Surviving a media scandal

weeks ago, one TWO of the most senior members of the United Methodist Church in Zimbabwe took his own life following a sex scandal that was circulated widely on social media and in local tabloids.

Tragic events like that show the pervasive influence of the media on people’s personal lives. If the matter had not found its way to social media, it is highly probable the clergyman would still be alive and with his family today. The nature of the media is that it amplifies problems to appear larger than they actually are.

The media distorts reality and makes people care for opinions of strangers.

The Collins Dictionary defines a scandal as a widely talked about situation or incident considered shocking and immoral.

The most common scandals reported in the media are financial, political and sexual.

Most scandals involve well-known individuals, like high-flying musicians, actors, sportspeople and politicians.

The most shocking scandals involve men of the cloth, when they either fall into temptations of the flesh or into dishonesty over money.

Scandals involving unknown people rarely make it to the headlines, unless they are so grossly shocking that they catapult them to instant fame.

The majority of matters — if they are not picked up by the media and turned into full-scale public scandals — start out as local gossip and end there.

Anything can cause or result in a scandal if it is received in a certain way by the public. Not everything that is shocking becomes a scandal.

Issues that are expected to go viral can be ignored while seemingly benign ones turn into scandals. It depends how the public perceives the issues and identity of the actors. Scandals can be based on facts or exaggerations, distortions and plain lies.

They can emanate from just about anything. Sources of scandals are rumours, social media posts, online comments and photographs and videos.

The need to be careful on social media cannot be emphasised enough.

The wide and easy reach of smart mobile devices gives wings to scandals, as they now go viral within minutes after being published.

Yesteryear, scandalous stories would have to wait to make it into the newspaper or a whole month to get into a magazine, and by then, the shock would have waned.

Scandals were less brutal when media sources were few and the grapevine was all the information source there was.

Only very salacious scandals made it to the newspapers. And once read and talked about, that was the end of the scandal until the next one. Nowadays, the internet has a permanent record, as even that which has been deleted can be undeleted.

Being the subject of a media scandal is one of the most traumatic personal experiences that one can go through.

At the material time, death, for some people, seems a far better proposition than shame and humiliation.

Fortunately, the majority of people who have been publicly scandalised survive and live to tell the story. However, other people, like the Methodist clergyman, are not so lucky and choose death over momentary shame. The majority of media scandals are soon forgotten as there are always new ones and fresh gossip coming out.

The only unforgettable national scandal has to be the homosexual forays of the late first president of Zimbabwe, Canaan Banana.

In its day, his criminal trial and imprisonment for molesting his personal male aides was media fodder.

Even the later red-headline scandal involving the public bathroom homosexual forays of the late Alum Mpofu — former ZBC chief executive officer — and consequent resignation in shame was quickly forgotten.

He was even later on elected a Member of Parliament. Sex scandals involving prominent politicians are commonplace everywhere in the world.

Scandal-ridden politicians almost always bounce back into power as if nothing happened. It shows that no media scandal, no matter how serious and embarrassing, is ever worth dying for.

Scandals can be survived.

“Being the subject of a media scandal is one of the most traumatic personal experiences that one can go through. At the material time, death, for some people, seems a far better proposition than shame and humiliation. Fortunately, the majority of people who have been publicly scandalised survive and live to tell the story.”