ statements. A person with real or imaginary blemishes of individual character, represented by for example treachery or dishonesty, is open to stigmatization. According to Goffman (1990: 14), these blemishes appear as a result of a person’s conduct and past, in the shape of what the community believes to be, say, immoral or debauched behaviour. Based on the knowledge we have, or think we have, about a stigmatized person, we then take different kinds of discriminatory measures, with the result that we very effectively, even if unintentionally, reduce the person’s life opportunities.

It is here that the branding and the negative treatment come into the picture, which may be developed into a stigmatization of the individual. Goffman (1990: 14–15) argues that, by definition, we think that a person who has been stigmatized is not fully human. This is particularly interesting considering that several of the interviewees said that they had been dehumanized by the journalistic reports, as we have seen. Ingmar explicitly described it as ‘a kind of dehumanization. You’re not a human, but a phenomenon, a figure.’ Suzanne, the high-profile newspaper journalist, explained it in a similar way when asked to explain the experience in greater detail:

What is hinted at here is the kind of demonization process typical of all mediated scandals (Allern and Pollack, 2012a: 187–8). Anna, a well-renowned author, spontaneously used the word ‘stigmatization’ to describe this experience:

The others also suffered the pain that results from a very public rejection. They were going about their everyday lives when all of a sudden they saw themselves from the outside, through the eyes of others. This shift leaves stigmatized people feeling insecure about what others actually think of them, with the subsequent result that every encounter becomes a burden, their usual framework for the interpretation of normal events having been undermined (Goffman, 1990: 25–6). Under such circumstances, our ‘we-relation’, in which the intersubjectivity of our lifeworld is developed and continually confirmed, is disturbed, and therefore also the natural mirroring of self in our grasp of the other’s experience of us, as Schutz writes (1973: 66–8; see also Williams, 2001: 11). This constitutive element of the we-relation is gradually replaced by a feeling of solitude.

The paradox of visibility and loneliness

One by one, the interviewees talked about the deep feelings of loneliness they experienced in the wake of the scandal. There was much talk of disappearing into a cocoon, being cooped up, or living in a vacuum. Karin’s husband, Paul, described how distressed he was when his wife became an outcast in their hometown, with people marking their distance by staring, turning to look away, or talking behind her back. Peter, a former top politician, said that he stepped into a kind of expected estrangement as a result of what had happened. In other words, being involved in a mediated scandal is a very lonely experience, even after the storm has blown over. The solitude is expressed as a special kind of separateness, which gives rise to a new form of visibility. In Sven’s words, a former leader of one of the largest parties in Sweden:

Stigma’s tendency to spread to the immediate surroundings resulted in contact with the interviewees and their families being either avoided or severed. Friends and acquaintances suddenly stopped phoning, invitations stopped coming, and colleagues stopped saying hello, and all of it supposedly because of the news reports. ‘You connect the silence [. . .] with the picture of yourself, that you can read about, so it takes a while to understand that you’re not the worst man on earth,’ Peter summed up tongue-in-cheek. Surprisingly, malicious gossip could even spread among quite small children. Karin’s husband Paul explains:

Goffman (1990) describes how the problems that encumber stigmatized people spread like waves, rising and falling in intensity depending on the proximity or distance to the afflicted person. In his portrayals there are also plenty of ‘starers’. People with a superficial or non-existent relationship to the scandal-ridden person react in similar ways: some very obviously looked the other way while others stared hard from a distance, gossiping behind his or her back. This reaction was hard to withstand. It simply happened according to some logic of its own, and left the person in question along with family members, apprehensive and socially isolated.

This state of loneliness tended to last for a long time, which partly explains the prolonged suffering in the wake of the scandal described above. Karin recounted how she took refuge at home, even though she felt threatened there. She did not believe she had anywhere else to go, which in time had serious repercussions, when she refused to go out at all.

She explained that she had received death threats by email and mail and had been verbally attacked on a number of occasions. When she was on a platform waiting for the tube, a man came up to her, stopped in front of her and spat at her. It was after these attacks that she chose to isolate herself. At home she was terrified of there being photographers on the rooftops with a clear view into the flat. After several weeks of isolation, with spiralling obsessions and social phobias as a result, she received help to go out, accompanied and assisted by her husband and a doctor. Karin emphasized that it took years for her to slowly rebuild her self-esteem and recover completely. In this sense, the scandal was deeply damaging to her and her family’s social life, which was in effect destroyed.

