Professor Erik P. Bucy - Learning from Media Scandal: How Coverage of Press Crises Primes...

Fulbright Scholarship Fellow Professor Erik P. Bucy delivers a seminar on their research, fully titled "Learning from Media Scandal: How Coverage of Press Crises Primes Accountability and Reaffirms Faith in a Socially Responsible Press" - Can we learn from media scandal? This talk argues we can, by studying how coverage of scandal in the wake of crisis primes accountability and other press values, shaping attitudes about media performance generally and offending organizations more specifically. The broader project from which this work is derived examines media scandals and news dilemmas in cross-national perspective beginning with disclosures of the News of the World phone hacking scandal in 2010 and continuing with media peccadillos to the present. Unlike political scandals, which have received sustained scholarly examination, the subject of press misconduct has received inadequate research attention and academic analysis outside of articles and tracts about the tabloid press or lapses in journalistic ethics despite significant harms to individuals and costs to information integrity. This project aims to rectify this deficit in understanding and identify how news coverage around media crisis works to reaffirm faith in a socially responsible press. For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias