Fans pick 100 books like Media Scandals

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!   

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.    

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.   

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.      

Smith, professor of communications at the University of Arkansas, examines the stories that Southerners have told about themselves—the “myths” of the South. The Old South/Lost Cause/New South myths “controlled Southern culture and Southern rhetoric for one hundred fifty years,” he argues, but by the mid-twentieth century, the strain between myth and reality finally became too great and “a period of mythic confusion,” ensued. By the 1970s, however, Southern artists, scholars, journalists, politicians, and preachers—both Black and white—had forged a new myth, based on the themes of distinctiveness, racial civility, and community. When Smith wrote, he was confident that there will always be some myth of the South, that it won’t become a mere quadrant of the U.S. with a "dysfunctional amythic culture." We shall see.

This book also operates as both a primary source as well as a scholarly work, essentially updating Boorstin. Postman’s classic book wrestles with the paradox presented by George Orwell and Aldous Huxley: Huxley, rather than Orwell, anticipated the future, as one does not need to outlaw certain books if one does not care to read—as one revels in the pleasures of “pseudo-events.”

Read in light—or glare—of the more recent smartphone revolution, Postman’s book becomes even more relevant to contemporary discussions about information, knowledge, and overload.

The best true crime books are similar to any good biography, in that they are crafted, powerfully-researched lives of unusual people. With true crime, the life of the subject usually goes awry, however, by degrees from childhood, culminating in disaster, which affects others. Crime takes different forms. This gripping book charts the downfall of the brilliant but unscrupulous media baron Robert Maxwell, ending in his mysterious death in 1991. Had he lived, he may well have gone to jail, like his daughter, Ghislaine. Author John Peston has an eye for grotesques and a nice sense of humour. 

This path-breaking book was a huge inspiration to me as I began to dig deeper into the relationship between culture and labor in contemporary China.

By the time Sun’s book came out in 2014, anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists inside and outside China had already carried out extensive studies of the largest migration in human history and the scorching inequalities that mass movement of people has generated. But Sun shows in compelling detail that this exodus from the Chinese countryside is a deeply cultural movement, too.

Blending ethnography with probing and compassionate analysis of poetry, videos, photography, and activist protest, Sun argues that culture can be the crucible of political consciousness for working people trapped in the grinder of underclass life. I’ve returned to this book again and again.

For me, every book by Clifford (Cliff) Christians is always a celebration. I met Cliff in 1996 and we kept in touch ever since then. Christians has contributed to the field of media ethics more than any other scholar I know. In this book, Christians explores the fundamentals of ethics and justice in moral theory. In addition to “the usual suspects,” i.e., Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Rene Descartes, John Stuart Mill, Auguste Comte, and Max Weber, Christians explores modern liberal philosophy, feminist philosophy, African philosophy, Latin American liberation theology, Confucianism, and Islam. He does this in his usual dazzling and most comprehensive style, exhibiting wide knowledge of the literature and brilliant analysis that adds layers upon layers of sharp insights. As in his previous books, Christians invokes an ethics of care and humanity in order to alleviate poverty, homelessness, and unemployment, issues that trouble Western and non-Western societies, albeit in different… show more.

Manufacturing Consent is the book that forms the basis of the discussions and arguments picked up and built upon in my own book—which even riffs on the former book’s name. Herman and Chomsky’s work has become a classic in the field of propaganda. It’s an essential roadmap for understanding how broadcast media, from newspapers to television to film, are so often controlled by the 1 percent. This, the authors argue, regularly results in news coverage that is skewed towards the goals of the powerful. They don’t pull any punches in building what they term “the propaganda model”—liberals, conservatives, democracies, and autocracies—all powerful organizations and individuals are involved in concerted efforts to mold public opinion.