No Spin Zone

A buddy of mine, Bryan Keefer, one of the co-founders of Spinsanity.org and co-author of the book All the President's Spin was on ABC's KGO 810AM radio station with Pete Wilson today. He was plugging the book, but he also talked for quite some time about spin in politics today and how the whole political climate, and especially the presidential campaigns, have basically departed from truth and fact and moved into the realm of advertising. Frankly, I think he's spot on. The crap we hear from both sides of the political spectrum is mostly rhetoric, spin and misleading advertising. There's very little truth in it. More disturbing, however, is how the media seems to be totally complicit in this transformation. You hardly find anyone in the media these days who actually holds any politicians or pundits accountable to the truth or who cuts through the crap and tells it like it is. That's where Bryan Keefer and his co-editors of Spinsanity.org come in. They've been doing a superb job of remaining totally non-partisan while debunking the rhetoric from both sides. Impossible, you say? Well, they've been lauded by many, many groups for their scrupulous impartiality. But perhaps even more compelling is the fact that the hate mail they get comes from both liberals and conservatives. You know you're doing a good job telling the truth when everybody hates you. I called into the radio show today and actually made it on the air. I asked Bryan if he sees any end in sight to the political spin and if there's any hope that the media will ever reassume their responsibility to the truth and to dissecting spin from reality. Bryan commented that the internet is becoming increasingly important for fact-checking and "de-spinning", and that the media is starting to recognize that. Unfortunately, I see things getting worse before they get better in the mainstream media. With media consolidation and commercialization ("infotainment") rampant today, and with an FCC that seems more interested in protecting business than the people (FYI, the FCC is supposed to work for the people), real journalists are dying off, and I anticipate that we're going to see a lot more of the parroting pundits before anything changes for the better. Bryan and Pete Wilson also touched briefly on the now infamous exchange between Jon Stewart and the hosts of Crossfire (transcript, video clip), specifically Tucker Carlson. I totally agree with Bryan that Jon Stewart did the world a service by calling those guys out and telling them that having a show where people just shout talking points back and forth is doing a major disservice to the American people. So, three cheers for Bryan Keefer, Jon Stewart and The Daily Show. The world needs more people like them.