Counter-spinning counter spin

Pity Tony Wall didn't ask some bigger questions of his advertorial piece for Counter-Spin in yesterdays Sunday Star Times.

The NZ Herald had run the story a week earlier after Counter-Spin bought advertising, it seems the SST will do it for free, so that's nice I suppose.

I took a sniff around CounterSpin, this new ‘site’ that attempts to unravel the spin, I left sensing bullshit.

The Republicans clicked onto the possibilities of online activism from watching Obama. They throw together an umbrella organization and provide cyber space where other fired up Fox News viewers can create horizontal activist synergy. It’s the Al Qaeda cell group of corporate social on-line movements.

CounterSpin is apparently run by two WASP sounding blokes who couch the entire purpose of the site to question whether or not David Bain should receive compensation by “Undoing the excesses of media indoctrination” – I kid you not, direct quote, I swear. They have money behind them, they could afford adverts in the papers, which of course guarantees them editorial coverage as a ‘news’ story in the Herald,

The site is called www.davidbane.counterspin.co.nz, as if this was the central pillar and purpose of the site. This promotes the site as some type of critical voice, but I don’t think CounterSpin is much about David Bain’s compensation at all, and I think the manner both none photographed profiles sell themselves as religiously focused on the Bain case is an attempt to make them seem neutral.

Kent Parker
Kent is a web developer working as a freelancer on the World Wide Web. He has a degree in Psychology and is setting up an Emotional Fitness Programme to help people avoid or treat psychological disorder and to improve functionality. He has either first hand or close proximity experience with a number of the major disorders and so has a good understanding of human dysfunction and the vagaries of the human condition. Given the state of the Bain household and reports of the behaviour of some of the family members, including David Bain, it is quite likely that some form of disorder has played a big role before and after this crime took place.

Bob Smith:
"I have always been vaguely interested in the Bain case and always thought that the original verdict of guilty was the correct one, but at that stage the only compelling piece of evidence that I knew about was the fingerprints of David Bain that were found on the rifle. Over the many years since the murders and subsequent appeals etc I took only a vague interest until in 2007 when David won the appeal for retrial from the privy council who had turned him down in 1996. This win for retrial for David got me very interested indeed so I began researching as much about the actual evidence as possible, this research just reinforced the idea already in my mind, and it was a great shock when the retrial in 2009 returned a not guilty verdict. To me and many other New Zealanders it was a travesty of justice, so since that date I have been, along with others trying to compile all the relevant evidence in this fascinating case on to a web site so that people can make up their own mind what the outcome of the trial should have been and also to give some justice to Robin Bain and his extended family. Another motivation is to make it difficult for David Bain to receive compensation that he clearly in my view does not deserve."

Also of note is the fact that it is not a blog which has a level of interaction where as access on CounterSpin is tightly controlled to allow other talk hate radio fantasists a cyber space to act out on-line group therapy sessions.

What makes me think CounterSpin has a much wider agenda than David Bane is because if you go to www.counterspin.co.nz it directs immediately to their David Bane site. The compensation issue is merely the a-political launch site, it seems CounterSpin intend to have much more spin to be spun.

Let’s see, what will CounterSpin’s next “Undoing the excesses of media indoctrination’ be?

Bet’s are now on for:

1: Why mining is such a great thing for the environment!
2: Green-Coal, is it the answer?
3: Greenpeace dodge taxes!
4: The Science behind global warming is wrong. There is no link between climate change and man made pollution just like there is no link between cancer and smoking!
5: Privatizing social welfare will be cheap as!
6: Did we mention how great mining is?


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