All the President's Spin : George W. Bush, the Media, and the Truth

All the President's Spin : George W. Bush, the Media, and the Truth Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer, and Brendan Nyhan Date: 03 August, 2004   —   $11.20   —   Book product page Rating:

I really enjoyed this book by the editors of spinsanity.com. It's almost a college course in Political Spin 101 as applied to President Bush. The authors point out the Bush administration's unprecedented use of marketing and PR techniques to package and sell their policies and themselves to consumers: the American public they are supposedly serving. They also present some insight into why the media lets them get away with it.

The book catalogues five major spin techniques used by the Bush administration to "bamboozle" the public:

• The relatively few flat-out lies
• Unrepresentative examples, like the "tax families" used during the last election campaign. The Bush administration trotted out, as typical middle-class beneficiaries of his tax-cuts-for-the-rich, a small group of families that had to meet stringent requirements - an income between 30k - 70k per year, they had to itemize their deductions, have no children in college and daycare, no family member in night school, no children under one year old, and no substantial savings beyond a 401(k) plan. Using these families, Bush implied that middle-class Americans would get a $1,800 tax cut. It turned out that only 15% of Americans in that income bracket met those requirements. The other 85% of us got around $450 in tax cuts (if any) - far less than we would have gotten with Al Gore's tax cut plan.
• Bush also makes claims that are "clearer than the truth". To sell a policy, he makes statements that go beyond the available evidence, and that ignore all debate over the veracity of his claim, like telling the world that Iraq's aluminum tubes could "only" be used to enrich uranium while ignoring significant debate in the intelligence community as to their true purpose.
• To squash debate, President Bush and many other administration and GOP officials often suggested that Democrat's questioning and legitimate dissent aided our nation's enemies. This tactic was used not only in defense of Bush's foreign policy endeavors, but extended to domestic issues like tax cuts and, most recently, prescription drug prices.
• Bush's most effective spin tactic is to make a series of statements that are technically true, but leave the listener with a false impression as to what was implied. Bush's description of Iraq as a "gathering and growing threat", talk of "mushroom clouds over American cities" within mere months, and chemical and biological weapons ready to be handed over to terrorists "within weeks" all created the impression of Iraq as an imminent threat. But, as George Bush would point out later, he never actually used the words, "imminent threat". The authors of the book call that, "strategic use of language". I call it weasel wording.

The authors also point out the Bush administration's treatment of the press as the enemy, and its very tight control over information, "When talking points are all officials will repeat, it gives reporters literally nothing else to quote." In fact, reporters have resorted to tempting Bush's dog, Barney, with treats in the hope that Bush will come after him and get close enough to answer some questions "off the cuff".

But reporters don't escape the book unscathed. The authors take them to task for putting sensationalism over substance, for creating stereotypes of political leaders (Bush is dumb, but resolute - Kerry is intelligent, but vacillating) in order to help engage readers, and for being lazy and stupid.

The lazy reporting that drives me nuts is the "he said, she said" format that bad journalists apply to a story when they are too dumb or torpid to find out the truth. I see this every day. A reporter will regurgitate a Bush statement, but instead of checking whether it's true, the reporter merely follows Bush's quote with a contradictory quote from the Kerry campaign. Who's telling the truth? Sadly, that information is nowhere to be found in the article.

The book wraps up with the depressing conclusion that both major parties are now engaged in a marketing and PR war, and for various reasons (some good, some bad), the mainstream media isn't going to help sort it out for us. Brothers and sisters, we're pretty much on our own if we want to wade through the muck to find some golden nuggets of truth. There are some media outlets, like factcheck.org and The Daily Show, that can help make heads or tails of spun issues, but with politicians actively trying to mislead the public on just about everything, the only real defense is to hone our own BS detectors. This book is a big help.