Josh J. Holinaty

The H1N1 vaccine rollout in Canada has been a complete gong show, a cacophonous torrent of contradictory messages flying in all directions. Everyone should get the shot as soon as possible. No, wait… priority groups go first. There’s plenty of vaccine for everyone. But wait… there’s not enough to go around. Provinces blame the feds. Liberals and Conservatives point fingers at each other. The public continues to wait in line… except the Calgary Flames. Oops. Officials are fired. Everything’s under control….

The communication has gone completely haywire. “It’s just been a mess,” says John Church, a political scientist in the University of Alberta’s School of Public Health.

It’s not just government spreading confusion. Breathless TV reports and newspaper headlines provoke more fear: Clinics added as death toll rises; Flu kills five more; Restrict travel if you feel sick; Flu a national emergency in U.S. Never mind that almost 150 Canadians have died from H1N1 — less than 0.0005 per cent of the population. Never mind that regular flu kills thousands across the country each year. Never mind that about 2,500 Canadians each year die in car crashes. That stuff gets conveniently left out. “There’s just been so much panic created around this,” says Church.

At a time when the public relations (PR) industry is growing, traditional journalism is shrinking and anybody with an opinion can share it on the Internet, all the spin has left many people wondering who to believe, who is really telling the truth — and who’s stretching it.

PURVEYORS OF INFORMATION

So, what’s spin? “A deliberate shading of news perception; attempted control of political reaction,” said the late New York Times columnist William Safire. That’s the definition preferred by Ira Basen, a radio producer and journalism instructor at Ryerson University who did a CBC documentary series on spin in 2007. “Spin is a matter of interpretation,” he says.

Most people in PR don’t like the word “spin” to describe what they do. “When I think of spin, I think of the tobacco industry,” says Allison MacKenzie, a public relations instructor at Mount Royal University. “There’s a perfect example of spin that was just completely out of control and was unethical and immoral and had huge consequences. To me, spin is quite a negative term.”

Tom Olsen, director of media relations for Premier Ed Stelmach, objects to the term “spin doctor.” “I’m a purveyor of information,” says Olsen, a former political scribe for the Calgary Herald.

Not everyone shuns the spin label, however. “I enjoyed being called a spin doctor,” says political strategist Rod Love, Ralph Klein’s former chief of staff. “Spin is just another version of the truth.” As an example, he recalls Alberta’s health care premiums (which Stelmach later nixed). “The New Democrats’ spin on health premiums was that they were a health tax.” The Conservatives, he says, used the word “premium” because the money didn’t go into general revenue, but was spent solely on health. “That was our spin. So neither of those examples are deceiving; they’re just a different version or interpretation of what it is you’re talking about. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

In reality, we’re all spin doctors on some level. We groom online profiles with photos and bits of information that portray ourselves a certain way. We embellish in job interviews, leaving the ugly stuff out. “Everybody’s trying to spin themselves, really,” says Jon Lovink, a former journalist who now provides PR training through “mastering the media” workshops. “Everybody has their truth. My job in my business is to try to get my clients to tell their truth in a way that’s credible.”

‘THE DARK SIDE’

Corporations and governments spend millions of dollars each year spinning their “version of the truth.” To handle the H1N1 situation, for example, the Public Health Agency of Canada handed out a pile of sole-source communications contracts worth more than $700,000 to nine PR companies in March and April. This is in addition to the agency’s own 79 communications staff.

The Alberta government also spends millions of dollars each year on spin. Loaded with a $15-million budget and 118 full-time employees, the Public Affairs Bureau handles government communication and answers to Premier Ed Stelmach. The bureau helped create Stelmach’s recent $134,000 televised address, which aired last month during a time when Stelmach was under growing political threat from the Wildrose Alliance Party.

Critics who believe the bureau is too politicized dub it the “Ministry of Truth,” referring to George Orwell’s 1984. Olsen contends the department is non-partisan. “The Public Affairs Bureau is not about spin; it’s about information,” he says. “That’s what they do. They’re non-partisan providers of information.”

Regardless, PR is unquestionably powerful in shaping today’s public opinion. “The efforts to manipulate the news media and manage the agenda… are a lot more focused and intense than ever before, that’s for sure,” says Lovink, whose media training seminars include topics like “Managing the TV sound bite” and “Communicating in a crisis.”

The rise of social media and online communication has also made it easier for PR people to communicate directly with their target audience instead of relying on the conduit of traditional news media. “We’re not counting on them nearly as much as perhaps we were to get our story out,” says MacKenzie.

