Corporate Crime as Trouble: Reporting on the Corporate Scandals of 2002

Abstract

Bankruptcies at Enron and other corporations led to revelations of widespread wrongdoing: the Corporate Scandals of 2002. Congressional hearings into the scandals culminated in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (2002). There was extensive media coverage of these events. Using insights from Emerson and Messinger's (1977) Micro-Politics of Trouble perspective, we consider how three newspapers covered the scandals. We focus on how these scandals were defined, explained, and the remedies that were proposed for them. We consider what the Micro-Politics of Trouble perspective offers for an understanding of these scandals, corporate crime and deviance generally, and the media's role in reporting these issues.

Acknowledgments

The authors names are listed alphabetically. They contributed equally. The authors thank Nancy Jurik, David Altheide, and anonymous reviewers of this journal for comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Notes

¹We use the term “corporate scandal” with the full benefit of hindsight. In our analysis, we suggest that coverage that assigned the term “scandal” to the events of 2002 did so with an implication that there was a culprit or culprits behind the events. We do not use the term “scandal” in this article with that same implication. Indeed, the events of early 2002 are now commonly referred to as “the corporate scandals of 2002,” and we use scandal with that historical knowledge in hand. At the time of the coverage, however, the events were emergent and the observers were not sure how the events would play out. It is this transformation from troubling event to “scandal” that we analyze.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gray Cavender

GRAY CAVENDER is a Professor of Justice & Social Inquiry in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona. His research and teaching interests include media and crime, punishment, and corporate crime. His most recent book (co-authored with Nancy C. Jurik) is Justice Provocateur: Jane Tennison and Policing in Prime Suspect (University of Illinois Press, 2012).

Kenneth W. Miller

KENNETH W. MILLER is a member of the faculty in University College at Arizona State University, Phoenix, Arizona. His research and teaching interests focus on crime, courts, and the death penalty. His recent book (co-authored with David Niven) is Death Justice: Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas and the Contradictions of the Death Penalty.