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Quite some time back, I remember Julia Roberts, playing a Hollywood star in Notting Hill, explaining why she was so worked up at newspaper reporters capturing embarrassing photographs – they never forget; they have dossiers, and every time anything has to be written about her in future, it would come up, or words to that effect anyway.
This article takes the example of one recent story – the confirmation of Supreme Court judge, Sonia Sotomayor, as the first lady Hispanic judge appointed to the Supreme Court, supported by the new Obama administration. All channels ran the same two clips showing her in a bad light, without giving sufficient context, and these clips were 4 and 8 years old – that were fed to all broadcasters by interested groups. The article deals in detail with how this news reached every news channel before the confirmation. Moreover, it dwells at length on the motivations of the person who dug up the clips and circulated them.
They say, no man is a hero to his valet. In similar vein, none of us would be able to stand up to this kind of scrutiny if even balanced (ie, without twisting context) clips about our past lives were to be available, kept ready and shown at the pinnacle of our careers. In the future, then, we will all have our 15 minutes of fame followed by 15 minutes of notoriety, with apologies to Andy Warhol.
This biting cartoon says it all!
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