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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Spin doctors are seldom out of the news for long. But who really understands what 'spin' is, or what spin doctors do? The media has moved on from a world where press officers carried piles of newspapers to the office each morning, when Twitter was what birds did and mobile phones were the size of bread loaves. Thank goodness Paul Richards is here to explain spin doctoring in a digital world. Essential reading for anyone who wants a career in communications or is intrigued by what keeps the cogs turning behind Parliament, How to Be a Spin Doctor covers all the essential skills, such as: Snagging positive media coverage Creating eye-catching news releases and photo opportunities Avoiding the endless traps set by journalists Paul Richards challenges the increasingly negative connotations of spin, arguing that it is neither a dishonourable practice nor a new one; it's simply the most practical way to convey information or make a point. The truth of the matter is that the spin doctor's trade secrets can be useful to anyone trying to promote a company, client or cause: to protect reputations, get messages across and win public support. So it's time to start reading and get spinning.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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PRAISE FORBE YOUR OWN SPIN DOCTOR
‘The “god-like genius” of Paul Richards The title may be opportunistic, but behind the gloss and the namedropping is a book that provides everything the spin doctors don’t want you to know. Drawing on his own experiences, the man who as Labour candidate for Billericay managed to get Newsnight to a Labour Party plant sale, helps you understand how journalists work and teaches that dealing with the media is a skill not magic – “there are tricks of the trade and techniques that can be learnt”.’ – Labour Left Briefing, 1998
‘Richards has an acerbic turn of phrase and a good line in anecdotes. Impressive.’ – Sunday Telegraph
‘Fabulous’ – Tribune
‘A useful guide for campaigners and communicators’ – Peter Mandelson
‘My only motive for plugging this book is that it is worth reading … Be Your Own Spin Doctor is punchy, clear and well laid out.’ – Phil Woolas
‘I am going to urge every colleague and friend in every organisation devoted to returning the centre-left to its democratic socialist traditions to go out, buy a copy, read it and act upon it.’ – Tim Pendry
‘A useful guide to good practice in public relations and news management.’ – Labour Organiser
‘A valuable insight into what needs to be done when dealing professionally with the press.’ – David Hill
For Alex and Ollie
The fear of missing out means today’s media, more than ever, hunts in a pack. In these modes, it is like a feral beast just tearing people and reputations to bits. But no one dares miss out.
—TONY BLAIR
A politician complaining about the press is like a sailor complaining about the sea.
—ENOCH POWELL
Contents
Introduction
Living in Spin
IT’S NOT THAT long since press officers carried piles of newspapers to the office each morning, when press releases were posted to journalists, when Twitter was what birds did, and mobile phones were the size of loaves of bread.
The digital revolution has changed all that. Today we carry devices in our pockets which can tell us the headline in the Washington Post, the weather in Guangzhou, what Putin thinks about Iran, or a picture of a panda sneezing. Today, anyone wanting to influence the media in support of a client, campaign or cause needs to understand how the techniques and tactics have changed, and are changing daily.
The digital revolution is speeding up. There’s the famous story of King Louis XVI who wrote in his diary on the very day the Bastille was stormed in 1789: ‘nothing’. People living through revolutions usually don’t appreciate what’s going on around them. That’s as true of the revolution in our own times. But just consider how you consume news compared to five years ago, where you get your information from, and how you communicate with other people.
If you’re a ‘digital native’, under the age of around thirty, digital technology is a ubiquitous part of your life, like electricity. You do not consider it at all odd that one of the largest hotel chains, Airbnb, owns no hotels; that the world’s biggest taxi company, Uber, owns no taxis; that the world’s biggest publisher, Facebook, creates no content. You receive your news and views on a device, from many sources, tailored to your tastes.
The underlying premise of How to Be a Spin Doctor is that the spin doctors’ trade secrets can be useful to anyone trying to promote a company, client or cause. Those trade secrets are no longer the same. The media landscape, and the ways to navigate and influence it, are so very different from even a decade ago.
Back in the 1990s, the term ‘spin doctor’ carried more than a little intrigue, excitement and edginess. People wrote novels about them. There was even a band called the Spin Doctors. Characters such as Peter Mandelson or Charlie Whelan revelled in their own mystique. Mandelson seemed to enjoy his nickname, ‘The Prince of Darkness’, so much that his later autobiography was advertised with him wearing a Dracula cape.
The ’90s US sitcom Spin City had Mike Flaherty, the deputy mayor of New York, as the heroic protagonist, played by Michael J. Fox. Flaherty is the smart character surrounded by nincompoops, frequently using the dark arts to rescue situations and reputations.
Spin doctors became the subject of media attention; over-exposed, investigated and reviled. The first line in the spin doctors’ charter is ‘never become the story’. If the spin doctor becomes more newsworthy than the stories they’re selling, it’s time for them to go. Charlie Whelan, with his briefings to journalists from the Red Lion pub, became more famous than the junior Treasury ministers of the day. Damian McBride, Gordon Brown’s spin doctor, resigned after leaked emails suggested he wanted to smear Tory politicians with all kinds of vile untruths. Jo Moore resigned after it was revealed she had sent an email on 9/11 saying it was a good time to bury any bad news. Through the 1990s and into the 2000s, spin doctors were dragged from the darkness and into the media limelight. Their stories revealed a set of practices and a culture which most people found distasteful.
Over time, the term became debased and devalued, culminating in the fictional portrayal of Malcolm Tucker in Armando Iannucci’s masterpiece The Thick of It. Tucker, the foul-mouthed, occasionally violent, government communications supremo is known as the ‘Gorbals Goebbels’, ‘Iago with a BlackBerry’ and has the ‘physical demeanour and the political instincts of a velociraptor’. Tucker’s method is a combination of threats and cajolery, backed by menace, and he brings down a Labour Party leader he is supposedly serving.
In 2011, the Danish political drama Borgen introduced us to Kasper Juul, the Prime Minister’s spin doctor. We also learnt, pleasingly, that the Danish for ‘spin doctor’ is ‘spin doctor’. Juul ends up as a political commentator and journalist, illustrating the well-trodden path taken by those who engage in politics later changing jobs to become those who talk about it.
In 2016, a French political thriller was broadcast. Its title in French was Les Hommes de l’ombre, which translates to ‘The Men of the Shadows’, a close cousin of Clare Short’s famous denunciation of the ‘men in the dark’. When shown on British TV, the title was replaced by a single word: ‘Spin’.
WHAT IS A SPIN DOCTOR?
In fiction, spin doctors are crafty, manipulative, roguish and sly. The truth, as ever, is more mundane. Spin doctoring is a new expression of a very old practice. People with a story to tell have always tried to find the best way to tell it.
The world’s religions depend on spin doctors – the priests, imams, vicars, rabbis and others who present their faith in the best possible light. Anyone trying to sell us something, from cars to holidays to cans of soup, needs to advertise the best features of their products. Anglers know a thing or two about spin – just ask them about the one that got away. The ancient Greeks and Romans understood that the truth was not enough – it needed packaging and presentation, and so the art of rhetoric was developed.
Politicians, visionaries, revolutionaries, social reformers – all have used what today we caricature as spin. Lenin didn’t sit at his desk in the Zurich public library and daydream about revolution – he created a newspaper with an army of spin doctors and sent them out to the Russian masses with his famous sound bite: ‘bread, peace and land’. Florence Nightingale used the media to win support for extra supplies from a hard-hearted War Office. Even Jesus Christ knew a thing or two about communications – the need for eye-catching stunts, effective presentation, simple sound bites and memorable stories. He called them parables.
We all do it, all the time. From prehistoric times, the hunters retelling the story around the fire of their heroism in bringing down the biggest mammoth, to the people on Facebook telling us through their pictures and updates about their near-perfect lives, we accentuate the positive, and skip over the bad parts.
We do it when we apply for a job and face an interview panel, when we go on a date, when we try to sell our car or house, or when we meet someone for the first time. Like the market trader who puts the best apples at the front of their stall, we push forward the positive, the impressive, the interesting things about ourselves, and downgrade or ignore the negative. That’s spin – seeking to influence others’ opinions by the selection of information designed to create the right impression.
Spinning does not involve telling lies. If you lie on a first date, in a job interview, or when selling your house or car, the chances are you will be found out. If you lie on your job application to get a job, the employer can not only sack you if you are subsequently uncovered, they can sue you for damages. If you lie on a first date, well, it’s not a relationship that’s likely to last. If you lie to journalists, whatever the short-term advantage, you will be finished as a spin doctor.
Anyone serious about selling their message cannot rely on the occasional lunch with a newspaper editor or the odd news release. Building, maintaining and protecting a celebrity, corporate or political reputation is a full-time job, reflective of the insatiable demand for news and comment from an increasingly diverse media.
