Political Scandal: Power and Visibility in the Media Age

Political Scandal: Power and Visibility in the Media Age, by John B. Thompson. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press; Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000. 324 pp. $57.95 cloth. ISBN: 0-7456-2549-5. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 0-7456-- 2550-9.

The media frenzy that typically surrounds scandals contrasts with the silence of academics about the subject. Scandals have generated plenty of journalistic accounts and individual memoirs, but few scholarly analyses. This gap perhaps owes to the fact that scandals have been perceived to be too trivial and fleeting to deserve serious sociological attention, and too close to the ugly underbelly of contemporary media politics to be understood as important events that activate and reveal political and cultural dynamics.

Thanks to John B. Thompson, that gap seems smaller. He has written a splendid book that helps to dispel misperceptions about the triviality of scandals, and that sets the stage for debate and future research. Thompson asks the right questions and proposes a reasonable argument to explain why scandals are a fixture of contemporary democracies. For him, scandals matter because they reflect new conditions of publicity. In times when mediated politics dominate and citizens are less inclined to identify with traditional ideologies, the personal reputations of politicians are crucial. Symbolic power has always been central to politics, but it has...