Word: spinnings
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...used to be, there was truth and there was falsehood. Now, there is spin and there are gaffes. Spin is often thought to be synonymous with falsehood or lying, but more accurately it is indifference to the truth. A politician engaged in spin is saying what he or she wishes were true, and sometimes, by coincidence, it is. Meanwhile a gaffe, it's been said, is when a politician tells the truth - or, more precisely, when he or she accidentally reveals something truthful about what is going on in his or her head. A gaffe is what happens when...
...Spin constitutes most of what's said in politics and other areas of public life (like Hollywood), and if it's not spin, it's a gaffe. Journalists enjoy gaffes as a slight taste of human reality at the banquet of artifice where they sup. They also enjoy the power of the gaffe to generate stories. Like stone soup, a gaffe can provide days of nourishment from almost nothing. A gaffe offers more stages of grief than Elisabeth K?bler-Ross: denial, quibbling, refusal to apologize, qualified apology, slavish apology...
...small secret is that journalists don't mind spin either. A politician's ability to spin is a measure of his or her professionalism, which journalists respect. Furthermore, spin needs to be interpreted, which is the journalist's job. If politicians were totally truthful, political journalists would be out of business...
...specific facts of this saga have not been friendly to the press's arguments. Far from keeping the government honest, the leaks or intended leaks in this tale were all part of a dizzy spin campaign in the Vice President's office. What's more, everyone involved seems to have overlooked the fact that a leak of the identity of an undercover officer can be against the law. This is a law that even most journalists think is reasonable. This law cannot be enforced if one of the parties to an illegal conversation is protected by the Fifth Amendment...
Such talk may amount to spin for an Administration that needs silver linings. But for Bush and Rice it may also reveal a deeper philosophical shift. In recent years the Bush team has split over whether to abandon the ambition that underpinned the invasion of Iraq--to bring Western-style democracy to the Islamic world--in favor of conventional Realpolitik, in which idealism takes a backseat to stability. The most obvious signals that the U.S. is tilting back toward realism came on Rice's trip to the Middle East last month, in which she toned down calls for democracy...