TJ WALKER - THE HABIT INFLUENCER - Personal Development | LIVE STREAM

Scandals in the news every single day. How do you tell a real scandal from a fake scandal? I'm going to tell you right here. The news media, they love scandals. And partisans, political parties love scandals when it happens to the other side. And we as voters, consumers, citizens, love to follow scandals. But how do you really tell what's a real scandal versus a fake scandal? Now let me define what I'm talking about. A real scandal is when something happens to a public official, public organization, and it genuinely changes public opinion and it does severe damage, harm to that individual or institution's reputation and career. That's a real scandal. A fake scandal is when there's lots of news coverage, partisans on the other side attacking, screaming like it's the end of the world. But no real damage ever happens to the individual in question, to the institution in question. They don't suffer any career loss, they don't suffer vote loss. Nothing much happens. How do you really tell? Well, I've been following scandals since the 1970s when it comes to major political figures, and I've been doing media training for 30 years, often put in a position to help politicians and others who are facing scandal. So I'll just share with you the questions I ask myself every time I see something being talked about like it's a scandal. First question I ask myself is, is there something here that seems like a real underlying crime? Is there something here that the average person could say that's bad, I wouldn't do that, or is it something that is complex, very process oriented and isn't quite understood? The next question I ask myself is, will the supporters of this person or this institution be really upset? Will truly, truly independent minded people be upset by this? Because sometimes there are things thrown out as scandals and the media gives it a lot of attention. But the only people who are really talking about it and upset about it are people on the other side of the political debate who are simply using this as a context to bloody up a political opponent. And they may talk about it for weeks, months, years, talk about it as if it were the greatest scandal. And they may go from hating this person a little to hating this person a lot. But if the basic supporters of that individual don't think it's a real scandal, well, guess what, it's not changing the political calculus. If 55% of the people love you and support you and 45% hate you, if the 45% hate you twice as much because of this scandal, it's not really going to have an impact on your career the next Thing I ask myself is, is the underlying crime, is it something that people in the other party or another team, if they were caught doing it, would they be upset about it? And quite often the case is no. You have people in one political party, one ideological camp, with this mock whore. Can you believe this person did this? And yet all you have to do is go back a year, five, ten years earlier, and people on their side were doing exactly the same thing and they didn't raise a peep. That's generally a sign that something isn't a real scandal. The next thing I ask myself is, am I able to look at this person or individual and say, you know what? I don't like this person. They're caught in what appears to be a scandal. Am I guilty of saying it must be a real scandal because I don't like them and I hope to destroy their career at any means possible? Or is this something real? That's actually the toughest question for most people because what I have found is even bright, intelligent, educated people can't differentiate between what they think truly is a scandal versus what they want as a scandal. If you really think a particular politician is doing horrible things to the country and advancing horrible policies, then it's human nature to say, ah, I hope this scandal forces him or her to resign, be run out of office, put in prison. But just because we want something doesn't make it true. So one of the real signs of an intelligent person, in my view, of a serious person, is to be able to look at a scandal and say, I don't like that person. I think what they did was wrong. I wish they'd somehow get voted out of office. But I don't think this particular scandal is going to hurt them politically. Therefore, it's a fake scandal. That is the hardest thing for people to do, in my view. It's an extremely rare thing. Now, I don't always get it right. And in full disclosure, I predicted that Brian Williams would survive his scandal and would not be removed from the anchor chair. So I'm not perfect. But I do want to share with you my thought process and show you how it plays out in real life. And I'll give you an example of four specific scandals at the moment. Because here's the thing, most scandals by definition are not real because they don't destroy careers, because there's a new scandal every day in the media. You don't see people resigning from Congress every day. You don't see people going to prison every single day. That's comparatively rare. So I'm going to show you how I analyze various crises and I'll tell you right up front if you're a true partisan Democrat or Republican, you're going to be upset with me. You're gonna be mad at me. Tough. I'm calling it like I see it. Let's look at the first scandal, Hillary Clinton's so called email scandal, fake scandal. It's not a real scandal. There's no underlying crime that anyone who isn't a