Spin in 2007

I was watching this documentary about "spin" in the political campaigning of the 1992 Presidential elections and in the media's coverage of those campaigns.

(You can also watch and download the movie here.)

There is a portion of it which I found interesting. Around 16 minutes and 43 seconds into the documentary, it starts talking about how there were a number of Democratic candidates vying for their party's nomination for President. Among these, there was one candidate whom the media dismissed and ignored - Larry Agran. He was rudely treated by media staff, cropped out of newspaper pictures, and left out of lists of polling numbers, even when his popularity in the polls reached levels equal to or higher than some of the media's favorite candidates. He was even excluded from the televised debates of the various candidates of his party.

All of this information reminded me of the political campaigns of presidential candidates for 2008, and especially that of the Republican candidate Ron Paul. (His official campaign site can be found here.) In his campaign so far, he has been rudely treated by the media (Although it is not the case that he has been formally excluded from televised debates, in the debates he has been almost ignored in the questioning, asked much fewer questions than the rest of the candidates, and those questions offered to him were very biased and slanted.), excluded from lists of polling numbers, and, even worse, when his poll numbers beat out all other candidates, the news reporters explained away his success as cheating on the part of the poll voters.

So, like laundry, politics and the media are in a big "spin" cycle as history repeats itself. And all the stains are still there.