SOME cynics insist election campaigns are more about spin than substance.
Less than 250 days out from the 2022 State Election, and with a federal election also looming, expect plenty of “messaging” from the political parties’ media teams assembling – Avengers-style – for the battles ahead.
Premier Steven Marshall and his Liberals are gunning for a second term of office, after the party spent years in the SA political wilderness before its 2018 victory.
Shots are perpetually being fired between governments and oppositions, but through the prism of a looming election both sides grow increasingly desperate to impart their own take on… just about any topic.
Hopefully media and voters are savvy enough to decipher fact from fiction, spin from substance.
Screen grabs – appearing above – of some media-release alerts last week provide textbook examples of how a single body of information can be interpreted, or spun, in two completely different ways.
SA Labor points out that SA still has the nation’s highest unemployment rate, while exactly five minutes later the Libs spruik SA’s unemployment rate, which has dropped.
What do you take from that? Probably whatever you want.
Similarly, at 5.32am last Friday the Liberals announced a new strategy to tackle the state’s road escalating road toll.
Within just nine minutes – at 5.41am – the State Opposition fired back with a media release of its own, criticising the government’s record on road safety.
Much of the mainstream media has become prone to only printing information and opinion that supports its own agenda, so hopefully we can get both sides of important issues heading towards both elections.
In the meantime, the battles may – for those of you familiar with the franchise titles – seem more like Infinity War than Endgame.