Meaning
A political press officer or media adviser whose job is to shape how journalists interpret events, putting the most favourable twist on bad news for their candidate or boss. Nearly always used critically or ironically, and the driving verb spin now stands alone. Informal and usually disparaging, so avoid it as a neutral job title; British political journalism adopted it enthusiastically in the 1990s. Regional use: General English (coined in American English; now very common in British English).
Origin
The earliest known print use is a New York Times editorial of 21 October 1984 previewing the Reagan-Mondale debates, which pictured senior advisers descending on the press room and called them 'the Spin Doctors'; Elisabeth Bumiller used it lowercase in the Washington Post four days later, defining it as advisers who put their own spin on the story. The OED dates the noun spin, meaning interpretation or slant, to the 1970s - first citing the Guardian of January 1978 on weighing CIA claims 'for factuality and spin', then a March 1979 Washington Post report that Jody Powell put a negative spin on talks. The doctor element plays on the slang sense of doctoring as fixing or falsifying. No confirmed coiner exists: suggested sources range from spin a yarn, recorded 1812, to spin on a cricket or baseball ball to a 1960s American fishing lure named the Spin Doctor, and the Phrase Finder concludes it does not know which.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- spin doctoring
- spin doctors
- spinmeister
Usage Examples
- Within minutes of the debate ending, the spin doctors were working the press room to recast her stumbles as bold honesty.
- The chancellor's spin doctor briefed that the u-turn showed strength of character, but the headline writers were unmoved.
- He left frontline politics and now works as a corporate spin doctor for a bank that officially hates the label.