Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

When I was a kid in New Hampshire, the Merrimack River was a public menace–stinking with sewage from every town it passed and used as a dump for toxic factory waste. And if you complained of what Factory X was doing, the owners would say that everyone else did the same–or worse. It had always been so in living memory, and it would always be so in the infinite future.

Guess what–people changed their minds about putting up with it. Public officials and private groups got together and forced all the people who wanted to foul that river to change their ways. (Thank you, environmentalists!) Now every time I revisit my home town, I see people sailing and canoeing that very river.

Tricking the people who read small-town newspapers–disguising Beltway spinspeak as just-another-letter-from-your-neighbor–it’s legal but it’s wrong.

• You couldn’t sell a gumdrop made in China under the label “Made in USA.”
• You couldn’t print a political ad without the name and address of the folks who paid for it.
• You couldn’t submit an article to a medical journal without admitting if some drug company paid for your research.
• So why is it okay for GOPTeamleader.com to send a letter written by Ari Fleischer but bearing the signature “Joe Smith” to Joe’s local paper? Why is Joe Smith the only person who has to consent to this obvious deception?

The Republicans aren’t the only folks who have tried it, they just got good at it faster than most. The Democrats’ response, as quoted in the New York Times–“We ought to be doing that.” No doubt they will–no doubt many even more unsavory groups will–unless “we the people” figure out a way to get them to stop dumping garbage into our river of information, or at least to identify their products’ origin.

The entire field of “Public Relations” exists to disguise biased information as real information. They have been successfully polluting the information content of the media for many years–but that doesn’t mean we can’t try to fight back.

The people of New Hampshire took back the Merrimack River from polluters with an established “right” to use it however they wanted. Taking public discourse away from the spin-meisters would be even more worthwhile.

Maybe the GOPTeamLeader.com site should add a product warning: “Caution: Use of form letters has been shown to result in public humiliation.”

The people who click to send those GOP form letters to their local paper are getting an unfair share of the blame and shame. The Republican National Committe is letting small town “Team Leaders” suffer for actions their website made possible and their “GOPoint” system encouraged.

For example, on the letters page of the Rutland (VT) Herald, an astute Web-watcher wrote this letter.

Wells

Monday’s NY Times finally breaks the Republican astroturf story that bloggers have been writing about for weeks. (Thanks to Paul Boutin’s blog for the link.) Unfortunately the Times reporter’s big point is that the massively funded, high-tech
Republican effort is exactly the same as what little, underfunded groups (Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin is the example given) have previously done–they provided prewritten letters their members could send to local papers.

Atrios, one of the bloggers to break this story, has a link to a
more intelligent newspaper article elsewhere. Stephen Phelps’s editorial (the Google cache) gives an editor’s point of view on the situation.

The Times also fails to mention that people willing to pass the RNC letters off as their own got paid with GOPoints they could swap for merchandise. Paul Boutin’s funny Slate article made that point very clearly.

M.E. Cowan at FailureIsImpossible.com just noticed a new round of astroturf claiming that Democrats in the Senate are acting in a way “tantamount to an attempted coup.” She wondered if this also originated at gopTeamLeader.com, and as this screenshot shows, that is just where it comes from.

This squabble was resolved on January 15 even though GOPTeamLeader.com was still pushing it as a live issue on January 25.

The Democrat-Republican split in the Senate is 49-51, a mirror image of what it was before the election. When the Democrats held the 51-49 majority, committee funding was split almost equally between the two parties. Democrats were outraged when Senate Republicans demanded to get two-thirds of the committee money–after all, a 49-51 split is the same kind of split no matter which party has the 51.

When Democrats refused to go along with this funding change, Republicans accused them of hanging on unfairly to Senate power, blocking the Bush agenda, etc. Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), went so far as to call their resistance “tantamount to an attempted coup.”

“Democrats denied the allegations, which Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) denounced as “reckless” and “inappropriate” in a Senate floor speech yesterday morning. They contended that committee organizations took longer in the last Congress, and said they were only seeking to match the distribution of funds to party breakdown in Senate membership.” (Washington Post, January 16, 2003)

Caught red-handed, Republican astroturfers insist that this isn’t news–will they get away with it?

“We’re just trying to use technology to get people more involved in the political process,” Chuck DeFeo told PC World (Jan. 22, 2003). DeFeo, who works for the RNC, denies that he’s doing anything wrong. And PCWorld accepts DeFeo’s stonewall stance because “using the Web to mass-mail prewritten letters is nothing new.”

Hold on there! Those Nigerian guys who want my bank account number are “nothing new”–and they are just “using the Web to mass-mail prewritten letters.” Does that make it okay?

