The experts in spinning in Malta are the Nationalist Party. They know how to manipulate public opinion: thanks to their spin doctors they can even make your dog’s shit spell like Chanel No 5. And Labour lacks this capacity to spin any story and any coverage.
In public relations, spin is a form of propaganda, achieved through providing an interpretation of an event or campaign to persuade public opinion in favour or against a certain organization or public figure.
The techniques used are various and include selectively presenting facts and quotes that support one’s position known as cherry picking, non-denial denial, phrasing in a way that assumes unproven truth, euphemisms to disguise or promote one’s agenda and burying bad news, that is, announcing one popular thing at the same time as several unpopular things, hoping that the media will focus on the popular one.
A case in point is the Main Guard or St George’s Square project in Valletta. The government wanted to give the impression that this is a new project when it only involved the paving of the square because the square was there and has been there for ages. But in order to give us the feel-good factor and make us forget the hefty bills sent to us for Christmas to pave the way for the increase in the electricity and water tariffs it introduced, the government engaged the media and spent more on the celebrations than on the refurbishment of the square. Thanks to the spinning, we are in doubt as to whether this is the same square that we have know since birth. This is a perfect case of spinning.
Edward Bernays has been called the ‘Father of Spin’. In his book he describes some situations in twentieth-century America where tobacco and alcohol companies used techniques to make certain behaviours more socially acceptable.
Another case in point is the gambling mania. Whereas until some time ago gambling was a taboo, nowadays we boast about the flourishing to e-gambling in Malta, the millions made by Maltco, and until some ago, the profusion of gambling shops all over Malta. The spin is that there is nothing wrong with gambling as long as it generates money in the economy.
Another spin technique involves the delay in the release of bad news so it can be hidden in the “shadow” of more important or favourable news or events. A famous reference to this practice occurred when UK government press officer Jo Moore used the phrase “It’s now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury,” in an email sent on September 11, 2001 following the attacks on the World Trade Centre.
Another tactic is that of blowing small circumstances out of proportion to get a certain reaction from the public, by engaging public relations firms to send out fabricated or misleading information to get a rise in the public approval of a measure taken by the government. During the last elections we witnessed the Zejtun incident which was blown out of proportion on purpose to attract more votes. Again, if the incident happened to the Labour supporters, Labour still has to learn how to spin the story the same way the Nationalists do. Let us not forget that in the Zejtun case, the law courts were opened on a weekend at the taxpayers’ expense and the charges were minimal. But circumstances at that time dictated that was the way to go ahead in order to attract more votes.
Take the murder of Raymond Caruana and the murder of Karen Grech. The Nationalist Party, rightly so, commemorate with a lot of pomp the anniversary of his death and they always spun the story to make the public believe that Labour killed Caruana. In the case of Karen Grech, Labour keeps a very low profile on her death and little is done to commemorate or ‘spin’ this tragedy.
State-run media in many countries also engage in spin by only allowing news stories that are favourable to the government while censoring anything that could be considered critical. In Malta this is very evident with PBS when the subjects for discussion are chosen to be the least controversial in order not to irritate the hand that feeds them. The Opposition through Evarist Bartolo is claiming that PBS is doing precisely this allowing news stories that are favourable to the government but this is immediately spun by opinion writers such as Stephen Calleja writing in The Independent, who attacks Labour for daring to criticise PBS.
This is the kind of spinning that Labour lacks when it raises an issue. There are no spin doctors who take up the matter in support of this issue. Note that in the Bartolo case, the opinion writer did not come ‘from the Nationalist side’ but from an independent newspaper and from an ‘independent’ opinion writer who has nothing to do with politics, and who sent the message that the concerns or the rebuttals, as in this case, do not come from politicians but from the man in the street.
Labour may have good stories and ample documentation to prove the existence of corruption, but it still does not have spin doctors who are available at the blow of the whistle.
The tender of the power station is a case in point and with all the documents that Labour has available, and with the government still refusing to admit that there were any signs of corruption, and with the Prime Minister, oddly enough, defending this charade, the only remedy available for Labour is to take action abroad and tell the whole world how to win a tender in Malta.
Because let us face it, if BWSC gets the money for this tender, it will be a severe blow for Labour as the voters will surely get the perception that if Labour could not get this right when it has all the documents in hand, how can it get other things right? It is therefore imperative for Labour to tell the EU, which provides most of the funds for the project, to stop such funding and conduct its own inquiry to check if the tender was giving according to its procurement regulations. Only international pressure can save Labour and the taxpayers from this disaster.
I smiled lately when President Fenech Adami in an interview he gave on this newspaper stated that he is keeping aloof from politics, when I know that last month he was in Tunisia attending a political conference. Now whether he was representing the Nationalist Party or himself I do not know, but even so as President Emeritus it is unconventional to attend these political gatherings. Labour was represented by its International Secretary and although they know that Fenech Adami was at the conference, they did nothing to ask how and why he was there, and spin the story in the media to show that he is still present in politics.
Take the declaration of assets of the people who rule this country – we are not given any information about the perks they receive and the extent that the palm of their hands gets greased by the public purse. But so far nobody has tried to spin this story or investigate the veracity of their declarations.
Spinning in politics is a necessary evil and we want to see more of it from Labour.
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