The suicide of Dr David Kelly, the microbiologist at the centre of the battle of wills between the BBC and the Blair government, ought to represent a loud wake-up call to politicians, political advisors, and political journalists in democracies everywhere, and in Australia in particular.

The Howard and Carr governments’ versions of Blair’s unsavoury spinner Alistair Campbell wield every bit as much shadowy influence here as does Campbell in London. Figures like Miles Jordana and Jane Halton and the departed Max Moore-Wilton – unelected, unaccountable, unchecked, unscrutinised – are, if not subject to proper media pressure at last, likely to drive Australian public life as far into the gutter as has this latest tragic result of New Labour’s increasingly dangerous, soft-totalitarian attempts to control every aspect of debate.

Dr Kelly’s death is another urgent call-to-arms for serious journalists everywhere to pause, step back from the pressures of minute-to-second coverage, re-appraise what exactly is occurring in the guise of ‘harmless’ Spin and how they are acquiescing to it, and then try to forge a big shift in the way they collect information and present it to us, the public they serve.

The media, no matter how much we like to criticise them, are on our side. And we need them to start fighting hard for us. The BBC Director-General and his journalists, despite some minor mistakes early in this affair (mostly over-personalising their response to Campbell’s opening attacks on them), are clearly up for the battle. Let’s see how many other journos are ready to get serious at last, especially those in the Murdoch outlets. I personally have a feeling that the Sun-style tabloid hacks, rather than the broadsheet nancy-boys, might prove to be our most powerful shock troops when it comes to breaking down the ‘information barrier’ now dividing the public from our leaders. If only they would get their tongues out of their proprietor’s bottom from time to time.

Here are five angles on defeating the Spin Doctors. Webdiarists might have others. ‘Defeating’ is not hyperbole, either; as the Kelly tragedy shows, there has long been an information war going on between the media and the political estates and it is now starting to cause fatal ‘collateral damage’ out here among the public.

1. Introduce the public to the Spin Doctors.

We need a comprehensive list of who exactly these people are. So powerful is their influence over public life now that we are surely entitled to know far more about them than we do. Someone in the mainstream press should publish an in-depth expose of who ‘spins’ for whom, and details of their employment contracts – including how much they are paid (if they are the public payroll), their working briefs, their security clearances, and their professional histories.

2. Banish Spin Doctor and press release anonymity.

The terms ‘official spokesman’, ‘a spokesman’, ‘a press secretary’ and ‘an official speaking for the government’ and so on should be banished from the press. Instead, even the lowliest official mouthpiece should be precisely identified and named, and press releases should not be accepted unless/until specific authorship is revealed. In opposition to my belief that news reporters should ideally be heard, read but never by-lined, anonymity in influential government circles is a wholly-insidious mechanism and one critical to a government’s ‘firewall’ and ‘dog whistle’ tactical modes. It allows ‘junior spinners’ safely to make (planned) ‘unauthorised’ statements or release information of dubious morality or veracity which, while proving useful in a short-term political sense, never-the-less allow the associated politician the escape route of disowning them later.

Here is an example of how Spin Doctor anonymity destroys public life from today’s Herald; Andrew Wilkie is describing a sick personal attack on him by the Howard camp, following his principled resignation over WMD:

The day after I resigned somebody in the PM’s office leaked to the media that I am having family problems, and that I was mentally unstable. Events were moving pretty quickly, but I clearly remember thata guy called me, around midday, and said he was from the Prime Minister’s office. . . . He said that Howard was personally very sorry that this story had been leaked by a junior person on his staff. They told me that they would retract the story, and to its credit, the press did not follow the story or ask me about it. My wife and I are separated, but I don’t think that means I’m crazy, and the only reason I’m explaining it now is because I don’t want people to think that any of it is true, but that’s the kind of thing that has been happening to me.

