Every election campaign produces, among other things, media myths and bad language. During the elections of the last decade, the language was infected by a new myth called spin control. The phrase, which broke a speed record in becoming a cliché after the 1988 election (George H.W. Bush vs. Michael Dukakis), implies that a good media relations practitioner can control the nature and texture of a story in the press -- can put the right spin on it to get the journalist to tell it the spinner's way.

It's just not so. For all that the myth implies, when it comes to the media, we propose -- but others dispose. Thus it was, and thus it always shall be, so long as we have a free press.

But is the telling always accurate? No. Is it always fair? No. Sometimes, despite all of the public relations professionalism, and despite all the cooperation we may offer the press, the story comes out badly. Disaster, dispensed in the aura of a supposedly objective press, doesn't merely strike, it reverberates.

The picture you so carefully and accurately painted is distorted, the wrong people are quoted and the right people are not, the facts are warped and bent beyond recognition, and the whole piece reads as if it were written by your most malicious competitor. Certainly, it will be relished by your every detractor.

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