The Anatomy of Spin:

Causes, Consequences, and Cure

By:

Kenneth S. Hicks

Assistant Professor

Department of Social and Behavioral Science

Rogers State University

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Introduction

Over the past twenty years, media scholars noted an increasingly adversarial and tendentious tone to relationships between and among members of the media and elected officials and their representatives (Patterson, 1994; Fallows, 1997; Cook, 1998; Janeway, 1999: Bennett, 2001; Sabato, 2001). Given the critical role the media plays as conduit of information between governmental actors and the public, the possibility that the media-government relationship has become dysfunctional is particularly troubling (Cook, 1998; Janeway, 1999). As a result, an entire language has sprung into existence to describe the Byzantine world of political news journalism. This essay is devoted to explaining the meaning and consequences of ‘spin,’ one of the new concepts that capture the increasingly problematic relationship between politicians and journalists.

New words draw attention to important changes in an environment. Just as sociologists have noted the profligacy of adjectives for ‘ice’ in Aleut vocabulary, etymologists must concede to ‘spin’ its origins in the rough-and-tumble world of American politics. Since the word was first discussed by Nixon speech writer-cum-journalist William Safire in a 1986 New York Times column, spin has moved from an occupation (i.e. ‘spin doctor’) to an activity in campaign politics (i.e. ‘spin patrol’) to an ongoing governing activity with multiple actors. Spin also refers to a journalistic interpretation of ‘acceptable’ or ‘unacceptable’ public relations manipulations. In a sense, spin often stands as a sort of code word for demagoguery just short of propaganda. However, the generally pejorative connotation of spin also points to the increasingly problematic nature of contemporary political discourse, and the need for a reorientation of the relationship between political actors and journalists.

This essay takes on four interrelated tasks whose overall purpose is conceptual clarification. An important initial goal is to attempt to delineate the meaning of spin as a form of political behavior. From there, consideration of the structural features of American politics that have facilitated the growing utility of spin will highlight some of the enduring problems that exist in a democratic polity. Specific illustrations of spin as a political tactic further demonstrate the increasingly adversarial nature of politician-journalistic relations. A final question is whether a democratic society can have a genuinely ‘spin-free’ discourse; if so, the question then becomes why Americans leave it to journalists to determine whether a particular discourse is free of spin.

What is Spin?

Journalists and politicians generally know what they mean when they characterize a statement as spin; that is, they know what they judge as legitimate and illegitimate attempts to control a message or avoid political fallout. However, the rules differentiating ‘spin’ from other forms of communication, including garden-variety public relations and more overt forms of propaganda, are often obscure. However, two contexts can help to clarify the meaning of spin, and set the stage for further consideration of its proximate causes.

The first context is the electoral politics that led Safire to describe an activity as ‘spin.’ According to Safire’s Times column, spin derives from 1950’s slang ‘to deceive,’ which he hypothesized originated with the phrase ‘to spin a yarn.’ Safire further mused that spin has more recently become a noun, and that spin now means that a person has “angled” a story “to suit our predilections or interests.” Elaborating, Safire noted that the “phrase spin doctor was coined on the analogy of play doctor, one who fixes up a limping second act, and gains from the larcenous connotation of the verb doctor, to fix a product by way a crooked bookkeeper ‘cooks’ books” (Safire, 1986).

Safire attributes the first political usage of spin to Jack Rosenthal, who was deputy director of the New York Times editorial page. A Times editorial noted that immediately after the conclusion of the 1984 Reagan-Mondale debates “a bazaar will suddenly materialize in the press room… A dozen men in good suits and women in silk dresses will circulate smoothly among the reporters, spouting confident opinions” (Ibid). Implicit in this description is a journalistic disdain for what the media perceived as crude attempts by both campaigns to minimize the potential damage of any misstatement. Nonetheless, the high stakes of presidential politics led to spin’s widespread adoption; in time, spin’s acceptance among candidates and journalists became habituated. Indeed, the perceived need to disseminate and control one’s message has taken on a near fetishistic quality in contemporary politics (Cook, 1998).

Part of value of spin as part of the journalistic vocabulary is the independence it confers on the user. By alerting the viewer/reader that a political agent is engaging in ‘spin,’ the journalist is implicitly suggesting ‘that is not what I am doing.’ As will be noted below, the need of journalists to maintain in independent stance itself constitutes a version of spin.

Earlier scholarship began to track this movement in American politics. An important resource in that regard is The Image by Daniel Boorstin, a book published in 1962 that captured the growing prevalence of public relations efforts in politics. Boorstin invented the phrase pseudo-events to capture what he described as the “tantalizing difference between man-made and God-made events” (p 11). Although the concept was sufficiently scholastic and infelicitous to prevent widespread usage among journalists, the pseudo-event clearly stands as a progenitor of spin, and captures many of its central characteristics. Boorstin noted the following characteristics of pseudo-events:

1. It is not spontaneous, but comes about because someone has planned, planted, or incited it. Typically, it is not a train wreck or an earthquake, but an interview.

