(music playing)
Dr. David Greenberg: My first book was a history of Richard Nixon's image, not a biography
of Nixon, but the story of what Nixon meant to the American public, and I'd look at a
whole series of groups of Americans and how they formed their images of Nixon.
It's through Nixon in part that I try to suggest in the book that this concern with image becomes
such a part of the media discourse, of public thinking, of what politicians do, it's not
just that Nixon is doing it, it is that he helps make us all aware of how much it goes
on in politics.
So in a way it was the work of Nixon that led me into the book I'm writing now that
is the history of spin.
It's both a history of the presidency and the evolution of the apparatus of messagemaking
and image-making around the presidency, but then it's also an intellectual history of
how the public and in particular various journalists and intellectuals respond to these developments
and what in the end this says about our concerns with our democracy.
Spin implies a bit of a game, there's some play involved, that we're getting spun, that
there's counterspin and it suggests something I think that's accurate to, which is the audience
has some awareness of this, but increasingly I think we have the tools to resist this challenge.
Sometimes we spin we like when it's by our guy and we applaud it.
We applaud the craft or the skill that goes into it.
You know, sometimes we're quite able to see through it and argue back.
I see the development of spin as something that is, if not inevitable, that it is a part
of the modern society and the trick is not to denounce it or sort of wish that our leaders
were more honest or just could level with us, but to recognize it is part of politics
and it is public's responsibility, often public meets that responsibility of reckoning and
grappling with the spin, and that's part of what political debate and argument is, is
challenging spin and understanding it and decoding it.
It's really with the 20th century, I think, with Theodore Roosevelt, the rise of mass
media, and the orientation of the presidency toward public opinion in a kind of regular
way, that I think sort of changes the nature of what presidents do.
You also have in this period, public relations professionals, people like Edward Bernays
and Bruce Barton and people from advertising start getting involved in presidential campaigns,
and eventually two in sitting and advising presidents beyond just the campaign.
So the challenge is in educating people as to which news sources tend to be more objective,
even if we want to reject the notion that anyone is perfectively objective, there are
some that aspire for objectivity.
Within a certain segment of the professional news media, the goals of objectivity are kind
of enshrined as what reporters worked towards, regardless of whatever their views.
I think if people can come to understand how those sources are more reliable as sources
of information, and then if I want to go to other sources to get a sense of how to interpret
that information, you know, I think that's something everybody does, everybody comes
to their own political opinions.
I think government inevitably does and should argue its case that it wishes to be heard.
But we in turn, both we the public and we the media, have an obligation to handle those
interpretations skeptically and question it and to seek out other interpretations.
(music playing)