08/23/25
Filed under:
General
Posted by:
Dominic Lusinchi @ 5:31 pm
The following is a discussion of a paper, “The All-Spin Zone,” by Stanley E. Fish (b. 1938), part of a collection published under the title Think Again: Contrarian Reflections on Life, Culture, Politics, Religion, Law, and Education (Princeton University Press, 2015, pp. 138-141). Fish is an academic and “public intellectual,” specializing in literary theory, constitutional law, First Amendment issues, and more. He is a controversial thinker. His Think Again, a compilation of his opinion columns at the New York Times between 1995 and 2013, is well worth reading.
In the article reviewed here, he critiques a book authored by Brooks Jackson and Kathleen Hall Jamieson (b. 1946): unspun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation (Random House, 2007). Jackson is the founder of FactCheck.org and Jamieson is a professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania. In his short piece, Fish (hereafter SEF) takes exception to an example given by Jackson and Jamieson (hereafter J&J) to illustrate what “spin” is.
The example is a 2006 statement made by Karl Rove (b. 1950), a senior advisor and deputy chief of staff in the G. W. Bush White House, according to which “real disposable income has risen almost 14 percent since President Bush took office” (J&J, p. viii; SEF, p. 139). SEF writes: “Jackson and Jamieson regard this claim as ’so divorced from reality as to seem unhinged’” (SEF, p. 139; J&J, p. viii). J&J do not characterize Rove’s statement as a “claim.” Indeed, to state that “real disposable income has risen almost 14 percent since President Bush took office” is not a claim but a statement of fact (insofar as we believe in the validity of official statistics) because it merely reports a number based on data provided by a reputable federal statistical agency (whose integrity SEF does not question; in other words, they all agree with the “reality” as defined by these official statistics). Thus, the statement is not “divorced from reality,” since that is indeed a ‘real’ statistic. The problem, as I explain below, is that it is, from a statistician’s point of view, a “poor” summary statistic to describe income.
What J&J describe is the “overall impression” (p. viii) Rove wishes to implant into the minds of his audience. J&J back their assessment of Rove’s description of the American economy with additional statistics. Their analysis is worth quoting: “The ‘real disposable income’ he [Rove] cited was a statistic that measures the total increase in income, not how that increase is distributed. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, real income (after inflation) for the typical U.S. household has fallen by 3.6 percent during Bush’s first four years in office—a loss of $1,670 in 2004 dollars. The income gains of which Rove spoke were going almost exclusively to those in the upper half of society, the same affluent households that owned the stocks, bonds and expensive homes whose values had grown so dramatically” (J&J, p. ix).
Although I’m not sure what is meant by “typical household” (is it the modal household income bracket? the median?), their description paints an entirely different picture from Rove’s. He did provide other numbers to complete his description: “The Dow Jones industrial average is near its all-time high. And since the 2003 tax cuts have been passed, asset values, including homes and stocks, have grown by $13 trillion” (J&J, p. viii).
SEF disputes J&J’s characterization of Rove’s statement as “spin.” In his estimation, what the two opposite descriptions represent are expressions of two different belief systems regarding what constitutes a “healthy economy.” Here is what he says: “What it proves is that in Rove’s view, the health of the economy is to be gauged by looking at how big investors and property owners are doing, while in Jackson’s and Jamieson’s view, an economy is not healthy unless the fruits of its growth are widely shared. This is a real difference, but it is a difference in beliefs about what conditions must obtain if an economy is to be pronounced healthy” (SEF, p. 139). Is that really what going on here? If that were the case, why would J&J, right after the Rove example, bother to provide another instance of “spin,” this time by the Democrats (J&J, p. ix)? Is SEF telling us that if poverty had decreased and real income had increased across the board, Rove would have failed to mention it just because his view of a “healthy economy” is “to be gauged by looking at how big investors and property owners are doing”? Seems hardly credible.
Is SFE playing naïve? For to believe, as he appears to, that Rove’s pronouncement is merely expressing his vision of a “healthy economy” seems incredibly simpleminded—which SEF is definitely not. Karl Rove, a central architect of the Bush presidency, is presenting the best possible image of the “accomplishments” of the administration he is serving. Is it spin? Of course, it’s spin. The statement and the use of that specific statistic is a rhetorical device. It seeks to persuade the audience that the policies of the Bush administration have been good for America.
The much discussed fourteen percent is based most likely on averages. The incomes of all American households were added together then divided by the number of households for the two years used for comparison purposes. But, as anybody who took a basic course in descriptive statistics will tell you, an average (aka a mean) is a poor summary statistic when the distribution of the variable of interest is not symmetric or approximately so—which, undoubtedly, is the case here. The distribution is most likely skewed to the right (income is on the horizontal axis and the number of households on the vertical axis), which means that most household incomes are bunched up at the lower (left) end of the scale and that there are a few households with very large incomes at the upper end (the right side) of the scale.
This is roughly the argument J&J are making. Is this “spin”? I’ll let the readers decide. If it is, it is “spin” of a professional nature. And it too is a rhetorical device, but as social scientists they would be derelict in their professional duty if they accepted at face value Rove’s minimalist characterization of the economy. Thus, SEF’s critique is very much off the mark. And he makes things worse when he writes: “If the question of fact is ‘Do we have a healthy economy?’, there are no independent bits of evidence that can tip the scale in favor of a ‘yes’ or ‘no’…” (p. 139). Indeed, some people are perfectly happy, as Rove may very well be, with an economy characterized by wide income differentials and will do all they can to maintain the status quo. The virtue of such an arrangement cannot be proven “scientifically,” and neither can its counterpart—an economy with greater income equality. SEF is right there.
However, is that the “question of fact” that J&J wish to resolve? Not that I can tell. Their goal is to identify instances of what they consider “spin,” which they define as “a polite word for deception” (p. vii). Is Rove deceiving his audience? He was addressing the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative think-tank. So, I would say no; he is just preaching to the choir and telling them what they want to hear. J&J, on the other hand, are fulfilling their professional duty as social scientists when critiquing Rove’s “upbeat” (p. viii) characterization as an incomplete description of the economy. Social scientists are supposed to know how to analyze quantitative data and J&J are doing so. If they concluded that the data are proof of an ‘unhealthy’ economy, then they would no longer be speaking as professionals but as ordinary citizens expressing their displeasure with the current state of affairs.
J&J and Rove are not in the same business. The latter, as a political operative, is duty bound to claim that policies emanating from his side of the political spectrum are good for the country. J&J as social scientists are not in the political promotion business; theirs is to provide as complete a picture of the social system as they can. Ordinary citizens can decide which “spin” they prefer.
To SEF’s own question, “Does this [Rove’s speech to the AEI] prove spin?,” he answered “I don’t think so” (p. 139). I would say to him: “Think again!”