Media person of the year: Noriko Sakai

In terms of the details of their respective scandals, Tiger Woods and Noriko Sakai seem to have little in common. The golfer got off with a small fine for crashing his car, while the idol singer spent weeks in jail and ended up with a criminal conviction and a suspended sentence. Tiger's confessed sin was sleeping around (and around and around) outside his marriage, while Nori-P's was smoking methamphetamine.

But their falls followed the same trajectory. Both started from a position of public trust in their carefully cultivated personas, so the distance of the drop was farther than what you normally see in similar scandals. Once they hit bottom everyone asked themselves the same question: How could we have believed they were that "good" in the first place?