Scandal and military mediatization

Abstract

Mediated responses to reports of abuse during the Global War on Terror are puzzling. Few of the many revelations of abuse prompted concerted reactions (e.g. scandals), and those that did were often very similar to reports that were ignored. This article draws from empirical research into responses to prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib to develop new concepts that help untangle the mediatization of American wars. Feedback helps to model the variety of polemical interventions that are adopted in public discussions as a result of a scandal. The concept of feedforward, introduced here, enables us to model polemical interventions that develop within an organization in response to such feedback. Together, these concepts encourage greater sensitivity to the cultural horizon of mediated events. Further, they point to a new theoretical focus for mediatization research, namely the cycles of feedback and feedforward that help shape new forms of understanding and behaving within organizations.

Micro-Sociology and New Wars: Visual Analysis of Terror Attacks During the “Intifada of the Individuals”

“…While the military is mediatized in the media (Maltby, 2012), our data are based on open sources and therefore enables a sociological analysis that is relatively free from this process. The use of media is an important process in New Wars and every side mediates its own version of the narrative, especially security organizations following scandals (Crosbie, 2015). On the contrary, our analysis is based on what civilians upload into the open sources, and the diversity of occurrences allow us to draw conclusions on the actual behaviors on the ground and then link them to greater sociological processes of political conflict.…”

The Military Scandal: Its Definition, Dynamics, and Significance

“…Recently, military scandals, as with scandals more generally, are attracting increased scholarly attention (Baugut, 2017; Crosbie, 2015; Crosbie & Sass, 2017; Habiba, 2017; Haller et al, 2018; Tumber & Waisbord, 2019; Wadham, 2016). Spurred by both growing scholarship on media–military relations (Corner & Parry, 2017; Hoskins & O’Loughlin, 2015; Maltby, 2012a, 2012b) and major episodes (Crosbie & Kleykamp, 2018) such as the HMS Vigilant (Wootson, 2017), “Fat Leonard” (Back, 2019), “Marines United” (Chappell, 2017), and the “Skype” scandal in Australia (Habiba, 2017; Wadham, 2016), studies of military scandals have raised both ontological and epistemological questions: What are military scandals?…”

“…Hence, they sometimes serve as uncommon case studies for media and communications research. Recently though, scholars such as Crosbie (2015), Wadham (2016), Habiba (2017), Crosbie and Sass (2017), and Johnson (2017) have sought to clarify and articulate the significance of military scandals. These valuable contributions go some way toward demystifying this phenomenon, but the accounts presented are brief and mainly focus on specific episodes.…”

On the Ambivalence of the Aphorism in Sociological Theory

“…The word “scandal” derives from “stumbling block”: successful scandals like successful aphorisms are arresting and agentic. See Adut (2008), Crosbie (2015), and Girard (1984).…”