Ingmar, the state secretary, described how on several occasions he had been physically attacked. For example an angry fellow passenger in the cabin of an aircraft struck him in the face. Lisbeth, the professor, also spoke of death threats and threatening situations in public, which for a long time prevented her from going out. When the scandal was at its most intense, her partner slept with a baseball bat beside the bed.

Those afflicted spoke of a disorientation in everyday life that lasted for a long time. It became more or less impossible to live ‘normally’. In phenomenological terms, the shock of being in the middle of a mediated scandal throws people out of their ‘social, natural attitude’, the accepted mode of lived experience in their lifeworld. It also means, at least momentarily, an end to their future prospects. It shatters the structure of meaning and frustrates the idealization of the ‘and so forth and so on’ and the ‘I can do it again’, as Schutz so eloquently puts it (1973: 35, 55).

A noteworthy example of this rapid dismantling of safety-creating routines is found in the former politician Peter’s narrative. As the media continued to hound him, he set up an eat-and-sleep clock so that he would not forget to eat and sleep. The alarm went off several times a day with exact information about what he had to do next – a materialization of the everyday events that are usually spontaneous.

Rumour and gossip in the communication circuit

A feeling of unreality was mentioned by a majority of the interviewees. This was at its most intense when the media attention was greatest, when they started to act in ways that they themselves considered to be atypical or even crazed. Some of them hid in their homes for weeks at a time, some abruptly left the country, some fled to the countryside, lying hidden on car floors or so bundled up as to be unrecognizable. One could say that the initial moral transgression led to an array of other transgressional acts, where the protagonist’s somewhat odd behaviour took place in everyday life, surprising both him- or herself, family and friends. As Steven, the former government minister, explained:

Steven was very earnest when he recalled this dramatic moment when things were at their worst. In some cases though there was a certain gallows humour in the narrative, as when Peter recounted a scene that took place when the media pressure was strong:

We might consider these acts and the black humour and absurd jokes that follow as signs of the ritual, or even carnivalesque nature of the scandals (Bakhtin, 1984). As Carey notes, they are moments of ‘shame, degradation and excommunication [which] are official and sanctioned ceremonies in all societies from the simple to complex’ (1998: 42). The anthropological ‘fall from grace’ reflects some of the carnival atmosphere when the world is turned upside down: moral transgressions are performed, moral issues are aired, norms renegotiated, and new limits drawn, all embodied in the fall of an admired or powerful person, who from one day to the next is suddenly brought low, crushed, ashamed and lonely. Few things please an audience more than such public amusements, which points to their impressive cultural and historical staying power (Bird, 2003: 21–51; Carey, 1998; Stephens, 2007: 94).

For Peter, disguising himself was not a one-off event. In fact, he continued to do so every time he went out in the city where he lives, even months after the news reporting had stopped. When asked why, he said that it was incomprehensible even to him: ‘It’s bloody strange. I don’t know why I hid. But hide I did.’ I would argue that these acts, common as they are, are an expression of social responsibility on the part of the interviewees. Through the entangled processes of stigmatization and ostracism (Boehm, 1999; Williams, 2001) – which are indeed fostered by the media, but first and foremost take shape in personal encounters – the subject of the scandal learns, bit by bit, that their acceptance as a member of his or her community is in doubt. Sometimes this is expressed by violent acts, as we have seen, but more often through silence and neglect (Goffman, 2008: 51).

It is important to stress that these interpersonal activities, which take place face-to-face, are intimately connected to the actions of the news media and the social media, as recognized by all those involved. Take Daniel, a private individual who became the centre of attention in a massive scandal:

From the interviewees’ point of view, the various forms of communication involved in the reporting and spreading of the scandal seem to blend. For example, when a scandal goes public the condemnatory remarks explode in online gossip communities, where the idiom is far more conversational than written, according to linguists (Baron, 2010; Dresner, 2005; Herring, 2011). Today these and other social media forums are of vital importance to journalists in their daily pursuit of news ideas and material (see Appelberg et al., 2014), which clearly affects their reporting of a scandal: the more heated the discussions in social media, the more heated they are in the news media, and vice versa (Hammarlin, 2013, 2015). This circulation of information and news takes place in cafés and workplaces, in kitchens and newsrooms, simultaneously (see for example Bird, 1997: 115; Gans, 2007; Martín-Barbero, 1993: 112–20; Stephens, 2007: 90–115).

