I’m making an attempt to define ‘spin’ as I was called a ‘spin doctor’ today and felt pretty annoyed, although I realised that some people may see it as a compliment! And I am sure they didnt think I was a member of the New York band!
‘Spin’ is a pejorative term (isn’t it?) signifying a heavily biased favourable portrayal of an event or situation. Leach in “Exploring Public Relations” defines ‘spin’ as: “…attempts by politicians and their advisers to put their own selective interpretation on news stories…” which he identifies as leading to public cynicism and distrust of government.
Exploring PR
The origins of the term, may go back to the phrase ’spinning a yarn’ which seems to have originated with sailors telling ‘tall’ stories. Bagnall wrote in The Independent on Sunday back in 1996 that the origin of the term could have begun with baseball whether the pitcher attempts to disguise the delivery of the throw. It began to be used in a political and promotional context in the late 1980s, originally in the US then also in the UK.
The effects of ‘spin’ in the UK have been written about in the context of the election campaign of 1997, although it is widely acknowledged that the earlier Conservative government used ‘spin’ too. Stuart Ewen argues in “PR! A Social History of Spin” that political spin grew out of the presidential campaigns in the US and was adapted through the corporate use of PR through the early exponents in the ‘20s and ‘30s such as Bernays.
The ethics around the use of persuasion by PR practitioners have not been fully resolved in my opinion. In his discussion about negative political campaigning, Drew Westen in “The Political Brain”
The Political Brain
attempts to define when campaigning goes beyond acceptable ethical standards as:” A candidate or party that is willing to practice the “politics of personal destruction”, showing no concern about who is destroyed in the process, lacks the normal capacity for conscience that is a prerequisite to participatory democracy”.
George Pitcher writing as a journalist (and also the founder of an issues management agency), about a ‘spin-culture’, describes it as “…both a product of the society in which we live and a replacement for engagement with real issues – a triumph of presentation over content, that values how we are perceived rather than how we behave or what we believe”. He argued that “You no longer argued about an issue. You argued about a position”. Pitcher is also well aware of the irony of his own name in any discussion around spin!
In my opinion, ‘spin’ is one of the tools or techniques of propaganda and operates as a one-way communication seeking to give a distorted or highly favourable interpretation or events or news. It has become a negative force in the reputation of PR and PR practitioners – hence my dislike for being called a spin doctor! It has also damaged the credibility of politicians and is a contributing factor to the public’s discontent with politics in the UK and USA.
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