The explosive growth of the media means that there are more opportunities for spin: more news outlets that need more stories, more interview slots that need filling, more experts who need to share their insights, and more space for your message. The political parties’ spin doctors need to pump out three or more stories a day, just to satisfy the beast. Like the plant in Little Shop of Horrors, the endless refrain is ‘feed me’.
All of us can be spin doctors if we have a cause we want to promote, an issue we want to raise, or a campaign we want to kick-start. The techniques of the White House, Downing Street, St James’s Palace and Square Mile spin doctors can be used to support the campaign to save the local hospital, sell tickets for the am-dram production of The Mikado, raise funds for the local scout troop, or plug a new charity, book or small business.
The reason is simple: the way we perceive the world beyond our personal experience is shaped by the media, the media is shaped by spin, and spin can be provided by you. What follows is not a guide to the black arts of manipulation and subterfuge, nor tips on lying and deceit, but some practical advice on how to influence the media in all its forms and get your message across.
If your voice deserves to be heard, neither an absence of knowledge about how to reach a wider audience via the media nor a lack of funds to hire a professional should be a barrier. This little book shows you how to be a spin doctor.
Chapter One
In Defence of Spin
If you’ve done it, it ain’t braggin’.
—DIZZY DEAN, US BASEBALL PLAYER
ASK THE MAN or woman on the Clapham Omnibus about ‘spin’ and ‘spin doctors’ and you will receive a strongly negative reaction, as though you’d asked them about athlete’s foot. Most people feel uneasy about the idea, and have it wrapped up in their minds with ‘propaganda’, ‘manipulation’, ‘cheating’, ‘lying’ and ‘public relations’. Spin doctors are understood to be people who obfuscate, con, gossip and plot.
If you pursue the conversation and ask what it actually means, the same people fail to come up with a definition. People know spin is bad, but they don’t know what it is. And if you ask people to name a spin doctor, they probably can’t.
Melanie Phillips writing in The Observer on 12 October 1997, after just a few months of the Blair government, called spin doctoring ‘a package of trickery, economies with the truth, manipulation of public credulity, bullying of journalists and favouritism’.
Michael Shea, who died in 2009, served as Her Majesty the Queen’s spin doctor from 1978 to 1987. In 1986, he ‘became the story’ when fingers were pointed at him for briefing the Sunday Times that Her Majesty was not a big fan of the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. After a mole-hunt it turned out Shea was the source, but he claimed to be misreported. In his political thriller Spin Doctor he describes these modern Machiavellis as ‘professional political strategists, able on behalf of their clients to manipulate the media – planting a story here, a rumour there, a tip-off somewhere else – so that any piece of news is tailored to show them in the best possible light’.
We saw a dollop of this during the Labour Party’s marathon reshuffle of the shadow front bench in January 2016, when anonymous ‘sources’ (people working for Jeremy Corbyn) briefed against Labour spokespeople for ‘incompetence’ and ‘disloyalty’.
Another novelist, Ken Follett, goes further: ‘People who do the briefing, who whisper words of poison into the ears of journalists, are of no consequence. They are the rent boys of politics, and we shudder with disgust when they brush past us in the corridor.’
The Chambers 21st Century Dictionary defines a spin doctor as ‘someone, especially in politics, who tries to influence public opinion by putting a favourable bias on information presented to the public or to the media’.
The Compact Oxford English Dictionary suggests a spin doctor is ‘a spokesperson for a political party or person employed to give a favourable interpretation of events to the media’.
These dictionary definitions get us some of the way there. It is right to highlight the realm of politics in the development of spin doctoring, but spin is far from confined to politicians. Most major organisations employ spin doctors: businesses, charities, celebrities, campaigns, even countries. We’ve known about the Queen’s spin doctors for decades. What about the civil service, the Army, Waitrose, Virgin Atlantic, British American Tobacco, Facebook and the Stop the War Coalition – don’t they employ spin doctors too? Don’t Richard Branson, Kim Kardashian, Beyoncé, Eddie Redmayne and Adele employ spin doctors to look after their image? Of course they do.
And hang on a second. Wasn’t our Prime Minister, David Cameron, once a spin doctor?
His future mother-in-law, Annabel Astor, persuaded Michael Green to take on Cameron as his director of corporate affairs at Carlton Communications. Cameron occupied this role from 1994 until 2001. He had never intended to stay there so long – he had believed John Major was going to call a general election in 1996. Unfortunately for Cameron, he failed to hold the traditionally Tory seat of Stafford in 1997 and thus was forced to return to Carlton to spin some more.