Darnton’s way of examining the spread of scandal in Paris in the mid-18th century (1997, 2000, 2004, 2005, 2010) speaks volumes about the complex communication circuits which constitute a scandal, and far more than the existing literature on today’s mediated scandals can manage. For example, Darnton describes how people spread compromising information by word of mouth about the political elite across a complex media landscape, which consisted of both oral journalism conducted by nouvellistes de bouche (professional scandalmongers) and printed journalism, produced by nouvellistes à la main. News books and news-sheets were effectively blended with oral news that was spread in the streets and cafés as rumour and gossip, songs and scurrilous verse (Darnton, 2000: 9; see also Brewer, 2005). Thus, the boundaries between verbal news, communicated in face-to-face encounters in the streets, and written news, distributed by modern technology, were constantly blurred (Darnton, 2005: 33). Instead, Darnton sketches the advanced information flows of the day, marked by their lack of clear hierarchies or directions between different types of media. ‘Of all the bromides now in circulation,’ he writes, ‘the claim that we have recently entered the information age is probably the most misleading’ (Darnton, 2004: 110). Similarly, traditional media forms such as gossip do not necessarily disappear because of the arrival of new media technology. On the contrary, they can be invigorated by it, which has become evident in the chatty, digital era. Additionally, sensational and scandalizing news journalism should not be seen as a late-modern phenomenon, nor as a sign of a transformation of journalism from a ‘rational’ domain to an ‘emotional’ strand, where ‘popular entertainment’ conquers ‘facts’. In Hartley’s terminology, when news is so light, shallow, entertaining, scandalous and gossipy that it seems meaningless, it probably matters the most to the audiences, in a deep political sense (Hartley 1996: 106–22). He points to the fact that scandals matter and that journalism matters when spreading these stories, giving people a chance to think about and discuss important moral and political issues. ⁹ For example, sex scandals show that sex and politics are, and have always been, neighbours (Hartley, 1996: 117), ‘bringing to the attention of popular readerships what court coteries and government cliques already know, namely, the politics of kissing’ (Hartley, 1996: 12). Hartley then rightfully seeks to challenge the misleading, constructed distinction between the private and the public, the popular and politics.

Conclusions

So, what conclusions can be drawn from the interviewees’ testimonies? I would like to make three points. First, it is evident that any researcher who focuses on media reporting may well assume that this phenomenon ‘no longer mainly gets its nourishment from discussions and conversations between people but primarily from the media’ (Nord, 2001: 20). What you choose to look at is what you see, so to speak. When putting scandal experience narratives in the centre, the picture grows much more complex, that is, it becomes clear that the oral, street dimension of the scandal still thrives and intersects with other media dimensions.

Second, and related to the first point, it is almost impossible to divorce ‘localized scandals’ from ‘mediated scandals’, in the way Thompson ( 2008: 61) does, at least if we consider the experiences of the person at the heart of the scandal to be a valid source of information and knowledge about it. According to the interviewees, any public scandal takes place at both levels simultaneously; partly through the journalistic reporting and partly through the stigmatization and ostracism processes, which unfold in interpersonal, localized encounters.

Finally, for centuries journalists have kept their ears to the ground. After all, they are trained to listen carefully to locate and publish news, and have always relied on the word on the street, that is, the oral dimension of our lives. When a scandal is in offing, the media play the role of the storyteller, but it ‘gains its momentum from the audiences’ (Bird, 2003: 31) as they use their power to slander and spread rumours in popular reality (Hartley 1996: 1–30). Someone has to answer the outcry ‘It’s a scandal!’ for it to become one.

So, in order to understand the power of a scandal, and how deeply it affects the person, any media circuit, or indeed any mediated scandal, must necessarily include oral communication, such as gossip and rumour shared among people in both digital and physical places. A separation between ‘localized’ and ‘mediated’ in this case would be deceptive. Undoubtedly, it is more accurate to regard the media circuit as the sum of all the different media, old and new, and their interrelationships at any given time and place (Harvard and Lundell, 2010: 15).

There is still a need for more research on the audiences of scandal. Through their engagement with these news stories they play a vital, yet little understood role in giving scandals traction through a whole range of communication activities – both historically and today. Finally, as mediated scandals offer irresistible topics to gossip about, they may do some good, or as Bird puts it, ‘The very questioning and speculation invited by scandal may help people discuss and deal with issues of morality, law and order, and so on, in their daily lives’ (2003: 39). In that sense, scandal’s viability over time can be seen as an indication of its cultural importance.