2. It is planted primarily (not always exclusively) for the immediate purpose of being reported or reproduced. Therefore, its occurrence is arranged for the convenience of the reporting or reproducing media. Its success is measured by how widely it is reported. Time relations in it are commonly fictitious or factitious; the announcement is given out in advance “for future release” and written as if the event had occurred in the past. The question “Is it real?” is less important than, “is it newsworthy?”

3. Its relation to the underlying reality of the situation is ambiguous. Its interest arises largely from this very ambiguity. Concerning a pseudo-event the question, “What does it mean?” has a new dimension. While the news interest in a train wreck is in what happened and in the real consequences, the interest in an interview is always, in a sense, in whether it really happened and in what might have been the motives. Did the statement really mean what it said? Without some of this ambiguity a pseudo-event cannot be very interesting.

4. Usually it is intended to be a self-fulfilling prophecy… (pp. 11-12).

To what extent do journalistic characterizations of spin reflect Boorstin’s criteria for pseudo-events? First, spin, like the pseudo-event, is not spontaneous, but results from the perceived need by a political actor to attract or deflect attention. In this sense, there are spinners (e.g. press secretaries, communication directors, and occasionally journalists themselves) and ‘spinnees’ (e.g. journalists, and, by extension, the attentive public). Second, spin is facilitated by the forum provided by the media; in particular, spin as a political strategy has benefited from the proliferation of cable television and specifically the rise of political talk shows, which offers a stage for the practitioners of spin. Third, spin constitutes a news event in itself; indeed, part of the political utility of spin is its ethereal, distracting quality. What makes political talk shows newsworthy is often the interplay among contending spinners -- and the collision of personalities -- rather than the substance of their remarks (what may be called the ‘Crossfire Effect).

Finally, spin emulates that part of pseudo-events that Boorstin likens to the ‘search for self-fulfilling prophecies’ (pp. 181-238). Boorstin identifies several characteristics of images that also reinforce the power of spin. First, images are “synthetic” or planned events (p. 185); similarly, campaign managers and political consultants plan and stage events to serve a specific purpose, and today presidents often move around the country with the primary purpose being to force the Washington press corps to follow them around to track their movements (Smith, 1996; Milbank, 2002A). The rise and pervasive use of ‘line of the day’ memos to would-be spinners is illustrative of the orchestrated nature of contemporary spin (Cook).

Second, Boorstin notes the importance of credibility for an image (Boorstin, p. 188). Likewise, spinner’s credibility derives from their ability to persuade and ‘make good copy.’ Credibility in circumstances characterized by spin is a complex phenomenon; while journalists expect political advisers and spokespersons to defend the elected officials for whom they work, journalists themselves derive credibility from establishing and maintaining the appearance of independence from a particular ideological or partisan perspective. An important corollary is that spin is not lying, an issue considered at greater length below.

Third, images are passive; as Boorstin puts it, an “image is a kind of ideal which becomes real only when it has become public” (p. 189). Practitioners of spin also aspire to such an ideal of passivity, seeking to present an audience with a prepackaged account of reality. Fourth, images are at once “vivid, simplified, and ambiguous.” According to Boorstin, images must be compelling enough to attract attention, simple enough for people to remember, yet sufficiently ambiguous that it “float[s] somewhere between the imagination and the sense, between expectations and reality” (p. 193). Likewise, the ambition of articulators of spin is to become “a receptacle of the wishes of different people” (p. 194). In other words, practitioners of spin want to give supporters a reason to believe in and support a cause in the face of unpleasant appearances.

Creating a perspicacious definition of spin is a more difficult task than it would appear. Succinct definitions ignore its dynamic qualities, while exhaustive definitions create conceptual vacuity that might include nearly all acts of political communication, including those forms of expression that are more clearly unacceptable.[1] Nonetheless, for the purposes of this essay, spin may be understood in the following sense:

Spin: attempts to reorient potentially embarrassing or ambiguous actions, (mis)statements, and/or circumstances in such a way as to deflect, minimize, or refute critical attention from a primary target (e.g. party, political actor, journalist or the journalistic profession).

The purposes of spin are many and constantly evolving. Spin can be proactive or reactive, can originate with a political actor or be carried out through surrogates, and can be a campaigning or governing activity (to the extent that the one set of political activities can be meaningfully extruded from the other). Indeed, spin often originates within the journalistic culture. One important thing to keep in mind is that spin is a discursive act that emerges from various actor’s perceived insecurities, and their attempts to sustain their influence and position within a system of separate institutions sharing – and often competing for -- power (Neustadt, 1960).

