The Slovenian political arena was recently marked by a political scandal involving a »standby bonus«. The media followed this scandal intensively. The article considers the potential meanings of political communication, mass media and the power the media seems to possess. The article focuses on how politicians are evaluated and described during scandals by considering a case study and analysing the press content related to the political scandal in Slovenia. In reporting on the scandal, the media showed its intensive interest with considerable attention paid to the politician as an individual, and putting his qualities under the microscope. The results show the requirements imposed by the media are high and that the media was used as a tool to discredit this politician and his party in the Slovenian political arena. Using content analysis, which relies on several innovative IT tools to perform the data collection and sentiment analysis, the article comprehensively analyses the political scandal, thereby adding to the political communication literature.