2 Gossip, rumour, and scandals In this part of the book, the analysis of the relationship between the interpersonal and the mediated dimension of the public scandal is deepened.1 The preceding chapter made it clear that these dimensions are more or less interwoven, a circumstance to which media researchers have not paid a great deal of attention because they have, as a rule, chosen to focus on the media themselves, employing a narrow definition of the ‘media’ concept. In order to acquire an idea of the inherent mechanisms of the scandal phenomenon, the focus in
This book illuminates the personal experience of being at the centre of a media
scandal. The existential level of that experience is highlighted by means of the
application of ethnological and phenomenological perspectives to extensive
empirical material drawn from a Swedish context. The questions raised and
answered in this book include the following: How does the experience of being
the protagonist in a media scandal affect a person’s everyday life? What happens
to routines, trust, and self-confidence? How does it change the basic settings
of his or her lifeworld?
The analysis also contributes new perspectives on
the fusion between interpersonal communication that takes place face to face,
such as gossip and rumours, and traditional news media in the course of a
scandal. A scandal derives its momentum from the audiences, whose engagement in
the moral story determines its dissemination and duration. The nature of that
engagement also affects the protagonist in specific ways. Members of the public
participate through traditional oral communication, one vital aspect of which is
activity in digital, social forums.
The author argues that gossip and
rumour must be included in the idea of the media system if we are to be able to
understand the formation and power of a media scandal, a contention which
entails critiques of earlier research. Oral interpersonal communication does not
disappear when new communication possibilities arise. Indeed, it may be
invigorated by them. The term news legend is introduced, to capture the
entanglement between traditional news-media storytelling and oral narrative.
increasingly encounter media content that blurs the line between reality and fiction. This includes everything from rumours and exaggerations on social media, through to partisan journalism, satire and completely invented stories that are designed to look like real news articles. Although this media content varies enormously, it is often grouped together under nebulous and all-encompassing terms such as ‘fake news’, ‘disinformation’ or ‘post-truth’ media. Scholars have started to pay serious attention to the production and impact of all these forms of
context of gossip and rumours, and in particular those about ‘baby-killing among refugees’, see Sandvik (2013) . 7 Field notes on file with author, Oslo, 23 January 2018. 8 For a general discussion of digitisation and datafication in humanitarian governance, see Dijkzeul and Sandvik (2019) . 9 Presumably a typo in the manuscript, which is meaningful when ‘in’ is replaced with ‘is’. Bibliography The Aid & International Development
became rapidly obvious to the population. More than half of the patients admitted to ETUs died, and their bodies were buried anonymously (except in Liberia, where they have been mainly cremated), fostering rumours of body parts being harvested and of deliberate infection ( Calain and Poncin, 2015 ; Gomez-Temesio, 2018 ; Gomez-Temesio and Le Marcis, 2017 ). Residents reported that living near ELWA 2 and ELWA 3 at this time
the hospital, which, whether through rumours or actual messages, had allegedly been designated by the rebels’ command as a place of safety for civilians. A city resident reported: The opposition sent a message to us that every civilian living in Bentiu, we need to stay within the hospital. The other place is the church. That’s why we were gathering there in the hospital. ‘Don’t expect that we are going to kill you,’ they said. ‘No, we will
their colleagues’ release. This option contravened the NGO’s explicit policies, but given the urgency and gravity of the situation, with their colleagues’ lives at stake, the aid workers in the field perceived that this option might be the only viable choice. Other aid agencies had experienced similar kidnapping crises in the same context. Rumours circulated about how much money organisations had paid, but publicly, agencies issued only blanket denials that money had been paid at all. Only through an informal, personal connection that one international staff member
– and evangelistic campaigns confronting teenage ‘dabbling’ in the occult. 4 By then the episode was over: after that there was only occasional press coverage, such as could be matched anywhere. 5 Different kinds of press coverage can be identified: reports of apparent specific instances of black magic rituals or whatever, 6 reports of the circulation of local rumours about black magic, 7 articles focusing on the denial
the final part of the discussion which outlines some of the problems of the current mainstream discussion of Russia, which is drowning in a discourse of speculation and rumour, ‘Putinology’ and historical analogies. This creates a great deal of additional noise that blocks the signal. Moving on from Russia Russia has been prominent in a flood of editorials, media interviews and
the sort of sentiment that drove a former First World War general, F. P. Crozier, to become a pacifist, convinced that defence had become useless and that German bombers could reduce England to chaos and starvation in a few weeks.42 Mass-Observation monitored public expectations of war in the last two years of peace. It found that despite the rumours of war, the recurrent international crises and the visible evidence of ARP, there was only low expectation that war would come soon, or ever, and widespread cynicism about government information. People had a fairly