Causes of Spin

The wellsprings of spin are numerous. While its profligacy makes it unique to American politics, the activity characterized as spin is probably innate to the political process itself; if spin is nothing more than equivocation, then spin has probably existed as long as language itself. Factors unique to American politics encourage the kinds of behavior that legitimize and systematize spin as a political activity. I will suggest three factors that have facilitated the rise of spin as a political phenomenon: (1) the inevitability of spin as a natural, human response to the ambiguities of political contestation; (2) features of the American political system that encourage candidate-centered and personality-driven politics; (3) a First Amendment-protected media whose intimate and ambiguous relationship with political actors creates an often problematic and irresolvable tension.

Spin as a Product of Human Nature

In order to understand the phenomenon more fully, spin must be accepted as a ubiquitous feature of political discourse, regardless of culture. History is replete with examples of figures that, faced with seemingly damning circumstances, attempted to present the most flattering justification for their actions. For example, Alcibiades – who, when accused of impiety by his fellow Athenians fled to Athens’s rival Sparta, and advised them on how best to harm Athens – offered this subsequent ‘spin’ to his treasonous behavior: “The true patriot is not he who, when he has unjustly lost his country, abstains from attacking it, but he who, because of his longing for it, tries by all means to regain it” (Chroust, 1954: 283).

From there, a number of political preconditions appear necessary for spin to occur. A first prerequisite for spin is a minimally democratic polity. Dictators rarely attempt to justify themselves, and find repression to be a more reliable means of guiding the perceptions of their subjects. This is not to say that dictators have not frequently resorted to propaganda; indeed, some would say that totalitarianism would not be possible without propaganda augmented by modern communications technology (Davis, 2001: 2-3). However, the point remains that people who rely on force to maintain themselves in power rarely waste time in the kinds of parsing activities that characterize spin, and differentiate spin from overt propaganda.[2]

Second and related, spin demands the presence of a fully articulated and respected body of civil law. If dictators lack the motivation to employ spin, democratic leaders in a society with an explicit legal superstructure feel compelled to employ the kinds of punctilious legal observances that are often the principal wellspring of spin. Third, spin requires the presence of a politically consequential and independent media (The second and third points will be considered at greater length later in the section).

Spin initially emanates from a relatively simple psychological assumption of the human nature of political actors in a democratic polity: people want to be understood as they understand themselves. To that end, political actors with sufficient resources and sufficient motivation will resort to spin when confronted with less than flattering circumstances.

Spin and American Political Institutions

The nature of American politics and the shape of American political institutions contribute in important ways to the emergence of spin. First, two-party political systems appear to be more susceptible to spin than multi-party systems. Part of the reason is the mixed nature of rewards in a two-party system. The potential for coalitions in two-party systems is usually muted; most often, the motivations for the two parties are to persuade voters to continue voting for them, while attempting to persuade voters to reject the other party. The result is a Manichean political environment that facilitates eristic debate, fertile ground for spin. In contrast, the foundation of multi-party systems is coalition building, where an election-day opponent may become part of a governing coalition.[3] Both party systems require compromise in order to produce policy, but two-party politics often mutes the public nature of such compromises by hiding them in committee negotiations, thus enhancing the kinds of ‘Us-Them’ rhetoric that gives spin its clearest voice.

Second, presidential systems of government are more likely to produce divided government, and with it spin-driven conflict. In the United States, while the president is the head of government and the symbolic leader of his/her party, that leadership brings with it few of the kinds of control mechanisms that parliamentary systems extend to their leaders, especially in the areas of party discipline within Congress and candidate selection in the campaign process. President’s can use their authority to make personal appeals to congressional members on votes, but such appeals are rarely effective when members see following their leader as a threat to their electoral future, and have limited effect on legislative members from the other party. Likewise, presidents can raise money and campaign for their preferred candidates, but often find that their influence outside Washington wanes unless a nationalizing issue overlaps local concerns. In some districts, a visit by national politicians is harmful to their preferred candidate’s chances.[4] Especially in primary politics, intrusion by ‘outside forces’ can by viewed as intrusive and paternalistic, and hurt the chances of the president’s preferred candidate.

Third, the separated nature of power in American politics generates a vacuum into which spin often intrudes. The framers of the Constitution did not anticipate the formation of political parties, nor did they envision scenarios in which one party controlled the legislative and executive branches of government. In the absence of decisive governing coalitions,[5] presidents and legislators must identify policy options that give voters a reason to continue supporting their party while simultaneously intimating that they should reject incumbents of the other party. The resulting electoral minuet has no real analogue in parliamentary politics, and creates a broken field on which professional practitioners of spin can work to great advantage.

