Almost without a doubt, the most famous sex scandal in politics was the Profumo Affair in Britain in 1961. John Profumo, who was the Secretary of State for War in Harold Macmillan's tory government, had an affair with a 19-year-old model named Christine Keeler beginning in 1961. This was further complicated with a red scare and reports which suggested that Keeler may have also been involved with a Soviet naval diplomat, Captain Yevgeny Ivanov, at the same time. Profumo kept his silence for the rest of his life and the scandal probably held cause the Macmillan Conservative government's defeat by the Labour Party in the 1964 General Election in part.
This was especially notable because it involved a high profile cabinet Minister, a Soviet naval officer and also because it was the first in an age of modern mass communication. By the time the you start applying the rules of rock and role and sport to politics after 1968, then the outrage of the public against the infidelity of politicians got thrown out of the window like a television being thrown into the swimming pool of apathy.
Peak newspaper readership happened in about 1954. Television and radio began to take over and by the early 1990s, we'd already invented the 24 Hour News Cycle. Having 24 Hours to fill with programming did not cause some golden age of news collection but rather a new era of talking heads, panel shows and an increasing number of tabloid opinion pieces where the news is almost a sideshow to the real stars of the news networks, who get to tell massive monologues without making jokes.
When politicians themselves switched from legislators and people pushing their way into the centre of policy, almost by default they became administration officers and with the 24 Hour News Cycles, they become players to be interviewed. Politics itself is sport, where there political football teams are entrenched and where in my country, one side owns both the football team as well as the newspapers and news networks.
With the tabloidification of news and where the news cycle follows an identical course to that of the sports pages, the natural level of interest from the public has morphed into a similar mould and the rules for any given piece of political news is also identical to the sports pages. It takes about ten days for any piece of politics news, however scandalous, to go through initial boom, discussion, rediscussion, echo boom (if it has one), and then finally the inevitable dribble towards irrelevance when it will be overshadowed by the news big boom.
Ten days is the natural life expectancy for any given scandal because if a thing happens on Friday 3rd of Octember, then two weekends will have passed before Monday 14th of Octember, and the public will cease to have any ability to care about that thing any more. Some other thing will have presented itself in the news cycle and that even means that sex scandals, racial slurs, minor fraud and corruption, will have all blown away. When it comes down to it, moral turpitude is mostly acceptable provided that the public doesn't have to hear about it, and even major indiscretions of character can be recast as authenticity to give an appearance of solidity to nothing more than wind.
Outrage to time can be graphed, where outrage is on the y=axis and time is on the x-axis. Broadly speaking, outrage follows the generic function of y=1/x, where outrage sort of trends asymptotically towards zero and if it is particularly interesting (such as a bunch of Senators stabbing the Emperor, an act of attempted terrorism on the parliament itself, or the Governor-General sacking the Prime Minister and installing the Opposition Leader as the next one), it then becomes the subject of history. It might be true that those who can not remember the past are condemned to repeat it but there's probably an interesting corollary that even those those who can remember the past are likely to ignore it.
The tabloidification of the news has meant that what now happens is that the borders which used to separate actual news, sport, weather, opinion, politics, fashion, celebrity, and scandal, no longer matter. Magazines were probably the beginning of this; the newspapers were quick to follow suit; cable news TV stations actively blur the lines; and that thing we call the internet, just doesn't do a very good job of demarcation due to the nature of putting everything onto a single screen.
If it was always the plan to put the world in your hand then the motive for doing so, was always the production of profit. Dollars themselves are almost by definition the most fungible item in an economy because of themselves they have no intrinsic value but have the power to buy anything. As dollars are fungible, then the things trying to attract those dollars are in any given marketplace also likely to be fungible. When it comes to the selling of news, then the sacred and the silly are allowed to stand alongside each other; the banal, the beautiful, and the barbarous, are all apt vehicles to put in front of eyeballs for money. In the eyes of news media organisations, eyeballs and the brains behind them are just two of the inputs of life support systems for a bank account.
So whether it is a sex scandal which can be forgiven by the media and the public after ten days (and after the person in question has gone through some kind of 'sensitivity training'), some hideous piece of racial intolerance which can be recast as someone speaking their mind and saying what they think, or some other failure of character, then to make that person acceptable only takes some time away from the media spotlight, where they will then go through some kind of reputation 'redemption arc' and then reemerge slightly differently and ready to be sold to the public as something else.
The reason why I mention all of this is that I have a suspicion that a reasonably high profile marketing manager at a marketing firm/record label who resigned from his post recently, will probably disappear from the public eye for a while and then will gain preselection for the Liberal Party to contest the District of Greenway at either the 2022 General Election or the 2024/5 General Election. If not this cycle, then two and a half to three years is certainly sufficient time for this person to go on an extended period of gardening leave before being recast as having grown as a person while being in the wilderness.
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