United States, welcome to the all-spin zone

Perhaps because we live in a nation of consumers who respond to spin advertising, Americans are used to believing things that sound good if presented by people, or geckos, they respect or trust.
This may, or may not, be a good way of buying stuff from cribs to car insurance to caskets.
Relying on advertising and believing spin in the political realm places too much faith in spinners.
Spinning is winning more in politics as the once-more-trusted news business has fallen on hard times.
Newspapers and networks are cutting costs, cutting people and trimming coverage of the kind of news that informs voters about their communities and state and local governments.

All the news you want to hear

Many Americans pay nothing for their news today and get the political coverage they pay for: short stories lacking depth, history and objectivity or longer spins redefining truth.
Americans are designing their own news, sometimes by relying on television and Internet outlets that cater to their own views. Many are designing new media inputs that fashion information and entertainment from many non-traditional sources, some appealing and informative.
The news media and the new media are changing so fast that in several short years consumers will face a myriad of very different choices from today’s increasing variety of the good, the bad and the ugly.
Designing individual media sources to reflect one’s preferences replaces the news commons that once upheld traditional journalistic standards.
Outside the commons, people are not in the same conversation.
As New York Times columnist David Brooks noted on March 12, “We live in a country in which many people live in information cocoons in which they only talk to members of their own party and read blogs of their own sect. They come away with perceptions fundamentally at odds with reality.”
Brooks has a good point about people believing what they see in their own information cocoons. He was saying that people don’t truly understand President Obama if they rely on the spin they see.

Working within the system

Obama is dismissed by critics on various sides grinding political axes as either a dangerous socialist or a muddling moderate. He clearly can’t be both, and he still wins the respect of many not buying the critics. Neither set of spun images informs as much as it inflames.
It’s also easier now for cocoon spinners to dismiss Brooks and the New York Times as wrong-way twisters, and for Americans to believe the spin they design to their own tastes.
Without a successful business model that would adequately monetize journalism and turn a profit, newspapers like the Times are losing their fight to cover as much political news as they once did. Older eminences, they now are forging new relationships with nonprofit news gatherers hungry to cover civic and political news.
The Times has new media partners in portions of the country as the gray paper of record slowly transforms itself into a 21st century news outfit trying to serve more readers.

Public-private partnerships and new arrangements pairing newspapers and nonprofit news gatherers are redefining how journalism works today in America. From Charlottesville to Chicago, newspapers are sharing their pages with new media nonprofits. This new media also allow citizens to join conversations, which is a good thing.
Local community news blogs and online news providers are joining the commons conversation and the business milieu. Some are starting to turn a profit, but many remain struggling operations with few employees and relatively little advertising revenue.
The nation’s political system still relies on private media that needs to turn a profit to survive. Newspapers, television and radio stations and magazines provide an information infrastructure that is fighting market failure while keeping voters informed.
How well that infrastructure adapts to new technologies will help determine the health of Virginia’s and the nation’s political system.
Newspaper, radio and television news aren’t vanishing as much as they are changing.

Government agencies and groups of citizen activists are providing what many people consider news as the older media fails or cuts back coverage.
Without a traditional media filter, many more governments and groups are spinning out their own unfiltered messages. Local media often pick up and pass along these messages with little to no editing, added reporting or rewriting.
Obama and politicians of all stripes communicate directly via email with many voters and bypass traditional media’s bothersome news conferences.
Without traditional media providing real balance and perspective, government can drive the news more than before.

When government drives the news, it rarely is critical of itself.
Americans may not have to wait long in the changing landscape of the media before computer generated government geckos clear their throats and deliver the “news.”
Why pay a real person if a government can manipulate a mouse?

Bob Gibson is executive director of the Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership. The opinions expressed here are his own and not necessarily those of the institute.