Page 26 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

Understanding Democratic Consolidation 11

The media’s recurring fixation on scandal and partisan conflict, manifest in sen-
sationalized reporting on personal peccadilloes and political vendetta, has inspired
equally trenchant critiques. “‘Gotcha’ politics,” Lanny Davis argues, is “about parti-
sanship, not about uncovering genuine corruption.” He adds, “It is about revenge and
payback, not about due process and investigations in search of the truth.” Ultimately,
he concludes, “it is about personal and political destruction, not winning in the mar-
ketplace of ideas.” Studying the newly democratic Republic of Benin, Chris Allen
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has faulted the media for “indulging in cynicism, propagating rumors, or, at worst,
simply fabricating scandal for payment,” while failing to report more serious issues.
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Veven Wardhana has dismissed scandal reporting in Indonesia as “exploitative info-
tainment.” Similarly, Howard Tumber and Silvio Waisbord argue that “democracies
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are inherently prone to be regularly shaken by scandals,” but the media, particularly
in mature democracies, are notorious for “short-lived attention” that “makes scandals
prone to have a brief existence,” inducing a “numb public opinion” and little real
change.
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While such criticism is often warranted in both new and established democra-
cies, horse-race coverage, partisan vendetta, and above all, scandal, can also play an
important emergent function in democratic transitions. Indeed, there is some frag-
mentary yet compelling historical evidence from the past four centuries indicating
that, in times of regime change, scandal over matters substantial or sordid can serve
as a discursive lever for widening the public sphere, discrediting the old regime, and
contributing to democratization. In his study of the Overby scandal that roiled the
court of James I of Great Britain, Alastair Bellany argues that sensational accounts of
murder by poison and sexual intrigue contributed to a changing “news culture” that
culminated, through a complex causality, in the English revolution of the 1640s. A
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century later in France, a succession of salacious courtroom dramas, exemplified by
the “diamond necklace affair” that stigmatized Marie Antoinette, sparked public fas-
cination. Print runs of up to ten thousand each for legal briefs “carried afar interest
and scandal,” exposing the corruptions of France’s absolutist monarchy and hastening
the French Revolution.
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In America’s postrevolutionary decade of the 1790s, partisan scandal aided demo-
cratic consolidation as journalists led by Noah Webster, founder of New York’s first
daily newspaper, set aside civility to become “peddlers of scurrility.” In this brawl,
America’s early press challenged the Federalists’ dominance over government and
public debate, ultimately helping to usher in the more democratic Jacksonian era.
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Similarly, in Wilhelmine Germany, the Social Democratic Party resisted repression via
exposés of financial scandals involving the kaiser’s government, undermining the aris-
tocratic order’s legitimacy and contributing to the regime’s collapse in 1918, thereby
launching a decade of democratic governance.
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Examining more recent events, Chappell Lawson has found that media lib-
eralization was the “primary cause of the devastating scandals that rocked Mexi-
can politics” in the 1990s, delegitimating the ruling party and facilitating political
change. Simultaneously, the scandals “signaled to elites that the rules of the political
game were changing,” thus making media coverage of once-forbidden topics a major
force behind Mexico’s successful democratic transition. Similarly, Miklós Sükösd
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observes that news coverage of the Danubegate scandal “helped dislodge” Hunga-
ry’s ex-Communist government. While the role of Indonesia’s media in Suharto’s
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downfall in 1998 was mixed, scandalous revelations, particularly concerned with the