It’s political season.  But, actually, it is “spin” era.  Since the ascendancy of “PR,” we have been the consumers of spin.  Usually, the spin is “invisible,” and we are not aware of just how much spin we are consuming, all the time.  And although the very idea is ancient, it is now quite truly omnipresent.

This week, I presented my synopsis of Deadly Spin:  An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans by Wendell Potter for the October Urban Engagement Book Club sponsored by CitySquare.  This book is about two things:  the health care issue, and the PR business.  Mr. Potter is a former insider, who developed (maybe “rediscovered”) a “conscience” (his word), so he left his job and the industry.  He served for well over a decade as the head of Public Relations for CIGNA, and was truly on the inside of the “spin machine” for all of health care.

Here’s a little about the book from this review:

From clandestine meetings carefully organized to leave no paper trail to creating third party front groups, Potter lets the reader in on the dirty secrets most big corporations would rather have the masses be in the dark about because the stakes are high and the profits even higher.

But, whether you are interested in the health care issue or not, the book is absolutely worth reading for its insights on public relations.  Here are two key excepts:

Human beings have distorted information for as long as they’ve communicated—with gestures, sounds, nuanced words, or whatever it takes to bring other people around.  (…a white lie, this art form—often called spin…)
and
Knowing how to decode spin is as important as basic literacy and numeracy in today’s media world.
We will never be free of spin, but we can be wise to it, and we can push back against it. There is too much at stake not to try.

In other words, what we hear, regardless of the source it comes from, may very well be “spin” from some corporate insider.  The book describes just how efficient and successful Mr. Potter was at getting journalists to basically print health-care-industry-generated press releases as news.  His warning is that this is what happens all the time, in industry after industry.  In other words, what we think is unbiased, relatively unfiltered information, is actually very carefully planned “spin.”

So, our challenge is simple:  “how do we learn to ‘decode’ spin, to be wise to spin, and push back against it?”

I think this is a book worth reading.