Abstract
Scandal and Silence asks a simple question with a complicated answer: why does some Presidential misconduct become a national journalistic scandal while other misconduct does not? It’s an important question to ask because, as Entman accurately states, ‘the Washington scandal machine may seem to operate at random’ (p. 1). Journalism’s focus on scandal seems especially random, and especially troubling for democracy, when more serious forms of misconduct (fixing intelligence to earn public support for war) are ignored for scandals of marital infidelity, which arguably have no negative consequences for the nation. Perhaps most worrisome is that Entman finds that journalism’s focus on less important scandals is systemic, not random, and so he seeks to reveal the ‘underlying logic to what might seem arbitrary and capricious journalism’ (p. 1).
To uncover this logic, Entman takes a non-media-centric approach to his research. Appropriately, 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). That system takes into account journalistic practices, but focuses on the public relations strategies of elite politicians, organizations, and activists. It is the skill by which politicians control each other and exploit journalistic practices and journalism’s decision-making biases that determines when Presidential misconduct becomes a scandal. Thus, a scandal is not out there, covered by the press according to the objective impact of Presidential misconduct on the nation, but a strategic frame whose appearance and magnitude in the press is dependent on the political skills of those who strategically promote or block misconduct as scandal.
Entman asks, ‘Under what circumstances does the US system of political communication produce scandal cascades, and what forces combine to silence potential scandals?’ (p. 27). Readers may recognize the language here – ‘scandal cascades’ – and be happy to know that Scandal and Silence updates the Cascading Activation Model for application to domestic issues. (The model was previously applied to foreign policy issues.) Whereas previous cascade activation research studied how frames move from an administration to journalism to the public and vice versa, Scandal and Silence adds different paths that frames may take – paths that are blocked and paths that allow a scandal frame to cascade through the political communication system – and seeks to explain why frames take these divergent paths. The model is updated to take into account new media and how they are influencing the cascading of scandal frames, and readers will notice that Entman has taken a more explicit account of cultural frames – ‘the dominant set of schemas in the society’ (p. 36) – than in his past renditions of the model (Entman, 2004).
These are important updates, but the last addition seems especially important precisely because it helps explain why some scandal frames are blocked and why new media forms of journalism are not having a routine impact on scandal activation. Entman rightly notes that journalists are not mere transmitters of elites’ strategic frames but that journalism’s ability to pursue misconduct as scandal is constrained by cultural frames. According to the model, cultural frames influence the spread of politicians’ strategic frames but not vice versa. This is perhaps the most interesting, and depressing, statement that the book has to make about journalism’s role in turning, or not, Presidential misconduct into scandal: journalism is storytelling, not information transmission or watchdogging. For Entman, one of the reasons that the press did not focus more on President George W. Bush’s failure to fully meet his National Guard duties was because it conflicted with his image ‘as a good guy, an honest man of high character and strong religious principles and a fiercely patriotic supporter of the military’ (p. 123). This is not an easy claim to support empirically, so concepts and research inspired by James Carey – cultural repair work and conflicting images in the news − may lend authority to this portion of the cascade activation model.
That said, in Scandal and Silence, scholars of journalism studies and political science will find a research agenda. Scholars of journalism studies may ask: What is it about new media and their relationship to more traditional forms of journalism that prevent or enable scandal cascades? Why are new media not having much of an impact, or having a negative impact? Readers will find Entman’s analyses of journalistic content thorough and creative but it is his painstaking review of behind-the-scenes political maneuvering that works best at explanation. Still, political scientists will find that the model needs to be supplemented with research that directly interviews political actors: if press frames can influence elite frames, as the model claims, then we need to ask the elites themselves why they revise their strategic frames. Finally, teachers will find something else for their students to worry about, and everybody will have a useful read.