Skip to main content icon/video/no-internet
icon backReturn to Entries

Spin

Public relations professionals have been called all kinds of names—sandbaggers, flacks, propaganda machines, spin doctors. These labels connote a P. T. Barnum approach to public relations. Such names imply that the industry engages in promoting hype, puffery, and manipulation. The term spin doctor continues to be used by the media to associate smoke-and-mirror strategies with public relations professionals.

Whereas some view public relations as a management function that promotes mutually beneficial relationships and encourages positive behavioral change, others advocate that their primary responsibility is to engage in image and reputation management. Still others believe that the public relations function is concerned mainly with media relations and publicity.

The purpose of this entry is to provide an in-depth discussion that offers information from various viewpoints, enabling practitioners to make more clearly defined and educated decisions about how—and why—they plan to practice public relations.

Original Spin Model Introduced

Today, when the term spin doctor is used in the same sentence with public relations, many professionals get chills up the spine; the chills are immediately followed by feelings of frustration. Many questions regarding the spin doctor paradigm are still left unanswered: (a) From where does this negative stereotype stem? (b) What has caused this misperception to continue? (c) What can the public relations profession do to diminish such inaccuracies? (d) Is this model really becoming acceptable as a mainstream way of doing business among public relations practitioners?

In 1994, Randy Sumpter and James Tankard identified the spin model as an alternative approach to other models. After providing a thorough overview of what this model entails, they concluded,

The field of public relations needs to come to terms with the spin doctor phenomenon. A cursory review of some public textbooks suggests little discussion of the role, and, indeed, some rather drastic differences between spin doctoring and standard public relations activities. Do public relations practitioners want to distance themselves from the spin doctor phenomenon, as Bernays appears to be recommending? Do they want to claim the spin doctors as part of their field? Or do they want to select what is effective from the spin doctor repertoire and incorporate it into the traditional public relations model, while ignoring the rest? The spin doctor conception of truth, and ethics of spin doctors, would also seem to be topics of further discussion. (p. 26)

Something of an ominous, conspiracy-like theory, the public relations spin model still prevails today— nearly two decades after Sumpter and Tankard initially suggested that it existed. One needs only to search the Internet; using the key words “public relations” and “spin doctor” will produce hits in massive numbers (263,000 in September 2012 when searched using Google).

Overview of Public Relations and Its Historical Underpinnings

Reviewing the early 20th century, James E. Grunig (1992) characterized one approach to public relations as the press agentry/publicity model—the era when the “public be damned.” Here are the origins of the concept of spin.

Negative Perceptions Based on Historical Activities

There appears to be “bad karma” among practitioners schooled in journalism programs and among journalists who have been ill treated by public relations practitioners. This negativity stems from the history and nature of deceitful, manipulative public relations activities practiced during the early part of the 20th century.

...

  • Loading...
locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles

Read next

More like this

Sage Recommends

We found other relevant content for you on other Sage platforms.

close

Have you created a personal profile? Login or create a profile so that you can save clips, playlists and searches

close
close
close Signed In to profile You are signed in as:
close
Logged in Institution Institution