I suppose hypocrisy is always around us, but recent events
have certainly brought it to the fore:
Hollywood stars are forever pontificating about the behavior
of others, but now it turns out that movie mogul Harvey Weinstein’s sexual
harassment has been an open secret in Hollywood for decades, but only now are
stars who knew about it willing to be “shocked” in public! Of course jokes about the “Hollywood casting
couch” go back to the 1920s, so really I don’t suppose this is new behavior in Tinsel
City.
And then there is the New
York Times, that bastion of investigative reporting, always ready to expose
wrongdoing (especially by Republicans) who apparently suppressed a story about
this in 2004 after getting pressure from Weinstein. The Times of course denies that it did this, but the evidence is pretty
clear. To their credit, they were the ones who – finally – broke the story this
year.
Then there are the NFL football players demonstrating against
the killing of unarmed blacks by police (16 last year, according to the FBI),
but conveniently ignoring the epidemic of blacks killed by other blacks (over
7000 last year, but 61% of black homicides are never solved, so it is probably actually
much higher). And of course they aren’t
going to protest the high rate of spousal abuse among NFL players either.
It does seem to me that hypocrisy is more in fashion this
year.
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