Fourth, non-ideological and anemic political parties give rise to candidate-centered, personality-driven campaigns and politics, allowing interest groups to play an enlarged role in political discourse. For example, strong parties are in a position to control candidate selection; in the U.S., Democratic and Republican leadership must often adopt positions of benign neutrality in primary battles that can exhaust and alienate the party faithful and sap the resources of the winners. In worst-case scenarios, having won a Pyrrhic primary victory, bloodied candidates often find that the promises made in the primary leave them exposed in the general election to attacks that they are the captives of their party’s most extreme supporters which is often electoral death in American campaign politics, where voters cherish moderate and/or independent candidates. Such leadership-in-name-only creates a very precarious governing environment. The resulting divided government spurs political actors (e.g. presidents) to ever-greater efforts to dictate the terms of political discourse, and stimulates emulation by rival political actors. As Stephen Hess noted of the intensely political nature of the Bush presidency during the 2002 midterm elections, “When one seat can make the difference between divided and unified government, that’s a big incentive” for Bush to raise the stakes, and risk his personal popularity campaigning across the country in the final weeks of the election (Allen, 2002: A08).

Many scholars argued that personality politics is the wellspring of spin, and emerged from the Byzantine manipulations of the Reagan administration. However, a case can be made that something similar to spin began taking shape in the activities of the 20^th century’s earlier Great Communicator, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. For example, Boorstin notes that Roosevelt was among the first political leaders in American politics to mold the news cycles to his own purposes:

F.D.R. was a man of great warmth, natural spontaneity, and simple eloquence, and his public utterances reached the citizen with a new intimacy. Yet, paradoxically, it was under his administration that statements by the President attained a new subtlety and a new calculatedness. On his production team, in addition to newspapermen, there were poets, playwrights, and a regular corps of speech writers. Far from detracting from his effectiveness, this collaborative system for producing the impression of personal frankness and spontaneity provided an additional subject of newsworthy interest. Was it Robert Sherwood or Judge Samuel Rosenman who contributed this or that phrase? How much had the President revised the draft given him by his speech-writing team? Citizens became nearly as much interested in how a particular speech was put together as in what it said. And when the President spoke, almost everyone knew it was a long-planned group production in which F.D.R. was only the star performer (p. 21).

What makes Roosevelt’s machinations a progenitor of spin is the erosion of the distinction between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ news: policy debate is increasingly reduced to speculation over tactics of ‘the line of the day’ and authorship of a particular soundbite, or who generated the latest iteration of a stump speech journalists have heard at every stop. Tactics and performance, rather than platforms and issues, become the linchpin of political success, and widen the distance between ‘Beltway Culture’ and citizens. Today, the once comfortable distinction between ‘tabloid journalism’ and ‘professional’ reportage has blurred in ways not approached since the era of yellow journalism in the late 19^th century (Fallows, 1997: 184).

Spin and the American Media Establishment

The media, as noted above, plays a decisive role in the generation of spin. The media in the United States is at once more independent from and less accountable to political authority than in other industrial democratic states. In part, this paradoxical circumstance is the result of constitutional design, and in part is the result of the commercial evolution of the news media.

Freedom of the press may not be a uniquely American ideal, but no other nation has taken freedom of the press to such extremes. While most democracies pay lip service to the idea of a free and open press, none but the United States has connoted ‘freedom of the press’ with a literal separation of the news media from the state.[6] In the absence of such constitutional strictures, states have felt free to run state-owned news services that effectively truncate the free market operation of information gathering and disseminating industries. In the United States, the press evolved initially as a party-organ, but by the 1830’s had mutated into an independent entity that tied profitability to a growing professional commitment to a stance of political independence (Schudson, 1978).

The commitment to freedom of the press is often cherished in theory but excoriated in practice. The United States is the exception that proves the rule. The rare instances where the American press has been subjected to regulation have occurred during times of national emergencies, and since WWI have occurred with much less frequency than in other democratic nations. The federal judiciary’s ‘strict scrutiny’ standard applied to states attempting to restrain First Amendment rights has generally insured that the media’s right to publish controversial or embarrassing information remains essentially unchecked.

