ABSTRACT
Authoritarian states manufacture and amplify scandal as an effective political weapon in the twenty-first century. Authoritarian leaders are able not only to use state-controlled media systems, but now are able to leverage many aspects of the way in which news is spread in the global online sphere to harvest significant political capital from both real and manufactured scandals. In many ways, authoritarian regimes are pioneering the more modern approach of perverting the democratic role of the media to inform even before widespread ‘fake news’ started to appear more recently in the West. This chapter will present a model of politicized scandal in authoritarian media systems. In analysing the origin, design and deployment of political scandal in authoritarian regimes such as Russia, we can understand how both controlled and free media can become weaponized against domestic and foreign targets. This will show how authoritarian regimes have adapted to changing media tastes and formats, particularly in the way in which Russian-style kompromat (Russian for “compromising material”) is moulded into an alluring form of infotainment and pseudo-facts that serve as highly effective weapons against political opponents. In this chapter, I will discuss how the authoritarian use of political scandal parallels aspects of the use of scandal by leaders in democratic systems, particularly by President Donald Trump and his Republican supporters. Through an understanding of the role of scandal in non-free states, we can assess the threat of politicized scandal to democracy in general.
