The Spin Doctors !

And you thought only Shane Warne and Murali could spin !

Well, if you are an avid current news follower like me who happens to spend a good amount of time traversing through the HTML pages of the right wing "Daily Pioneer", to the Left Wing New York Times & Indian Express, you could possibly relate to my first sentence.

Yes we live in a world where Spin Doctors galore. This phrase 'The Spin Doctor' has now become a global phenomenon much like anything else. And no, you do not need a college degree to have this doctorate. This doctor is pretty much a person, who by his ability to apply spin, can convince you that what he believes is the actual fact.

Subtlety is her forte. She packages her news,views and ideas in a certain manner so as to buttress her claims or her ideology.

There are spin doctors on both the sides, i.e Left and Right. Its from who's prism you see the world that makes all the difference between you agreeing or disagreeing on a certain subject.

Bush's "war on terror" has been the most argued subject in my recent memory. Right from the New York Times to the "Navakal" of Pune,India, would have debated this war for almost 3 years now. Each newspaper providing its own little spin to this war which has come to stay with us and possibly affecting all of us.

Right from Arundati Roy's rabid leftist views on this subject to Bill O'Reilly's equally strong and intense views, a common reader is witness to the best spin doctors in the game each day.

And the higher up you are on the celebrity chart the better spinner you are.

So Arundati Roy to buttress her 'liberal' views will tell you how 1,00,000 innocent people have died in this war and add more examples where American troops have been involved in killing what she calls and wants us to believe as 'innocent' victims. Off course for the likes of Arundati Roy, even Saddam Hussein is innocent. And so is Osama. Thus Arundati Roy will always be very selective in her examples. She will never tell you that Osama's cohorts have killed more than 60,000 Kashmiris. She will not tell you that Saddam Hussein butchered 100,000 or more Kurds. She will not tell you that in China there have been more human rights excesses than the excesses of all the nations put together. She will instead give only positive examples of China.

But if Left wing is full of spinners the right wingers are not behind. Though they are late in the game, the right wing is soon catching up on this art. They are doing pretty good in US. With FOX news leading this bunch that is ably aided by the blogsphere where right wing conservatives have made a mark.

In India sadly the balance is highly tilted in the Left's favour. May be 10 years down the line the situation will change. Who knows?

For now except for the "Daily Pioneer' of Delhi, most Indian newspapers give a lopsided picture of a story which can be seen only through the left's prism or from the Gandhi family's prism.

For all practical purposes the Indian democracy is a farce.
If its not, please give me one example of a democratic country where one and only one family has been voted again and again for more than 40 years. If committing the same mistakes again and again is an art, well, Indians have mastered that.
When the same family rules again and again, you call it Monarchy.

The Indian spin doctors have a huge advantage over their US counter parts. They have no opposition.They are never questioned. Nobody can tear their theory apart.

Times of India in recent times has become the Gandhi Family mouthpiece. The way it is packaging Rahul Gandhi, it can put the best of ad-makers to shame.
So if Times Of India runs a subtle advertisement for Rahul Gandhi, showing how dynamic he is or that how he celebrated his birthday privately, only few people do not miss the fact that the Congress run newspaper has its spin doctors working overtime. This image building excercise undertaken by the nation's 'best' newspaper tells a story unto itself.

How does it really matter to country fighting poverty and looking for social equalities how this Gandhi family member celebrated his Birthday? But "Times Of India', the nation's premier daily comes up with such irrelevant features on front page, and far worse, gets away with show casing a dumbo as a potential PM. Infact ever since Rahul Gandhi has exploded on the Indian political scene, no other newspaper has made us hear the bang more than Times Of India. I think TOI wants us to believe that Rahul G is the best thing to have happened to India after the green revolution or economic liberalisation.

But if TOI today symbolises scycophancy, Indian Express is not far behind. There's been so much of pro-establishment spin in the newspaper these days that someone actually made a web site called
spindianexpress.
It is tough to believe that this Goenka owned newspaper was at some point of time forefront in anti-establisment views. There was a time when Indian express really had its money where its mouth was and it backed its tag line 'Journalism of Courage' by bold actions and views, whether it was Bofors or Emergency.

Today it has become Sonia and Manmohan's B-Team. You just have to visit its Editor-in-Chief, Shekhar Gupta's columns once in while to realise how shallow it has become.

'The Hindu' happens to be the worst of the lot. It is now promoting marxism pretty blatantly. And at times it does not even bother to apply spin but brazenly demonstrates its subjective journalism.

In a country where all these newpapers tell you that how Modi is the biggest villain of the century and how Sonia Gandhi is next only to Mother Teresa, there are very few who bother to read the other end of the spin doctors array.

The 'Daily Pioneer'. Its the right wing's answer to Indian Express. Its BJP's answer to Congress' TOI and Hindustan Times. But again Daily Pioneer has a neglible readership. So by and large Congress is way ahead in this game of Spins.

The art of spin is not what you tell, but its what you DO NOT tell to the gullible reader. So to make you believe that Narendra Modi is the biggest villain, the Times Of India wants us to believe that more than '2000 muslims were killed in riots in Gujarat spanning number of days'. A 'truth' it was able to stick by repeated assertion (of lies). What it does not tell you though is that not 2000, but 700 muslims and 300 hindus died in riots and that the riots were not spanning days, but only 3 days to be precise.
Also Times Of India will not compare these figures with the far worse violence nation ever suffered. The 1984 Sikh riots, where even by official figures, more than 3000 sikhs were butchered by Congress workers (some of them are MPs now) and the riots went in for months.
The Indian Express will tell you that Modi government is full of corrupt officials but will never tell you that the Gujarat government under Modi, clocked 15% GDP growth this year against the national average of 7%.

Not telling something definitely is a part of spin. Or tell only so much so as to enforce your view point. You take the reader to a point where he's convinced and than leave him right there. If the reader is really interested in the story he will dig further. But 9 out of 10 will not dig further and the newspaper and the view point will win.

So if Arundati Roy does not tell you about the excesses done by the Taliban in Afghanistan (or even if she does, not with the same intensity as Bush's war on terror), be rest assured that its her spin doctorism at work.

The large number of people who take the views represented in TOI as the gospel truth are in danger of never having known the other side of the story. Similarly all the BJP supporters who have never read anything beyond 'The Daily Pioneer' will never know the follies committed by BJP.

Objective journalism has been a victim of this Spindoctorism. If at all it existed, that is.

We live in a web of lies and only we can apply some common sense to really understand this spin. For most though, news is irrelevant and hence truth is only incidental to the event.