You can see what’s happening here. A dual Spin Doctor aim has been achieved – the intended target in this case is not the public, but the Press. Firstly, journalists have now been ‘made aware’ that the ‘real story’ (wink wink, dog-whistle-firewall) here is that Wilkie’s marriage is collapsing and he’s nuts. This is intended to undermine the context in which they receive and report Wilkie’s statements.

Secondly, however, John Howard pre-emptively distances himself from the mucky tactics (in this case almost immediately); journos are ‘made aware’ by another anonymous Spinner that Howard is ‘personally very sorry’ that they now know about Wilkie’s private life. Howard’s circulated regret is no more (or less) genuine than was his public ‘agreeing to disagree with Fred Nile’ over banning Muslim headdress, or his being ‘personally angry’ that ‘someone’ in his office ‘didn’t pass on’ the children overboard or Nigerian nuke-link truths ‘in time’.

His own ‘profound regret’ doesn’t matter; the filthy Wilkie story is out there. (No doubt Howard media supporters will ‘blame’ Wilkie himself for ‘further spreading’ the story now, even in trying to hose it down.)

This is how the anonymous Spinner spins the filthy webs that his ‘respectable’ boss climbs up, creating the opportunities for him to deploy the dog-whistles, the insinuations, the mock-Socratic ‘innocence’, denying stories precisely to stoke them, ‘disavowing’ bigotry and division and gutter-politics precisely while piggy-backing on them.

But these tactics can only work if there is someone putting the dirty cards on the table in the first place. (You can see this tag-team mode of Spin swinging into action now in Britain; Blair is in ‘conciliatory’ mode towards the BBC over Kelly’s death even as his friend and former Spinner/Minister Peter Mandelson is savaging the broadcaster viciously over it).

The role of the anonymous Spinner in particular is to spread the unrespectable dirt: a ‘statesman’ can’t react in (mock-concerned, luke-warm, half-hearted) denial to a suggestion that all Muslims are terrorists, say, unless someone makes that suggestion in the first place. It might be another public figure – Nile, Hanson – or, increasingly (since other public figures can’t always be relied upon), it might originate internally, in the form of ‘an error’, a ‘lapse of judgement’, an ‘unauthorised statement’, a ‘bureaucratic blunder’, and so on.

In the latter case, what is critical is that the originator must be Mr Nobody. A Howard or Carr populist opportunist can only pull off the dog whistle + firewall manoeuvre if he is able to distance himself safely, and you can only do this if there’s no specific person you might have to public ‘finger’ (to prove you’re serious about your ‘disavowals’ – which of course, you are not.).

Clearly, if he was really sorry about this dirty Wilkie story emerging from his office, John Howard would have outed the ‘junior person’ who spruiked it and sacked them, not merely cried crocodile tears; just as, if Blair really is trying to be conciliatory to the BBC, he’d be denouncing Mandelson’s ugly accusations vehemently. But if they both did that, Howard would run out of anonymous spinners willing to leak the useful dirty stories in the first place quick smart, while Blair would have no-one shifting the heat for Kelly’s death onto the BBC on his behalf.

Low-level Spin Doctors know that they’ll never have to personally account for their own immoral tactics, which is the only way immoral tactics ever flourish and flourish. Doing truly filthy anonymous work is all part of the Spinner’s junior apprenticeship. The Republican Party in the US has a huge army of these clowns – the kind of low-level, wannabe-Dick Morris interns and undergrads who organised and peopled the ‘spontaneous democratic voters protests’ (in reality, violently pro-Bush intimidations) in ballot officials’ offices during the Florida recounts.

But now this stuff is turning increasingly poisonous, and in this case fatal. This is hardly the first time an innocent and honourable citizen has committed suicide as a result of anonymous political filth, but it’s an incredibly unambiguous example, and for once it’s not hyperbole to argue that Alistair Campbell, at a minimum, has at least some blood on his hands.

