Untold Psychology of Scandal Exposing in Media

In this digital era, scandal of any significance can spread quickly, and for the business owners, crisis management and public relation management are the two lessons they must learn well.
Media, including newspaper, magazines, TV, Cable, and websites, blogs, are quick to expose some scandals, and there are no shortage of examples of these both at a local level and at a world wide level.
Here are some of the psychology behind the scandal exposing in media:
First of all, scandal usually involves two or more parties, and exposing the scandal can inform the victims of the truth, which is an altruistic behavior at its very least.
Secondly, scandals are good attention-gaining stories. And some notorious scandals can easily make the source of the information well-known almost overnight. In the Web, scandals go viral.
The third consideration is the economic competition. This is especially true in the relationship between the big news networks and the biggest sponsors of these news networks. These biggest sponsors spend millions of dollars on advertisement on these news networks, and they usually are the market leaders or can become market leaders with their advertising budget. Over a period of time, the market share in a certain industry is dominated by these biggest sponsors and the competition in this industry becomes stagnant, yet when it comes to the biding price for advertising on these big news networks, the bidding competition actually becomes less fierce, and consequently a lower biding price for the sponsors and more reliance of the news networks on their sponsors. This is a good situation for the ad sponsors, but not for the media. So, new competition has to be brought into, and scandal exposing, among many others, is a good tool to break the market situation in a certain industry, and rightly so, to push the big sponsors to improve their products and services, and to hope for a better biding price for the ad hour or space with the now hot competition from the non-market-leaders and new market entrants.
Of course, scandal exposing involves many risks as well, whether legal, moral and economic risk, but it’s always on the mind of the people of the strategic planning department. When used objectively, scandal exposing can bring new life into a certain industry and the business world.
For the relationship between smaller media and smaller sponsors, the third motivation for scandal exposing may not be so obvious, but the logic remains valid.
And for bloggers, every blog in fact is a media in nature; all the three factors interact with one another to determine the outcome and compared to the biggest news networks, the third motivation for scandal exposing is weaker. And surprisingly enough, many bloggers seem to have realized that they have the responsibility to expose the unfair and the unjust and make the world and World Wide Web, the on-line world, a better place. Many scandals are first exposed by blogs nowadays, Maybe it’s because we know that only the informed and the honest can survive.
Speaking of the biggest news networks, consult World’s 100 Largest Newspapers(as of March,2008) and Top 100 Newspapers in the United States .

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