Spin

In the early nineties, private satellite dishes could pick up raw feeds never meant to be broadcast. Brian Springer recorded those feeds for months through the 1992 election, gathering what politicians, presenters and televangelists said to each other while the cameras were rolling and the microphones were still on. The film that came out of it is less about the election than about how news is manufactured: who is allowed into frame, who is quietly kept out, and how many times the naturalness on screen has been rehearsed. With the same material Springer also covers the Los Angeles uprising and the abortion protests of the period. At fifty-seven minutes it counts among the harshest pieces of media criticism, because it records not only what went out but what did not.