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.
SPIN DOCTORATE 