It was the day before Valentineâs, and one congressman was clearly besotted with a blonde bikini modelâso much so that he could not keep his attention on the presidentâs âState of the Unionâ address. Congressman Steve Cohen (D-TN), representing a district that includes Memphis, Tennessee, was spotted picking up his phone amid his peers in Congress. He felt compelled to send that special someone a private message on Twitter.
Except he sent it publicly as a tweet.
ânice to know you were watchin SOTU(state of the union). Happy Valentines beautiful girl. ilu,â wrote Congressman Cohen, as President Barack Obama addressed the nation in 2013 about the countryâs issues surrounding the longtime debt crisis, tax reform, and Medicare.
Cut to the news mediaâs perspective:
Americaâs economic vitality? B-O-R-I-N-G!
A sex scandal that stars a 64-year-old politician and a 24-year-old woman?
Now we are talking.
Across the land, editors snapped their fingers and journalists pounced on Congressman Cohen, ready to uncover a naughty relationship. Cohen deleted the tweets within minutes, adding to an air of illicit mystery. The next day, the congressmanâwho is not marriedâcame clean as he spoke with reporters in his office: The bikini model was actually his long-lost daughter. The tweets were âfatherly rather than flirtatious,â wrote the New York
Daily News the following day.
1 During this private news conference, Cohen said he learned of his paternal relationship to this woman only three years ago, and they were both attempting to establish a fatherâdaughter bond. Cohen said, according to NBC News:
When she let me know she was watching the State of the Union address, I was thrilled that she wanted Steve Cohen to be part of her. I had such joy, that I couldnât hold back from tweeting her. 2
Meanwhile, five months after the SOTU Twitter incident, a DNA test revealed that the young model was not actually Cohenâs daughterâsaddening Cohen 3 âand marking âcase closedâ on what began as a congressmanâs cryptic tweets to a comely woman. 4
The Cohen kerfuffle emphasizes that if a politician tweetsâand then deletesâmessages to an attractive woman, the nature of their relationship can only be one thing: scandalous. But in this instance, the truth revealed itself to be far less salacious than the facts originally seemed.
This book represents an effort to probe the frenzied, knee-jerk, and titillating relationship between scandal, news, social media, and the public in a digital age.
It is dangerous out there.
For this reason, it is worth revisiting the elegantly phrased nod to discretion immortalized by Martin Lomasneyâa Massachusetts politician from last century who famously said, âNever write if you can speak; never speak if you can nod; never nod if you can wink.â
5 But because Lomasney was born 20 years before the invention of the telephone (The phone! Who has time to talk to someone in real time
these days?), his guide needs a twenty-first-century approach. Here is our attempt to update Lomasneyâs charmingâif antiquatedâwisdom:
Donât sext when you can talk dirty offline. Donât talk when you can whisper in person. Donât whisper when you can wink. Make sure you have the consent of all those involved. Have them sign non-disclosure agreements. Donât share passwords. Know that everythingâs hackable. Never email. And dear lord: Put the iPhone away when the clothes come off.
Life, indeed, was much simpler back then.
But even our amended homage to Lomasney does little to help someone who is recorded without his or her awarenessâand whose actions are certainly scandalous. Consider the case of the former British Member of Parliament, Lord John Sewel, who was 69 at the time of an incident that caught himâon videoâin a rather delicate and unflattering situation in 2015. Ironically, Sewel was also chairman of the Privileges and Conduct Committee, which oversees the behavior of Lords behaving badly in Parliament. Therefore, he likely did know better than to enjoy a romp with prostitutes in London while snorting coke, fondling them, and making derogatory comments about Asians. 6 But he partied anyhow, andâunfortunately for this lusty lordâthe sex workers captured the rendezvous using a hidden camera. Footage, easily available through a simple Google search, shows the politician lounging in an orange brassiere and snorting three lines of coke. To Sewel, perhaps Lomasney would advise: Do not party with women who are not your wife, when you can just party with your wife. Sewel added insult to spousal injury when he âturned a framed picture of his wife face-downâ 7 during the tryst. Lomasney himself never married.