And it’s a growth industry: the number of Canadians working in PR and communications exploded from 27,465 in 2001 to 36,905 in 2006. The number of journalists, meanwhile, went from 12,960 to 13,320, and has doubtless fallen since as struggling newspapers shut down bureaus and cut staff.

Many journalists end up moving into PR, abandoning poorly paid jobs for fatter paycheques and better hours. Reporters who see their colleagues move into PR like to invoke Star Wars, calling the process “going over to the dark side,” a phrase used in only partial jest. Basen says the term reflects journalists’ misunderstanding of PR. “Journalists like to see themselves as being morally superior to PR people, in the sense that we tell the truth and they don’t, and that’s a very overly simplistic way of looking at it,” says Basen. “There’s nothing wrong with PR…. It’s an indispensable part of our world.”

Lovink says he got sideways glances from his media colleagues when he made the switch from journalism into PR. Olsen says that while his former colleagues didn’t directly give him flak for his PR-move, “probably behind my back there was a bit.”

But both Lovink and Olsen say they don’t regret making the change, as they find their jobs challenging and fulfilling. “What I’m really trying to do is manage the media agenda,” says Lovink. “The difference now is that I’m trying to manage your agenda, and I probably wasn’t as conscious of that when I was a reporter — that there was a whole effort to do that.”

PHOTO-OP ‘NEWS’

People in PR don’t equate “managing” news with “spinning” it; they say there’s an authentic, credible way to do their work. Lovink gives Maple Leaf Foods’ handling of the listeria outbreak last year as an example. Twenty-two Canadians died after eating food that mostly came from the company’s plants. In the midst of the crisis, Maple Leaf put out a sombre TV ad (also posted on YouTube) of company CEO Michael McCain apologizing and acknowledging that the company “failed” Canadians. “That was an incredible example of doing it well,” says Lovink.

But as newsrooms are thinning out, reporters have to crank out more copy in less time. They do less investigative journalism — a focused attempt to cut through spin and get at the truth — as it’s costly and time-consuming. “Journalism is much more susceptible than ever, I think, to PR,” says Basen. “If you used to have to do three stories a week and now you’re doing five stories a week, then that press release that maybe would have once gone right into the recycling bin now starts to look a lot more attractive.”

Or perhaps media doesn’t cull a story from a press release, but a carefully planned photo-op like Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s so-called surprise piano performance in Ottawa last month. After years of being orchestrated by the Harper government — including being forced to let the Prime Minister’s Office choose which reporters get to ask questions at press conferences — the media ate up Harper’s Beatles rendition at the piano, expanding it into a political game changer that even made the cover of Maclean’s, complete with a photo of the Harper family crossing Abbey Road, Beatles-style, in London.

In the Globe and Mail, Ottawa reporter Jane Taber wrote that while Harper’s personality was a problem in the past, “with his recent performance that issue is off the table.” Basen’s response? “Come on. Use your brain. This was a very planned photo op and it worked beautifully, but it only worked because we in the press allowed it to work. Why we continue to do that — why we continue to be sort of passive conduits for spin — is a real mystery to me.”

In this case, media weren’t only spun, but completely duped. The Prime Minister’s Office sent newspapers and magazines a flattering photo of what it claimed was Harper’s performance at the gala. In fact, the shot was taken at a rehearsal beforehand. Media outlets weren’t told that and some ran the shot, along with the inaccurate caption. It’s the deceived media outlets — not the Prime Minister’s Office’s spin doctors, who later apologized for the error — that ultimately ended up looking foolish.

Using Safire’s definition of spin as “deliberate shading of news perception,” journalists are themselves purveyors of spin on some level. “We shade news perception all the time by deciding who we’re going to talk to and who we’re not going to talk to, and what quotes we’re going to use and what quotes we’re not going to use,” says Basen. “There are a large number of facts or quotes that you can use in your story, and you choose the ones that fit best with what you think is the best available version of the truth.”

But when journalists spin a misleading story, they’re increasingly likely to get called on it, as people on blogs and Twitter constantly deconstruct news coverage, calling into question assumed facts.

The same goes for organizations that are trying to get their stories out there, says MacKenzie. “It is a much more vigilant public, and the call for authenticity is much greater than it’s ever been. I’m pretty confident that organizations that spin are outed…. The people who are conversing about you will call it as they see it.”

That’s the optimistic view. Yet even well-intentioned online commentators who vigilantly deconstruct news coverage will have less to work with if there’s no news left to deconstruct — and that leaves us all the more vulnerable to spin.