Page 172 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

Media and Civil Society 157

theory, Pippa Norris also presents evidence of this positive correlation between news
consumption and civic engagement.
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A more comprehensive survey of findings on “watchdog journalism” in democra-
tization by Sheila Coronel reveals a mixed picture indicating both the potential and
limitations for all such journalism, including scandal reporting, in furthering democ-
ratization. In a public lecture in 2008, Coronel argued that Philippine investigative
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journalists kept showing the public how bad corruption was, reporting scandal after
scandal, but this awareness rarely went anywhere. People who were guilty were not
thrown out of office because the constitutional mechanisms for rotation of officehold-
ers were not well connected to public opinion. It was this disconnect, this lack of rota-
tion, that produced “politics fatigue.” As fatigue set in, she explained, the market for
“critical” reporting would shrink, setting in motion a vicious cycle.
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Yet in all the cases examined above, a mixture of motives—cynical, self-serving,
and civic-minded—converged to break up collusion and maintain the fluid political
contestation essential to democracy. The periodic emergence of major scandals has
overcome this disconnect between press exposé and political reform, showing the
power of media attention to force a changing of the guard. Scandals that alter the
course of history have a key distinction: Revelations issue from, and enter into, a
volatile matrix of competing forces and actors, driven by varying and sometimes con-
flicting motives. It is the often unexpected combination of revelations and motiva-
tions that produces the grande scandale d’État that can arrest, even if only temporarily,
authoritarian reversal.
In the ensuing political dramas, fueled by media competition, public outrage, civil
society mobilization, partisan rivalries, and personal vendetta, intraelite conflicts spill
out into the open. In the glare of publicity from traditional and social media, would-be
conspirators turn on each other, and public figures move opportunistically to survive
or even capitalize on the uproar. These chain reactions can break up collusive pacts
and spur turnover in leadership as politicians and their parties gain or lose public
favor.
In all four of these postauthoritarian countries, scandals contributed to a general
flux in the balance of power, maintaining uncertainty in the contests between the
contests—that is, the battles in courtrooms and the court of public opinion playing
out on a daily basis between elections. The rise and fall of political fortunes between
elections is also part of the necessary institutionalization of the regular, rule-bound
rotation of leadership in democratic consolidation.
Clearly the watchdog role of the media, including scandal reporting that demands
resolution, has its limits as an extrainstitutional force for change, even if aided by
mobilized publics and independent anticorruption agencies, such as Indonesia’s Cor-
ruption Eradication Commission. But in democratizing nations beset by a recurring
pull toward reversal, such journalism remains a vehicle for consistently loosening col-
lusive pacts and reintroducing uncertainty into democratic contestation.
Such reporting, moreover, is arguably integral to consolidation of the conditions
that make democracy self-perpetuating—fostering what Pippa Norris calls “a virtuous
circle,” which in turn furthers a process that Samuel Valenzuela refers to as “virtu-
ous institutionalization.” The media contribute to such developments by imposing
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transparency that makes the recapture of the state by antidemocratic forces more dif-
ficult and by helping create an informed citizenry able to express preferences not just
in periodic and carefully controlled elections but on a regular basis via multiple ven-
ues open to public interaction, input, and influence. Reporting practices focused on