The Rise of Weaponized Flak in the New Media Era. Brian Michael Goss

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СКАЧАТЬ p. 263). In this view, scandals animate the cleansing rigors of search for the truth.

      Scandal and Flak: What’s the Difference?

      Like scandal, flak depends upon mediatization and it also lends itself to being narrativized as an absorbing story. However, I posit several irreducible differences between flak and Thompson’s account of scandal.

      To start, Thompson does not address flak—which is not surprising since scandal remains a far more recognized term. However, for largely eliding strategically weaponized discourses, Thompson effectively collapses flak into ←33 | 34→scandal. The cover of his book features Clinton with head-bowed as the poster-boy of political scandal. In the text inside the cover, Thompson also amalgamates the many discourses and investigations around Clinton as scandal. In other words, Thompson does not differentiate the flak fishing expeditions around Clinton—notably the insipid nothing-burger of Whitewater—from the eventual sex scandal that years of flak yielded. This example underscores the need to tease flak from scandal and to identify what distinguishes them.

      Thompson construes scandal as concerned with investigating and determining whether wrongdoing has occurred—or, importantly, has not occurred. However, flak does not conform to the same model or its logics. If political agents want to launch episodes of flak, an actual transgression or reasons to believe one has occurred (the first phase in Thompson’s schematic) are not needed to commence the mediated discourse about wrongdoings. In terms of Thompson’s schematic, a flak discourse goes directly to the third phase of disapprobation along with stepped-up (State and/or media) scrutiny. Simply acting as if there has been a transgression and proceeding from there will suffice for flak purposes! Furthermore, unlike the processes around scandal, flak-mongers are uninterested in whether there is an underlying truth to accusations. Stirring up a flak storm with its attendant scrutiny and passions is the objective in itself; and the lack of resolution around flak claims can mean that the flak narrative continues indefinitely. In these respects, flak is the evil twin of scandal that it mimics.

      Consider the hideous, years-long campaign against Barack H. Obama as to his nation of birth, meant to impugn his basic qualifications for the presidency. While this flak discourse did not achieve mainstream play, it lingered like a low-level outbreak of dysentery in swampier districts of opinion. Nonetheless, the Hawaii State Health Department felt compelled to address the “birther” flak spasms by producing the scanned version of Obama’s long form birth certificate—thereby setting off a new flak round of specious denunciations of the birth certificate as a forgery (Mikkelson, 2011). The “birther” flak campaign went straight to disapprobation, in Thompson’s schematic of scandal—and then lurched onward, indifferent to resolution via evidence, enacting an infinite loop of accusation and disapprobation, all in contrast with a genuine scandal.

      Thompson’s magisterial work on scandal nonetheless anticipates what I am describing as flak, even if he does not further explore it. Thompson warns of the “roving searchlight” and avers that the essential functions of investigation into scandal must be “insulated from partisan interests” through “a clear ←34 | 35→remit and a well-defined focus” (2000, p. 269). Although he does not discuss flak, Thompson is also cognizant that a media environment characterized by untrammeled accusation becomes “conflictual, uncooperative and non-participatory”; the kind of social order riven with bilious cynicism that has come into clear view as flak has risen like a toxic plume over the political landscape. All societies have deeply inscribed divisions within them. Cynicism channeled into flak presents an instrument for exacerbating these fractures by keeping people at each other’s throats while elites hover above the fray unscathed, a phenomena that has gone global and can happen anywhere.

      Flak Versus Scandal Case Study: Dissing Dilma

      In 2016, Dilma Rousseff was impeached and then removed from the presidency of Brazil. The series of events presented a steep fall for the twice-elected president and her Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT, or Worker’s Party) that had ruled Brazil since 2003. The series of events also illustrates that flak and scandal can be differentiated from each other—as indeed they need to be when contentious, contrived flak poses as sober scandal.

      PT’s era in government registered significant successes in the decade of the 2000s. The government introduced “large scale social programs such as Bolsa Familia, which provided subsidies to poor families to buy food and other necessities,” while riding “an upswing in economic fortunes” (Arnaudo, 2017, p. 7). The resolutely un-radical World Bank enthused that, “Brazil’s socioeconomic progress has been remarkable and internationally noted,” for “innovative and effective policies to reduce poverty and ensure the inclusion of previously excluded groups”; the results “lifted millions of people out of poverty” (quoted in Chomsky, 2018, para. 24).

      However, by 2016, impeachment was greeted with wide public approval due to Brazil’s faltering economy and antipathy toward across-the-board corruption. The proximal trigger to the impeachment was alleged accountancy crimes, including the timing of the government’s payment of a loan to the Bank of Brazil. Not only were Rousseff’s ostensible crimes scarcely discussed during her Senate trial, their status as crimes was itself a stretch. Stephen Mothe (2016) explains that, in Brazil,

      The president can only sign a decree once it has gone through an extensive process, which includes technical and legal analyses within the Ministry of Planning and ←35 | 36→other organs. At the time in which the three decrees reached Rousseff’s desk, there was no explicit understanding that they contravened any legal norms, but rather an implicit endorsement of their compatibility with the law, dispelling any possibility of malice or willful misconduct on the part of the president. […] It was only through a posterior decision, reached under questionable circumstances, that the Audit Court found the decrees irregular, and applied this understanding retroactively. (2016, para. 7)

      Once impeachment was in motion, Mothe claims that Brazil’s senators shifted ground and transformed questions about a bureaucratic procedure into a full-blown political trial. In this view, there was no scandal to speak of; but there was abundant flak-in-action.

      As Brazil’s 61 senators cast their impeachment ballots, 20 of them were implicated in the sprawling lava jato (car wash) anti-corruption investigations that Dilma had enabled to go forward (Arnaudo, 2017; Caudros, 2016; Democracy Now!, 2016). Michel Temer replaced Rousseff as president—a lofty perch to reach when he had been barred from running for office for eight years due to an election fraud conviction. In a stark departure from his PT’s predecessors’ policy package and without an electoral mandate, Temer’s administration rapidly implemented a deep austerity regime that was loathed by Brazilians. Austerity, along with Temer’s recorded participation in bribery, drove his administration’s approval rating in polls into single digits (Caudros, 2016)—scandal that Temer managed to weather as he hung on for two years until the end of what had been Dilma’s elected term. Along with sandbagging the lava jato anti-corruption investigations, the flak campaign against her presidency signals restoration of traditional class hierarchy in Brazil to cancel PT’s efforts toward more widely spread prosperity.

      Impeachment was flak-in-action enacted by a small circle of elites. However, the campaign against Dilma also had its vox pop (or bottom-up) dimensions, implicating large numbers of Brazilians. New media was a key conscript against Dilma’s government. During election season in 2014, candidates employed online computational propaganda, a large share of which was bot-driven. Following Dilma’s reelection, the opposition’s online apparatus was not rolled up and, instead, mobilized as a permanent flak caravan (Arnaudo, 2017). Groups such as Revoltados ON LINE and Vem Para Rua (“Go to the Street”) had 16 and four million members respectively and their messaging reached many more (an estimated 80 million people). In Dan Arnaudo’s appraisal, the online outrage was “boosted by botnets” and “helped lay the groundwork for the impeachment campaign” (2017, p. 15). Flak memes ←36 | 37→ricocheted through Brazil. Through sheer repetition, around half of Brazilians came to believe that PT had ushered СКАЧАТЬ