Journalist and media scholar Katherine Bell analyses the roots of the frenetic news coverage of the Anthony Weiner scandal. The media don’t simply record the first draft of our hyper-mediated history, she writes. They too are marinating in the cultural soup that gave us this most visual of 21st century stories. American media culture, she writes, is “a place where powerful Puritan morals sit next to an obsession with sex, sexuality and the body.”