hardcore partisan Republican conservative is going to agree is a real crime. It's like not filling out a form properly. It's simply not going to resonate with people. So it's not a real scandal. It's not going to hurt her. The polls show it. She has not been hurt at all. She's still far and away the most popular Democrat really ever when it comes to this particular cycle in an election where it's not an incumbent running and she's trouncing utterly destroying every Republican in face to face trade off ballot questions. Now, I'm sure it's true that Republicans who already hated her now hate her twice as much and they would cite this as a scandal, but it's not actually hurting her as much as you want it to. Now all of you Republicans now hate me. Now all you Democrats are going to hate me because I'm going to analyze three scandals that are affecting Republicans at the moment. Number one, the 47 Republican senators who wrote to the leaders of Iran thumbing their nose at President Obama and according to some legal experts are in violation of the Logan act and according to some analysts are actually guilty of treason. Well, with treason you can be executed. My estimation, fake scandal. They're not going to be hurt politically because the people who support the Republican senators don't care about it. It's not going to change the opinion of any actual supporter of those Republican senators. Next scandal, Bill O'Reilly. Bill O'Reilly, it's now been documented that he has manufactured experiences in his life, lied, if you want to call it that, to a far greater offense than anything Brian Williams ever did. Many are calling for him to be fired from FOX News. Guess what? Fake scandal again, following my definition of will someone actually be hurt? Will their career be harmed? No. Bill O'Reilly's ratings have gone up. If anything, this scandal has made him more beloved to his core audience. If anything happens to him because of this scandal, it's going to be getting a million dollar raise. You might not like that. You may think he's done something really Bad. That's a separate issue again from whether it is a scandal that will truly harm someone's career, destroy their career. Next one. Jeb Bush faces a scandal right now because Florida state law says that all office holders must make all email available at the end of their term of office. Well, he withheld tens of Thousands of emails, seven and a half years after he left office. Seems pretty clear cut violation seems to many fair minded observers to be much more egregious than anything Hillary Clinton's accused of doing. Is this a real scandal? It will be hurting him. No fake scandal. It's not going to hurt him because it's just too complicated, too procedural, too fuzzy and isn't something he's going to pay a price for. So I've just given you four things that are talked about a lot as a fake scandal and excuse me, as scandals. They're not real scandals. As far as having the capacity to destroy someone's career. And I've probably offended all of you now folks, you can disagree with me on any one case, but here's the thing. If you only agree with me when I say a scandal that affects someone you like isn't a scandal, but you disagree with me if I say something isn't a scandal and it's someone you don't like, that to me shows that you're not serious about analyzing news or having an intelligent rational conversation about news. What it really means is you're just a sports fan because that's what sports fans do. Sports fans say any call against my enemy is by definition true. Any call that's negative towards my team is by definition a bad call from a bad and ref. And unfortunately that's the attitude too many people have in politics today. That's not intelligent discourse, that's just being a sports fan. Now what is an example of a real scandal that could destroy someone's career? We've seen it in the last 24 hours with representative Aaron Schock of Illinois. His first mini scandal was that his office was decorated like something from Downton Abbey. That's not a real scandal. The next mini scandal was revelations he posed shirtless for a men's magazine. Not a scandal that's going to destroy a career. Next revelation. He's traveled all over the place going to Katy Perry concerts, other places, sometimes using tax money that's a little more serious but not enough to destroy a career. That's not a real scandal. What finally made him resign? The revelation of clear cut fraud on getting reimbursed, on travel expenditures he asked for $90,000 in reimbursements for on his car. Getting $50,000 that it can be proven didn't happen because the car when he sold it had 90,000 fewer miles than what he claimed for reimbursement. So there was no possible, there isn't even a theoretical way that it could have been a slight miscounting. It was egregious. That's something where people view it as stealing. Doesn't matter if you're Republican, Democrat, liberal, conservative stealing from the public coffers and not $500, $50,000 is something that cuts everyone understands, doesn't affect just people on the other side. It affects people across the spectrum. That's an actual scandal. That's a real scandal. That's a career ending scandal. And that's why Aaron Schoch was smart to resign because he would not have survived it. But that's why all these other people I mentioned in the previous four scandals, they're not resigning, they're not quitting their campaigns because they aren't real scandals. They're just media noise.