Supreme Court decisions have helped shape American media in ways that have contributed to the evolution of spin. No case greater illustrates the legal instantiation of spin than Sullivan v. New York Times (1963). In Sullivan, the Court established the standard of ‘actual malice’ necessary for public figures to sustain a libel verdict. Mere misstatements cannot constitute libel under the ‘actual malice’ standard; rather, litigants must prove that journalists made character-harming misstatements with malicious intent. Such a high standard of proof has not prevented political actors from at times using litigation as an effective threat,[7] particularly in local politics, where small newspapers lack the financial resources for extended litigation. However, the evolution toward ‘pack journalism’ and ‘feeding frenzy’ reporting often leave libeled politicians the choice of suing reporters backed by powerful media corporations or doing nothing in the hope that the offending story will die quickly. Thus far, political actors faced with such a stark choice have opted to do nothing, perhaps realizing that the courts would have little enthusiasm for litigation touching so clearly on First Amendment freedoms. As a result, journalistic standards have descended toward the level of the tabloids, resulting in the publication of mere rumor by attribution with tabloids often breaking news (Sabato, 2000: 100-102).

Buckley v. Valeo (1986) is another decision that has had a sweeping impact on political campaigns, and inadvertently facilitated spin-dominated discourse. In the Buckley decision, the Court accepted limits on political party’s spending, but not individual spending by candidates themselves. Political parties have been weakened by Buckley, and will be weakened further still by the McCain-Feingold Act. Candidate’s reliance on television advertising to reach as wide an audience as possible has dramatically increased the cost of campaigning, and expanded the influence of interest groups and wealthy contributors. The attempts by political actors implicated in these access-for-contributions relationships constitute an entire chapter in the evolution of spin.

The commercial evolution of the media in the U.S. has furthered the proliferation of spin. James Fallows, for example, has effectively chronicled the growth of the ‘punditocracy’ and the misguided incentives under which contemporary political journalists operate. The ambitions of journalists today lead them less toward a posting in the White House press corps or a byline with the New York Times, but rather toward achieving sufficient notoriety on the television talk shows to command lucrative speaking fees on the lecture circuit. The kinds of performances that television values and rewards (e.g. the capacity to make statements that are at once clever, sweeping, simplistic, and controversial)[8] are often directly at odds with the values of professional reportage, and create a capricious environment where political actors feel compelled to make increasingly dramatic statements simply to gain attention (Fallows, 1997: 74-128). The attempt to pursue a political agenda in such a frenzied atmosphere naturally results in frequent miscalculations that journalists quickly (and at times, accurately) denounce as spin. American legal traditions have firmly ensconced a privately owned, for-profit media. The consequence of this commitment is a media whose primary objective is profit-driven, motivations that do not often lend themselves to educative tasks, an essential justification for the First Amendment. Media programming is generally more committed to entertaining than to providing citizens with the kind and quality of information needed to make informed decisions. Indeed, many media executives display evidence of real cynicism, stating, in effect, ‘we are simply giving the public what it wants’ (Bennett, 2001: 89-100).

In addition, modern journalism’s commitment to an ideal of independence and partisan neutrality often produces political coverage that has the dubious distinction of being at once anti-political and vacuous (Sabato, 2000; Fallows, 1997). A recent consequence is the creation of ‘journalistic spin,’ which will be analyzed in the next section.

The advent of the Internet has served to intensify spin in numerous ways. Howard Kurtz notes that through the 1980’s, only three newspapers had national circulations (Kurtz, 1994: 44). Today, most newspapers and television stations have free Internet sites. Political parties and interest groups have quickly followed suit, and most federal campaigns have online strategies designed to quickly respond to opponent’s attacks or media criticism, a rapid-fire evolution of Clinton’s ‘War Room’ strategy (Stephanopoulos, 1999: 86-91). As Internet use has spread from affluent to middle-class citizens, its democratizing potential brings with it greater opportunities to employ spin.

To summarize, spin, while not unique to American politics, is not so ubiquitous in other nations as to merit its own word. In American political discourse, part of spin’s novelty is its constantly evolving nature. As noted above, spin began as primarily a campaign related activity, and while confined to the stump or the halls of Congress, its excesses explained if not excused. However, spin has since burst through the confines of Washington, blurring the lines between election year rhetoric and ‘nuts and bolts’ governance, and become the currency of a ‘permanent campaign’ (Ornstein and Mann, 2000).

Spin 2002

Attempts to categorize spin are fraught with difficulties, not the least being the dynamic and evolving quality of politicians’ public relations efforts. Nonetheless, spin falls into a relatively discrete set of easily comprehended categories. An initial distinction is between political and journalistic spin. The purposes of journalistic spin are sufficiently distinctive to require treating it as a separate phenomenon: journalists do not simply label the statements of politicians as ‘spin,’ but also engage in discursive activities whose intent is to advance journalistic objectives, which will be considered below.

Political Spin

Political spin is a multifarious activity. One possible formulation of political spin revolves around the following questions: Who is spinning? What is the political intent behind the spinning? Analysis of these questions yields a four-part typology.

