Spinning Stories

At my brother’s suggestion, I recently devoured All The President’s Spin (2004) and enjoyed its rational, careful analysis of how the aesthetics of campaign rhetoric can operate as a form of political power – and how the Bush administration seems to have demonstrated a quantum leap in spin technique. It occurred to me that “spin” was a term that had crept up on me unnoticed; I don’t remember when I first heard it used, I’m not quite sure how long it’s been around, and for several years I’m quite sure I didn’t know what it meant. Now, like many an infectious meme, the concept of “spin” has proved far too useful to shake.

The Wikipedia’s entry on spin argues that the term signifies “a heavily biased portrayal in one’s own favor of an event or situation” designed to bring the spinner back on top. The label of “spin” implies that a source of information has been “disingenuous, deceptive and/or highly manipulative” in using tactics intended “to sway audiences away from widespread (and often commonsense) perceptions.”

The Online Etymology Dictionary (which notes the appearance of “spin doctor” during the Reagan presidency, in 1984) shows that the word comes from the Old English spinnan (twisting fibers into thread) and also implies stretching. Political spin, likewise, involves stretching facts and twisting them around each other to transform the thread of public discourse. Spin first meant “revolving” or “turning rapidly” in the 17th century; political spin certainly involves turning not only the facts around (to make them mean the opposite of what they appear to indicate by shifting their context) and disorienting the press and the public, but also a reversal of fortune in that negative data is re-worked in order to serve the argument that it initially appeared to refute. The goal of spin, after all, is to come out on top, no matter what the available information seems to indicate.

What fascinates me is how this tactic – and I enjoy how the excellent correspondents at Spinsanity manage to consistently treat “spin” as a tactic, not a condition – is often perceived as a state rather than a methodology. The emphasis, in other words, is on the pre-existing “bias” of the spin doctor, rather than on the feats of misdirection and illusionism that are required to make spin happen. (Note that bias, like spin, stems in part from language about the weaving and cutting of fabric – as does the word text, and, of course, fabrication).

But if one accepts bias as a fact of human nature – not insurmountable, of course, but nevertheless a basic tendency to look at the world from one’s own point of view (go figure) – then we can see a certain amount of “spin” in the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we’ve experienced. In the 12th century, Snorri Sturluson’s retelling of Norse myths preserves and re-uses a tactic favored by the Norse poets: the use of misdirection and deception, both as a plot device and a rhetorical strategy. His concept of poetry was deeply informed by this: poetry is a beautiful deception, a vastly creative construction: a distortion at best, and a fabrication at worst.

How is it that we have become such fundamentalists when it comes to story-telling that we expect reporters to be capable of conveying information without bias? Do we believe that their words can somehow provide an unadulterated access to the truth? Nor do I suggest that the existence of bias invalidates the concept of truth. Aristotle argued when he defended the value of poetry that many imitations of the truth can provide greater access to truth – through their compilation and comparison – than any one “authoritative” account might provide. I mean by all of this to suggest that our culture seems addicted to an almost unquestioned belief in pure information, as if information could exist independent of the story that shapes, conveys, and catalyzes it. David Mindich writes:

“… reporters, despite their claims to be ‘objective,’ did not (and do not) operate in a vacuum. This is what makes the information/story dichotomy so untenable: information cannot be conveyed without an organizing narrative, and stories cannot be told without conveying information.” (Just the Facts, 133).

Poets of other times knew this; the Northern skalds told a story that their audiences knew had been twisted and changed, to suit both the occasion and the audience. They told of how the world was created by ancient gods who could spin the world out of the “deceiving gap” that was before creation. They sang that their own words were borrowed or stolen; that their words, like the words of chieftains and even gods, should never be completely trusted. It was only in full knowledge that they were being, in some part, deceived by the poet that the audience could really play the game of meaning with him – and thereby absorb, with a skeptical ear and eye, the poet’s story in such a way that they could might glean some truth from it.

We, on the other hand, appear to have lost sight of both the unavoidable deception inherent among reporters – who use a ruthlessly minimal form of poetry, but poetry nonetheless – and their willingness, as well as our own, to be blatantly misled. It seems as if many reporters would remain blithely unaware of how their claims to objective transparency deny the power that they exert, particularly in constructing and perpetuating a particular bias.

Ultimately the worst sort of poet, it seems to me, is the one that claims that everyone else is doing the spinning. Such liars are dangerous: from their point of view, the world only revolves around them. We must also recall that no story can ever provide the complete and total truth. (If it could, it wouldn’t be a story – it would be reality itself.) By understanding the mechanisms of storytelling we can better perceive how a story has been spun – because all stories spin. It’s just that some poets are more honest about their alterations than others.