Spinning Before It’s Been Spun

By Kyle Taylor

Well well, it looks as if a UK election is FINALLY just around the corner. After more than three years, Gordon Brown MUST trot down to Buckingham Palace and ask the Queen to dissolve parliament so the voters can remake it again. The tell-tale signs are there: Weird, confusing, totally unclear maps like the one above are being reproduced everywhere with captions like “breakdown of the UK electorate likely voter turnout by county excluding outlier opinions and small parties were the election to occur tomorrow.” WHAT? Is this it all scientific? Then there’s inevitably some new interactive feature that allows you to “sway the vote and see what happens.” What happens, you ask? You “spin” the dial and the colors change, making a graphic you initially could not understand even more confusing and turning you into a spin doctor in the process. “Look how easy it is to totally convolute the news,” they seem to say.

The other tell-tale sign? Each party begins to spin the election and “what it’s about” before it has even started, meaning they’re spinning before there is even anything to be spun! News reports like this one in the Guardian say thinks like: “the Prime Minister will say” and “the Tory leader will counter this by saying” and “that other guy from that other party will then double back by contradicting the first guy and chastising the second guy before declaring what the election is ‘really about.'”

The media used to be in the business of telling what happened. Now they’re apparently psychics, telling us what the news will be tomorrow! Isn’t that in and of itself – a newspaper that tells the future – a cover story?!?! The reality is that the “will say” is now code for: “We’re not going to wait to convolute, contort, manipulate, and angle our story. We’re going to try and spin it before it’s a story that way when it becomes a story, it won’t appear to be “spun,” it will just appear to be news.” It’s rather brilliant on their side, rather detrimental to get fair information on our side.

Are we to the point where we’re spinning and spinning so much at every stage in the game that it’s impossible to wade out the garbage, or are we as a public so aware of it now that we just simply write it off as “spin” and ignore it all? It’s hard to tell, especially when our base line may have actually been pre-spun for us too.

Stay alert Britain. This is a big one.

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?