Media Scandals

Rating:
Summary: Badly Needed Book
Review: In Media Scandals, Lull and Hinerman have completed one of the first consolidated scholarly approaches to the study of a common cultural form: the scandal. The essays utilize a variety of methodologies and produces, from a communication perspective, a rich orientation toward scandals--how they work, why they occur so often, what we can gain from them. For lay audiences, this book forces us to reach beyond the good/bad dichotomy--scandals are neither good nor bad, and perhaps not even a reflection of the moral quality of the characters involved in them. This book would serve as a fine textbook in a cultural studies course, especially for its attention to the rhetorical aspects of the media scandal form. As long as we have a commerical news media, and as long as we expect superhuman behavior from our public figures, we will have media scandals. This book is the right step toward trying to help us understand them.