The Death of Spin?

by Kyle Taylor

Here with an entire online space dedicated to understanding and analyzing spin, it seems pertinent to raise the question, does spin even exist anymore, or has it just been replaced with flat-out lies?  There is a certain art-form to “spin.”  You’re taking the truth and finding the angle that’s most advantageous to your side of the argument.  Take the health care debate in the USA, for example.  Democrats spin the debate to lowering costs and covering more people.  Republicans spin the debate to big government and Communism.  At least, that’s the way it used to work.

Now, it seems, when most people support something (like health care reform) and your spin isn’t working, you just start lying.  You may argue there is a fine line.  After all, what is truth anyway?  We’ll save that question for a much more philosophical blog.  The difference between perception and reality can be quite enormous and spin attempts to turn reality into your desired perception.  I think politicians do know the difference and recently, when their perception hasn’t really “stuck,” they’ve decided it’s better to just make stuff up.  After all, once it’s on TV, it’s true!  Lets take Sarah Palin and her claim of death panels – this notion that the government will set up boards where old people have to go and essentially defend why the government shouldn’t kill them.  No, seriously, people believed this.  Or that the IRS is going to hire 16,000 new people to tax those who don’t get health care.  Also totally not true.

Entirely unrelated, Senator Scott Brown has started suggesting that Rachel Maddow, a TV commentator, is planning a bid for his Senate seat; a claim she has denied about 100 times in this video.

Does it matter that she has denied it?  Absolutely not, because he already said it!  It’s a tell strategy coming from a party that doesn’t offer new ideas or even new spin on old ideas.  It’s like they had a big meeting to discuss how their ideas are wildly unpopular then some guy in the back shouted, “how about we just make stuff up?” leading to the inevitable group think of nodding heads and big smirks of old white men who are so disconnected with public opinion, the only way they can get something done is to make stuff up.

So then, is spin dead?  Is lying the new spinning, or is there hope that this art form will somehow survive this all to destructive denigration of politics?