There is a well-established and strictly obeyed format for writing about a women who is alleged to have had an affair with a powerful man, one that has barely been updated from the John F Kennedy era. They must be portrayed as predatory but simultaneously idiotic; actions and attributes that would seem in most other circumstances innocent – has a job, has friends – become deeply suspect; photos from her past – ideally on holiday, even more ideally at fancy dress parties – are published. The only part of this schtick that has been updated since the mid-1960s is that instead of tricking the woman’s friends and family into giving them the photos, newspapers now scrape them off her social media, so that the photo accreditation “from Facebook” has become as much of a feature of these stories as references to the woman’s blond hair.
Much of the coverage of Carrie Symonds, the PR chief who is being cited as the reason for Boris Johnson’s divorce, has ticked off each of these cliches with the kind of speed that makes you wonder if there isn’t so much a format for writing these stories as a bot: “We got another one, boys! Activate the scarlet woman bot!” (And really, the idea that one woman can be blamed for the demise of Johnson’s marriage is like singling out one particular raindrop for flood damage.)
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2x2P77R
via
0 Comments