

Over half your daily news is spin - dsplittgerber
http://www.crikey.com.au/2010/03/15/over-half-your-news-is-spin/

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joss82
I thought the figure would be much higher, around 80-90%.

Maybe that's why nobody is reading them anymore?

Is the economist really the last bastion of interesting informative
information or is it just me?

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byrneseyeview
_The Economist_ interviews a lot of experts, all of whom have their own
agendas. Which makes perfect sense. A sustainable journalistic organization
needs lots of generalists; experts are only rewarded for putting their
expertise to work. So the only way to get high-quality information is to
absorb some opinion along with it.

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dsplittgerber
I actually stopped reading daily newspapers about two years ago. You can get
the 'necessary' (differs for everyone) amount of daily information from the
web - faster, cheaper and more relevant due to filtering possibilities.

Thorough analysis is in my opinion still best to be found in a select number
of weekly and/or monthly publications. The time span involved leads to less
noise making it. Finance & economics is the only exception I know of,
notwithstanding The Economist. There are an immense number of really
knowledgeable bloggers.

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rsingel
This article is based on some faulty logic, mainly that a story started by a
PR pitch is "spin." So if Paypal decides to partner with Bump to make a
payment application, and the companies put out a press release, and a writer
decides that is interesting, it counts as 'spin' in the study. Same thing if
the White House announces something. Of course, journalists rely on press
releases to find some of their stories. That doesn't make it spin. Things are
much more complicated than that. Spin comes from simply accepting a point of
view uncritically and not challenging assertions made by sources quoted in a
story. Spin also comes in ways that aren't easily detectable, such as getting
in with a source by being an outlet that is generally favorable to it.

Basically, this study doesn't mean anything. For instance, when Facebook
decided to change its privacy policy in December it announced it to the press.
Many published the changes and questioned their legitimacy and why Facebook
was inverting its policy. But according to the study, all of those stores were
"spin."

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mseebach
When news-people use the word "spin" it's invariably in the same errand: To
blame someone/something else for the fact that they don't do their jobs well.

Spin is your source biting back, and some of the sources are getting quite
good at it. The response is to bite harder. Writing process-stories about how
this or that was "spinned" is just whining.

Disclaimer: I'm not familiar with Crikey and can't tell for sure if this
applies to them.

~~~
philk
_Disclaimer: I'm not familiar with Crikey and can't tell for sure if this
applies to them._

Not really. Crikey caters to a very limited niche in the Australian market and
is subscription only. It has a really strong presence amongst policy
makers/politicians etc and is probably the best political newspaper in
Australia.

Crikey is not read by the man in the street. To give you an idea, their
subscription base is in the thousands (not the tens of thousands) out of a
country of about 20 million (so ~ 8 million potential households or so). Those
who do subscribe do so because it often has leaks/stories that the main papers
don't carry.

It's also not a daily newspaper in the traditional sense, unlike the main
newspapers. It's an email sent out around midday. You wouldn't subscribe to it
to replace the dead tree that turns up outside your house each day. [1]

 _When news-people use the word "spin" it's invariably in the same errand: To
blame someone/something else for the fact that they don't do their jobs well._

You're making a mistake here in assuming that the business of major newspapers
is in producing news. It isn't. It's in producing entertainment. If it
contains the veneer of news, all the better. On a mainstream newspaper, the
news-people are doing their jobs well [2]; they're filling an advertising
catalog with enough interesting looking fluff that people will pay for it and
read through it.

[1] Although if you're reading Crikey and reading the mainstream newspaper
your main motivation for the latter is potentially only to see what other
people are reading.

[2] Yes I'm aware the Internet is killing major newspapers, but that's because
there's almost limitless other entertainment out there, for free.

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agentq
If anyone is interested in a more academic (i.e., behavioral economics /
information theory-based) discussion of "spin" or "slanting," I'd recommend
this paper by Mullainathan and Shleifer:

The Market for News

[http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/shleifer/files/mark...](http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/shleifer/files/market_aea.pdf)

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plesn
No way !?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent> (Edward Herman and Noam
Chomsky)

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philk
Crikey is pretty much the best news in Australia, which is why it manages to
make an online subscription model actually work.

