Rating: 
Summary: The Second Rough Draft of History
Review: Kurtz takes us behind the curtain into the space where reporters and political spinmeisters make the news, like factory workers building widgets. There are strategies to be followed, products to be pushed, and lies to be told -- artfully.
The book is good, but not great. Like most journalistic works, it has more of a he-said, she-said type of writing style that works best in newspapers but not as well in a three hundred page narrative...
We'll have to wait 10 or 20 years probably for the Doris Kearns Goodwin edition of the Clinton years...Now that will be the book to get.
Rating: 
Summary: FREE PRESS IN AMERICA - WAKE UP TO THE PROPAGANDA!
Review: Kurtz takes us behind the scenes of the White House political operation. He shows how the Clinton team packages and shapes the news by manipulating, misleading, and in some cases, intimidating the press. It tells of how the journalists buy this prepackaged propaganda and spew it forth to the unsuspecting public. What is even more shocking and infuriating is in some cases the journalists also add their own spin to the news story making two levels of lies.
Rating: 
Summary: Problems with sensationalism
Review: My main concern with this book is how it uses allegations and stories which emerged in the press and later proved untrue. Particularly with regards to the Lewinsky case, a lot of the remarks and speculations which Kurtz uses to draw a picture of how the story unfolded, have proved to be exactly that: speculations. I find it unsettling that someone apparantly so serious as Kurtz has not done some proper sourcechecking. Furthermore, I found the structure of the book to be very chaotic. Also, when I read a book about the development of spin, I don't want a book that reads "like a thriller", if I did, I would buy a thriller. For people with interest in the subject of the relationship between the press and the presidency, I strongly recommend Warp Speed by Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach. It will give a nice counterweight to Spin Cycle, and furthermore put some of Kurtz's ideas into perspective.
Rating: 
Summary: Flash: Press Gives Good Reviews to Book About Press!
Review: Poorly written. Not much new. Of interest to people who (1) like reading detailed accounts of how the press works but aren't concerned about structure or content, (2) like reading anything bad about Clinton, (3) find it scandalous that that politicians try to use the press to make themselves look good, (4) find it amazing that large donors to political parties are allowed to talk to politicians, or (5) feel there is no such thing as a bad sentence if it has at least one negative adjective in it.
Rating: 
Summary: Spin Cycle shows the trivialisation of the presidency by the
Review: Spin Cycle is a must read for anyone interested in the White house "communications" office and the tailoring of political "news" for the press and those who follow politics. Although the book is ostensibly about the "spin" the White House puts on their own press releasses, statements, and news stories affecting the president perhaps its most valuable service is to show how the Clinton White House has trivialised the presidency by operating in thier campaign mode. Kurtz shows the cynicism of modern politics through the White House release of non-stories and minor stories and announcements as if they had some significance other than to provide a daily story about supposed actions and decisions made in the White House.
Rating:
Summary: Spin Cycle shows the trivialisation of the presidency by the
Review: Spin Cycle is a must read for anyone interested in the White house "communications" office and the tailoring of political "news" for the press and those who follow politics. Although the book is ostensibly about the "spin" the White House puts on their own press releasses, statements, and news stories affecting the president perhaps its most valuable service is to show how the Clinton White House has trivialised the presidency by operating in thier campaign mode. Kurtz shows the cynicism of modern politics through the White House release of non-stories and minor stories and announcements as if they had some significance other than to provide a daily story about supposed actions and decisions made in the White House.
Rating:
Summary: Nothing new here
Review: Stated simply, this book does no more than apply the following two propositions to a set of facts: (1) people don't tell the whole truth, and; (2) the media's coverage of an event dictates public perception of it. But it does serve the traditional function of providing self-styled cutting-edge pundits the opportunity to vent their abiding cynicism into the national yawn.
Rating:
Summary: Problems with sensationalism
Review: The media and the White House are the players. The country and its people are the pawns. "Spin Cycle" is a revealing and highly disturbing report on the game people responsible for truthful and unbiased guidance of this country play. Howard Kurtz digs deep into the Clintonian bureaucracy to show how presidential aides, especially Mike McCurry, the White House spokesman, juggle the news while the media vultures scavenge for sound bites. Kurtz shows how "the Press Party" sometimes takes the extra step when it comes to acting the role of gatekeepers. They are the ones who decide what will be the next morning's front headline. And if they do not have one that can sell enough copies, they create one. Kurtz points out the traditional measures by which the president should be evaluated, instead of scandals and issues not related to the presidency. "Now the increasingly opinionated mass media had somehow become the arbiter of the political success and the distiller of the conventional wisdom. A president's words were endlessly sliced and diced by the self-appointed pundits, his every move filtered through someone else's ideological lens," he writes. This manipulation and intimidation, however, works both ways. The Clintonites are deciding what their policy on an issue is depending on the mood of the press. The author concludes with the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The journalists decided to draw the line. After numerous obscure press conferences, interviews and tip-offs, they demanded a blockbuster headline. And they got several. How and why was not important. At the end of all the "lovers quarrels," the public was exhausted. It seems that the only outcome of this "game of smoke and mirrors" was an increased distrust in the leadership of the country. "Spin Cycle: How the White House and the Media Manipulate the News" should be a mandatory reading for everyone concerned with constitutional rights and moral guidance of this country.
