I'm a Czech scholar in Japanese studies and media studies who became spontaneously interested in the way media scandals unfold in Japan. For ten years, I was studying Japanese scandals at The University of Tokyo (Ph.D. 2017), and I developed a new approach to Japanese scandal as a highly mediatized social ritual that tends to preserve the status quo while generating commercial profit. After my return from Japan, I continued my scandal research at the Czech Academy of Sciences, and I'm currently teaching media & communication theory at Ambis University Prague. In 2023, Routledge finally published the results of my decade-long research in my new book titled Scandal in Japan: Transgression, Performance and Ritual.
I wrote...
Scandal in Japan: Transgression, Performance and Ritual
This book is the first to provide a comprehensive analysis of media scandal in contemporary Japan. It makes a novel (and somewhat provocative) contribution to the topic by analyzing scandals as highly mediatized “social rituals” that manifest and manage social conflict while generating commercial profit for the media. The book offers three in-depth case studies: the celebrity drug scandal of Sakai Noriko, the political donation scandal of Ozawa Ichirō, and the corporate accounting scandal of Olympus. Here, I reject the cliché that scandals are marginal if entertaining, and I show that by analyzing these media rituals we can learn about the most probing issues and intricate mechanisms of contemporary Japanese society.
I discovered this book more than ten years ago, when I was still a stressed PhD student in Tokyo, and reading the book gave me some great relief.
The book was the first to show me that scandals can indeed reveal a lot about the society that produces them. Further, it taught me how to approach scandal as “moral disturbance” (the author’s term), and it updated my knowledge on the role of scandals in the art world (Oscar Wilde).
I love the book because it provides great insights into how the social structure defines individual agency, and what happens when structure and agency clash in a form of scandal.
Despite dealing with somewhat difficult concepts, the book is easy to read and has a clear, compelling, and engaging narrative. Highly recommended!
Scandal is the quintessential public event. Here is the first general and comprehensive analysis of this ubiquitous moral phenomenon. Taking up wide-ranging cases in society, politics, and art, Ari Adut shows when wrong-doings generate scandals and when they do not. He focuses on the emotional and cognitive experience of scandals and the relationships among those who are involved in or exposed to them. This perspective explains variations in the effects, frequency, elicited reactions, outcomes, and strategic uses of scandals. On Scandal offers provocative accounts of the Oscar Wilde, Watergate, and Lewinsky affairs. Adut also employs the lens of scandal to…
The author of this book, John B. Thompson, is one of my favorites.
I love his 1995 masterpiece Media and Modernity which offers a general social theory of the media. In 1997, Thompson published a chapter on the social theory of scandal, and finally in 2000, he published the book I am now recommending here.
What I love about Political Scandal is that the book is both incisive and disturbing, and that the author succeeds in showing us how scandal unlocks essential secrets about power and politics today. This book is a very useful source for the students in media, political, and critical discourse analysis.
Political scandals have become a pervasive feature of many societies today. From Profumo to the cash-for-questions scandal, from Watergate to the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, scandals have come to play a central role in politics and in the shaping of public debate. What are the characteristics of political scandals and why have they come to assume such prominence today? What are the social and political consequences of the preoccupation with political scandal in the public domain?
In this major new book Thompson develops a systematic and wide-ranging analysis of the phenomenon of political scandal. He shows that the rise of political scandal…
This book is a must for those who want to explore the social phenomenon of media scandal.
What I liked about the book was that it is not only about theory – the authors discuss scandals and controversies revolving around Kurt Cobain to Michael Jackson, and from O.J. Simpson to Magic Johnson. In this volume, I personally loved John B. Thompson’s chapter “Scandal and Social Theory”, which was an eye-opener to me, and later it contributed to building my own theoretical framework.
The book taught me a lot about what happens when personal desire goes beyond moral boundaries in the lives of social elites worldwide. The book was written in 1997, but it still stimulates much discussion about this fascinating subject.
Are scandals a form of legitimate journalism, or are they a sign of a society in moral degeneration? These questions are addressed and assessed in Media Scandals, the first book to take a comprehensive look at how scandals are produced and played out in modern culture.
I strongly recommend this book to all those scholars and students who aim to take “scandalogy” seriously. I discovered this book just when I was finishing my own book on Japanese scandals, and it helped me overcome all my doubts and uncertainties about scandal research.
There are 50 chapters in this edited volume, and they constitute pretty much the best you can find in the scandalogy discourse today. I found this book particularly useful and enlightening because the chapters cover practically every single detail related to the topic of scandal, and they are written in a very accessible way by prominent scholars from various fields beyond scandalogy.
Howard Tumber is Professor in the Department of Journalism at City, University of London, UK. He is a founder and co-editor of Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism. He has published widely in the field of the sociology of media and journalism.
Silvio Waisbord is Professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, USA. He was the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Communication, and he has published widely about news, politics and social change.
I believe that this book is a nice starting point for students (starting with undergraduates) who are interested in learning more about media scandal via particular examples.
I was attracted by the book because it focuses on some of the most influential and notorious media scandals in history. What I found particularly useful for my research was the detailed timeline that helped me to put the wide-ranging scandals into historical perspective.
This is why I personally recommend this book to anyone interested in the social phenomenon of media scandal.
This fascinating volume offers an overview of the most influential and notorious media scandals, from newspaper publisher John Peter Zenger's groundbreaking 1735 trial for printing and publishing false, scandalous, malicious and seditious statements to Dr. Phil McGraw's 2008 thwarted attempt to force his television cameras inside Britney Spears' hospital room, from the attempts to ban literature by the likes of D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Henry Miller, and Allen Ginsberg to the excesses of gossip mongers like Walter Winchell, Hedda Hopper, Geraldo Rivera, and Matt Drudge. It delves into the tabloid press and walks through the minefields of political opinion shapers,…
Teenager Paige Abernathy awakens after a severe beating to find that she suffers from amnesia, and that everyone seems to hate her. She has only flashes of memory until the night a grieving parent attacks her in her hospital room. Paige then remembers her role as the creator of an online group where members talk about ways to commit suicide.
After recovering from the beating, Paige embarks on a journey of penance to atone for a disaster born of good intentions. Her odyssey launches her on a mission of mercy and into new danger. The Samaritan’s Patient is a thought-provoking novel about navigating the treacherous waters of social media.
Teenager Paige Abernathy awakens after a severe beating to find that she suffers from amnesia, and that everyone seems to hate her.
She has only flashes of memory until the night a grieving parent attacks her in her hospital room. Paige then remembers her role as creator of an online group where members talk about ways to commit suicide.
After recovering from the beating, Paige embarks on a journey of penance to atone for a disaster born of good intentions. Her odyssey launches her on a mission of mercy and into new danger.
The Samaritan's Patient is a thought-provoking novel…
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