The point of the Republican “letter generators” is to trick small-town papers around the country into publishing spin-doctor prose disguised as the work of a fellow who lives next door. The Republican mailings were wrong for the same reasons those Nigerian mailings are wrong.

• The letters are written by pros but claim to be written by amateurs–because if you knew who wrote them and why it would be fatal to what they are trying to do.
• The letters are used to trick people into acting against their own best interests–most newspapers would rather get paid an advertising fee to publish RNC releases instead of giving them free space on letter pages.
• The letters are signed by people who expect to be paid (in points they exchange for merchandise)–but this is not disclosed either.

No wonder the Republicans don’t want to outlaw spam with deceptive headers–it lies at the heart of their own PR campaign!

Did any of those letters-to-the-editors say “Paid for by the Republican National Committee”? Because the GOPLeaders.com website, Mr. Chuck DeFeo, and whoever wrote those smarmy letters probably cost the RNC a bundle. Not to mention the merchandise people get for signing them…

If you find suspicious astroturf in your local paper, let the editors know. Suggest that they bill the Republican Party instead of giving them space for free.

If you want to write your own letter in reponse M. E. Cowen’s excellent blog has astroturf examples and advice. Let’s see if we can break this chain of complacency and deceit.

• Jan. 20: First news story using Google to show 31 identical letters signed with 31 different names.
• Jan. 21: Screenshot of web-based spam-generator.
• Jan. 21: Irate letters to the Inquirer as Republicans protest these revelations.
• Jan. 22: Screenshots of prizes you get for sending spam, thanks from Republican National Committee.

• What you can do plus examples of RNC spam going back to April. (M. E. Cowan–this page continues to be updated as new information becomes available.)
• Background plus lots more
  deceptive Republican Astroturf (Gary Stock)
• Blog with reader comment–one reader’s friend turned out to be a “GOP Team Leader” himself. (Ben Hammersley)
• Another screenshot of the html form used to create “demonstrating genuine leadership” letters. (G. W. Bodine)
• Salon.com readers discussed similar letters appearing as early as February (thanks to Paul Boutin for the link.)

There are two kinds of organized mailings, both called “Astroturf” because they imitate grassroots support. Both kinds involve lots of folks sending on a form letter they got from some group they support. But one kind is meant to be informative, the other is meant to be deceptive.

Informative astroturf sends a lot of the same form letters to some politician so that politician can count up how many people support the point of view.

Deceptive astroturf disguises its form letter as a personal, heartfelt opinion, sending one copy (each signed by a different person) to each of many newspapers or individuals. The recipients aren’t meant to guess they are reading a PR firm’s carefully-worded message. Propagandists call this way of disarming suspicion the “Plain Folks” effect.

There’s a very big irony in the recent exposure of deceptive Republican astroturf by bloggers and by Mike Magee at the Inquirer.

The irony is the Bush team is sending out astroturf with intent to deceive–after denouncing and refusing to consider more than 700,000 messages sent to them in an open, appropriate way by members of environmental groups–because they were form letters and not “original.”

Check out this New York times story, by Katharine Seelye. Registration (free) is required, so let me just quote for you the astroturf-relevant bit:

“… the [Clinton-era] Forest Service actually relied on public comment when it developed its “roadless rule,” intended to protect 58 million acres of undeveloped national forest from most commercial logging and road building. It drew 1.6 million comments, the most ever in the history of federal rule-making. Almost all the comments — 95 percent — supported the protections but wanted the plan to go even further, which it eventually did.

But the Bush administration delayed putting the rule into effect and sought more comments, receiving 726,000. Of those, it said that only 52,000, or 7 percent, were “original,” meaning that the administration discounted 93 percent of the comments. The rule is now being challenged in court.”

• Jan. 20: First news story using Google to show 31 identical letters signed with 31 different names.
• Jan. 21: Screenshot of web-based spam-generator.
• Jan. 21: Irate letters to the Inquirer as Republicans protest these revelations.
• Jan. 22: Screenshots of prizes you get for sending spam, thanks from Republican National Committee.

Mike Magee posted a screenshot of the HTML form that generates this letter–a spam-generating engine run by the Republican National Committee.

Irate Republicans wrote to the Inquirer complaining about these revelations. Okay, so people were sending out press releases from the RNC disguised as personal letters–that wasn’t the point. The point was that each person sending the letter had the pure motive of getting out this fine message to the world.

Ooops–that’s not true either. The Inquirer this morning shows what was really behind the barrage of spam: the senders get prizes for signing and sending these letter. He’s got the screenshots to prove it.

Shooting down well-financed-fakers is exactly the kind of stuff we all hoped the Internet would help us do. