Why is Emotional Spin So Dangerous?
Spin is not about making stuff up, okay?
Emotional Spin Impact
Let's get that clear.
It's not about coming up with something out of the thin blue air and making a big deal out of it. It's all about focusing on a fact and blowing it up, exaggerating it, or repositioning it in such a way that people's attentions are redirected from what they normally would pay attention to.
The misdirection comes from the equally valid fact that this company did meet and exceed revenue targets recently.
Usually, when people think about spin in the political speech context, they talk about cherry picking. Somebody would take a very bad news item, and they would cherry pick what is good or somewhat neutral about the news, and blow it up out of proportion. In fact, you would not even think that this person is talking about the same news item that everybody else seems to know about.
For example, if a company got hit by the federal government with a multimillion dollar tax bill, the company may make a big deal of the fact that its revenues have grown so big that those tax bills are somewhat justified. When a company does this, they appeal to notions of fair dealing and ‘justice’ in the American values lexicon. In other words, they are engaging in emotional spin. All it takes is positioning.
I hope you understand how this works. I hope you have a clear understanding of how this plays out.
Now, what if I told you that facts are not the only tools at your disposal? You could also use emotional spin.
Emotional spin is really playing with fire. If you put a spin on an emotional issue, it can as easily blow up in your face as burn your enemies.
Emotional spin really plays on the very touchy nature of certain subjects. In particular, child protection or protecting children from child molesters and child rapists is a very emotional issue.
Similarly, people living in a country are emotionally susceptible to news regarding people from another culture moving in or immigrating and taking up social resources. These are emotional issues.
And emotional spin is very dangerous because it really is demagoguery. There is really no other way to describe it. There's really no other word that would do justice to spinning facts in such a way as to heighten its emotional rawness.
When people get all emotional, and people get all pumped up, facts, reason and logic often go out the window. And this can lead to a very dangerous combination of raw emotions and bad policies.