Old spin, new spin
by Stephen Gardner
[ politics | opinion - october 03 ]
Spin is dead. Well not really, but it has taken a battering. Tony Blair's WMD debacle and the spin-stripping Hutton Inquiry have seen to that. The media - at least the BBC - has also been severely compromised, leading to a general period of soul searching over how politics is communicated and reported.
But if spin has been discredited, what comes next? A golden era of straight talking politicians and honest reporters telling it like it is seems unlikely. In fact the crisis of spin has been brought about not so much by the immediate events surrounding the Iraq war - though these have brought the issue into the spotlight - but rather by more deep-rooted changes to the media landscape. It is here that clues to the future can be found.
Spin is essentially a technique of political communication invented for the twentieth century model of the mass media. Its roots can be traced back even before that - Napoleon had a Bureau of Public Opinion. But it was between the two World Wars that spin was really pioneered. Nazi propagandist-in-chief Joseph Goebbels harnessed the power of the emerging mass media, especially radio and cinema, to promote his venal creed.
His techniques were refined in post-war America, in particular from the 1952 presidential campaign onwards, as documented by Vance Packard in his now sadly overlooked book The Hidden Persuaders. In 1952, Packard notes, the Democrats 'took a shellacking' after Eisenhower's Republicans brought professional propagandists into their inner circle for the first time. Later, Bill Clinton and his spin doctor-in-chief James Carville mentored Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson as they re-invented the Labour Party.
In the twenty-first century, however - as Blair has discovered to his cost - the traditional model of spin is increasingly out of date. The mass media, for which spin was invented, has been in decline for years. Newspaper readerships have fallen steadily over the last few decades. The television audience has been fragmented by the arrival of a bewildering array of new satellite, cable and digital channels. The most important development is the emergence of the Internet, which allows citizens to make their own choices from a vast global media candy shop.
'Old' spin has been made redundant by new technology. How can New Labour effectively spin to British Muslims who take their news from Al-Jazeera on the Internet? In the US, meanwhile, during the Iraq war, sceptical Americans fed up with the restrictively patriotic media line in their homeland simply directed their Internet browsers at alternative sources such as The Guardian.
Two examples from the Iraq war controversy illustrate how the Internet spells the death of spin. Tony Blair's February 2003 'dodgy dossier' was largely plagiarised from an online article and was almost immediately exposed by a mouse-wielding academic and his trusty search engine. The Hutton Inquiry, meanwhile, has released an unprecedented selection of government documents direct to the public via the Internet, an implicit recognition of the power of this new medium to rise above spin.
Consideration of changes to the media landscape gives some interesting indications for the future. Successful 'old' spin controlled the government-citizen relationship by managing what went into newspapers and thus determining the framework within which people's political decisions were made. Various techniques were employed to this end, from careful control of the information flow by restricting journalistic access and keeping everyone 'on message', to bullying and threats if the media stepped over the line.
The new digital communication landscape, however, gives the government the opportunity to cut out the media and talk to the citizen directly. One manifestation of this is initiatives such as the Hutton Inquiry - a vast amount of information publicly released and enabling anyone who can be bothered to wade through it to make up their own mind independently of the opinions of pesky journalists. Another development is the growth of e-government - government services delivered online straight to voters' desktops.
Potentially, these new developments can safeguard and even extend democracy by making government more transparent. In the very near future, come election time, voters will be able to compare party manifestos online, perhaps using some kind of software to 'score' different policies (possibly in the manner of Internet sites such as www.amihotornot.com). Votes will be cast online, and four years later voters will be able to search the archive to find out if the elected party kept its promises - and send an email direct to the Prime Minister if they didn't. It will all be done in a streamlined way saving paper, postage stamps and postmen's backs.
But there is also a dark side. A more direct relationship between government and citizens gives the government more power to control the information it puts out. Proliferation of the Internet offers vast opportunities for monitoring online behaviour, for collecting vast amounts of data and for profiling and categorising anything and everything. Calls to use digital technologies to these ends are already being heard, with police chiefs wanting DNA databases covering everyone in the country and David Blunkett's determination to introduce an ID card.
Ironically, as the relationship between government and citizens changes, offering the authorities the chance to cut out the mediating influence of the media and speak directly to citizens, there is a greater need than ever for the media to play a strong role. The new digital media landscape contains both opportunities and threats for democracy. In the spin-free future, government will need to be scrutinised as never before.
