It's no shock that an American president would employ skilled PR pros to carefully hone a message that makes the administration's objectives more palatable to the general public. It's a tradition that dates back decades. But it's another matter entirely to base an entire presidency on the bending, twisting, and distorting of the truth. According to authors Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer, and Brendan Nyhan, the George W. Bush administration tiptoes around the definition of lying but still uses ambiguous language, selective use of facts, and shaky evidence to sell the American people on issues like the effect of tax cuts, the impact of a business-friendly environmental policy, and the reasons for going to war in Iraq. While the authors have plenty of blame to place on the administration, the news media are also fingered for parroting administration spin and reporting it, without verification or context, as objective fact. Fritz, Keefer, and Nyhan, founders of the political analysis web site Spinsanity, detail how Bush and company, more than any administration in history, cherry pick information that they find helpful, regardless of how representative it is of the overall truth, and then package it with a forceful and persistent presentation that eventually takes on the patina of reality. Democrats will also find that 2004 presidential candidate John Kerry appears very much up to playing the political game on Bush's terms as the authors dissect and deflate plenty of misleading primary season anti-Bush charges made by the Democratic nominee. All The President's Spin is richly detailed, not surprising given the sound bite-free task of picking apart political spin, and while it is intensely critical of Bush's messaging, it does not pass judgment on the wisdom or efficacies of the policies themselves. Any politician could take a lesson from the authors' clarity and comprehensive scope. --John Moe


From Publishers Weekly
George W. Bush vowed to restore "honor and integrity" to the White House during his 2000 presidential campaign, but instead he has launched an "assault on honesty," argue the authors, who founded the watchdog Web site Spinsanity.com after concluding during the 2000 election that the "national debate had been reduced to an endless barrage of spin." In this lucid critique of Bush’s "permanent campaign of policy disinformation," the authors evenhandedly point out instances when other politicians, including Kerry, Clinton and Reagan, have distorted the truth to their advantage, but they contend that Bush is the "current leader of the arms race of deception." Bush’s weapons: "emotional language designed to provoke gut-level reactions, slanted statistics that are difficult for casual listeners to interpret, and ambiguous statements that imply what Bush does not want to state outright." The authors support their claims with many solid examples. For instance, when commenting on the method that Bush used to imply a connection between Saddam and September 11, they point to a televised address that aired prior to the war in which Bush linked Iraq, al Qaeda and September 11 without saying directly that Iraq was responsible for the attack. The book isn’t just a critique of Bush’s spin tactics, however. The authors also reproach the media for letting statements like this go unchecked and for being so overly concerned about objectivity that they’ve become a mere outlet for politicians’ "talking points." Well organized and heavily referenced, this passionate indictment will pique readers’ awareness of political spin and of the outlets—bloggers, publications like the Economist and "infotainment" programs like Comedy Central’s The Daily Show—that are purportedly fighting it.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


Review
Jonathan Chait The New Republic A clinical, dispassionate, and intellectually bulletproof analysis of the ways President Bush has manipulated public opinion. The authors meticulously paint a troubling picture of the way our national debates function. It ought to shame the press corps into mending its ways.

Tucker Carlson CNN Politicians talk so much that hardly anyone pays close attention to what they're actually saying. Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer, and Brendan Nyhan do, staying up late to match words with reality. It's a tough job -- imagine the migraines -- but the rest of us can be glad someone's doing it.

Neal Pollack author of Never Mind the Pollacks A chilling and comprehensive account of how the government has polluted our country with a thick mist of foul propaganda.


Review
Neal Pollack author of Never Mind the Pollacks A chilling and comprehensive account of how the government has polluted our country with a thick mist of foul propaganda.


