If the Elliot Spitzer scandal proves anything, it’s that the speed at which juicy sex scandals spread is dramatically shorter than it used to be:
Sex scandals have been tainting American politicians and titillating the public for nearly as long as there have been American politicians and publics. In 1797, former Treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton confessed to a long affair with the married Maria Reynolds after a pamphleteer published the couple’s love letters. The episode dented Hamilton’s reputation at the time, but hasn’t damaged his standing as a Founding Father.
What’s changed since then — indeed, what’s changed in just the past decade or so — is the ability of any politician to survive tawdry, indecent or even criminal behavior of a sexual nature.
What New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer discovered this week is also what a host of elected philanderers, fondlers, sexual harassers and call-girl clients have found out in recent years: News of unsavory doings travels so widely and so fast nowadays that the pressure on the accused can quickly become overwhelming. As a result, compared with the pre-Internet era, politicians are less likely than ever to survive a sex scandal with their careers intact.
The news about Spitzer came on “like an explosion, which clearly shows you the warp speed that information is capable of traveling in a wired world,” says Tom Fiedler, a lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Such speed “forces [the accused] to make decisions more quickly. You can’t sit back and reflect
As the article points out, it’s not just Spitzer. Mark Foley and Larry Craig also learned that, once a sex scandal becomes public, the ability to control the situation evaporates. The world moves too fast to spin things today and there are more voices to spread the word than their used to be.
Can you imagine what Watergate would have been like if the Internet, Cable news, and blogs had been around in 1972 ?
It took nearly two years from when the story of the break-in first broke for the information to leak out in sufficient quantity to force Nixon to resign. Even the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal lasted more than a year before it was finally resolved at Clinton’s impeachment trial. But fast-forward to 2004; it was only a matter of weeks before the truth about Rathergate came out, thanks to bloggers.
The days when scandals would fester for months, if not years, are long gone.
