Special Lecture

The World According to Spin:
The Media and Stealth Public Relations

Instructor:  Neil Santaniello

Course Description:   This lecture will  examine  “spin,”  which is the manipulation of language to toy with the truth.  This is a pervasive practice and darker forms of Public Relations.  “Spin,” which conjures up an image of centrifugal motion that can disorient, describes a practice almost ubiquitous in modern life and news coverage.  It is artfully used by politicians, government spokespeople and PR professionals to try to control what appears in the press – to get the media to portray an event or outcome in the best, or sometimes worse, possible light.  “Spin” seems to fall into the gap or gray area between truth and lie, but it can veer into the realm of deliberate misinformation and propaganda. 

Politics is rich in “spin” and language meant to mask reality,  George Orwell once pointed this out when he said “a political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.”  “Spin” can rewrite our vocabulary.  Sewage sludge in recent years has become sweeter sounding biosolids.  The civilian casualties once produced by war are now more dehumanizing collateral damage.  When a South Florida congressman sends sexually suggestive messages to a congressional page, they become, in the damage control vocabulary of Washington, D. C., cover friendly emails.  Modern PR still follows the classic industry logic that good PR is invisible PR, but “spin” has morphed into new forms.  Among those: video news releases, “fake news reports hand-fed to television news crews, and so-called front groups and Astroturf groups that sound like something they are not.”  The media, facing economic, staffing and time constraints, are not always on the job filtering out “spin” and at times merely echo it.

Biographical Information:  Neil Santaniello is a former staff writer for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel where he specialized in covering the environment after writing general assignment and government stories.  He holds a Master’s degree in Journalism from Northwestern University and a Bachelor’s degree from Boston College.  He left the newsroom in late 2005 to join the faculty of FAU’s School of Communication and Multimedia Studies and now teaches journalism to undergraduates at the university’s Jupiter campus.  He also directs FAU’s Scripps Howard Institute on the Environment, organizing an annual weeklong educational fellowship for up to 25 professional environmental journalists.