The way corporate media works is a few reporters or even, occasionally, a single one find out about some certain event or disaster or transgression and break the story. Then all the rest of the for-profit media outlets — especially TV news operations — turn the biggest or most salacious of the stories into a 24-hour circle jerk.
That’s what is happening now with the workplace sexual abuse story.
Hanks
Then, after a few weeks, the consumer public grows weary of the story. Sometimes they even grow angry with it, their rage shifting from the perpetrator(s) to the messengers.
That’s what will happen with the workplace sexual abuse story.
I bet the way it’ll come down is some beloved male figure will be accused of grabbing some intern’s breasts or cracking a joke about the length of his dick, and a wellspring of evidence will arise that the incident never happened. Let’s say it’s Tom Hanks. Some five-degrees-off-the-center-of-sanity young woman will make the charge, it’ll be easily refuted, and, suddenly, Tom Hanks and his nearly holy rep will become the story rather than the gazillions of women who’ve come forward to make real, provable charges against other lunkheads.
That’ll be the death knell of the workplace sexual abuse story.
You just watch.
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A New Day
BTW: Don’t fret that the recent revelations of asshole-ishness, ranging from Harvey Weinstein to Charlie Rose, will go for naught. Uh-uh.
Ancient History (Hopefully)
My guess is the tipping point not only has been reached but, sooner rather than later, it will be so far in the past that we won’t be able to see it with a telescope.
Workplace sexual abuse is dead, babies. Anybody stupid enough to try it now will suffer a deserved firing and public humiliation, just not on a national news level. Branch managers and community theater directors, fire department deputy battalion chiefs, restaurant shift supervisors, and all the rest of the heretofore petty tyrants who thought it was a riot to make fish market jokes around women co-workers or underlings will, for the sake of self-preservation, abstain from being dickheads from now on.
You just watch.
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