Issue185—Spring 第五次作业

dairuxin512UID: 2178329

Issue185.
Scandals—whether in politics, academia, or other areas—can be useful. They focus our attention on problems in ways that no speaker or reformer ever could.
字数：545   用时：2小时   这篇文章的例子好难找啊！不过最后的例子还是比较好的，提供给大家参考。顺便帮忙拍一下哦！


Scandals, being uncommon information, are more easily to attract public attention, particularly in the current society with broadly active mass media. From my perspective, the greatest value of scandal is assisting us to supervise and regulate behaviors of every field in the society rather than only catching our attention. Meanwhile, some negative effects scandal forms should also be noticed by us.

In the realm of politics, one example often mentioned by people is about previous American President Nixon and Watergate Affair. After Watergate Affair, many Americans feel very disappointed to federal government and politicos for that Nixon, a remarkable president that most citizens considered as a man of wise, integrity and honesty, changed into a liar merely overnight. However, through this affair, the public realized the importance of the political leaders’ moral standards. Nixon's case discloses the neglect of the ethic quality of the political leaders, which the government failed to call the attention of the public on. Under this circumstance, scandal embodies its positive effects and improves the political system.

In the economic field, Enron Corporation, which is billed by Fortune magazine as “America’s Most Innovative Company” for six straight years from 1996 to 2001, became one of the largest bankruptcies in U.S. history in December 2001 because it had reported false profits, using accounting methods that failed to follow generally accepted procedures. The Enron scandal played a major role in shaking investor confidence in American business because the firm was able to hide its losses for nearly five years. But meanwhile, the scandal resulted in new legislation that reformed accounting practices and strengthened the ability of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to investigate accounting fraud. Therefore, The Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act of 2002 provided for the strictest government oversight of business financial reporting since the New Deal legislation of the 1930s. See also accounting and Bookkeeping.

Then, let us check scandal in sports Dom. Marco Pantani, the first Italian cyclist since 1965 to capture the Tour de France road race which concluded on August 2, 1998, in Paris, France, was overshadowed by a drug scandal that cast a dark cloud over the world's most prestigious cycling competition. Finally, one-third of the 21 teams that began the 1998 Tour de France on July 11 in Dublin, Ireland, did not finish the race. Six of the teams dropped out after the July 17 expulsion of the highly rated French team Festina for the possession and use of performance-enhancing drugs. And Tour de France officials invalidated the results from that day's racing. After this scandal exposed, however, International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Juan Antonio Samaranch took the opportunity to call for a drastic reduction in the number of banned substances and proposed setting up an independent anti-drug agency and scheduled an international conference on the subject for January 1999, which enforced to guarantee the principle of fair competition between athletes.

The above instances in three different areas show that scandal is two-edged sword. It actually attracts more attention on concealed problems, and facilitates to build more perfect law system and management mechanism served for the whole society. Meanwhile, it results in various negative effects, such as beating public confidence, hampering progress of some fields and interrupting expansion of normal activities, etc.

atshineUID: 2411331

我看到的文章几乎都有写水门事件,很容易雷同

ENRON 那个不错