The issue is about scandals and focusing attention on problems. The statement about whether scandals are more useful than speakers or reformers in focusing attention on problems is a complex one. Scandals have both a good side and a bad side in the process of revealing problems. And speakers and reformers are irreplaceable by scandals.
On the one hand, scandals are useful to attract the public attention to the seriousness of the problem such as corruption, food safety and murder which is hard to be tackled by speaker and reformer in China. Scandals, which reflect the ugliness of human nature, provide a valuable clue to trace back to the source of the problems. Take an example from China to illustrate this point, Zhengfu Lei, whose sex media was leaked out from the internet firstly, was soon caught with discovery of corruption. Surprisingly, He was considered to be a decent official in the past years. It can be seen the power of scandal in this example. Corruption is ubiquitous in the world, and laws cannot bring the criminals to justice easily and effectively without the help of scandals. Even if speakers and reformers racked their minds, it cannot rival a small story of scandals.
On the other hand, scandals will also move the public attention from the real matter itself to something largely irrelevant. Sometimes people are more interesting in the scandals than tackling problems when the problem is not so big or it doesn’t have detrimental to their interests. For example, nude picture scandals broke in early 2008 about Edison Chen makes people more focus on the pictures and the story about Chen rather than finding out an effective method to suppress the materials from the internet. When scandals are in large demand, problems will be abeyance.
We have seen the double side of scandals, but we should realize that scandals cannot take the place of speakers and reformers. In the fighting process against enemy or emancipating humans’ freedom, such as war or demonstrating, scandals serve little function but the speaker and reformers can show off their stuff. Gandhi or Martin Luther King is such example to apt this point. Gandhi called all people to act on their subjective view of truth and Martin Luther King’s speak of “I have a dream” improved the ethnic rights eventually. In the history scandals were unlikely to make such achievement.
But then again, If Gandhi or Martin Luther King, for instance, had been caught up in a massive sex scandal, what would the impact of that have been? It can be seen everywhere that one use scandals skillfully to defeat his opponent and then using scandals become an effective method in the election campaign. Thus, if anyone who want to accomplish something big business, then he must not be involved with scandal. One false step brings ever-lasting grief.
From the discussion above we can easily to draw a conclusion that scandal is a double sword. A scandal can be useful to solve the problem and can ruin one’s life as well. 