Scandal

A scandal can be broadly defined as the strong social reactions of outrage, anger, or surprise, when accusations or rumours circulate or appear for some reason, regarding a person or persons who are perceived to have transgressed in some way a social norm. These reactions are usually noisy and may be conflicting, and they often have negative effects on the status and credibility of the person(s) or organization(s) involved.

For other uses, see Scandal (disambiguation).

Society is scandalized when it becomes aware of breaches of moral norms or legal requirements, often when these have remained undiscovered or been concealed for some time. Such breaches have typically erupted from greed, lust, or the abuse of power. Scandals may be regarded as political, sexual, moral, literary, or artistic, but often spread from one realm into another. The basis of a scandal may be factual or false, or a combination of both.^[1] In contemporary times, exposure of a scandalous situation is often made by mass media.

Contemporary media has the capacity to spread knowledge of a scandal further than in previous centuries and public interest has encouraged many cases of confected scandals relating to well-known people as well as genuine scandals relating to politics and business. Some scandals are revealed by whistleblowers who discover wrongdoing within organizations or groups, such as Deep Throat (William Mark Felt) during the Watergate scandal in the 1970s in the United States. Whistleblowers may be protected by laws which are used to obtain information of misdeeds and acts detrimental to their establishments.^[2] However, the possibility of scandal has always created a tension between society's efforts to reveal wrongdoing and its desire to cover them up, and the act of covering up (or indeed of revealing) a contentious situation may become a scandal.

List of scandals with "-gate" suffix

1Malaysia Development Berhad scandal

Davis, John H. (8 December 2014). . Xlibris Corporation. ISBN 978-1-5035-2189-6.

Perpetuation of the United States of America

Dirks, Nicholas B (30 June 2009). . Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-03426-6.

The Scandal of Empire: India and the creation of imperial Britain

Ehrat, Johannes (2011). . University of Toronto Press. ISBN 978-1-4426-4125-9.

Power of Scandal: Semiotic and Pragmatic in Mass Media

Moeller, Robert R. (15 August 2008). . John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-0-470-28992-1.

Sarbanes-Oxley Internal Controls: Effective Auditing with AS5, CobiT, and ITIL

Ponceau, Peter Stephen Du (1834). . E. G. Dorsey. ISBN 9780608426365.

A Discourse on the Necessity and the Means of Making Our National Literature Independent of that of Great Britain: Delivered Before the Members of the Pennsylvania Library of Foreign Literature and Science, on Saturday, Feb. 15, 1834

Vargo, Marc E (12 November 2013). . Routledge. ISBN 978-1-317-76610-0.

Scandal: Infamous Gay Controversies of the Twentieth Century

Williams, Anne; Head, Vivian (2008). . Book Sales. ISBN 978-0-7088-0365-3.

Infamous Scandals

Wilson, Colin; Wilson, Damon (31 May 2011). . Ebury Publishing. ISBN 978-0-7535-4732-8.

Scandal!: An Explosive Exposé of the Affairs, Corruption and Power Struggles of the Rich and Famous

Garment, S. (1991). . Anchor Books. ISBN 978-0-385-42511-7. 375 pages.