Doctor's Orders is a weekly satirical column in which two unprofessional, definitely fake doctors offer up prescriptions for their Phoenix patients.
We all wanna’ ball as hard as Jay-Z. Ball is life, so life is hard. Sometimes, we question major decisions we’ve made or need to make, like what our major is going to be or whether to graduate early. Other times, we fail to adhere to ethical journalistic standards in our work, and our careers and credibility are called into question.
Sometimes it’s just an accident — you embellish a war story one time on national television, and suddenly you’ve got to stick to that version of events and pray nobody fact checks you. It’s not lying if you don’t get caught, right?
Wrong.
When these kinds of things happen, life calls for us to take a break — maybe a six-month break at the insistence of your corporate overlords. Students call this a gap semester.
If any of the above rings a bell, or you happen to be a famous millionaire on Elon University’s School of Communications Advisory Board, then this column is for you.
You’ve got a lot of free time on your hands now, and sure, you’ve got enough money to disappear forever and live better than 99 percent of the planet, but maybe you love the limelight and want to restore your honor like a real-life Prince Zuko. We can respect that.
First, take a deep breath. Listen to the wisest voices of the pop culture bible. It is written in the Book of Miley Cyrus that nobody’s perfect. Believe her. Just never make that mistake again.
And it might help if you disclose every time something like this has happened while the ball is in your court. You don’t want to keep telling the story about bodies floating past your hotel if the story is tantamount to fanfiction. You’ve got to be 100 percent honest from now on.
If you so much as tweet about what you had for breakfast, there better be a matching Instagram post with proof. Maybe even timestamp the picture so we can be sure it wasn’t a meal someone else had an hour before you even sat down to eat.
If you’ve got a halfway decent voice, you might want to take the Usher approach and confess your sins over some smooth R&B. If you can parlay this media attention into a Saturday Night Live hosting gig, might we suggest a play on Richard Nixon’s “I Am Not a Crook” for your opening monologue? Lorne Michaels probably won’t let you anywhere near the Weekend Update desk though — that’s for the best.
If you did repeat your mistakes — say, by releasing a statement apologizing for your lie and then omitting key details of the truth in that same statement — well, you could have handled that better. If honesty’s just not your thing, Fox News is still putting literally anyone on the air, and it’s not like they’ve ever cared much about journalistic integrity anyway.