It is true that scandals will attract people's eyeballs in all ways they could especially in this century, in which news can appear on not only the traditional media like newspaper or magazine, but also your phones and the homepage of  your browser. People read the scandals and respond in their own ways. Also, scandals can expose the problems or faults in their areas and urge the related department to solve. I strongly agree that scandals raise public's attention to the problems than the speakers do.
Scandals take less time than the speech do to pass over an area. Scandals spread over the whole world or the whole country in just a day, but it takes maybe a few weeks for a great speech to kindle the public's curiosity. For a speech, the speakers will organize their words in their logic. Naturally, audiences cannot absorb their point of view immediately because everyone needs some time to adjust his own mind with others. Also, speakers will bring in their own emotional inclination and their positive or negative judgement. All these elements contribute to the receiving information process not so impersonal. On the other hand, people always talk and discuss when they read the scandal. It is the discussion involved that makes the speed of scandal transmission so impressive. When people comment, they try to dig out the problems behind the scandal and appeal to solve the problems. Governments has to react to appease the public's indignation. In this way, the issue pulled out by the scandal will be solved.
Scandals force some related organization to respond effectively. Take the cycling competition as an example, maybe some new kind of dope can be default for all the competitors, but the scandal can make up the mind of the organizer of the cycling competition to improve the doping detection techniques. The scandal of Lance Armstrong, who won the tour of France for consecutive 7 years, was deprived of all his previous arona of championship and banned from competitive cycling for the rest of his life because of doping. This scandal has show the determination of the organizer of inhibiting doping and make the match more fair. Another example of nuclear power also shows the power of scandals. Before the leakage scandal of Japanese nuclear power plant, lots of speechmaker try to raise the awareness of the harm of nuclear power, but they failed to reach congruity with others. As the scandals gives people chances to think more about the safety of usage of nuclear power, some countries like Germany even announced that they stopped to use nuclear power.
Granted that scandals sometimes may lead unnecessary panic or even lit on distrust between people. That's why Chinese mother rush to purchase the milk powder originally produced by foreign country after the toxic additives of inland dairy product detected. However, scandals can effectively become a focal and help the problems solved. So I cannot agree more that scandals are useful in improving the society.