Will 2012 be remembered for its scandals? The keys in any true scandal are impropriety, power, and intricacy—along with an element of shock. For the purposes of the list below, we’re giving extra points for internationalism—or, in scandal-speak, for headlines around the world. Such scandals are different from structural outrages (Super PACs, child poverty); political disgraces (Todd Akin, climate-change silence, the Republican primary field); tabloid ephemera (Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, Prince Harry in Vegas); fugitive oddities (John McAfee); or just plain bullying (the Vatican and American nuns; Vladimir Putin and Pussy Riot). There are also sagas that have taken a scandalous turn, but don’t really belong to 2012 (Guantánamo, Sarkozy and the L'Oreal billionairess, Lance Armstrong).
[#image: /photos/590953f92179605b11ad3c26]
But then there are the scandals that are globe-spanning parts of the fabric of the year, like the six below. There are undoubtedly more: leave suggestions below, or send them to me on Twitter (@tnycloseread).
6. The BBC’s child-sex-abuse failures: First the BBC killed a report that Jimmy Savile, a strangely British television personality, had sexually abused perhaps hundreds of children, and instead ran a tribute to him; then it broadcast false accusations in another case, because it hadn’t wondered if there might be two people with the same name—all during a time when the British press is in disrepute and could use some good arguments against more government regulation. Mark Thompson, the BBC’s general director in the crucial period, is now chief executive of the New York Times Company.
5. Jacob Zuma’s naked picture: It is not often that a country’s governing party buses in four thousand people to protest a painting hanging in a gallery. Then again, not many presidents have a rape accusation (and eventual acquittal) in their pasts. As Alexis Okeowo has written, the affair of “the Spear” raises questions about where South Africa’s political culture is going—questions echoed in the shooting, a couple of months later, of striking miners—and what sort of model it will be for the continent.
4. Russia’s fallen Defense Minister: Corruption or adultery? As Masha Lipman writes, that was the question following the abrupt departure of Anatoly Serdyukov, who was reportedly found in a bathrobe and slippers when police raided the home of his alleged mistress in the early hours of the morning. What is remarkable about the story is the level of extreme cronyism governing Russia: Serdyukov was Putin’s friend, but his father-in-law was a better one.
3. Libor fixing. The manipulation of the London Interbank Exchange Rate—which is the rate that banks charge each other and the basis for many other financial operations—involved large sums of money, the integrity of international finance, and also a great deal of technical language. But the e-mails between conspirators were also studies in what might be called corrupt-casual. From one banker to another, who had just fixed a rate for him: “Dude, I owe you big time! Come over one day after work and I’m opening a bottle of Bollinger.”
2. The Petraeus scandals—all of them. We can’t forget the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency’s affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, and how it was exposed when she sent a Tampa hostess intimidating e-mails, causing said hostess, who had an extensive correspondence with another four-star-general, to turn to the man we’ll always think of as the shirtless F.B.I. agent. But let’s also spare a thought for the militarization of the C.I.A., the legal fishiness of the drone war, and the myriad corruption scandals fed by our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Petraeus might also be a better person to interrogate about Benghazi than Susan Rice.) And then you get to watch the clip of Broadwell on “The Daily Show” again. Bonus junior edition: The Secret Service’s Colombian prostitution affair.
1. The fall of Bo Xilai. Petraeus was a powerful man, but the number-one spot wasn’t even a close contest. Bo was the Party boss in Chongqing, and about to rise to the highest level of the Chinese government, when the story began to unravel: it involves the cyanide-poisoning murder of a British businessman with an unclear past, for which Bo’s wife was convicted; a police chief fleeing to the American embassy; the secret wiretapping of senior politicians; alleged corruption involving, potentially, well more than a hundred million dollars; a son gallivanting around Oxford and Harvard; and dozens of mistresses. That’s all in one scandal. And there were other scandals in China that arguably trumped most of those on this list: from the crashed Ferrari carrying unclothed but politically connected young people, to naked bureaucrats’ group sex, to the death caused by corruption connected to a collapsed bridge (see Evan Osnos for more on that). China has shaken the scandal world.
Photograph by Gilles Rolle/REA/Redux.
