The Successful and Unsuccessful Spin on Gaining Public’s Trust: Volkswagen Emission Scandal VS Kony

In this modern liberal democracy, in order for companies and organisations gain their access to power they have to manage their public opinion through the mass media and win the support from their audience. They are famous because they are media personalities, they are appear important because the media makes them important (Louw, 2010). This essay will explore the practice of spin doctoring through the creation and preservation in gaining public’s trust. It will be argued that the Volkswagen emission scandal is considered as a successful result of manufacturing a synthetically fabricate public’s trust while Kony 2012 were diminished due to its unsuccessful spin doctoring. Even though both cases uses a similar techniques in relying to media exposures, in the end, the most important aspect is the relationship between the key players.

Introduction

In behind every great companies and organisations campaigns, lies a skilled communication practitioner called “spin doctor.” As a form of propaganda, spin doctors helps its clients establishing their legitimacy, managing their image and reputation and ensuring that others interpret an event from a particular point of view. The history of spin doctors believed can be tracked back to the 1930s, when the term of “spin doctor” first appeared in the United States as a sport’s metaphor referring to the practice of putting a spin on a ball to have better control with its trajectory (Huyghe, 2008). Then in 1984, the phrase was first used in print of an editorial in the New York Times regarding an article about the aftermath of the televised debate between the presidential candidates, Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale (Safire, 1986).

Spin doctors typically advise and coach their clients on how to act and say properly in order to improve their image and reputation. The conscious and intelligent of spin doctors to influence the media and manipulate what the public see and hear emerged due to the liberal democracy movement. This is an unseen mechanism of today’s society where it constitute an invisible government, which is the true ruling power of the country (Bernays, 1928).

When distinguishing in between successful and unsuccessful spin doctoring, it is important to understand the background of what are the important factors that could make it considered as a successful one. Successful spin doctoring occurs when the objective of the spin effort has been established, supported with its profitability and efficiency than become directly visible (Tübke, 2004). Whereas unsuccessful spin is considered when the objectives of the effort has failed to be conducted.

Successful Spin: Volkswagen Emission Scandal

Volkswagen is a German car manufacturer headquartered in Germany, the company is considered as one of the oldest in the world and it also owns some of the world’s best car brands, including Lamborghini, Audi and Bentley. In September 2015, Volkswagen was found to have been cheating emissions tests. The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found that many of Volkswagen’s cars that being sold had a software known as “defeat device” that could detect when they were being tested.

After the issue arouse, the spin team realised that it is important to respond to the issue right away, being silent or slow to communicate with public can only do more harm than good the company. The spin team acted quickly enough to keep up with the mass media in order to gain an understanding of what the public thinks towards the issue. In order to turn public opinion, the spin team needs to shape the media. Thus, the use of media were critically needed in this point to spread the viewpoint of stories that the spin team has constructed.

First of all, just within days after the scandal has broken up to public, Martin Winterkorn, the CEO of Volkswagen, published an apology video saying that “I would like to make a formal apology to our customers, to the authorities and to the general public for this misconduct. We will do everything necessary to reverse the damage and we will do everything necessary to win back trust – step by step.” The reason why they published a video instead of holding a press conference is because for a start, they just want to create a pseudo-event in order to grab media attention (Louw, 2010). Holding a press conference would leads to uncontrolled questions from the journalists and any respond to that – including the ones that might be not answered – will only leads to negative media coverage and thus, public opinion cannot be turned. As the apology video continues, it concluded with a statement of “At present, we do not yet have all the answers to all the questions but we are working hard to find out exactly what happened.”

Secondly, the spin team managed to get ahold of the company’s business contacts including its customers, brands and car dealerships to share their talking points and scripted perspective to make sure that everything came up to the media in uniformed. Based on The Telegraph, the Porsche family have signalled its support for the troubled company, the chairman of Porsche himself, Wolfgang Porsche, stated that “The Porsche and Piech families support job security at Volkswagen through a stable and successful company, we know jobs are an invaluable asset and this asset cannot simply be gambled away.” This follows with the support from the German officials as Alexander Dobrindt, a minister in German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government, said that “Volkswagen reputation in the United States would not suffer a lasting damage.” This has created a scripted maximal audience appeal, which made them bankable commodities within the culture industry (Louw, 2010).

