The spin doctors

It is therefore important that news be filtered to the electorate not as the presentation of facts, but rather dressed and advertised by the sales people of political “goods”. The British gave these a name: the spin doctors. These replaced the old-fashioned “adviser” sometimes taken on as a “consultant” for this or that political project. Every government and indeed every political party in a democracy needs to inform the public.

Few governments, even those with a reputation of authoritarianism and clandestinity, can avoid the imperative of producing information. Information officers, a ministry concerned with getting out news releases, press attach?s exist in every government as part of the bureaucracy. The spin doctors exist between these and the public. They mediate, select and package news so that policies seem so logical, necessary and, if possible, non-partisan, that they are accepted.

The sociologist Fran?ois Bourricaud argued that certain power relations force compromises which must be hidden from the non-initiated. These compromises are meant not to be understood or unearthed by delving journalists. It is Panday’s “politics has a morality of its own.”

It may well be that the network of compromises hidden within the PP’s Fyzabad agreement permitted a common electoral front in a highly segmented society. These compromises have now largely surfaced and become known or suspected by the non-initiated within and outside of the parties of the coalition. The problem of coalition politics has followed.

Marketing the news

Turn on the television. Try to disentangle what is information and what is spin; what is news and what is subtle political advertisement. This ranges from the provision of water to Rowley on Carnival day, from budget figures to charity presentations, to this or that institution or icon.

It is not only the advertising firms. Marketing techniques are now part of political science. This is less and less the old politics, philosophy and economics of Oxford, Cambridge or Manchester. It is now, above all, polling. This is the use of sophisticated marketing techniques in order to predict the result of elections or the acceptance or rejection of this or that policy.

This became important in France only at the end of the 1960s. It was introduced by Stone in Jamaica around 1971 and was introduced here by Selwyn Ryan in 1976.

In some countries polling exists as only one of the strands of political science. In addition, political science often exists alongside philosophy, history as a social science and more clearly the sociology of politics. In TT the political usefulness of polling and its financial possibilities is gradually chasing out political science as that critical analysis of politics associated with “mature” democracies.

Spin and packaging

Spin doctoring, advertisements and the use of targeted polling is not only true of Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s UNC. It was there with the modernising NAR, with Manning’s PNM and incipiently there in Eric Williams’ choice of CLR James as the editor of the PNM newspaper.

It is certainly not true only of TT. Who can forget Alistair Campbell as the major spin doctor for Tony Blair or Karl Rove for George Bush, Jacques Pilhan for Fran?ois Mitterand and then for Jacques Chirac, or the mixture of spin doctoring and newspaper editor placed at Cameron’s doorstep. And who can forget the story of the influence reputedly exercised by a crazy Orthodox monk on a Czarina of Russia.

The first qualification needed to be a spin doctor is to gain confidence. Firstly of the employer and then of the public or a segment of the public. It is in this segmentation of a public that the pollster may be useful to the spin doctor. All that is then needed is to present the “message” according to how it is likely to be accepted by this or that public. Or to limit the unfavourable impact of this or that action or statement and to pass it to some overworked journalist or well-known purveyor of gossip.

Whatever of past politicians the spin doctoring today has invaded every section of information. “Packaging” now includes how a President combs his or her hair to a remake of his or her public persona. Who believes in the sincerity of a calypsonian after the turnaround and “bounce back” of a Sugar Aloes? Or does not look carefully at churchmen after the Christmas three hundred million goodies? Or believe a Government spokesman after the present Creed affair? It is this spin more than anything else which has discredited today’s governments and politicians.

Marion O’Callaghan,

Social anthropologist,

formerly Director of Social Science Programmes, UNESCO