SMS scandals: sex, media and politics in Finland

This commentary analyzes public reactions to two intimate scandals in Finland that involved two high-profile ministers and were heavily covered by the media. It investigates the fictional strategies that media narratives use to engage the audience by inviting them to invest emotionally in the events witnessed. The complexity of meaning-making processes and affective bonds between the audience and the public figures discussed here manifest themselves in numerous ways: internet discussions, letters to the editor and even complaints to the Chancellor of Justice. In order to explain these strong emotions, the most appropriate method is to approach the cases through two interrelated opposites: the spectatorial logic of shame and exposure on the one hand, and the rhetorical logic of imagination and unreliable narration on the other. By employing these operational logics, I shed light on how media narratives function in engaging the audience emotionally, and how these emotions in turn feed back into those narratives. This feedback loop also explains both the intensity and the genuineness of these emotions, because it is a self-feeding process that has to do with the expectations we attach to our real-life relationships much more generally.