Book Description
All the President's Spin, the first book from the editors of the acclaimed nonpartisan website Spinsanity, unmasks the tactics of deception and media manipulation that George W. Bush has used to sell his agenda to the American people. From his campaigns for tax cuts to the debate over war in Iraq, President Bush has employed an unprecedented onslaught of half-truths and strategically ambiguous language to twist and distort the facts. Fritz, Keefer, and Nyhan's powerful critique of Bush's record of policy deception explains why the media has failed to hold him accountable and demonstrates the threat these tactics pose to honest political debate. This is the essential book for every citizen who wants to understand how George W. Bush has misled the nation and why, if left unchallenged, all the President's spin could soon become standard practice -- a devastating development for our democracy.


Download Description
"All the President's Spin, the first book from the editors of the acclaimed nonpartisan website Spinsanity, unmasks the tactics of deception and media manipulation that George W. Bush has used to sell his agenda to the American people. From his campaigns for tax cuts to the debate over war in Iraq, President Bush has employed an unprecedented onslaught of half-truths and strategically ambiguous language to twist and distort the facts. Fritz, Keefer, and Nyhan's powerful critique of Bush's record of policy deception explains why the media has failed to hold him accountable and demonstrates the threat these tactics pose to honest political debate. This is the essential book for every citizen who wants to understand how George W. Bush has misled the nation and why, if left unchallenged, all the President's spin could soon become standard practice -- a devastating development for our democracy. "


From the Inside Flap
Jonathan Chait, The New Republic "A clinical, dispassionate, and intellectually bulletproof analysis of the ways President Bush has manipulated public opinion. The authors meticulously paint a troubling picture of the way our national debates function. It ought to shame the press corps into mending its ways." Tucker Carlson, CNN "Politicians talk so much that hardly anyone pays close attention to what they're actually saying. Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer, and Brendan Nyhan do, staying up late to match words with reality. It's a tough job -- imagine the migraines -- but the rest of us can be glad someone's doing it." Neal Pollack, author of Never Mind the Pollacks "A chilling and comprehensive account of how the government has polluted our country with a thick mist of foul propaganda."


