ICE aims to bring together academics, professionals and campaigners from a range of disciplines in the field of communications to share interests and highlight ways of improving standards. Issues to be explored at the conference might include

• The history of scandal coverage in the media
• Case study analyses of media coverage of scandals
• Handling scandal coverage: the dilemmas of PR
• Handling scandal: journalists’ perspectives
• Corporate scandals: how managements respond
• Scandal and the ethics and dilemmas of whistleblowers
• Law and the rights of whistleblowers
• Sex, sleaze and celebrity scandal: the dumbing down debate
• The politics of scandal: feminist and Marxist approaches
• Law and scandal: is a new privacy law emerging ‘by the back door’?

Keynote speakers include:

“Reporters, Priests and Gossips: Unravelling the Gay Conundrum in the Church”
Michael Ford, writer and reporter/presenter for BBC Religion and Ethics and BBC World Service.

“Spinning tales: How PR deals with journalists' scandalous needs”
Simon Goldsworthy, Senior Lecturer in Public Communication, University of Westminster.

Those interested in presenting a paper to the conference should send 200-word abstracts to the ICE conference co-ordinators, Richard Lance Keeble (rkeeble@lincoln.ac.uk) or Fiona Thompson (f.thompson@leedstrinity.ac.uk) by October 1. The conference co-ordinators will respond to all submissions by October 14.