Fourth International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

This paper offers a comparative analysis of two major sex abuse scandals of recent times – the British Coronation Street scandal in 2014 and the international Harvey Weinstein scandal in 2017 – to investigate the relative powers of mass vs. social media in the formation of dominant discourses and narrative frameworks. The two scandals share a number of significant features which make them comparable – e.g. enormous publicity, rape allegations, multiple victims making allegations, allegations spanning several years, the media industry setting, celebrity involvement – but the outcomes were very different; as the Coronation Street scandal ended in public victim-blaming, the Weinstein scandal sparked off the #MeToo campaign and set in motion a cultural shift towards victim-believing. This paper traces the mass and social media histories of these two scandals; analysing newspaper coverage, celebrity Twitter accounts and hashtag campaigns, this paper reveals a complex, enmeshed media landscape in which narrative changes (Gamson 2001), winning discourses, and the very activation of scandals (Greer and McLaughlin 2013) are far from inevitable and contingent upon a range of interacting factors.