Sketchpad: Putting A Spin On The News

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May 03, 2005

Putting A Spin On The News

Facts are facts.

Newspaper reports, while they report ‘facts’ to one extent or another, are not ‘facts’. They are often misleading, sometimes intentionally, sometimes totally unintentionally. The reporters and their editors take the facts of story and position them to serve their own purposes. Typically they want to be informative, or to promote a particular position or viewpoint, or to just plain and simply sell more newspapers.

Take, for example, the case of Broc Bebout. The facts are, as far as I can tell by reading the articles:

Broc had quadruple-bypass surgery at the age of 39
He took up bicycling, watched his diet, and paid attention to his health
He enjoyed another 20 years of good health
At the age of 59 he successfully bicycled 2,400 miles – from coast to coast in the US
On the trip back home after his cycling trip, he died of a heart attack

Personally, I found Broc’s example to be tremendously inspirational. Other people may not find it as inspiring. My reaction probably has something to do with my life long preoccupation with bicycling and more recently kickbiking, the fact that as a child I always dreamt of bicycling across the US, and the fact that I happen to be 59 years old. Your mileage may vary.

That being said, Associated Press (AP) put Broc’s story out on the news wires, and newspapers all over the world put their own individual spins on it. As of this morning there were over 271 listings of articles about Broc shown in the Google News search page. All of them had the same set of ‘facts’ to work from, but the way that they reported the story varies dramatically. From many of the headlines you would automatically jump to the conclusion that Broc had undergone heart surgery, then jumped on his bicycle, or that bicycling was the cause of his death instead of prolonging and improving the quality of his life for several decades.

Here’s a list showing the wide variety of spins applied to Broc’s story-