What about this idea of putting a ‘favourable bias’ or ‘favourable interpretation’ on information? Is putting a favourable bias on things confined to spin doctors? Who puts an unfavourable bias on what they say about themselves? With this definition, spin is no more morally reprehensible or responsible for the downfall of public standards than the used car salesman who gives his cars a good clean, or the job interviewee who selects their whitest shirt or blouse.
What about journalists? Don’t they write and broadcast their own spin on things? Aren’t the professional choices they make subject to their own convictions, views, prejudices, upbringing and proprietorial influence? Don’t they choose to give a voice to certain points of view and perspectives which mirror their own view of the world, or the editorial line of their publication?
If journalists were simply reflectors of a perfect, objective truth, then the Daily Mail and The Guardian would be full of the same stories, written in the same way, every day of the week. Alastair Campbell wrote in the Mirror on 3 July 2000 that ‘the vast bulk of spin comes from what I call journalist spin doctors’.
We don’t have to go as far as the tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorists, the people who complain online about the ‘MSM’ (mainstream media) as the mouthpiece of an establishment plot to hide the truth. We should, however, recognise that journalists and media organisations have agendas. The public, of course, understands this pretty well, and doesn’t need someone in a Guy Fawkes mask to enlighten them.
The term ‘spin doctor’ was born, along with many of the techniques, in the United States of America. Spin doctor is an amalgam of ‘spin’ – the interpretation or slant placed on events (which is a sporting metaphor, taken from the spin put on a baseball by the pitcher, or the spin put on the cue-ball in pool), and ‘doctor’ deriving from the figurative uses of the word to mean ‘patch up’, ‘piece together’ and ‘falsify’.
The phrase first appeared in print in the New York Times during the 1984 US Presidential elections, and during the ’80s the term became common among the political classes on both sides of the Atlantic, especially during the 1988 US Presidential elections.
In Britain, the term is often applied to the handful of ‘special advisers’ employed by politicians. Special advisers are an important part of our machinery of government. Harold Wilson appointed the first ones, and every Prime Minister since has done the same. The numbers have steadily increased, despite opposition parties’ calls to limit the numbers.
But not all special advisers are spin doctors. Most of the special advisers employed by government ministers are policy experts whose day-to-day work involves meetings with civil servants and interest groups, drafting policy documents and speeches, and providing another perspective and political advice to ministers otherwise reliant on the civil service. These special advisers have few, if any, dealings with the media beyond occasional phone briefings or ghost-writing articles. Each Cabinet minister has a personal political spin doctor, and the Prime Minister has a handful. But the numbers are pitifully small compared to other systems, especially the fabled West Wing of the White House.
So what is a spin doctor? A spin doctor is a media specialist, with an expert knowledge and understanding of journalism and journalists, who uses his or her professional skill to help an organisation or individual get a message across to the right people.
It is a more highly skilled job, requiring a higher level of credibility and expertise, than a press officer or public relations officer. These jobs, though perfectly respectable and useful, are more concerned with drafting and issuing news statements, running social media accounts and answering factual enquiries from journalists.
The press officer is to the spin doctor what the first violin is to the orchestra’s conductor. On this definition, it is obvious that spin doctors exist far beyond the narrow world of politics.
Wanted: Spin Doctor
‘Wanted: Spin Doctor’ is not a job ad you’ll ever see.
The role is masked by other titles: head of communications, director of media, director of strategic communications, and so forth. But in my experience, the same attributes are required by all of these jobs, whatever the official job title may be.
The modern spin doctor must be in tune with all of the channels and platforms available, not just the traditional outlets of TV, radio,newspapers and magazines, but direct forms of communication such as Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook.
He or she must have an instinctive feel for public opinion, but also be conversant with scientific methods of measuring how people think and feel about the world around them.
They must have great writing skills and be able to turn out speeches, press statements, policy briefings and tweets at a moment’s notice, as well as ghost-writing anything from articles to books on behalf of their client.
Sometimes, experience of journalism is an advantage, but often the transition is hard and unsuccessful. Someone used to writing in their own name within a news organisation might find it hard to lead a team and work with others.
They must know a lot: about the area they’re working in, the latest developments, thoughts and ideas, and what’s around the corner. This involves spotting trends, analysing data, and having a sixth sense about how a media story might play out.
