Media attention to large-scale corporate scandals: Hype and boredom in the age of social media

We investigate how media attention to large-scale corporate scandals has changed over time, and how the clustering of different scandals alters media attention to individual scandals. Building on the literature on media agenda-setting, we examine quality newspaper coverage for a sample of 123 major corporate scandals between 1990 and 2016. Whilst previous studies have typically examined specific corporate scandals in isolation, we find that the interplay of scandals is characterized both by crowding-in processes (or hype effects) – which predominantly occur when scandals fall into different categories – and crowding-out processes (or boredom effects) – which dominate when scandals are of one and the same category. Over time, and reflecting the emergence of social media, we find substantial changes in attention patterns, where more recent scandals have attracted significantly higher peaks of attention followed by a much steeper decline.