Richard Quest, the flamboyant CNN presenter, was arrested a couple a couple of days ago in New York's Central Park because he was found to have a packet containing a small amount of methamphetamine. A judge accepted that it was a misdemeanour rather than a high crime and ordered Quest to undergo six months of counselling.
It was embarrassing for Quest, a Liverpool-born Brit who began his broadcasting career with the BBC. But the story may just have passed by without too much comment and allowed Quest, and CNN, to go on as before.
Then the New York Post ran a story claiming that Quest was wearing a strange contraption under his clothes and that police had found a sex toy in his boot. The net was soon humming. The Quest arrest was suddenly big news, with hyped-up stuff that suggested, to quote the headline on one report, a weird sex twist.
As Philip Stone points out in a sympathetic appraisal of Quest's dilemma, "it was really nasty, vindictive stuff... the lurid details it [the Post] reported were not part of the arrest charges - there was no public lewdness. Think of it, a man condemned globally on an unverified report in one New York tabloid!"
Now Quest's career is in the balance. Despite his popularity - or maybe because of it - can CNN take the risk of allowing a man convicted of a drugs offence (and accused of other supposedly "kinky" business) to go on being a newscaster?
NB: Though I usually reject conspiracy theories, I do think there's a ring of truth in SportsBod's comment.