They must be resilient and self-confident: a lot of grief will come their way. They must be prepared to work over a 24-hour cycle, including weekends and public holidays, with little time for friends, family and sleep.
Lastly, they must be good company. Journalists must like and trust them. Senior figures must respect them. Their staff must admire them. They should be good at managing people.
Spin doctors are people employed for their skills at communicating. They can advise their bosses or organisations on how to present a positive face to the world, how to harness the awesome power of the mass media, how to avoid making the kind of mistakes which can send the share price into free-fall or cause the snap resignation.
The modern spin doctor is not a liar, or a dissembler, or a fraudster, or a manipulator – he or she is an invaluable asset to an organisation, and, much to the chagrin of journalists, an important contributor to the world of journalism. Journalists like to complain about spin doctors, especially if they’re effective, but they rely on them in order to do their jobs.
The TV journalist Vincent Hanna once said that that the relationship between a politician and a journalist was that of a dog and a lamppost. He could just have easily been talking about spin doctors and journalists. I think that’s an unfair characterisation. The relationship between a spin doctor and a journalist, if kept professional and based on some degree of trust, can be of mutual benefit. Journalists have to churn out stories, and people with a message have to sell it.
The spin doctor has become an invaluable link between leaders in business, politics and public life or celebrities and the consumers of media (that’s you and me). It is through the media – newspapers, radio, television and internet – that we view the world beyond our immediate environment. In an age where few attend public meetings to hear speeches, or digest lengthy policy manifestos or a business prospectus, it is through the media that our reality is created.
We all like to think of ourselves as individuals, with our own distinct tastes, views, lifestyles and identity. Yet consider how much of your perception of the world comes through the prism of the media, not from personal experience. If I were to buy you a coffee and ask you for your opinion on any of the following:
Jeremy CorbynNew ZealandThe so-called Islamic StateEd SheeranHoxton… I have no doubt that you’d have a view to share. But challenge yourself: how much of your view is based on personal experience, say bumping into Jeremy Corbyn and Ed Sheeran in a bar in New Zealand for example, and how much comes from the media?
What we experience directly is dwarfed by what we hear about from others. The truth is we largely form our perception of the world around us based on what we hear others say, often through newspapers, magazines, social media, websites, radio and TV. Your reality is shaped as much by that little screen in your pocket as the eyes and ears in your head.
Those who can use the media to their advantage can effectively shape reality.
The people employed in shaping this reality tend to work in communications or public relations for myriad organisations. The 2014 PR Census puts the number of people employed in PR in the UK at over 62,000 (PRCA, 2013).
The explosion of social media has enabled increasing numbers of companies to roll out a PR strategy in-house. This makes it difficult to gauge an accurate figure of the number of people employed in PR, but it’s more than those working in coal-mining, iron, steel or any other of the industries which used to be the pillars of the British economy.
It is estimated there are around 4,200 PR agencies in the UK. In 2014, 62 per cent of firms reported increasing their digital and social media budget compared to the previous twelve months. There was a 13 per cent growth in the number of firms relying on their own social media efforts for PR rather than relying on an agency.
PR consultancies continue to turn over almost £10 billion a year – increasing by approximately 30 per cent in the last five years alone. Thirty-three UK universities and colleges offer PR as an undergraduate degree, with 140 different courses between them. PR is big business in the UK.
Public relations is a bigger activity than pure spin doctoring. Not all PRs are spin doctors.
THE TRUTH IS A DIFFICULT CONCEPT
If such a thing as absolute truth existed, there wouldn’t be any spin doctors. But it doesn’t, so there are. As Lord Justice Scott concluded at the completion of his inquiry into the Matrix Churchill scandal, ‘the truth is a difficult concept’.
I’m not getting into the philosophical question of truth, which has occupied thinkers down the ages, from Aquinas to Wittgenstein. I merely make the point that what is considered to be true depends on a range of factors, from the source of the truth, the beliefs, convictions and prejudices of the recipients of the truth, the decade in which the truth was uttered, and so on. You can have a lot of fun marvelling at what intelligent people consider to be true, from astrology to the belief that 9/11 was faked.
This last belief, that the attacks on 9/11 were some kind of inside job, is promulgated by a growing industry of conspiracy theorists under the banner of the 9/11 truth movement. There’s that word ‘truth’ again. There are plenty more ‘truths’ where that came from: that JFK was shot by more than a lone assailant; that aliens landed at Roswell, New Mexico; that NASA faked the moon landings; that Princess Diana was assassinated; that Paul McCartney died in the 1960s and was replaced by a lookalike; that the government scientist David Kelly was murdered by Iraqi secret agents; that the world is controlled by a secret world government.
