The term ‘spin doctor’ first appeared in America during the 1980s. At this time, the use of sound bites became increasingly popular with the American media and a new type of publicist was required to provide them.
The use of the word spin is related to the term ‘yarn’. People who tell stories can be said to be ‘spinning a yarn’, a term coined in the early 1800s and first appearing in print in 1818 in ‘A New and Comprehensive Vocabulary of the Flash Language’ which was written by James Hardy Vaux.
Although the word spin has been used in connection with storytelling for around two centuries, it was not used in its modern context until the mid-1980s. In October 1984, following the Reagan/Mondale debate, one of the first citations of the terms ‘spin’ and ‘spin doctor’ appeared in a New York Times article:
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