How to Expose Spin

This section examines how to expose the activity of shaping public opinion through the sophisticated use of public relations – otherwise known as spin. Used since before World War One, by politicians and political parties in need of burnishing their image in the public eye, spin has increasingly been associated with government and corporate campaigns. Like political spin, the use of PR by business dates back to the early years of the twentieth century in the UK, burgeoning whenever public acceptance of corporate dominance has dipped.

Spin’s evil twin is lobbying. The right to lobby government is every citizen’s prerogative in a functioning democracy, but in Britain the practice is dominated by a £1.9 billion industry which mainly lobbies on behalf of big business interests. This has doubled in size since the early 1990s and, until the May 2010 proposals by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat government to create a lobbying register, was largely unregulated. People involved in the profession today range from consultant lobbyists – many of whom are employed by large PR firms, law firms or management consultancies – to in-house corporate lobbyists, business associations, trade unions, NGOs and think tanks. The majority of successful lobbyists have political experience and contacts inside government, with many professional lobbyists being former politicians or staffers. Based on US figures, the estimated pay-offs are staggering: for every $1 spent on lobbying, a business can expect a return of $100. Since the success of a particular lobby usually depends on resources and access, which often translates into influence, it becomes imperative for citizens to understand the linkages between lobbyists and officials and potential conflicts of interest.

As spin and lobbying are largely conducted behind closed doors, detailed investigative methods are required. You will, therefore, need to use any or all of the previously-described methods in clever combinations, looking at both individuals and organisations and the connections between them. This kind of research usually begins with a simple internet search for an individual PR guru or lobbyist or an agency with which they are affiliated. Follow all the links that come up and, if relevant information is available on a website of dubious credibility, you will need to look for an alternative source to verify it. If you suspect that pages from a particular website have been modified or removed, use the Way Back Machine at archive.org to retrieve older versions. If you would like to capture a current web page for posterity, use the Firefox extension, at screengrab.org.

If you are researching an individual, you can use published volumes, such as Who’s Who or Debrett’s Peerage, to establish the basic family history and affiliations of the great and the good. For a more thorough search, especially on issues of historical relevance, you might use Nexis UK (available digitally through the website of the university library), which will bring up lists of press and publications involving the subject of your research. You will also need to deploy some of the methods outlined in the sections on How to be a Web Detective and How to Find People Online to track down individuals.

If you are looking at a company, refer to the chapters of this manual dealing with Companies House and corporate accounting; if you are investigating an organisation with charitable status, the various Charity Commissions of the UK keep registers that are available online. In the battle to control public and political opinion, the use of think tanks, front groups and fake grassroots (or astroturf) organisations has become established practice, and information available at Companies House might provide important insight into the powerful funders behind a particular organisation. You may wish to explore the links of company directors and charity trustees in order to establish a pattern of inter-connectedness. You can use social network analysis to visually map out the linkages between various groups and individuals, using graphical software such as Y-ed. Some interesting experiments in this area have been conducted, with Exxon Secrets, showing how Exxon Mobil funds attempts to disrupt the scientific consensus on global warming.

In order to expose junctures at which corporations have used spin to massage the figures, you will often need to compare the message they want you to read with the actual facts, which may involve consulting annual reports and empirical research from the same field. If you are researching lobbying, you may wish to consult Hansard, the daily record of debates in the House of Commons, to determine when a particular issue was brought before parliament and by whom.

If you are investigating a website, look for registration information, as outlined in the Web Detective chapter, while bearing in mind that, in recent years, some actors have taken to using domain-anonymising services to conceal their identities. Similar searches may also be carried out for IP addresses; sometimes all it takes to expose a front group is to put its address into Google and check whether another organisation shares the same address.

Something as mundane as a phone call might also help to establish a link. In 2009, a call to the London offices of Réalité EU – a web-based project with a newsletter that pushes alarmist claims on Iran – was redirected to voicemail in the US. Taking down the number given in the voicemail and typing it into Google showed it to be a number in the offices of The Israel Project, a hard-line Israel lobby group based in Washington DC. Subsequent emails received from Réalité EU revealed that they were sent from a mail server registered to the Washington offices of B’nai B’rith International, a leading national Israel lobby institution, which shared a mail server and office with The Israel Project.

You can also make extensive use of the Freedom of Information Act (see the first chapter of this manual) to obtain information from public bodies which is not generally available. Although private companies are not vulnerable to FoI, their communications with public bodies are and this can be a key resource for investigating corporate lobbying. Be prepared to persist to obtain the information you need. It took Spinwatch researchers two years to force the House of Commons to release the names of former MPs with pass access to the House of Commons, which showed that at least twenty-five of them were working as lobbyists and were able to use their passes to gain access for their clients. Freedom of Information also operates at a European level, providing access to important documents dictating policy to member states.

A useful forum for collating and publishing your research into spin and lobbying, with feedback from editors, is provided by Powerbase. The site focuses on power networks, on how they are organised and on associated issues such as spin and propaganda in politics, the corporate world and elsewhere. It includes significant resources on neoconservative networks, terrorism expertise, policing and intelligence agencies. The project aims to serve as a resource for journalists, activists and academics and as an educational, campaigning or knowledge transfer tool. By laying bare the professed or hidden affiliations of powerful actors, it seeks to highlight conflicts of interest and hidden agendas in order to promote transparency in public life. Powerbase operates as a Wiki which requires you to register in your own name in order to begin editing pages. The golden rule when researching spin and lobbying is to remember that things are not always as they seem; beneath a seemingly benign, grassroots organisation, with a message which seems to favour the public interest, may lurk more cynical motives.

Based on a presentation by David Miller

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