This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

There's a famous quote, from the legendary basketball coach John Wooden: "The true test of a man's character is what he does when no one is watching."

The quote is in need of an update, because with smartphones recording everything and social media disseminating everything, is there ever a moment when somebody — especially someone in a position of celebrity or power — isn't being watched or overheard?

There are countless examples of famous or influential people being caught short because of something they said or did when they thought nobody was recording. Here are three recent ones:

• Vanessa Hudgens, star of the "High School Musical" series and Fox's live "Grease" production, recently negotiated to pay a $1,000 fine for vandalizing a federally protected rock formation in a national forest.

The feds caught Hudgens because she memorialized her destruction — a Valentine heart, with her and her boyfriend's names, carved into the redrock — on her Instagram account. It's hard to mount a legal case when you've sent the evidence to 18.4 million followers.

• Utah Gov. Gary Herbert had to do some serious explaining when The Tribune's Robert Gehrke reported about an audio recording from a fundraising meeting he held with lobbyists, in which the guv suggested his pliability to anyone writing a check to his re-election campaign.

"I'll just say, I'm available. I'm Available Jones," Herbert said. This was a reference to a character from the "Li'l Abner" comic strip who bragged "I can be had — for a price."

A day after Gehrke's story broke, Herbert told reporters that the "optics" of such a callow display to lobbyists didn't look good. "I'm disappointed in myself and how we handled that," he said.

• Then there's Donald Trump, who has become a godsend to commentators and columnists, a barrel with an inexhaustible supply of fish to shoot.

To start the week, there was the Washington Post story about how, back in the '80s and '90s, Trump would masquerade as his own publicist — giving the names John Miller or John Barron — to give reporters the inside scoop on Trump's romantic life.

This was caught on tape by one reporter, Sara Carswell, then of People magazine, who was covering The Donald's divorce from his first wife, Ivana Trump, and his courtship of his eventual second wife, Marla Maples.

On NBC's "Today" this week, Trump denied he was the braggart on the tape. By doing that, he contradicted what he told Carswell back in '91, and what he testified to in court then about his habit of pretending to be his own publicist (so either he's lying now, or he committed perjury then — take your pick). The denial also goes against what Maples and gossip columnist Cindy Adams told Carswell at the time, after hearing the tape, according to the Post's report.

One imagines every reporter who ever interviewed Trump — and, given how much the man loves the sound of his own voice, there must be a lot of them — rummaging through tapes to see if there's anything that would make a good story now. (On Wednesday, The Daily Beast's Lloyd Grove wrote about one from 2004, by interviewer Chaunce Hayden, in which Trump denied dating a former Playboy and Penthouse model because she "looks like a f—-ing third-rate hooker.")

Also this week, Trump found a way to claim he was misquoted in an attack ad whose audio is made up solely of things uttered by Trump.

The ad — made and released by the super PAC Priorities USA, which supports Hillary Clinton's campaign — has women, in Trump T-shirts, lip-synching to some of his more crude public utterances.

They include Trump's line about Fox News' Megyn Kelly having "blood coming out of her wherever," an appraisal of a woman's "fat ass" and his assessment that "if Ivanka weren't my daughter, perhaps I'd be dating her." The last audio cut is Trump's declaration that "you can tell them to go f—- themselves."

Trump tweeted that this final quote was a misrepresentation, that he wasn't talking about women (as the other quotes did) but about China.

Nowhere does the ad specify that the offending passages were all about women, just that they were Trump being his usual foul-mouthed, bad-tempered and less-than-presidential self.

In all these cases, what's most shocking is the notion that a public figure — whether a celebrity or a politician (or Trump, who's both) — thinks that the things he does and says won't get out into the wider world.

"Of course we didn't know we were being recorded. We thought we had all friends there, so that probably caught us a little off guard," Herbert told reporters after the "Available Jones" comment went public.

Is he kidding? Did he learn nothing from what happened to Mitt Romney during the 2012 presidential race, when a comment he made to campaign donors writing off "47 percent of Americans" who pay no income tax, was recorded and went viral? (Romney ultimately received 47 percent of the popular vote, proving again that karma is the best joke writer ever.)

TV reporters and radio hosts are taught to assume that every mic is a hot one and that anything they say could wind up recorded. Why, in the name of Joe Biden, haven't all public figures learned this lesson?

No one is naive enough to expect our politicians to talk as honestly when the cameras are rolling as when they aren't. But in this era when practically everyone carries a recording device that transmits to social media in an instant, it's political malpractice not to talk in private the same way they talk in public­ — because there isn't a difference anymore.

Sean P. Means writes The Cricket in daily blog form at http://www.sltrib.com/blogs/moviecricket. Follow him on Twitter @moviecricket. Email him at spmeans@sltrib.com.