A few weeks ago, I noted the arrival of the GSA scandal as the first under President Obama to meet the standard used in my research: a front-page Washington Post story that focuses on the controversy and describes it as a "scandal" in the reporter's own voice. I then taped an interview with NPR's On the Media about my research in which I noted the role that slow news periods play in fomenting scandal and suggested that Obama was vulnerable to executive branch scandal in the period before the fall campaign.
Just two days after the interview was taped, news broke of Secret Service agents hiring prostitutes in Columbia. This controversy quickly became Obama's second scandal according to the standard I've proposed. Indeed, it has racked up six front-page Post stories since April 17 (by comparison, the GSA scandal has had only two).* After years of avoiding scandal, President Obama is learning how easily it can engulf an administration - it's quite a reversal.
* The Post appears to produce different versions of its front page for different editions. To maintain consistency with my research, my posts on Obama scandal coverage in the Post use the articles and page numbers archived in the Nexis news database.
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