John B. Thompson

Political scandal : power and visibility in the media age

List of Illustrations. Preface. Acknowledgements. Introduction. 1. What is Scandal?. 2. The Rise of Mediated Scandal. 3. Scandal as a Mediated Event. 4. The Nature of Political Scandal. 5. Sex Scandals in the Political Field. 6. Financial Scandals in the Political Field. 7. Power Scandals. 8. The Consequences of Scandal. Conclusion. Notes. Index.

The New Visibility

This article examines the characteristics of a new form of visibility which has become a pervasive feature of the modern world and which is linked to the development of communication media. With the development of the media, the visibility of individuals, actions and events is severed from the sharing of a common locale: one no longer has to be present in the same spatial-temporal setting in order to see the other or to witness an action or event. The rise of this new form of mediated visibility has transformed the relations between visibility and power. Thanks to mediated visibility, political rulers are able to appear before their subjects in ways and on a scale that never existed previously. Skilful politicians exploit this to their advantage; with the help of their PR consultants and communications advisers, they seek to create and sustain a basis of support by managing their visibility in the mediated arena of modern politics. But mediated visibility is a double-edged sword: it also creates new risks for political leaders, who find themselves exposed to new kinds of dangers. Hence the visibility created by the media becomes the source of a new and distinctive kind of fragility. However much political leaders try to manage their visibility, they cannot completely control it: mediated visibility can slip out of their grasp and can, on occasion, work against them.

Shifting Boundaries of Public and Private Life

High-profile political scandals are symptomatic of a profound transformation of the relations between public and private life that has accompanied and helped to shape the development of modern societies. While the distinction between public and private life is not unique to modern societies, the emergence of new media of communication, from print to radio, television and the internet, has altered the very nature of the public, the private and the relations between them. Both the public and the private have been reconstituted as spheres of information and symbolic content that are largely detached from physical locales and increasingly interwoven with evolving technologies of communication, creating a very fluid situation in which the boundaries between public and private are blurred, porous, contestable and subject to constant negotiation and struggle. The shifting boundaries between public and private life have become a new battleground in modern societies, a contested terrain where individuals and organizations wage a new kind of information war, a terrain where established relations of power can be challenged and disrupted, lives damaged and reputations sometimes lost.