Normal sins: Sex scandal narratives as institutional morality tales

Sex scandals are widely assumed in he tales of individual transgression, se rving as reminders of the normative sexual order: This payer, a qualitatitv e multiple-case comparison of three contemporary media-conveyed sex scandal s narratives, suggests otherwise. Drawing on extensive news documents, the study considers three stories, each revolving around the same sexual behavi or, but each playing out in a different institutional environment: televang elist Jimmy Swaggart's encounter with prostitute Debra Murphree in 1988. ac tor Hugh Grant's encounter with prostitute Divine Brown in 1995, and presid ential advisor Dick Morris' encounter with prostitute Sherry Rowlands in 19 96. On the one hand, within the same overarching narrative, different theme s become dominant. in one case, the relationship with a prostitute gives ri se to a story primarily focused on hypocrisy: in another to a story focuscd mainly on recklessness; in the last, to a story focused mainly on amoralit y and disloyalty Oil the other hand, the stories share a common dynamic and common themes: the discussions of sexual "misbehavior," which kick each st ory into gear, are rapidly edged out by themes of inauthenticity, and by su ggestions that hypocrisy, risk, or disloyalty are facilitated by the man's particular institutional environment. Sex scandal stories, rather than rema ining stories of individual sexual transgression, are transformed into inst itutional morality tales. Such a pattern, the author argues, results from p ronounced needs on the parr of mainstream media organizations to both mimic and distinguish themselves from tabloid media, and from journalists' inter est in transforming "soft" into "hard" news stories. While they draw on and buttress familiar "cultural givens" about masculine sexuality these scanda l stories offer an even more theoretically challenging twist: an unexpected cultural reversal, in which sexual "sins" as narrated by American news med ia, reveal not individual, but institutional pathologies; not a nonnative o rder, but institutional decay.