The Martlet

When you think of the term “spin”, where does your mind go? Media? Government? Social justice? In this case, “Who’s Spinning Whom?” is a panel of five people who will speak on the topic of media and the Criminal Justice system on Jan. 19.

The panel is being held on behalf of the Vancouver Island Criminal Justice Association (VICJA), which hopes the event will educate, inform and promote debate on Criminal Justice. Speakers include UVic Assistant Dean of Fine Arts Dr. Lynne van Luven, former Corrections Canada spokesperson Dennis Finlay, Global News News Director Ian Haysom, Times Colonist columnist Les Leyne and author/retired journalism professor Dr. Nick Russell.

So what exactly does the term “spin” connote in media? This is a question former journalist Lynne van Luven often tackles. The term began to take shape in the early 1900s, when “spinning a yarn” was a phrase which implied that someone was telling a story that might have been magnified. The person may have also twisted the story to make themself seem more heroic than they actually were.

“In about 1982, as far as I can tell, the New York Times started using this term to apply to the people who were operatives for either corporations or governments — the kind of people who would try to plant stories or information to try and subvert true coverage, in a sense,” says van Luven. “And now, I think what’s happened to the term ‘spin doctors’ is that it’s been so overused that it has almost no meaning whatsoever. People are talking about spinning all the time.”

The question of whom is being spinned is an important one.

“Ironically, I think people like the Harper government and even the Liberal government here in B.C. are using the term as a way to undermine journalists and to undermine the freedom of the press. What they do by spinning the news, or by planting the news or trying to take a news story off on another angle, is that they increase the public’s distress and distrust of the media — that in itself undermines the media more than anything because people do love to bash the media,” says van Luven.

“The general person likes to say, ‘Oh, you can’t trust anything you read in the paper.’ So that’s a whole terrible way of attacking the media for some situations that we really can’t control. For example, the huge use of [public relations] people makes it so that you can never get to a minister. You can never get a direct statement,” she says. “You interview politicians and they just have one line that they keep on inserting over and over — and they never actually end up saying anything.”

Van Luven says the problem is not necessarily releasing a false story or piece of information, but that there is a lack of a source in the first place.

“I would say that sometimes journalists are lazy and sometimes mainstream journalists don’t do their research the way that we expect them to,” she says. “It’s almost a no-win situation for journalists unless they go out on their own and do independent research.”

She admits that the panel may be a bit one-sided.

“I don’t like the way this panel is set up because there’s a whole bunch of journalists; there’s four of us on there, and we’re all going to talk about spinning — and by talking about spinning, how do we know we’re not going to undermine the public faith in media further?”

Crime is always in the news, and “spin-doctored” stories make them even more prevalent, which can make public crime seem more at-large than it is.

“Some journalists have been good about saying, ‘You know what, crime isn’t going up, it’s going down.’ If you just listen to the ministers, you’d think that you couldn’t walk across the street without being gunned down,” says van Luven. “All of these things are really distressing.”

Why the call for such a panel?

“They’re doing it out of concern and I think they’re trying to educate the public about how the media works. And maybe also that the public should be more aware of criminal justice issues,” says van Luven. “Most people don’t read widely enough to know what the multiplicity of views is on a subject.”

“I’m hoping I’ll learn something new from people who have more information than I do,” she adds.

“Who’s Spinning Whom?” will be held at UVic in room A110 of the Social Science and Math building (SSM) from 7–9 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.