The wages of spin

the long version

"We had never heard of spindoctors until 1990. But within a few years they came to dominate and discredit the British political scene. They became an addiction which the body politic found as difficult to break as any hard drug." "No one is better qualified to explain how British politics came to be blighted by this phenomenon than Bernard Ingham, who spent twenty-four years as a press officer for Labour and Conservative governments, the last eleven of them as Margaret Thatcher's chief press secretary. He is also a former head of the Government Information Service." "In The Wages of Spin he traces the slow evolution of relations between government and journalists from the invention of the printing press to the dramatic events of 1997 when the Blair Government brought a new obsession with hyperactive presentation to British politics. He gives an insider's view of spindoctoring and the contributions of politicians, civil servants and journalists to its brief flowering, showing how rules laid down at the end of the Second World War for the conduct of government relations with the media were changed and abused, and how journalists colluded in their own corruption."--BOOK JACKET.