	First Person	Surrogate
	I	III
Offensive	II	IV

The person engaged in spin provides an important orientational cue. As individuals become more politically powerful and influential, they are correspondingly more inclined to have surrogates do their spinning for them, and will only resort to first-person spin when the stakes are high and circumstances demand it. Part of the problem for influential actors, especially presidents, is that first-person spin brings greater risk than leaving such public relations tasks to surrogates.

Spin usually serves two strategic, interrelated purposes. Defensive Spin includes all attempts to recast or redefine an unfavorable set of circumstances to encourage viewing them in a more favorable (or at least more understandable and hence palatable) light. Offensive Spin involves attacking or the strategic use of anger as a means of either immobilizing opponents who would otherwise be in a position to capitalize on embarrassing circumstance (i.e. ‘the best defense is a good offense’) or, alternatively, to immobilize journalists by raising the costs of pursuing an aggressive line of questioning.[9]

Examples of these categories of spin abound in recent political discourse:

First-Person Defensive (F-P-D) Spin. This category of spin refers to attempts by a primary political actor to resort to personal explanations as a means of recovering support lost by an embarrassing circumstance. Politicians forced to resort to F-P-D spin attempt to create a controlled and staged event: a press conference, or a televised interview with a selected journalist with pre-screened questions. Studies indicate that for personal appeals can be effective (Robertson and Burgess, 1970), but a number of factors will influence the success of F-P-D spin, including:

Pre-event name recognition (district, state-wide, national);

‘Positive/negative’ perceptions’ among voters;

The nature of the event in question (private vs. public infraction; culpable malfeasance vs. merely embarrassing situation or statement, etc.);

The intensity of the news cycle.

Recent political memory offers numerous instances of F-P-D spin (e.g. ‘I am not a crook,’ ‘I didn’t inhale,’ ‘It depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is,’ etc.), most of which suggest that primary actors should avoid being compelled to make such statements whenever possible. Perhaps the most infamous recent instance of a failed F-P-D spin was Gary Condit’s disastrous interview with Connie Chung. Condit’s attempts at spin failed miserably for a number of reasons, including:

A poor public relations strategy (saying nothing to the media for nearly two months, and then belatedly attempting to ‘clear the air’ without giving away any details of his relationship with the missing intern Chandra Levy);

The perception among the media that Condit had a ‘Gary Hart’ problem (womanizing).

A slow news cycle (summer with little hard political news for journalists to report);[10]

Poor pre-event name recognition (members of the House outside the leadership are rarely well known).

First-Person Offensive (F-P-O) Spin. Offensive spin typically involves attempting to change the subject, either by questioning the credibility of persons attacking, or by attacking the media in an attempt to raise the perceived stakes of pursuing a line of questioning a politician clearly indicates is out of bounds. Politicians, however, can rarely afford to pick fights with journalists, given the mutual needs of both sides (Graber, 1997: 279).

Typically, F-P-O spin takes the form of calculated outbursts of anger directed at reporters following up on a politically embarrassing or damaging event. Given the high costs associated with alienating reporters, the intent behind F-P-O spin is frequently to head off ‘feeding frenzies,’ where reporters engage in pack questioning of the same incident that dominates news cycles and can destroy politician’s careers (see Gary Condit). For example, W. Lance Bennett has noted that instances of truculence can help politicians with an easy-going reputation (Bennett, 2001: 256-257).

A recent and complex example of F-P-O spin was Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle’s angry speech from the Senate floor on September 25, 2002, denouncing a Bush campaign speech he and Democrats perceived as politicizing the war effort (Loughlin, 2002; Sisk, 2002). Daschle was especially angry at a line in a Bush speech given in New Jersey that concluded, “The Senate is more interested in special interests in Washington and not interested in the security of the American people.” Daschle declared that the remark was “outrageous,” that neither party should seek to create a political advantage from the war on terrorism, and that the President ought to apologize to those Democratic members who had fought for their country. Senate Republicans immediately attempted to respond, questioning whether it was Bush or Daschle who was politicizing the issue, and Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer attempted to defuse the issue at a press conference, remarking, “Now is a time for everybody concerned to take a deep breath” (Sisk).

Daschle’s behavior is actually a complex example of F-P-O spin. On the one hand, Daschle’s anger at Bush’s impugning the patriotism of Senate Democrats illustrates one of the chief virtues of F-P-O spin; for a day, Daschle’s outburst blunted Republicans’ efforts to make the midterm campaign about homeland security. On the other hand, Daschle’s long term hopes proved largely ineffectual: Bush did not apologize, Republicans continued to campaign on the issue, and ultimately several vulnerable Democratic senators – especially Missouri’s Jean Carnahan and Georgia’s Max Cleland – were defeated by opponents who received heavy campaign support from Bush and the GOP National Committee, who made the Senate’s failure to pass a homeland security bill a major issue in attack advertisements.