The BBC will wear much artificial opprobrium over this in the coming days, but in fact the journalists involved seem to have behaved with admirable principle and strength of purpose. Still, Kelly, by going to the press with highly-damaging information, stepped outside the government safety zone where anonymity is desirable. Suddenly, it was imperative that he be indentified, so that – like Wilkie – he could be subjected by the likes of Campbell to a vicious credibility-assault. (This is why I argue for anonymity for news reporters – the second a reporter ‘becomes someone’, they are a discreditable target. Witness also Campbell’s intense attacks on BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan, who broke the story.)

I also experienced how government Spinner anonymity is deployed when I tried to defend Margo’s reputation at State Parliament last year (see In which Jack is repelled from the citadel and Jack’s back.) The ‘firewall’ low-level person in Bob Carr’s office, to whom I spoke at length, refused point-blank to identify herself, even while she demanded very, very aggressively all my own personal details (which I happily gave). If it’s good enough for the Kellys and Gilligans and Wilkies to become targets when it suits governments the same should apply to all government personal staffers, right down to the phone boy if necessary.

The time has come to put an end to the anonymous safety for the low-level dirty-work foot-soldiers of Spin. Who are these people, what nasty little things do they get up to from day to day, and – in the case of this ‘junior person’ in the PM’s office, say – how do we, the public, get rid of them, if we can’t vote them out?

The press alone are in a position to flush such grubs out into the harsh light of democracy, and they should do start doing so before the next honourable and idealistic citizen kills themself in demoralised frustration.

3. Point out that the mini-Emperor has no clothes in real time, face-to-face.

Journalists must recognise that there is only one way to take on the smooth and slick Spin Doctor, and that is head-on, using the great traditional strengths of the working reporter: drag the bullshit detectors out, and brush up on the swear word vocabulary. Good spin doctors rely above all else on tame journalists remaining tame (University-tamed, you might say); exhibiting nice manners, personal restraint, a sort of mildly-embarrassed unwillingness to make a gauche scene in front of their journalistic peers.

Margo wrote of the mostly-prissy, foot-shuffling silence from colleagues that greeted her angry tete-a-tete with Bob Carr last year. Alan Ramsey once stood up in the Canberra Press Gallery and shouted “You LIAR!” at John Gorton. Neither episode was sophisticated or elegant, but it is precisely this jettisoning of the self-censoring press conference ‘conventions’ that is now needed.

Since when have Spin Doctors been allowed to tell journalists which questions they can and can’t ask, and when, and how? Why do journalists so meekly follow the Spin Doctor rules? Personally, I crave the day when someone of the stature of Kerry O’Brien or Laurie Oakes simply says, in response to a typical slice of spin doctoring: “No offence, mate, but you are frankly full of bullshit.” I once suggested (in ‘ 52 Ideas for a healthier Australian news media) that reporters should be polite and civil, but it may be that they would make a lot more headway in regaining public support with a little more fruity aggro. Put it this way: reporters can’t sink any lower in the public eyes than right now, so there’s little to lose.

And journalists might be surprised at the effect a little contemptuous rudeness could have on the smarmier Spin Doctors. Most spinners rely heavily on an assumption that no journalist is ever going to stop playing the game. Yet laughing, sneering dismissal of any charlatan’s lies-on-behalf-of-the-boss are usually the best way to burst the bubble they try to construct. If you make them look stupid on-the-spot, then the whole charade tends to collapse. However it’s done, journos need to get the initiative and momentum back from the Spin Doctors. You can only so this by throwing them personally off-balance first.

4. Treat Spin Doctors as the powerful players they are.

As Alistair Campbell has lately discovered, the best way for the press to destroy the power of the Spin Doctor is to manifestly transform him from a nominally back-room player into the front-room ones they really are. The Spin Doctor’s most powerful weapon, both defensive and offensive, is the disingenuous claim to be ‘simply doing a job’. It is precisely why the Spin Doctor’s function is so poisonous – all care and power and influence, zero responsibility or accountability. In times of high crisis, the Spinner seeks to appear as a hapless ‘little man’ buffer, gamely doing an honest job of work on behalf of the ‘accountable’ politician. And so they stand bravely at the podium in a kind of bemused but good-natured funk, pretending to be trying hard to be straightforward with the jackals under difficult conditions.