This book offers a collection of essays and studies on scandal in a digital age when our misdeeds and private moments can be broadcast to a worldwide audience in less time than it takes to enjoy a cool sip of water. The scandals that we are interested in are not just any old, analog example of people behaving recklessly with wild abandon. Rather, we are interested in how the misuse of technology facilitates scandal and how technology itself can capture our most private moments and share them to an eager crowd of 7 billion and counting, ready and armed to comment, retweet, share, and like. Our scandals include politiciansâ misdeeds, as well as those of celebrities, journalists, religious leaders, and even private people.
Elsewhere, we have argued that scandals represent a social institution because there is the habitual way that scandals unfold in the news and there is the presence of âcharacterâ types who fulfill roles specific to their status or position. 8 When approaching scandals one at a time, the events constituting one scandal may appear distinct from the next one that comes down the line. But when scandal is viewed as a social institutionâin aggregateâwith set agents and patterns of behavior, then it is possible to pinpoint the repetition of processes and to identify a scandal script. In scandal, one can find a consistent narrative, which sociologist Joshua Gamson (who appears in this book) has labeled âa common script.â 9 This script includes an âaccusation or revelation, broadcast, denial and/or confession, and, frequently, a comeback or attempted comeback.â 10
While we have established a general scandal âscript,â what exactly defines a
scandal? The simple definition is a âbreach of virtue exposedâ that causes public disapproval.
11 John Thompson, a sociologist at the University of Cambridge who wrote the foundational book
Political Scandal:
Power and Visibility in the Media Age, describes five qualities to scandal.
12 - 1.
Scandals involve the breach of âvalues, norms, and moral codes.â 13
- 2.
Scandals involve secrecy or hush-hush activity.
- 3.
People disapprove of this moral breach once it becomes public.
- 4.
Some folks express their outrage.
- 5.
There is the risk of a damaged reputation for those involved in the scandal.
Public revelation is central for an event to explode into one hot mess of a scandal. 14 Therefore, media play a central role in the evolution of a scandal. It is the platform that allows people to âconsumeâ its juicy contents. If the public is not aware of the event in question, then a scandal cannot transpire. (Of course, that does not mean the scandalous event never happened. It certainly did. It is just that the public did not find out about it. The phenomenon is equivalent to that old tree in the forest, albeit with a modern twist: If a celebrity made a sex tape but never leaked it to the public, can its existence be scandalous?) Or think of it this way: âCorruption [or scandalous activity] is a constant, and scandal is a variable.â 15
But there is something distinctly different about scandal in our digital age versus the analog age: We have long been socialized to set our gaze as voyeurs upon the personal lives of others. As a routine part of our day, we have normalized online lurking and Googling and peeping into the digital footprint of strangers and friends alike. And the media enables and indulges our peccadilloes to pursue our superficial curiosity about othersâ private moments. Clay Calvert, the journalism scholar and author of Voyeur Nation, coined a term for this phenomenon: âMediated voyeurism.â It involves âthe consumption of revealing images of and information about othersâ apparently real and unguarded lives, often yet not always for the purposes of entertainment but frequently at the expense of privacy and discourse, through the means of the mass media and Internet.â 16
Mediated voyeurism certainly facilitates our eager consumption of scandal. But it is not as if our collective interest in scandal only emerged with the digital technologies that sculpted us as voyeurs. Indeed, the historian John H. Summers writes that our proclivity to probe private details in public life has roots with the founding of the USA (and certainly, one would presume, goes back to the start of civilization!). âIn the early republic and throughout the nineteenth century, American political culture subjected the sexual character of officeholders to closer, steady, and often unflattering scrutiny, as most voters insisted a man of virtue constituted âthe only safe depository of public trust.ââ 17 Of course, as the republic grew up to become the USA, and as journalists emerged as polished professionals eager to embed themselves within elite circles of influence in the early twentieth century, the practic...