Before I offer those caveats, consider the example of the South Korean “Dog Poop Girl” (hereafter, DPG). In 2005, DPG refused to clean the fecal matter that her dog deposited on a metro train floor, despite exhortations from others on the train. After observers recorded and disseminated the episode, DPG was the target of furious rebuke and eventually retreated from her university studies (Detel, 2013). Harassment of DPG was wildly out of proportion with her admittedly gross transgression—but it does not rise to the level of flak as there was no tangible sociopolitical goal implicated in the invective.
By contrast, in 2013 in the United Kingdom, Caroline Criado Perez successfully campaigned for a woman to be featured on a British banknote. One may call this campaign feminist or female-friendly and it led to Jane Austen replacing Charles Darwin on the “tenner.” It also led to “50 tweets an hour being hurled toward her, including rape threats” (Jeong, 2018, p. 13). Sarah Jeong cites several more cases of women being abused online with a clearly gendered dimension that is, in effect, meant to harass all women. In the case of Zoë Quinn’s “Gamergate” ordeal, Jeong posits her former paramour Eron Gjoni as having “managed to crowdsource domestic abuse” (2018, p. 17). Moreover, Jeong observes that internet bots with female names are subject to “25 more times ‘malicious private messages” than male-named bots (2018, p. 20); chauvinism toward real people is, apparently, easy to project on to non-existent people.
The upshot is that trolling of a person may be salted with sociopolitical issues that indicate a campaign to intimidate and harass broader social groups. Online furies may thereby cross an unmarked frontier into the domain of flak when the abuse is more than trolling a convenient target with personal antipathy. In these instances, flaksters bring on board a palpable sociopolitical ←32 | 33→dimension that is, nonetheless, far less structural and lacking in the formal authority of Jim Crow or the “hostile environment.” I will return to this point with further examples later in discussing issue-oriented as well as “ambient,” meta-ideological flak.
Scandal—and Its Evil Twin
What flak is and is not is at the heart of its relation to scandal.
Published near the dawn of the Internet age, John B. Thompson’s Political Scandal parsimoniously identifies three temporal phases of his book’s titular subject (2000, p. 24). Thompson posits that scandal consists, first, of a transgression of consequence, coupled with an effort to hide the misbehavior. In the second phase, information leaks despite efforts to suppress it and hints of wrongdoing enter circulation. Third and finally, at an unmarked tipping point, the scandal becomes a full-blown story with the attendant disapprobation and further scrutiny.
Thompson posits that, in recent centuries, scandals have become heavily mediated events. In this view, media narratives are not “secondary or incidental” but “partly constitutive” of scandal (2000, p. 61). As journalistic and/or State investigation into the scandal ramps up, the public can become absorbed in the drip-by-drip developments. As Thompson observes, the scandal narrative plays out like “a good novel” as audiences “assess the veracity of the protagonists, to figure out the plot and to predict its resolution” (2000, p. 73). After scandal has gone into motion, investigation commences with an opportunity to clean up the political sphere. In Thompson’s words, this is a public good since “scandals have highlighted hidden activities which were of questionable propriety and have helped to stimulate important debates about the conduct and accountability of those who exercise power” (2000, 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,”