Corporate Crime as Trouble: Reporting on the Corporate Scandals of 2002

Bankruptcies at Enron and other corporations led to revelations of widespread wrongdoing: the Corporate Scandals of 2002. Congressional hearings into the scandals culminated in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (2002). There was extensive media coverage of these events. Using insights from Emerson and Messinger's (1977) Micro-Politics of Trouble perspective, we consider how three newspapers covered the scandals. We focus on how these scandals were defined, explained, and the remedies that were proposed for them. We consider what the Micro-Politics of Trouble perspective offers for an understanding of these scandals, corporate crime and deviance generally, and the media's role in reporting these issues.