The magazine Cat Fancier is biased. They have few articles on dogs or tropical fish. Bias of this sort is inescapable. It is not possible to discuss everything, so there is an inevitable process of sorting out topics into those of more interest and less interest, taking the audience into account. That’s selection by interest, not spin.

Most decisions involve many factors. For example, choosing a presidential candidate involves consideration of life experience, political ideology and values, and technical expertise in specific areas, including fiscal matters, foreign policy, administration, and energy. Each voter forms their own equation of categories, assigns weights to each category, and how each candidate rates in each category. Single issue voters have an easy time, because they only care about one category. Most voters face the complex array of issues and reach a subjective decision without so much as building a spreadsheet.

Most issues are complex. A fundamental of spin is to selectively consider the elements of the issue, ignoring the aspects that are not favorable to the conclusion the spin merchant favors. In our presidential debates, McCain showed a detailed knowledge of foreign policy issues, Obama did not. In the vice presidential debates, Biden showed substantially more detailed knowledge of foreign policy issues than Palin. It was interesting to watch Republican advocates claim that detailed knowledge was critical when it comes to the presidency, but not import for the vice president. Democratic advocates took the reverse position, that it was important for the vice president, but largely irrelevant to the presidency. When in the mode of arguing the unimportance of detailed knowledge, both sides stressed the greater importance of “sound principles.”

Voters must decide whether foreign policy knowledge is more important for the president or the vice president, and whether it is important at all relative to other issues and qualities. The point here is awareness of the spin. Spin permeates journalism as well as advocacy. Journalists report what they believe is relevant, and ignore what they believe irrelevant.

A classic example is the New York Times coverage of the Abu Ghraib scandal. In fifty front page stories, not editorials, the Times alleged that the incidents of abuse were either official policy or the product of official policy. They felt that offering the hypothesis was important and that it would surely be confirmed as the story evolved. The allegations were disproved, but even if they had been proved the repetitions without proof would have constituted spin. It would have been responsible to report new evidence, but repeating unsubstantiated claims was spin-based advocacy.

A good exercise in unraveling spin is to map out an issue explicitly in spreadsheet style. For the issue of energy independence, one might put possible solutions on on one axis: increased drilling, coal-to-oil conversion, oil shale, nuclear power, ethanol from corn, ethanol from cellulose, wind, solar, and compressed natural gas. On the other axis headings include: timeliness, capital cost, recurring cost, mobile fuel use, generation of electricity, pollution, and, if you like, global warming. Each cell in the chart provides a space for a rating. Wind and solar involve very high capital costs because they require building 100% backup facilities. Ethanol from corn is expensive and is a net energy loss, but it potentially converts electricity, perhaps from coal, to liquid fuel for mobile applications. The point is to sort out the arguments for systematic evaluation.

Rather than use timeliness as a column heading, one might divide each cell into “near term” and “long term.” That is a way to make what is essentially a three-dimensional chart.

After you have a issue fully mapped, the spin of advocates often becomes apparent.