Several factors weigh in the decision by primary political actors to employ F-P-O spin, including:

The nature of the politician-media relationship;

The intensity of the news cycle and media estimations of the size of the story;

The possible calculation of ‘scandal fatigue’ among viewers;

Daschle failed largely because people were willing to accept the GOP’s politicization of the issue. Daschle’s criticisms failed to persuade either the voters or the Bush administration that such politicization was unfair. Within a few days, the media returned to its preoccupied with the campaign, and Democratic complaints of unfairness were lost in the horserace.

Surrogate Defensive (S-D) Spin. The use of proxies to defend the actions of a political actor or administration – previously a sporadic tactical maneuver reserved for crucial moments – has in past ten years become basic feature of contemporary political discourse. To illustrate, in 2002 the Bush administration launched a number of well-coordinated public relations campaigns employing the disciplined use of surrogates, the first to refute the idea that going to war with Iraq was an attempt to shift the tone of midterm elections (Hirsh, 2002; Milbank, 2002; Solomon, 2002), and the second to engage the entire executive branch in the campaign (Allen, 2002).

The surrogate spin campaign on Iraq began inauspiciously, when comments by Karl Rove, a top Bush political adviser, and Andrew Card Jr., Bush’s chief of staff, each indicated that war with Iraq should become a principal plank of the GOP midterm election efforts.[11] The Bush administration discipline regarding leaks is already widely noted, but the administration spent time early on attempting to minimize perceived ‘Hawk-Dove’ conflicts within the administration and the GOP at-large (Hirsh, 2002; Saleton, 2002). Many observers argued that Democrats were lulled into accepting Iraq as a campaign issue, thinking that Bush’s inexperience would create confusion within the administration that would work to Democrat’s advantage. In the end, Democratic leader’s quiescence on Iraq became a powerful campaign issue that worked to many Democratic candidates’ disadvantage in the midterms, and allowed Bush to be one of only three incumbent presidents in last 100 years to avoid losing seats in midterm elections.[12]

Republican pre-election spin on the midterms came from Ken Mehman, White House political director, who sought to lower expectations by concluding that if the GOP was successful in holding the House and winning back the Senate, “we would make history by defying history” (Bumiller and Nagournney, 2002). Democrats like former chief of staff John Podesta countered by claiming that Bush could have taken the high road, but that instead “he is out there in the dirt with the candidates,” (Bumiller and Nagourney, 2002). Republican strategists, in hindsight, correctly calculated that Bush’s involvement in the campaign would cost little, and that the benefits far outweighed any perceived disadvantages.[13]

In the weeks leading up to the midterms, the Bush administration took advantage of the loosening of the Hatch Act to solicit the full support of the executive branch on behalf of GOP candidates. Members of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) were sent a memo reminding them that federal employees “are permitted to take an active part in partisan political management and campaigns” (Allen, 2002: A08). When Democrats questioned these activities, White House communications director Dan Bartlett claimed that “The president is the leader of the Republican Party and he’s doing everything he can to help elect people who share his agenda… It’s totally appropriate to allow people to participate in the political process” (ibid). Thus, where Democrats viewed these activities as ‘politicizing policy implementation’ Republicans defended them as ‘encouraging participation.’

Surrogate Offensive (S-O) Spin. Proxies can also go on the offensive in spin wars. The above-mentioned ‘wag-the-dog’ controversy enabled Bush supporters to attack Democrats. For example, spokespersons like White House press secretary Ari Fleisher lashed out at Democrats’ ‘wag-the-dog’ insinuations, declaring, “Even the suggestion that the timing of something so serious could be done for political reasons is reprehensible” (Milbank: A01).

Another example of the aggressive strains of S-O spin are the GOP’s attempts to deflect or deprive Democrats of Social Security as a campaign issue. Paul Krugman, an op-ed writer for the New York Times and harsh critic of George W. Bush’s administration, quotes a GOP National Campaign Committee memo which declares “It is very important that we not allow reporters to shill for Democrat demagoguery by inaccurately characterizing ‘personal accounts’ and ‘privatization’ as one and the same” (Krugman, 2002). Realizing how unpopular privatizing Social Security was among older voters, Republicans embarked on a strategy whose goal was to “mau-mau reporters out of using the word ‘privatization’ in this context” (Ibid). Many incumbent GOP candidates in the midterms sought to preemptively inoculate themselves from the issue by airing personal issue advertisements disavowing any intention of cutting Social Security benefits or seeking privatization.[14]

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To summarize, most varieties of ‘real-world’ spin are combinations of the above categories. As the Daschle example above suggests, frequently spin simultaneously serves offensive and defensive purposes. Additionally, W. Lance Bennett suggests that the relationship between primary actors and surrogates deserves serious analysis. At times, intimate relationships between surrogates and journalists trump surrogate’s relationships with the person for whom they are spinning. According to Bennett, “the new coziness results in a potentially unsavory mix of news spin calculated to balance a client’s immediate interests with the sometimes conflicting interests of other clients, and with the consultant’s own reputation as an insider with whom reporters want to do business (Bennett, 2001: 159).

