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 20th
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
19th 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]
- - - - -
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 Crossfire and Hanity and Combs, shows whose primary appeal lies not in the light
cast upon issues, but rather in the heat sparked by the clash of personalities
between hosts and guests, and where shouting often obscures whatever serious
points might be raised within such a format.
Perhaps more disturbing, as noted above, journalists and
consultants often find themselves in ambiguous positions because of the
calculus of spinning. The necessarily cozy triangular relationship among
journalists, surrogate spinners, and political actors often works to the
detriment of politicians, with surrogates surreptitiously helping journalists
get unflattering stories about their political sponsors. However, politicians
are rarely in a position to know whether someone working for them because
journalists feel a strong professional incentive to protect sources has
betrayed them.[16]
Overall, there is very little accountability imposed on journalists, which
leads some scholars to ask the question: “Who elected them? And to whom are
journalists responsible?” (Cook, 1998: 167).
When is Spin
Not Spin?
Briefly,
spin is not spin when a person crosses the line between parsing and lying.
Lies, by definition, cannot be spin. However, the exponential and pervasive
deployment of spin creates a wide gray area that frequently tempts political
actors and journalists into falsehoods in the hopes that they can dress up
prevarications as spin. Two examples illustrate the range of problems that can
tempt political actors into crossing the line.
Bill Clinton’s fiery,
finger-thumping January 26, 1997 “I did not have sexual relations with that
woman” statement in the White House Roosevelt Room was a clear example of a lie
masquerading as spin. The politics that led Clinton are sufficiently well known
that need not exhaustively characterized. By 1997, Clinton had convinced
himself that lying was an acceptable tactic against a faction of the GOP that
was obsessed with his destruction.
A second example of a lie
masquerading as spin took place repeatedly during the opening months of George
W. Bush’s administration. Sensitive to mounting evidence of a recession and the
harsh medicine that would likely be required to combat it, Bush started
including in his fund raising speeches across the country a story that, when
questioned during the 2000 campaign whether he would ever consider running a
deficit or dipping into Social Security, he replied he would only do so in case
of war, recession, or national security. His applause line was “Never did I
dream we’d have a trifecta” (Editors, 2002D: 8). The problem, as The New
Republic editors have exhaustively pointed out, is that Bush never made
such a qualifying remark in any speech that any reporter recalls hearing. The
editors of The New Republic have repeatedly challenged the Bush
administration to show any videotape or recording to substantiate his claim.
Clinton’s non-spin took place
in a media swirl that no one could ignore. In contrast, Bush’s non-spin has
been taking place in small fund-raising venues before sympathetic audiences.
The discomfiting implication of these two instances of lies-qua-spin is
that lying about policy is more understandable – and hence more acceptable –
than lies about personal behavior. However, both instances of lies-qua-spin
indicate instances where political actors feel sufficiently threatened by an
issue or event that they feel compelled to prevaricate, and hope either that
the media will not discover the lie, or that the media will not have the will
to publicize the lie. Failing that, politicians must hope that voters will
forgive them.
Conclusion:
Is ‘Spin-Free’ Political Discourse Possible?
The problem of spin is much
like the problem of faction confronted by James Madison in Federalist 10. How can a democratic society prevent the wealthy and
powerful or the numerous and angry from exerting a disproportionate influence
over a polity’s discourse? Legally barring such behavior was a cure worse than
the disease. Madison’s answer lay in controlling the ability of factions to
completely dominate the institutions of government. Spin is a logical byproduct
of the inertia built into the American system of government.
If the arguments in this
essay have any validity, then the likelihood of banishing spin from American
political discourse is remote. Indeed, imagining a conversation about politics
that did not resort to some kind of spin-like rhetoric is to imagine a dull
conversation, held among people who do not care sufficiently about politics to
have arrived at a coherent set of beliefs, and hence make little effort to win
the argument. In an important sense, part of the reason for spin is that
politics is not simply a cooperative process of identifying public goods.
Politics is also about the distribution of scarce resources among people who
frequently have diametrically opposed ideas of what to do with those resources.
Spin is one set of tactics employed to win such arguments.
However, a spin-dominated political discourse has many
unfortunate implications. The damaged relationship between political actors and
the media has seriously impaired the ability of the media to act as a forum for
a mass public. Politicians increasingly rely on television to wholesale their
messages, and rely on spin to shorthand their views to the public. If the
present discursive norms were in place in 1787, The Federalist Papers would likely have been reduced to
catchphrases like “A federal government will bring peace and secure prosperity.
Do you want inflated prices and an ineffectual government? If so, stick with
the Articles of Confederation.” What made the ratification debates so important
was not the absence of hardball politics, of which there was plenty; rather,
the ratification debates offered testimony to the power of vigorous and
passionate public debate before an attentive citizenry.
The existence of journalistic spin should alert political
observers that the media is incompetent to adequately inform the public. Part
of the problem is that conducting campaigns through private media is
prohibitively expensive, and in the end favors the side with the most money.
While wealth is unconnected to the validity of a person’s ideology or policy
preferences, the reality established our jurisprudence is that persons with the
resources to hire lobbyists or make large campaign contributions can speak more
loudly than people who lack those resources.
The journalistic profession has materially
contributed to the intensification of spin (Bennett, 2001; Cook, 1998). The
question is whether the media’s culpability can be remedied, or whether
proposed solutions may prove to be worse than the cure. The problems
exhaustively chronicled by academics and journalists themselves should yield to
the recognition that the media simply cannot act as a reliable conduit of
information. In other words, citizens may find their information needs better
served by more explicitly partisan news outlets than a private for-profit media
whose independence is dubious and whose profit motives undermine their
credibility as conveyors of news. Far better to use the wealth of contributors
to fund liberal and conservative networks, rather than continue to rely on
‘neutral’ news coverage that often fails to meaningfully distinguish between
diametrically opposed partisans. Conservatives have already established
themselves in the news-dissemination business; rather than decry the influence
of FoxNews, liberals would likely be better off politically (and on firmer
constitutional grounds than campaign funding limits advocates) to seek funding
for a liberal media outlet.
In conclusion, one might argue that if spin is
inevitable, why not simply accept that spin is one of the ineluctable
byproducts of American institutions. However, to say that spin is inevitable is
not to say that a democratic society can long endure a political discourse where
political actors are unable or unwilling to communicate forthrightly with the
public. When spin becomes the currency of the realm, no one should be surprised
to find that what is bought is cynicism, apathy, and a jaded and unsatisfactory
political discourse.
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