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
INTRODUCTION During the 2000 presidential campaign, then-Governor Bush liked to tell the story of a hypothetical waitress who would benefit from his tax cut plan. "Under current tax law," he said, "a single waitress supporting two children on an income of $22,000 faces a higher marginal tax rate than a lawyer making $220,000," adding, "Under my plan, she will pay no income tax at all." This wasn't much of a feat. What Bush failed to mention was that his hypothetical waitress probably already paid no federal income tax. In August 2001, President Bush announced a new policy on the use of stem cells in federally funded medical research. "More than sixty genetically diverse stem cell lines already exist," he told the nation in a televised address, concluding, "We should allow federal funds to be used for research on these existing stem cell lines." Researchers eager to obtain access to these "existing" lines were quickly disappointed, however, when Tommy Thompson, Bush's Secretary of Health and Human Services, admitted that only twenty-four or twenty-five lines were actually "fully developed." Although sixty lines did exist, it was uncertain whether many of them would ever become available to researchers. In late 2001, Bush began pointing back to a statement he claimed to have made during the 2000 campaign. As he put it in May 2002, "when I was running for president, in Chicago, somebody said, would you ever have deficit spending? I said, only if we were at war, or only if we had a recession, or only if we had a national emergency. Never did I dream we'd get the trifecta." It was a good story, but there's no evidence that the President ever made such a statement in Chicago or elsewhere. In fact, Vice President Al Gore was the candidate who had listed the exceptions in 1998 (though Bush advisor Lawrence Lindsey said at the time that they would apply to the Texas governor as well). Was this an innocent mistake? The answer is almost certainly no -- Bush continued to repeat the "trifecta" story for months after it had been debunked. Then, in a televised address to the nation in October 2002, Bush declared, "We know that Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network share a common enemy -- the United States of America. We know that Iraq and al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade. Some al Qaeda leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq. These include one very senior al Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year, and who has been associated with planning for chemical and biological attacks. We've learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases. And we know that after September the 11th, Saddam Hussein's regime gleefully celebrated the terrorist attacks on America." Each of these statements was true, but Bush's words were carefully constructed to leave a false impression. Without ever stating that there was a direct connection between Iraq, al Qaeda, and September 11, the President artfully linked them together with a series of carefully chosen phrases. After the war, Bush told an interviewer from Polish television that "We found the weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq. But he was not reporting the discovery of drums of chemical weapons or artillery shells filled with anthrax. Rather, Bush was referring to a pair of trailers that some analysts thought might have been used to produce biological weapons. While experts debated the purpose of the trailers, the President of the United States was falsely claiming that WMD had been found. These examples might not be so troubling if the press had consistently called attention to them. But on most issues, with the possible exception of stem cells and the aftermath of the war in Iraq, he got away with little more than a slap on the wrist. Journalists deserve much of the blame for this, but one of the chief reasons these examples received so little attention is that many were based on a partial truth about a complex policy issue; after all, the waitress did end up with no federal income tax, there were sixty "existing" stem cell lines, and Iraq had some fragmentary connections to Al Qaeda...sort of. Bush's record raises a number of questions. Just how often did the President deceive us? How did he do it? And why didn't anyone put a stop to it? The answers are disturbing. George W. Bush has done serious damage to our political system. His deceptions span nearly all of his major policies, were achieved using some of the most advanced tactics from public relations, and were designed to exploit the failings of the modern media. In the process, Bush has made it even more difficult for citizens to understand and take part in democratic debate. These deceptions are worthy of close attention for more than the insight they give us into the President himself. He is simply the highest profile carrier of a virus infecting our political system. Its symptoms are misleading public statements, a disregard for the value of honest discussion, and treating policy debates as little more than marketing challenges -- a devastating combination for democracy. BUSH'S TROUBLED RELATIONSHIP WITH THE TRUTH Compared to other presidents, Bush's deceptions might seem unremarkable. He has certainly not been caught lying in a scandal comparable to Watergate or Bill Clinton's affair with a White House intern. Minor scandals have erupted during Bush's tenure, such as questions about his service in the Air National Guard and his administration's ties to Enron, but his behavior in these matters has been no different than that of previous chief executives. Nor do his statements about the conduct of military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq stand out compared to the great war-related deceptions of previous presidents like Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon. George W. Bush's dishonesty is different. Rather than simply lying, he has subtly and systematically attempted to deceive the nation about most of his major policy proposals. On issues ranging from tax cuts to stem cells to the debate over the war in Iraq, he has consistently twisted the truth beyond recognition in order to promote his policies. Remarkably, he has done so while generally avoiding obviously false statements. Instead, Bush consistently uses well-designed phrases and strategically crafted arguments to distract, deceive, and mislead. The result is that all but the most careful listeners end up believing something completely untrue, while proving the President has lied is usually impossible. Unlike famous White House dissemblers of the past, Bush almost never explicitly claims that black is white or day is night. Instead, he deceives the public with partial truths and misleading assertions. So rather than saying day is night, George W. Bush will focus on an instance of a solar eclipse or remind Americans that people who work graveyard shifts are asleep. Both might be true, but without the proper context, they're highly misleading. Because Bush's statements are so often constructed in this way, he has walked away from one deceptive claim after another scot-free. These tactics originate in public relations, a field that has become extremely skilled at promoting a message regardless of its factual accuracy. Previous presidents have also drawn on PR, of course, but Bush has gone far beyond his predecessors, systematically employing these dishonest strategies in nearly every major policy debate. At this point, the difference between corporate marketing and White House communications has largely disappeared. THE RIGHT DEFINITION OF DISHONESTY Before assessing Bush's dishonesty, however, we must answer an important question: What counts? One school of thought holds that any politician who contradicts his previous statements -- like George H. W. Bush's decision to disavow his "no new taxes" pledge -- is a liar. But violating a promise is not lying. This demeans the word and holds our leaders to an unrealistic standard that makes it impossible for them to compromise or adjust to changing circumstances. For instance, once he took office, Bill Clinton abandoned the middle-class tax cut he promised during the 1992 campaign, choosing instead to focus on reducing the federal budget deficit. Does this mean that he wasn't sincere when he first proposed the plan? We can't know for sure. That's not to say politicians should escape scrutiny for breaking a promise, but it's not a good measure of their honesty. Similarly, some accusations of lying are based on little more than vague political rhetoric, such as George W. Bush's promise during his first year in office that veterans would be a priority for his administration. He has since been accused of dishonesty for allegedly not spending enough on health care for veterans. But spending on veterans has increased every year Bush has been in office. Some may suggest that the budget has not gone up quickly enough, but there is no objective definition of a "priority." This sort of disagreement is hardly evidence that a politician's statement was misleading. Rather than bickering over what counts as a priority or calling every broken pledge a lie, we need a different standard for political dishonesty. A better approach is to judge public officials' words against the known facts. We should focus on what the President and his top aides knew or should have known to be false or misleading at the time they made a public statement. By that standard, George W. Bush has been extraordinarily deceptive about public policy issues. SETTING A NEW STANDARD? The cumulative effect of these tactics is to blur and distort the truth so much that honest discussion is impossible. After all, if we can't agree on whether it's day or night, there's no way to figure out what time it is. By the same token, if we can't agree on whether the Bush administration justified the invasion of Iraq by saying Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, it becomes impossible to assess whether those statements were accurate. That is why, after nearly four years of constant deception on major issues of public policy, the President must be held accountable. If we fail to do so, Bush's approach to political communications threatens to become the new standard for politics in America. From its campaigns for tax cuts to the debate over war with Iraq, this White House has invented a new politics of dishonesty. Copyright © 2004 by Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer and Brenden Nyhan

