Why we should not have to spin

Putting a positive turn on unsavoury events does not make them any the more palatable.

It’s a complex problem that needs to be handled – as long as it is not, the effect will be negative. It’s not lack of spin that is the problem, it is just that the problem is intractable.

By P. GUNASEGARAM, The Star

ALL this talk of spin is sending me into a tizzy.

As if we don’t have enough spinning, the suggestion has come that we have better spin doctors! And this from no less than Information, Communications and Culture Minister Datuk Seri Dr Rais Yatim, which seems to us something of an anachronism.

Perhaps the minister was not quite aware of what spinning means in current terminology.

Actually, it’s not very far from what is meant in the age-old phrase we have such as in “spinning a yarn”.

One spins a yarn, suitably exaggerating and embellishing it, to make it an interesting tale for one to tell and for others to listen to.

I know a particular person who is adept at this – he has no qualms about twisting, turning and even obliterating the truth for the sake of the story.

Well, spinning in the current context is a bit like that.

In the world of public relations and lobbying, it’s basically about finding the positive about what is essentially a negative thing and high lighting that.

It’s not such a new industry in PR but a lot of firms get paid a lot of money to do that – and yes, many governments pay, too.

But its benefits are dubious and cannot be measured effectively. Besides, you can see through such spinning pretty easily.

Let’s take a recent example.

In our country, a Muslim woman was going to be caned under Syariah laws for taking alcohol.

News like that makes it around the world in a flash and makes us look like the, er, Taliban when we clearly are not.

What kind of spin can one put on that to make it look positive in the eyes of the world?

None probably.

It’s a complex problem that needs to be handled – as long as it is not, the effect will be negative. It’s not lack of spin that is the problem, it is just that the problem is intractable.

Time and again, there have been attempts to improve the “perception” that foreign fund managers have of our capital markets.

So, we “spin” to them, we tell them all the good things and we leave out all the bad.

Fund managers are the last people you can spin stories to.

They are smart, they do their own research, they pay a lot of money to get research from other people, they pump you dry for every bit of information.

If you shed no new light for them – which means explaining what you intend to do with the tough nuts – they won’t buy. Period.

We believe – foolishly – we can spin our way out of the situation.

We fail to realise that putting the most positive face on the worst of things does not make unsavoury practices palatable.

But if you take the right measures, if you can find a way to enhance growth and development, if you encourage high valued-added industries and services to set up shop here, if you can spawn local entrepreneurs, etc, you don’t even have to market to fund managers – they will come here of their own accord.

You need to inform the misinformed, not the well-informed.

It’s here we need to tell our story.

Communications is about telling our story well when indeed we have a good story to tell and it’s about saying what we are going to do about bad situations.

Good communications and good PR highlight the bad in organisations and in countries and bring it to the attention of those in power so that they can do something about it.

It does not try to bury the bad under the carpet and push some furniture over it, the way spinning does.

An example of a great story badly told is palm oil. It’s basically a good vegetable oil, almost as good as olive oil, some say. And it takes less land – much less land – to produce the same quantity of palm oil as compared to any other edible oil.

In fact, its production is far less damaging to the environment than any other oil.

But we get slammed in the international media all the time about palm oil.

The anti-palm oil lobby group has found a very effective icon in the orang utan – it basically propagates the myth that those cute, cuddly creatures are being deprived of their habitat by rapacious oil palm cultivation.

That stopped being true in Malaysia decades ago and even then not all of the orang utan suffered.

We have succumbed to negative spin.

The best way to counter that is not positive spin but the truth.

It will prevail eventually but can’t we learn to tell a true story well so that it will prevail sooner?

We are not talking about spin here. How about some information and communication, Minister?

Here’s a question for the Information Minister:

What kind of a spin should be put to make your statement that we need better spin doctors look positive?

Now, that’s a pretty tough question to answer, especially since an information minister calling for more spin doctors is exactly the kind of story that will make headlines – of the negative kind – around the world.

Here’s what will get rid of spin doctors – information, the right, full and fair disclosure of all manner of things of public interest.

That helps to ensure right behaviour which leads to right perception and, therefore, obviates the need for spin.

No sir, Minister. We don’t need better spin doctors.

We need better information, communications, and yes, culture, too, in all the things that we do.

Taking the spin out and stating it simply, isn’t that your responsibility?

Managing editor P. Gunasegaram says that spinning a yarn gets you tangled in thread.