In Depth
Spin Cycles
Spinning into the 21st century: Episode 6
The sixth part of a series about spin, the spinners and the spun by Ira Basen for CBC Radio's The Sunday Edition
Originally broadcast February 23, 2007
CBC News
The dawn of the internet age poses significant new challenges for the press and PR. Will either even matter any longer in a world where people can create their own media. What will be the future of spin?
This program features three interviews with people whose backgrounds make them unlikely crusaders for their various causes. But crusaders they definitely are…
Death of Spin
George Pitcher is an unlikely person to have written a book called The Death of Spin. The former industrial editor of the Observer newspaper, Pitcher left journalism in 1991 to found the PR firm of Luther Pendragon, which grew to be one of Europe's leading PR agencies. He left in 2006 to become a minister in the Church of England. Pitcher's critique of what he calls "spin culture" is an attack on the secular, individualistic, atavistic society spawned by the free-market ideology of Thatcherism in the 1980s, and boosted by the spin-saturated decade of New Labour. Pitcher believes the spin culture has now run its course, but admits "the death of spin" is taking a lot longer than he had anticipated. He is an interesting and original thinker. You can read part of our interview here.
Julia Hobsbawm has an unlikely pedigree for a public relations practitioner. Her father is the noted Communist and Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm. But his daughter has established herself as one of Britain's top PR practitioners, a profession where few Communists have been known to excel. Her new company Editorial Intelligence has the laudable goal of ending the suspicion and distrust between PR and the press. Some people in the press have embraced the concept, while others are much more wary, especially of her proposal for "content labeling" of reporters' stories. You can read more about that and her other big ideas for ending the Cold War between journalism and PR in our interview.
Jim Hoggan
Jim Hoggan runs his own PR shop in Vancouver. He has been in the business about 30 years, which makes him an unlikely candidate to be an anti-PR crusader. But that is precisely what he is when it comes to the public relations firms that are behind the groups denying the validity of global warming. Hoggan believes passionately in the fight to save the planet. The PR firms on the other side are, in his mind, behaving unethically, and he uses words like "criminal" to describe their behaviour. Hoggan oversees a lively climate change blog that contains lots of useful information on the groups leading the fight against the Kyoto Protocol and global warming.
Jay Rosen is one of the most innovative thinkers in American journalism today. Rosen is on the journalism faculty at New York University, but he is best known to journalists, academics and media critics for his smart blog PressThink. PressThink has been in hiatus recently as Rosen has concentrated on his new online venture NewAssignment.Net, which is an innovative experiment in "open source journalism." You should check it out. It could be the future of journalism. And, you can read more about Jay Rosen's thoughts on "spin" and the Bush White House in our interview.
If you want to explore the fascinating range of videos being provided by American soldiers in Iraq, the best place to start is prepared by National Public Radio host Mark Glaser.
