A new business venture may begin with a hole in the market – a real
need which has not been filled – or with a need that has been placed in the
mind of the public. Whiter teeth, for example, have been extensively
promoted through advertising media. Someplace along the way such a
need for a better, more efficient, more elegant language was created in the
minds of Americans.^5 This followed not because speakers of English were
suddenly no longer able to communicate with each other and required a
solution, but because they were made to feel inadequate or ashamed.
The parties sounding dire proclamations about the decline of spoken
English are, not coincidentally, the ones with the cure to sell – those right-
thinking and right-speaking individuals who are able to set the public on a
straight and narrow path to the one true way of speaking.
Opinion, spin, propaganda
Editorial opinions are not out of place in any kind of information media,
as long as they are clearly marked as such. The presentation of alternate
interpretations is a public service, and an important one. In the past twenty
years, however, the distinction between editorial commentary and news,
between news and entertainment has given way to what has been called
infotainment (Thussu 2011).
Objectivity is a theoretical concept and hardly attainable in real-world
communication, even by the best trained, widely experienced and most
professional and sincere journalists. Every exchange of information comes
with a context that is relevant to understanding the speaker’s intent. The
purposeful lack or withholding of information is just as significant as the
presentation of demonstrable fact. It might be more useful to speak of a
continuum from absolute, unvarnished truth to purposeful, unapologetic
falsehood; from a theoretical purely objective to purely subjective. On this
continuum, spin sits somewhere between the center point and the purely
subjective.
Everybody practices spin in communication. If you do very poorly on a
performance review, you might tell your co-workers by starting with the
fact that you had the flu that day, or that everybody came in below the 70
percent mark, or that you were thinking of changing jobs anyway. You
might not mention it at all. You might deny you were reviewed. Or, if you
state the fact outright “My performance review came back totally