Are scandals useful in calling our attention to important problems, as this statement suggests?
I agree that in many cases scandals can serve to reveal larger problems that a community or
society should address. On the other hand, scandals can sometimes distract us from more important
societal issues.
On the one hand, scandals can sometimes serve to call our attention to pervasive social or
political problems that we would otherwise neglect. Perhaps the paradigmatic modern example is
the Watergate scandal. Early in that scandal it would have been tempting to dismiss it as
involving one isolated incidence of underhanded campaign tactics. But, in retrospect the scandal
forever increased the level of scrutiny and accountability to which our public officials are held,
thereby working a significant and lasting benefit to our society. More recently, the
Clinton-Gore fundraising scandal sparked a renewed call for campaign-finance reform. In fact the
scandal might result in the passage of a congressional bill outlawing private campaign
contributions altogether, thereby rendering presidential candidates far less susceptible to
undue influence of special-interest groups. Our society would be the dear beneficiary of such
reform. Surely, no public speaker or reformer could have called our nation's collective
attention to the problem of presidential misconduct unless these two scandals had surfaced.
On the other hand, scandals can sometimes serve chiefly to distract us from more pressing
community or societal problems. At the community level, for example, several years ago the
chancellor of a university located in my city was expelled from office for misusing university
funds to renovate his posh personal residence. Every new development during the scandal became
front-page news in the campus newspaper. But did this scandal serve any useful purpose? No. The
scandal did not reveal any pervasive problem with university accounting practices. It did not
result in any sort of useful system-wide reform. Rather, it was merely one incidence of petty
misappropriation. Moreover, the scandal distracted the university community from far more
important issues, such as affirmative action and campus safety, which were relegated to the
second page of the campus newspaper during the scandal.
Even on a societal level, scandals can serve chiefly to distract us from more important matters.
For example, time will tell whether the Clinton sex scandal will benefit our political, social,
or legal system. Admittedly, the scandal did call our attention to certain issues of federal law.
It sparked a debate about the powers and duties of legal prosecutors, under the Independent
Counsel Act, vis-i-vis the chief executive while in and out of office. And the various court
rulings about executive privilege and immunity WIU serve useful legal precedents for the future.
Even the impeachment proceedings will no doubt provide useful procedural precedent at some
future time. Yet on balance, it seems to me that the deleterious effects of the scandal in
terms of the financial expense to taxpayers and the various harms to the many individuals
caught up in the legal process---outweigh these benefits. More importantly, for more that
a year the scandal served chiefly to distract us from our most pressing national and global
problems, such as the Kosovo crisis, our social-security crisis, and health-care reform, to
name just a few.
In sum, I agree that scandals often serve to flag important socio-political problems more
effectively than any speaker or reformer can. However, whether a scandal works more benefit
than harm to a community or society must be addressed on a case-by-case basis.