Rating:
Summary: Sluggish Bureaucracy and Sound Bites
Review: The media and the White House are the players. The country and its people are the pawns. "Spin Cycle" is a revealing and highly disturbing report on the game people responsible for truthful and unbiased guidance of this country play. Howard Kurtz digs deep into the Clintonian bureaucracy to show how presidential aides, especially Mike McCurry, the White House spokesman, juggle the news while the media vultures scavenge for sound bites. Kurtz shows how "the Press Party" sometimes takes the extra step when it comes to acting the role of gatekeepers. They are the ones who decide what will be the next morning's front headline. And if they do not have one that can sell enough copies, they create one. Kurtz points out the traditional measures by which the president should be evaluated, instead of scandals and issues not related to the presidency. "Now the increasingly opinionated mass media had somehow become the arbiter of the political success and the distiller of the conventional wisdom. A president's words were endlessly sliced and diced by the self-appointed pundits, his every move filtered through someone else's ideological lens," he writes. This manipulation and intimidation, however, works both ways. The Clintonites are deciding what their policy on an issue is depending on the mood of the press. The author concludes with the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The journalists decided to draw the line. After numerous obscure press conferences, interviews and tip-offs, they demanded a blockbuster headline. And they got several. How and why was not important. At the end of all the "lovers quarrels," the public was exhausted. It seems that the only outcome of this "game of smoke and mirrors" was an increased distrust in the leadership of the country. "Spin Cycle: How the White House and the Media Manipulate the News" should be a mandatory reading for everyone concerned with constitutional rights and moral guidance of this country.
Rating:
Summary: and this was just the dress rehearsal (so to speak)
Review: The presidential flacks had done their job. For 1997, at least, their spin had carried the day.
-Howard Kurtz, Spin CycleIn a story that is utterly devoid of edifying moments and chock full of quite depressing ones, these
final lines of the book are the most shocking. For it is only as you read them that the full realization
hits home that Howard Kurtz's justifiably jaded and cynical look at the way the Clinton administration
manipulated the press and the public in order to cover up or blunt scandal was written before the
Lewinsky scandal broke. Commingled with the shock though is the sudden comprehension that the
Clinton Administration was uniquely well prepared to deal with such a scandal, having spent the prior
seven years honing their obfuscatory skills on a whole series of equally disturbing and potentially
damaging scandals. In fact, as Kurtz notes in a hastily tacked on Epilogue, one that subsequent events were to wholly
outpace, in the deposition that Bill Clinton gave in the Jones case, on the weekend that Matt Drudge
broke the Monica story, he revealed that he had in fact had sex with Gennifer Flowers. In other
words, on the very first occasion that most Americans saw Clinton, the infamous Super Bowl night 60
Minutes appearance, he lied to us all, with Hillary at his side, and it worked. What Howard Kurtz really ends up detailing for us is just the long dress rehearsal before the big show,
in which the Clintons and their spin machine worked out all the kinks in their act. By the time the
Lewinsky scandal broke, they understood that all they had to do was deny initially, demonize liberally
(both accusers and investigators), leak pre-emptively, and acknowledge belatedly and they would be
able to so desensitize the press and the people that Bill Clinton would ultimately survive. And so, as
the tawdry mess reached its foreordained conclusion, we had the hitherto unimaginable situation of a
credible rape charge (by Juanita Broaddrick) against the President of the United States, which he did
not even deny, but which the press chose not to hound him with. He had finally just beaten them
down to the point where they didn't have the heart to pursue another scandal. Then, in a moment which nearly redeems him, Clinton left office in a blizzard of bartered pardons and
other final acts of contempt for the staffers, supporters, and voters who had excused everything he'd
ever done. It was the final (...) gesture of a man who clearly understood that he had so implicated a
nation in his treachery that he had become untouchable. To judge Bill Clinton at that late date would
have required people to face all of the excuses and allowances that they'd made for him in the
preceding eight years, and that was not going to happen. It was all just so brazen that it was hard not
to admire the in-your-face flourish with which he departed. Howard Kurtz does a fine job of charting
the early years of the Clinton scandals, but there was so much more yet to come. GRADE : B+
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