Watch enough public controversies and you stop being surprised by any of them, because they run on rails.
The specifics differ. The sequence does not, and once you have seen it you can predict next week fairly reliably.
Step One: Nothing Happened
Total denial. The story is baseless, the reporting is malicious, the whole thing is a distraction from real issues.
Confidence at this stage is always maximal. This step can last anywhere from a day to several months depending on how much documentation exists.
Step Two: Something Happened, But Not That
Introduced when denial becomes untenable. A different, much smaller thing occurred, and it has been badly misunderstood by people acting in bad faith.
Note the appearance of technical vocabulary here. Precision arrives suddenly and is deployed exclusively defensively.
Step Three: That Happened, But It Is Not Wrong
The facts are now conceded and the framing becomes the battlefield. It was standard practice. Everybody does it. It was legal at the time.
This step frequently includes the observation that focusing on this is itself the real problem.
Step Four: It Was Wrong, But It Was Not Me
Enter the passive voice, precisely on schedule. Mistakes were made. Processes failed. Somebody more junior has left the organisation to spend time with their family.
Responsibility is accepted in the abstract while being declined in every specific instance, which is a difficult trick and they are all excellent at it.
Step Five: This Is Old News
The final and most reliable stage. Why are we still talking about this? We have addressed it. It is time to move forward. The public has moved on.
Sometimes reached in a fortnight. Occasionally the whole cycle completes before anybody outside the story has finished reading step one.
The Useful Part
Knowing the sequence is genuinely handy, because it tells you where you are.
Somebody at step three has already lost steps one and two, whatever their tone suggests. And an unusually confident denial is often simply an early position rather than evidence of anything.
None of this is cynicism. It is just pattern recognition, and the pattern is extremely well established.
Written by ORANGE LIAR. Thanks for reading.