Moreover, the spin team has successfully created an empathy within the public as Winterkorn announced his resignation as the CEO of Volkswagen. He said in a statement, "As the CEO I accept responsibility and we are agree on terminating my function as the CEO of the Volkswagen Group. I am doing this in the interests of the company even though I am not aware of any wrong doing on my part.” This has made a critical action that turned people’s opinion around from hatred to respect. According to C. Daniel Batson (1995), empathy will arise action to help, regardless of what people can gain from it and relieving suffer becomes the most important thing. Yes, Volkswagen has made a mistake but this further action has just made people think that the company has done much more than what they need to do in order to make it right.

A recent survey found that more than half of the Germans are still considered Volkswagen as an "outstanding" company regardless of the issue. Many also apparently view that people has just taking things too far and that they will forget it easily.

Unsuccessful Spin: Kony 2012

Kony 2012 is a 30-minutes video published by an organisation named, Invisible Children. The organisation was found by a trio of filmmakers, Jason Russell, Bobby Bailey and Laren Poole, to increase the awareness towards the activities of a guerrilla group called Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Africa. The leader, whose named Joseph R. Kony, has conducted the group for over a period of 30 years, the group has kidnapped thousands of children, forced the boys to become his army and the girls to become sex slaves.

The aim of Kony 2012 is to make the man famous, "Not to celebrate him but to raise support for his arrest and set a precedent for international justice.” As Russell explained, “Kony is considered as the most wanted man in the world according to the ICC.” Since going live, the video has millions of views worldwide, followed with thousands of people have contributed in donating for the cause. The video has certainly grabbed the Internet's attention.

Kony 2012 started amazingly well by being a “confidence tricksters” towards a good cause in making an enthusiastic atmosphere in a colloquialism of the media industry (Louw, 2010). Since the video was first published, they endorsed Oprah to help boosting the video as the views skyrocketed to over 9 million. Initially, they have gained a widespread support mostly from the youngsters, however it was being criticised a lot and according to Tanya Lyons, the president of the Africa Studies Centre at Flinders University, “Kony would be loving this, I think it would be feeding into it and making him more powerful rather than making any difference to any type of international intervention that may or may not be underway.” Since then, the spin team does not have anything to backlash it nor offer another action in gaining public’s trust convincing that they are serious in handling the issue. The silent action had taken too long, leads to the media had lost interest in them. Losing control of the symbiotic relationship with the journalist meant losing public support.

10 days after the video was released, Russell was found screaming to the street of his San Diego home, naked and layed himself down onto the pavements until he was eventually taken to the hospital by the police after a brief psychotic breakdown. This too, became a viral video. The spin team once again lost control of the information they wanted to be filtered through to the media, which resulted the media to be more interested in covering this news rather than the actual objective of opposing Kony. This was a major failure for the spin team, if the journalists were not feed anything cover, they could influence derivative of being authoritative and gives them the opportunity to trivialise the issue (Louw, 2010).

On top of all, Kony 2012 was not able to achieve its major aim in capturing the “bad guy”. According to Bracht et al. (1999), community programs must be shaped and managed by skilled and resources to maintain continued effort. In the end, it was only 32 percent of the over $8 USD million that raised being received by direct services and it was not stated about where the rest of the money went.

Conclusion

Public opinion is perhaps the most important element of media process, everything that appear in the media are all purposely in order to influence public opinion. According to media system dependency theory, people depends on media to meet their needs in order to act effectively. In this case, journalists are the key players in generating public opinion but the spin doctors are they ones who fed them with the token.

How Volkswagen successfully regain their public’s trust is a perfect example of a successful spin doctoring. The spin team utilised a quick response to its issue and was able to maintain the journalists interested with its structured stories. In contradictory, Kony 2012 was able grab people’s attention to its hype but the spin team could not maintain their interest, which in the end it only leads to the media deflect their stories and questioning their objective.

To add, Kony 2012 were not prepared for any effective follow up from the media. Whereas Volkswagen, on the other hand were fully equipped to take a full responsibility and use it to successfully follow up with a well organised rebound of their company.