Facts, figures, events, words: all have different meanings to different people. It all depends on perspective and interpretation. The internet, far from enhancing our understanding of the universe around us, has strengthened the role of interpretation and perspective.
As society’s trust in ‘experts’ and professionals has diminished, individuals are bolstered by the half-baked, ill-informed and often entirely fictitious ‘truths’ that abound on the internet. People will earnestly repeat nonsense they’ve read on their phones as though they were sharing some great insight. These falsehoods are often negative and can be hugely damaging to an individual or institution’s reputation.
On social media, the truth can be shaped and spread within minutes, often with little relation to the facts. It can have catastrophic results, as with the case of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine. In 1998 a doctor called Andrew Wakefield published a study of twelve children with autism who had had the MMR vaccine. He established a link between the two, and soon tens of thousands of parents were refusing to get their children vaccinated. The rate of MMR vaccination dropped from 92 per cent to 80 per cent.
In 2010, the General Medical Council declared his research ‘dishonest’ and various medical bodies have shown there is no link between vaccines and autism. Yet parents persisted in their conviction, even when their children, and the children of others, were in danger. In 1998, there were fifty-six measles cases in the UK; by 2008, there were 1,348 cases, with two children tragically dying.
Over the past few years, a great number of viral news stories have been exposed as hoaxes. Social media allows these stories to spread rapidly; the pressure on the media to have the most up-to-date content means speed often takes precedence over verification.
There are 500 million tweets a day, 30 billion pieces of Facebook content a month, 300 hours of video uploaded to YouTube each second and news sites publishing and updating thousands of articles daily. We’re all bombarded with more information than we can pause to verify or process.
In the early days of 24-hour TV news, the joke was that a story was ‘never wrong for long’. The thirst to be first meant that broadcasters would get it wrong and quickly correct it afterwards. For example, broadcasters announced that Alan Johnson had been elected deputy leader of the Labour Party in 2007, when in reality it was Harriet Harman. This remained on the screen for a few seconds, before the broadcasters corrected their mistake.
The issue for social media is that an item may be shared countless times before verification. Once a tweet with false information is out in the ether, it belongs to the hive and may be retweeted thousands of times, regardless of the fact that it is wrong. Even if a correction soon follows, this might not be retweeted by the same people.
For example, an Evening Standard reporter once tweeted that ‘Rio Ferdinand wins landmark privacy case against Sunday Mirror’, when in fact he had lost. A correction was soon tweeted, but the original tweet is still out there in cyberspace, misinforming anyone who stumbles upon it.
Craig Silverman, a blogger on journalism, says: ‘Social media is the most unverifiable information source in the world but the news media believes it because of its need for speed.’
In October 2014, the National Report website reported that street artist Banksy had been arrested in Watford. Within hours, all the main UK national newspapers featured the story on their websites. The original article contained multiple errors, including claims he had been arrested by the non-existent London Police and a quote from the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, ‘Lyndon Edwards’. Presumably, Bernard Hogan-Howe (the actual Commissioner of the Met Police) was not particularly happy that no journalist recognised his role was being attributed to a fictional individual.
Perhaps the most common form of media to go viral is photography. In 2015, a photo appeared that seemed to show Ronald Reagan shaking hands with a young Vladimir Putin on a state visit in the mid-1980s. At this time, Putin was in fact in his thirties and a KGB agent.
Hoax news stories that go viral tend to tap into pre-existing anxieties among the general public about issues facing society. It’s a mass form of ‘confirmation bias’ – we notice the things which back up our own views.
Here’s a good example: in 2015, someone called Patrick tweeted a pie-chart of an opinion poll showing that 74 per cent of attendees of the Glastonbury festival had voted Conservative at the previous month’s general election. It was mocked up to look like a Guardian poll, with Guardian-like colours and fonts (although not the actual font). It was gleefully retweeted by people who saw it as proof of their suspicions that Glastonbury had become mainstream, middle-class and commercial. These included Guardian journalists and, I’m ashamed to admit, myself. If we had thought about it for a moment, that figure of 74 per cent would have seemed ludicrously high. It confirmed our biases, and in a click it was retweeted.
Concerns about mass immigration have generated many scare articles in the tabloids attesting to the idea of immigrants taking over the UK. One such article in the Daily Express
