3 Scandals are useful because they focus our attention on problems in ways that no speaker or reformer ever could

Scandals, although seem eye-catching and have nothing to do with the progress of society, they are useful because they focus on problems in ways that no speaker and reformer ever could.

To begin, political scandals can help the government to correct their unethical behaviors. Scandals like PRISM scandal and the Cambridge Analytica scandal are related to government surveillance and the intrude of individual’s privacy. Government tried hard to mask these kinds of unethical behaviors in order to control its citizens. But after scandals pop up, the government has to correct its misbehavior, reluctantly at most times, to resolve the anger of the people. Take the CCP (the China’s Communist Party) as an example. When the coronavirus first broke out in Wuhan, two important meeting of the CCP was going, and in order to make the two meeting go well, the government of Wuhan concealed the coronavirus outbreak and admonished several doctors who had warned the public about the severity of the virus. But one month later, the Wuhan government’s misbehavior was revealed in the internet, arousing people’s anger towards the Wuhan government. Accordingly, to ease the anger of people, more than ten officials of Wuhan were dismissed.

In addition, some scandals can make people reflect about the essence of human-beings and thus make a better world. Many scandals are not only related to controversial issues that are debated a lot in the society, but also give us an opportunity to rethink about the essence behind the specific issue. In 2017, He Jiankui, a Chinese scientist working in Southern University of Science and Technology, claimed that he successfully produced genetically altered babies in Shenzhen. This claimant shocked both the public and the academia, and immediately became a scandal. Retrospecting to the last century, when the first clone sheep was produced, people began to doubt that is we are we living in the science fiction movie and the world in which full of Frankenstein is not far from us. Back to the CRISPR-baby scandal, people tend to rethink about human decency, about the dignity of human: Are human the experimental mice or something integral that should not be impaired by others’ will? Alienation, objectification are all in confrontation with our human nature, and that is what the public can learn from the seemingly meaningless scandal.

However, I have to admit that many scandals are nothing but eye-catching sexual affairs. Scandals are often be revealed by the media, which are operated either by the government or big corporations. For the former, media are more like the government’s propaganda machine and the mouthpiece of the party in power, thus they wish for more people have the motive to read through the content. For the latter, media have to publish something that are original and provocative which can increase the amount of reading and thus can earn more advertisement income. Media, thus, either are owned by the government or by giant companies, are willing to report a lot of sexual affairs of celebrities that are meaningless for the society. Take the Clinton sexual affair as an example. When that affair was exposed, the first thought of the public was not to think about the attacking between the Republican party and the Democratic party, as well as the polarization of American society, but to search the pictures of Lewinsky. And although Clinton himself is an ambitious politician who contributed a lot to the economic boom of the U.S., he lost the respect from the people and failed the election of the president.

In a nutshell, although many scandals are meaningless to the society, they have the significance of correcting misbehavior and reflect about the human nature.