Rules of Thumb are those little unofficial, unscientific statements we hold to be somewhat true in a given circumstance. I use them often. A few small examples of things I’ve heard that sort of hold up:
– stay 4 seconds behind the car in front of you (or 1 car length for very 10 mph)
– an ounce of liquid is about what you pour in a count of one
– to figure out how long you’ll wait in a bank teller line, multiply the number of people ahead of you by 5 minutes, then divide by the number of open windows.
I have one of my own invention: The Tabloid Rule of Truth
The Tabloid Rule of Truth is that if a celebrity is on the cover of a tabloid for some reason, the truth of the story can be determined by how many tabloids have the same story on the cover.
1 cover – Not True. They are just making things up.
2 covers – Grain of Truth. Something happened, but probably not what is being reported.
3 covers – True Story. The President really did meet with Martians, or whatever.
This rule has served me well for quite a while, until yesterday.
Yesterday, while wasting in line at the grocery store, I saw Bill Cosby on FOUR covers. As you might guess, they were all related to the numerous allegations against him that fall along the similar lines of “He made me drink, it was drugged, I was raped.” Four tabloid covers, including Us and People, featured him.
I never considered a story being on more than three tabloid covers for my rule of thumb. This broke my scale.
People are to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, but rules of thumb are hard to ignore.
This leaves us vulnerable to the media. If something seems to be reported “everywhere”, it appears to be more true. What if “everywhere” is really just media owned by one or two people?
It’s one of the reasons rich people like to buy media companies. They can send a message (“Taylor Swift’s new album is great!”) out through their ecosystem of blogs, magazines, radio and TV shows, newspapers, and so on and make sure their view is well-represented in so many places that it appears that there is some buzz behind something. It appears authentic, though it is manufactured.
They can also use their media holdings to tear something down, or crowd it out when it goes against their plans. There is not much in-depth, serious coverage of poverty, anti-militarization efforts, bank protests, or women being victimized.
With the Cosby story – it isn’t one message being spread by a single entity. It’s multiple stories in multiple locations. Multiple women have come forward. The media goal for Mr. Cosby at the moment, though, is to try to avoid headlines. It isn’t working well.
The stories against him certainly seem believable and similar. I strongly suspect he did things he shouldn’t have, repeatedly, over decades. It sounds like he started giving girls knock-out potions in order to have sex with them against their will, then got addicted to it. If true, he has a serious problem. If not, an oddly large number of women are suddenly making up stories about him, which would be another weird event in itself.
“Innocent until proven guilty” is hard to evaluate when a wealthy person settles out of court over prior accusations.
The Cosby story hasn’t come to an end, and we’ll have to wait to see where it ends up. My rule of thumb points in one likely direction.