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Just in time for the national conventions and the 2004 election, All the President's Spin, the first book from the editors of the popular website Spinsanity.org, exposes the tactics of media manipulation that George W. Bush and his administration have employed to sell their agenda to the American people.

Certainly all presidents have engaged in spin to a certain extent, but in the past the media-and the public-checked the extent to which our leaders were able to fudge the truth. However, President Bush has repeatedly used deception, told outright lies, and rewritten history to sell his policy agenda. And thanks to one of the most aggressive public relations teams ever assembled, he has been able to get away with it since he began his campaign.

In the wake of September 11, the administration has taken its questionable conduct to a new level by attempting to intimidate critics and trying to connect virtually every policy initiative to the war on terrorism. Bush has used the same tactics to mislead the public on a wide range of other major policy initiatives, from the environment to homeland security to Social Security-all with little skepticism from the media.

All the President's Spin is a well-documented, investigative analysis of the deceptions of President Bush and his aides, the complicity of the media, and, most importantly, how our democracy suffers as a result. Known for their civic-minded approach to debunking spin on both sides of the political aisle, Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer, and Brendan Nyhan critique the president's policies, reveal the truth, and illuminate the devastating effects of Bush's politics.

Bryan Keefer, Ben Fritz, and Brendan Nyhan are recent college graduates who co-founded SpinSanity.org to fight political spin. Their work has earned them national media attention and hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors to their site.They live in Palo Alto, New York, and North Carolina.

FROM THE CRITICS

CNN - Tucker Carlson

Politicians talk so much that hardly anyone pays close attention to what they're actually saying. Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer, and Brendan Nyhan do, staying up late to match words with reality. It's a tough job — imagine the migraines — but the rest of us can be glad someone's doing it.

New Republic - Jonathan Chait

A clinical, dispassionate, and intellectually bulletproof analysis of the ways President Bush has manipulated public opinion. The authors meticulously paint a troubling picture of the way our national debates function. It ought to shame the press corps into mending its ways.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Politicians talk so much that hardly anyone pays close attention to what they're actually saying. Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer, and Brendan Nyhan do, staying up late to match words with reality. It's a tough job — imagine the migraines — but the rest of us can be glad someone's doing it.  — Tucker Carlson

A clinical, dispassionate, and intellectually bulletproof analysis of the ways President Bush has manipulated public opinion. The authors meticulously paint a troubling picture of the way our national debates function. It ought to shame the press corps into mending its ways.  — Jonathan Chait