Journalistic Spin

Journalistic spin is less apparent but more insidious than political spin. After all, the psychological motivations of political spin are self-evident: parties and politicians use spin as a semi-legitimate tactic in a twilight struggle to seize the political initiative. In contrast, journalists seemingly have little incentive to spin, so long as we understand spin as a primarily political activity. More to the point, journalists have little incentive to spin so long as we conceptualize the media as occupying a non-political role as a disinterested chronicler of political happenings and as government watchdog.

Recent scholarship has increasingly challenged this view of the media as a non-political private enterprise with independent political responsibilities.[15] Investigations of the media’s role in politics has yielded a number of conclusions, ranging from conspiratorial views of the media as an indoctrinator of the dominant economic class (e.g. Parenti) to the media as increasingly concentrated in its ownership, and hence limited in the views that are distributed (e.g. Bagdikian) to the media as an innately political institution whose ability to act as a neutral forum for political discourse is increasingly undermined by its commercial imperatives (e.g. Cook). Add to that conservative complaints of an incipient liberal bias in journalistic coverage of politics, and a picture emerges of the media as an institution occupying dangerously ambiguous ground. The result is a political institution disguised as an industry whose competence to provide the detailed, issue-centric coverage necessary for a democratic citizenry to make consequential decisions is dubious, and whose accountability within the framework of a democratic society is uncertain.

Journalistic spin is primarily a tactic of deflection, designed to avoid the perception that a media actor has violated norms of objectivity. A second motivation for journalistic spin lies in the reward structure of contemporary reportage. Call the first manifestation objective spin, and call the second manifestation bloviating spin. Each variety of spin serves the overarching purpose of maintaining the image of the media as gatekeeper/watchdog while often serving to further individual journalist’s careers, with the added consequence of sterilizing media coverage of politics.

Objective spin serves to deflect criticism from political actors, who complain about a left- or rightward tilt to media coverage. Journalists seek out stories that facilitate the view of the media as an independent and impartial forum. One of the most intensively employed varieties of objective spin during election campaigns is ‘horserace coverage’; using public opinion surveys, journalists report on ‘who is winning, who is losing, who is gaining ground etc.’ (Sabato, p. 35). The virtue of the horserace format is that journalists occupy the role of a seemingly disinterested announcer, excited by the atmosphere and drama of the race (Bennett, 2000). The midterm elections of 2002 offered a new variation on horserace coverage: with VNS unable to iron technical problems with its exit polling models, the major networks were not in a position to call many of the major races. As with Florida in the 2000 elections – but without the mortifying mistakes that cast doubt on the media’s competence – the 2002 midterm elections created a new ‘race’ drama: election as down-to-the-wire marathon, which no doubt enhanced network ratings.

Another important version of objective spin is the ‘gridlock’ story format. Focusing stories on congressional conflict offers the media the opportunity to decry divided government while appearing above the fray. A Jack Shafer posting on Slate’s Internet site meditates on certain reporter’s penchant for condemning gridlock. For a certain group of journalists:

blocking legislation is partisan and awful while passing legislation – no matter how ill-conceived – is nonpartisan and wonderful. [Journalists] imagines the House and Senate as legislative factories that should be judged by the same metrics the Soviets would apply to a steel mill: Never mind the quality or whether or not there’s a demand. How much did it produce last year? Not much? Then, let’s shake up management! (Shafer, 2002).

The gridlock framework enables journalists to criticize political actors without seeming partisan, but one consequence of this narrative framewok is to pass along a profoundly simplistic and dangerously anti-political attitude to the viewing public, who increasingly reflect this dissatisfaction in public opinion surveys.

Bloviating spin reflects the growing popularity of the proliferating shows in which journalists interview other journalists on television (examples include Face the Nation, Meet the Press, Cross-Fire, The Capital Gang, The McCloughlin Group, Hanity and Combs, etc.). Program hosts’ set up their interviewees – usually ‘celebrity reporters’ like Cokie Roberts or George Stephanopoulos – who then proceed to offer whichever witticisms brought them to the set (Shafer). Bloviation has been facilitated by the popularity of adversarial talk shows like Cro