Unspun

The China-Tibet issue needs unspinning


Unspun thinks that China is being treated unfairly by the Western press. This is not to say it is squeaky clean, does not oppress some of its citizens and the model of human rights.

But fair is fair and the western media is not. Sezs who? Sez the article below and also here, for instance.

clipped from www.spiked-online.com

As part of its 85,000-mile ‘journey of harmony’ through 20 different countries, the Olympic torch passed through London yesterday. The torch relay has already encountered various Tibet-inspired protests, first in Athens and then Istanbul. If the April snow was unexpected in London yesterday, the angry, sometimes violent disruptions were not. Like moths to a propane-fuelled flame, the plight of the Tibetan region of China really look does like the raison d’�tre for some disillusioned Westerners.
Since the military suppression of the anti-China protests in the Tibetan capital Lhasa last month, the focus on China’s treatment of its Tibetan population has intensified. But while it has been the West doing the focusing, the Beijing Olympics has provided the lens.
has now become an opportunity for moral grandstanding, an opportunity to portray China as everything we in the West are not.
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3 responses to “The China-Tibet issue needs unspinning”

  1. Rob Avatar
    Rob

    Unspinning or re-spinning? 🙂

    I am not in PR (which is probably a good thing because I think I would suck at!) but do PR people use terms like re-spinning…

    As I was channel surfing the other day I caught a glimpse of the “O’Reilly Factor” and apparently the spin stops there. The point being I heard ‘spin’ used in a number of ways but never as “re-spin”…

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  2. Rob Avatar
    Rob

    oops…”suck at it!”

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  3. unspun Avatar
    unspun

    @Rob: the word “spin” is confined to people who do very bad PR or who grossly misunderstands what PR is about.

    The good PR practitioners do not go for spin, which is something you do only if you do not have the substance to communicate with.

    Good PR is about advising and steering clients to do the right things and to ensure that their talk then matches their talk. It is sometimes skillful framing of arguments and messages.

    Ironically, I find that if you’re a PR person and you out argue a person, the most convenient way they try to wriggle out of the situation is to call your arguments spin. Intellectual laziness then triumphs because they then do not have to go beyond labeling to substantiate their arguments.

    This is as lazy as Decartes turning to belief in God when he reached the limits of his logic.

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