This is, of course, exactly his role in the politician’s overall team – to act as a point man for the heat. Thus, journalists should cheerfully oblige by giving it to the bastard full on, extending absolutely zero of the professional sympathy the Spin Doctor seeks to elicit from them in such circumstances. In the absence of the relevant politician, the Spin Doctor should be savaged as if they are that politician; inspiring a ‘hey-go-easy-on-me-personally-mate’ attitude is a key to how Spin Doctors protect their bosses during crises. They should be torn to pieces by reporters so ferociously and personally that they will think twice before taking the heat again. There is no such thing as the Nuremberg defence. No-one on the planet can take refuge in, or seek an easier ride from, the ‘only doing my job’ line.

5. Reclaim language as the journalist’s vocational weapon.

Maybe this is the most important shift of all. Journalists, who more than anyone else know exactly how language can be blurred and manipulated to just about any end, must regain the high linguistic ground. And they have to be willing to challenge Spin Doctors – also linguistic gymnasts – on what might seem like tedious and even pedantic matters of language, ad nauseum, in real time. They need to be prepared to fight cant with an on-the-spot deconstruction of that cant which may seem at times a little anal. The debasement of public language has to be fought, inch-by-inch, and journalists are the ones at the front line. Favourite Spin Doctor cliches and phrases have to be blown out of the water as such, the instant they are heard. Meaningless adjective + abstract noun linkages like ‘appropriate action’, ‘inappropriate behaviour’, ‘debatable merit’, ‘compelling argument’, ‘absolute conviction’, or hard adjective + imprecise verb linkages like ‘definitely address’, ‘seriously consider’, and ‘fully reflect upon’ are all the more dangerous because they sound so convincing. ‘It is my understanding that’. ‘It could be argued that.’ ‘Some people might take the view that.’ Reporters should point out aggressively that this sort of slippery, disconnected Spin Doctor bullshit is utterly meaningless, null language; pre-emptive Alice-in-Wonderland tossing-off that allows anyone and everyone to delude themselves that whatever follows means only – and whatever – the hell they want it to mean, at any given time yesterday, today, or tomorrow.

‘It remains my absolute personal conviction that there was a very compelling argument that Saddam was a serious WMD threat, and I made the appropriate decision based on my understanding of the facts, only after a profoundly serious consideration of all aspects of the debate, on merit’. This sentence means nothing, nothing, nothing. It’s less than a lie. And yet we went to war thanks entirely to rubbish just like that.

It’s this watery, limp, gutless, waffling, obfuscating, muddying, underhand and deeply cowardly poisoning of our public conversations that is quickly eroding all the grand things that define Western civilisation, and which we are supposed to be defending against terrorist nihilists: our capacity for self-improvement through tough self-criticism, intellectual precision and rigour in language and debate; honesty, honour, humility, moral courage, principle. The rise and rise of Spin Doctor mediocrity is neither the fault of one person or group or political tint, nor is it within the power of any individual to combat alone. But it’s rising and rising never-the-less, and it’s driving the broader public increasingly into cynicism, political disengagement and civic despair.

And now suicide. I think that it’s only by political journalists confronting Spin Doctors and their Spin head on – calling bullshit bullshit in real time, like Australians in particular used to do as a matter of instinct – that these two central, and symbiotic, components of our public polity will begin to force, or scare, or intimidate, or embarrass each other – and therefore our elected masters – into ensuring that civic life becomes defined by a little more responsibility, restraint, grace and accountability once more.

UPDATE: A quick extra note. It seems there is also growing disquiet at the BBC that Gilligan may have ‘sexed up’ his reporting of ‘Kelly’s sex up’ allegations against the government. In other words, that the BBC is guilty of the same kind of spin itself. In which case, it’s an even better demonstration of the way the two sides of the Spin v Journo war tend to poison each other’s modes of communication to the public.