… In short, the entire scandal narrative was a fiction. But it had real consequences, effectively derailing Obama’s agenda not long after a resounding reelection, costing several people their careers, and distracting and misinforming the public. It’s not that nothing went wrong at the IRS, but that the transgression merited nowhere near the media response it earned. …
Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth political scientist who studies the media’s role in creating scandals, wasn’t particularly surprised. “In other circumstances, the first reports might not have immediately turned into a media firestorm, but the context was very favorable for a scandal to develop and so the media largely embraced the targeting story before all the facts were known,” he told Salon.
What’s often important in scandals is not that someone violated ethical norms, but that “a public figure or institution are successfully construed as violating ethical norms,” he wrote in a recent research paper. Scandals are social constructions and how big one gets often has little to do with the actual severity of the ethical transgression in question, and a lot to do with the political and media context. ”In some cases, it will only take a spark from a relatively flimsy allegation to set off a significant controversy, while other environments will be much less prone to scandalous conflagrations.” [cont.]
Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon