ABSTRACT
Sociologists have tended to take insufficient account of the importance of emotions to the social power of the institution of media, particularly as altered by the emergence of social media in the current media ecology. This paper compensates for this neglect by means of a brief illustrative case study of the effect of social media on the public reception of the 2011 Sepp Blatter racism scandal and of other ‘race-related’ scandals in the UK. In proposing media scandals’ wider sociological significance regarding the dynamic, multi-accented relationships between emotions and power, it analyses how England’s prevailing climate of ‘postcolonial guilt’ was reinforced and conveyed through social media networks.
