A political scandal is the exposure of corrupt or unethical conduct by a politician, a public figure, or a government agency. Scholars have studied the causes of political scandal (Mandell, 2017; Tumber & Waisbord, 2019) and how alleged transgressions blur the lines between the private and public spheres (Almond, 2016). The growing body of research on scandal has paid considerable attention to news media coverage of specific scandal events, such as Watergate, Iran/Contra, and Benghazi.
This article focuses on how the news media frames specific scandal events, and how these frame discussions of the events shape citizens’ perceptions of them. It builds upon previous work examining news media representations of specific scandal events, such as the Whitewater and e-mail investigations (Entman & Stonbely, 2018; Mandell, 2017; Fogarty, 2013; Puglisi & Snyder, 2011), by examining how journalists frame a particular scandal in a given time period and how this framing influences how scandal discussion develops alongside the story itself.
This study demonstrates that the transformation of private actions into public scandal is a deeply political process that takes into account the merits and costs to respective parties. It suggests that the way in which misbehavior is transformed into a scandal is a poor proxy for the overall degree of malfeasance and that the use of scandal as a political tool is symptomatic of the rising levels of polarization in contemporary American politics. It also reveals that the more a politician engages in bad behavior, the more likely they are to become engulfed by political scandal and that it is important to understand how scandals are produced in order to reduce them.