No more spin rooms? Say it ain't so!

The persuasion of postdebate spin rooms is going undercover.

from the October 2, 2007 edition

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But a few retired spinners I sought out suspect there's more at play here, and I agree. Today, news moves at lightning speed and can be leaked through unlimited avenues – by BlackBerry, cellphone, e-mail, and, surreptitiously or not, on blogs.

"The spin room was for a time when there was just old media, when we knew who the media were," says Carol Darr, a former political insider now at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Mass.

Even many of those old media types won't miss it. "Spin is basically deception," snorts Brooks Jackson, a veteran political correspondent who started the website factcheck.org to measure the advertising claims of candidates against the facts. "It never made sense to me that we filed in like sheep to be [fed a line]."

But I hesitate to celebrate the end of an era before I better understand what the next era might bring. If spin rooms are about persuasion – built, shall we say, on selective facts – at least the spinners have names and faces.

The same can't always be said about the intricate web of campaign bloggers and blog posters out there. I claim no expertise about this new form of, well, spin. But I felt awfully uneasy last week as panelists at a forum at Boston's Emerson College explained how tough it can be to trace the source of stories that jump from little blog to bigger blog, from a bit of buzz to breaking news on some 24-hour cable show.

Linda Peek Schacht, acting chair of Emerson's department of organizational and political communication and a former press secretary of Jimmy Carter's reelection campaign, is generally upbeat about a new generation of grass-roots campaigners. But she acknowledged that in the modern era of spin, "Who knows what horrible and scurrilous stuff is going to be put out there? And once it's out, it's impossible to kill."

Yikes.

Just maybe – if you'll forgive me Mr. Jackson – we may someday miss those flesh-and-blood spinmeisters, even if at times they insist on hiding behind the veil of anonymity. At least today, reporters know whom they've talked to and can try to gauge whether the spin has any grounding in fact. On the Internet, the "news" in time may truly come from nowhere.

Spin, I suspect, is neither dying nor fading away. It's just going deep black, increasingly beyond the range of detection. I'd personally prefer to meet the spinners – and watch the rugby scrum.

• Jerry Lanson teaches journalism at Emerson College in Boston.

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