106 SURYANSU GUHA
Lull and Hinnerman’s overestimation of the impact of scandals as emanating from an
earnest zeal of truth-telling ending in disruptive change and remedy is prone to
viewing scandal manufacturers in a light of apologetic self-righteousness. Tumber
and Waisbord (2004: 8) also set the ultimate intention of scandal as publication of
corruption. Following these theorems, PigGate cannot qualify as a scandal but would
be dismissed as hearsay since it neither amounted to any social change nor did its
author pretend to wanting to cause one. But does a scandal always necessarily entail
an entreaty of legal action and social change? And are the actors in a scandal
necessarily offenders and perpetrators of criminality? Take for instance the infamous
match fixing scandal – Italian association football’s ‘Calciopoli’ of 2006: ten years of
court cases, trials and litigations, even punishment, yet the prosecutor was unable to
produce a shred of evidence to substantiate the allegations against the most prominent
football clubs that was not overruled by the defense as inadmissible or refutable. Yet
Luciano Moggi, former director of Juventus Football Club, still serves a life ban from
the sport. Scandal however does not necessarily have to be litigable in the legal sense
of the term. It is in fact a search for a remedy to the injury sustained by the collective
consciousness. It is a phenomenon resulting from public disclosure, a form of public
address inviting active participation from the addressee where legal action and change
might be inadvertent by-products.
The Reflexive Circulation of Scandal
Warner’s study of public discourse posits a “circular encounter oriented model” as
opposed to the traditionally established “sender-receiver, author-reader model” is of
notable interest when studying scandals as mediatised events. He writes, “[i]t is not
texts themselves that create publics, but the concatenation of texts through time” and
more importantly, this succession is not a “mere consecutiveness in time, but a
context of interaction” (2002: 62). For example, in Oakeshott and Ashcroft’s article,
the ‘text’ cannot be considered the absolute determinants of the scandal. It is the
deluge of responses to a pre-supposed discourse, counter-responsive arguments and
even a response to a responses, in short the hashtag social media frenzy creates the
audience for the scandal. But what characterises the field of possible interplay in
PigGate were not responses that either validate or invalidate the ‘truth quotient’