My lifetime seems to been a matter of living through a series of scandals. Everything from Watergate, to Iran/Contra, to Whitewater, to whatever, to whatever, to John Edwards to . . . (moving fast forward), John Tressel, to Anthony Wiener, to Rupert Murdoch, to today, Piers Morgan. Feel free to fill in the blanks. This is not a comprehensive list.
It seems there is a pattern. Accusation are made and the subject of the accusation issues a denial. That only sharpens the teeth of the people or entities that are investigating the scandal that know that the denial is not truthful. Then the fun starts and there is a cat and mouse game with more information being investigated and divulged. Inevitably, the subject of the scandal has to tuck tail and retreat. Rarely do they survive. Bill Clinton seems to have survived but not unscathed.
OTOH, Hugh Grant admitted and survived. His career was damaged but not fatally. Still, not unscathed. Well, if you are guilty you should suffer some consequences.
So the debate question is: Does the initial denial serve any purpose? Yet, this seems to be the tactic almost every time. Would an initial admission of guilt be a better option, as humbling and distasteful as it is? Is there a tactical lesson in this?
IMHO, barring outright criminality. it’s usually better to admit that there’s a problem right off. Immediately start apologizing, spinning, making a show of trying to fix the problem, but don’t try to cover it up. Not only does it seem to fail most of the time, but it makes it worse including turning things into scandals that never would have been without the cover up.
How many people even think of the Tylenol poisonings these days? They didn’t try to pretend there was no problem, they yanked bottles off the shelves, warned people to beware, and made their packaging more tamperproof. As a result, it’s just a minor note in their history. If they’d done the typical corporate thing and tried to pretend their product hadn’t been tampered with and denied everything until matters were dragged through the courts then their reputation would probably still be stained, or the brand name just wouldn’t exist anymore.
We don’t know how many times people have gotten away with denying. Unless the other shoe drops it is a winning strategy. We know of all the cases where the other shoe does drop, but not of those where the muckrakers found nothing because the skeletons were buried too well.
I sometimes wonder how often the reason behind denying the sexual type things isn’t so much a career move as it is them trying to save their marriage. But as a long run, career decision, admit it. Lots of people cheat (or do other sexual things that they’d prefer not to get caught doing) and a few months or years later, no one outside that person and their family is really going to care anymore.
Hell, anything that people are going to be able to find out anyways, should probably be admitted right away once you get called out on it. This way you don’t add lying to the list of ‘charges.’ That is, assuming you know other people have proof and will come forward. So, you have sex with a co-star in the parking lot, maybe deny it at first and see what happens. But if you have sex with a co-star at a party in the bathroom and some take a cell phone picture…don’t even start with ‘it’s not me’ stuff. If you just own up to it, it’ll blow over a lot faster since the media will spend a lot less time picking over the picture trying to figure out if it’s really you or not (remember Michael Phelps hitting a bong in a college dorm).
That’s a good point, but I think the OP was talking about national scandals here. You’re right, it’s one thing if someone goes up to the PR firm for [celebrity] and claims they saw him doing lines in the bathroom fancy dinner and they deny it and it goes away. We, the public, have no idea how often that happens. Probably often enough that it’s not even that big of a deal in those circles.
But how many major scandals have there been where the person in the hot seat denies everything for weeks in the media and walked away ‘innocent’…especially if they weren’t innocent? It seems like in most of those cases the target eventually admits guilt, and the longer it is before they admit it the more likely they are to resign in the case of politics.
I doubt that happens most of the time. If the skeletons are buried that well, the question isn’t asked so there’s no denial. By the time people start asking questions, the evidence is already bubbling to the surface.
I think you’re seeing selection bias here. The examples you’re using is of people who are now generally considered to be guilty of whatever the allegation was. They’re people who denied unsuccessfully.
But there are other people who have been denying allegations for decades and have supporters who believe them. Admittedly in some of these cases, the allegations were false and the denial is true. But that’s kind of the point - we don’t know the allegation is true.
Let’s pick an example of a long-standing rumor - John Travolta is gay.
It’s been a rumor for over twenty years. There is some evidence although none of it’s definitive. Travolta has consistently denied being gay. And for all I know, maybe he is straight. But if he’s gay, then denial is working for him.
I’d say that it’s more the fact that it doesn’t really matter and that his association with Scientology disturbs a lot more people rather than denial “working”. And given that being homosexual isn’t a crime and isn’t going to get you fired in modern Hollywood, I’m not even sure that it even could have “worked” in any sense at all; anyone who it titillated by the idea will believe it denial or not, and for the rest there’s no damage for such a denial to work against.
I am not showing selection bias and that is why I was trying to be careful not to suggest that my examples are a definitive list.
There is the saying that “the cover-up is worse than the crime” and so often that seems to be the case. So, from historic lessons, why is cover-up so often the initial reaction. Haven’t the handlers and the spin control artists figured it out and learned? Or, does denial give one a better than 50% chance of surviving the scandal? Watergate, of course, is the classic example and that wasn’t sexual as were many others, like the current phone hacking scandal.
I intentionally picked an example where legality wasn’t an issue. And it’s also not an issue of whether homosexuality is regarded as good or bad. My point is that Travolta, assuming he is gay, has chosen to deny it and for the most part, his denials have worked.
But that is selection bias. You’re arguing that cover-ups are a bad idea by listing examples of cover-ups that failed. If you gave a list of cover-ups that worked (admittedly those are going to be harder to find) then people might conclude denial is a realistic option. Maybe cover-ups quietly work ninety percent of the time but we only notice the ten percent that spectacularly fail.
That’s what I’m asking. I’m not arguing a position.
The denials that blow up in the deniers face make all the news. But maybe denial does work, it just that we see the train wrecks. That’s why I posted the OP.
“Worked” in what sense? What have they done? What have they accomplished? It’s like the old joke about about a magic symbol that keeps elephants away. “But there aren’t any elephants within a hundred miles!” “See how well it works?!”
Let’s look at Dick Cheney when he accidentally shot Harry Whittington. There was a delay between the time of the shooting and the time it was reported.
There’s a rumor that the reason for the delay was that Cheney had been drinking and wanted to avoid the possibility of a sobriety test. If that rumor is true, then Cheney’s policy of cover-up and denial worked - the possibility of getting proof is now gone forever. Are you suggesting that if was true that he had been drinking, Cheney would have been better off in retrospect admitting it at the time of the incident?
No, I’m saying that he was powerful and privileged enough that denials made no difference. It has been made quite clear that he and his fellow Republicans were pretty much above the law. He could have boasted on national TV that he was drunk and shot the guy for fun and he wouldn’t have been punished.