EXPOSED Living with Scandal, Rumour, and Gossip

EXPOSED Living with scandal, rumour, and gossip L /� MIA-MARIE HAMMARLIN EXPOSED Living with scandal, rumour, and gossip Exposed Living with scandal, rumour, and gossip MIA-MARIE HAMMARLIN Lund University Press Copyright © Mia-Marie Hammarlin 2019 The right of Mia-Marie Hammarlin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Lund University Press The Joint Faculties of Humanities and Theology P.O. Box 117 SE-221 00 LUND Sweden http://lunduniversitypress.lu.se Lund University Press books are published in collaboration with Manchester University Press. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library An earlier version of this book appeared in Swedish, published by Hammarlin Bokförlag in 2015 as I stormens öga ISBN 978-91-9793-812-9 ISBN 978-91-983768-3-8 hardback ISBN 978-91-983768-4-5 open access First published 2019 An electronic version of this book is also available under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC-ND) licence, thanks to the support of Lund University, which permits non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction provided the author(s) and Manchester University Press are fully cited and no modifications or adaptations are made. Details of the licence can be viewed at https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Lund University Press gratefully acknowledges publication assistance from the Thora Ohlsson Foundation (Thora Ohlssons Stiftelse) Cover image: © Lars Hammarlin Typeset by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited Contents Introduction page 1 The project and purpose of this book 4 Previous research and theoretical points of departure 5 Affects, emotions, feelings 8 The lifeworld 12 Swedish scandals in an international perspective 15 The low level of corruption and the high level of trust in Sweden 17 The meaning of the concepts 21 Bricolage as a method 23 A methodological experiment 25 Flashback Forum 26 The interviews 27 1 In the middle of the media storm 31 The food-and-sleep clock 31 The paradox of visibility and loneliness 35 The branding and the escape 40 Shame, self-contempt, and laughter 48 Lies and damned lies 58 Family, love, caring 63 Fellowship-of-the-hounded letters 68 How things change 72 Concluding comment 75 2 Gossip, rumour, and scandals 77 Mediated orality 77 Chronique scandaleuse 81 Gossip and scandals in today’s media system 85 Digital town squares 87 vi Contents The rumour about Under-Secretary of State Ingmar Ohlsson 89 Hot topics 96 The spatial and the social dimension 101 The role as an exemplum 104 Concluding comment 105 3 Floorball Dad 107 Confusion 110 Anxiety, fear, and community 115 A child’s sense of vulnerability 118 The police interrogations 119 The pale cast of thought 120 News legends 123 Passing-down and narrative contagion 126 Fake news as folklore 128 Concluding comment 129 4 The journalists and the rabbits 131 The objectivity talisman 132 Scepticism – media scandals, do they exist? 136 Undignified behaviour and a lack of independence 139 The art of justifying one’s actions 143 Honour, fame, and rabbits 149 Feeling empathy 154 Concluding comment 163 Concluding words 165 Appendix 169 Bibliography 182 Index 197 Introduction At long last, twenty-seven-year-old housekeeper Katharina Blum has had enough. She raises her gun and kills reporter Werner Tötges with multiple shots. The murder takes place on a Sunday around lunchtime in Miss Blum’s previously so neat and tidy flat, which is now a study in disorder. Tötges had come there to interview her. He worked for ‘die ZEITUNG’ – in capital letters (‘the News’ in the English translation) – which had for several days dragged Blum through the dirt, had indeed ruined her entire life. And not just her life, but also the lives of members of her family. This brutal murder of a journalist opens Nobel Prize laureate Heinrich Böll’s novel The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, which sold well and occasioned debate in West Germany when it was published in 1974. The reader follows the repercussions of the cynical headlines in everyday life, described in a documentary style characterised by ironic distance. Scenes depict the concealed and open loathing to which Miss Blum is subjected. Neighbours whisper, gossip, and spread malicious rumours about her, she who was previously, before the scandalous articles, known as a loyal, proud, and correct woman. Now they stare at her and no longer want to ride in the lift with her. They avoid or attack her. Friends desert her. Acquaintances make statements about her being a shady character. Anonymous men call her at night and breathe heavily into the receiver. The newspaper’s obsession with the crime Blum has supposedly committed – before the murder, that is; throughout the novel, she is accused of harbouring a fugitive from justice – gives rise to inventive interpretations of the statements made by the people around her. When Blum’s aged mother exclaims in despair, ‘Why did it have to end like this, why did it have to come to this?’, Tötges translates this into ‘It was bound to come to this, it was bound to end like this.’ The justification for the change is that he, as a 2 Exposed reporter, is used to ‘helping simple people to express themselves more clearly’.1 Heinrich Böll himself regarded the story of Katharina Blum as a pamphlet in the sense of a polemical piece of writing which describes a person who is subjected to the most profound public humiliation through a relentless campaign of demonisation. This is a form of violation, the writer claimed, that leads to Blum losing her sense of belonging in society and being exiled into a barren landscape of loneliness. In this context, the subtitle of the book makes sense: ‘How violence develops and where it can lead’. The murder of the journalist can be seen as a grim metaphor for Miss Blum’s defenceless- ness against the mudslinging and the prying into the smallest details of her life that characterise this kind of journalism. Böll wrote in anger and claimed that even the headlining done at a newspaper’s editorial office can be defined as a form of violation. His wrath against what he called the Boulevardpresse (gutter press), and especially the tabloid Bild-Zeitung, did not abate over time. Ten years after the original publication of the novel, he wrote the following in a postscript: ‘It would be a task for criminology some day to investigate the problems newspapers can cause in all their bestial “innocence”’ (Böll 2011:153). His powerful feelings were not only expressed in statements like this one but also in the book itself, where the characters are torn between hope and despair, a desire for revenge and shame, fury and powerlessness. While Böll’s story arose from a peculiarly charged political background, it nevertheless provides insights into the possible social consequences of scandal journalism, and here I do not mean the dramatic act of vengeance carried out by Miss Blum. Four decades after the publication of Böll’s controversial book came the release of an award-winning documentary about the much-criticised American congressman Anthony Weiner. Like The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, the film, which is simply called Weiner, supplies insights into the contagious effects that lurk in every scandal: the scandal does not simply revolve around the main figure but also pulls in the people in the immediate vicinity of the scandalised person. By way of the invasive camera, it is Huma Abedin, Anthony Weiner’s wife, who is made to symbolise this fact. Her naked, 1 All three quotations may be found in Heinrich Böll, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, or: How, [sic] Violence Develops and Where It Can Lead, trans. Leila Vennewitz (New York: Penguin, 1975), p. 105. Introduction 3 shifting facial expressions stay with the viewer: she is sometimes determined, sometimes vulnerable, sometimes angry, sometimes in despair. The look she occasionally gives her husband, in connection with the exposure of his frequent sex-chatting with young women, is heavy with venom. As his electoral support plummets, she seems to hate him while at the same time, almost reluctantly, loving his increasingly broken figure. Her vulnerability is beyond question, and it appears to be on a par with that of her husband, or perhaps even greater than his. The whole thing is excruciating to watch. And very entertaining. It should, by way of introduction, be said that media landscapes differ a great deal from one country to another. Scandals in Sweden cannot be directly compared to scandals in the United States, or to scandals in other parts of the world for that matter. At the same time, scandals are connected across the borders of countries and across continents, not only through the universal, emotional experi- ences undergone by the main figures of these scandals and their families, but also through a kind of resilience over time that characterises the phenomenon in question. This is one of the things that the present book will demonstrate. What is unique about the stories of the fictive character Katha- rina Blum and the real-life Anthony Weiner is that they succeed in illuminating dimensions of media scandals that have escaped the attention of many people, not least scholars: the scandals in no way play out in the media only; they find their sustenance, their breath of life, outside the media, in regular everyday conversations and interactions between people.

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