According to Eric Louw (2010), twentieth century politics has been intruded by public relations, spin-doctoring and hype (media-ization). He (Louw, 2010) defines spin doctors as demagogues who work to steer journalists toward the direction they wanted mass media and public to see. This essay will look at two spins as examples of successful and unsuccessful spin. The successful spin will be of Joko Widodo’s blusukan campaign during Jakarta Gubernatorial Election 2012 and the unsuccessful spin will discuss Australia’s management and public relation responses regarding Indonesian officials spying scandal.
The cases will be built from information obtained through several news articles that documented the cases. Then, these two cases will be analysed for factors that contributed to the success and failure of them. In particular, this essay will examine spin-doctors’ aims, impacts, techniques, as well as, relationship between all those participating in its creation will be analysed and compared to spin-doctoring theories that are available.
Jokowi and Blusukan
When Joko Widodo (Jokowi) and his partner, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (Ahok), emerged as the winner of Jakarta Gubernatorial Election 2012, skeptics such as Tobias Basuki were surprised by the result. Basuki (2012), a researcher from Centre for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in his article for East Asia Forum that the eighty-five per-cent of Jakarta residents were Muslims. In addition, there had been a persistent notion that top posts should be held by someone local of a major religion, which in this case a Muslim Betawi. Jokowi was not from Jakarta and Ahok was a Christian with Chinese ethnicity, both deemed outsiders (Basuki, 2012).
Their rival was the previous gover...
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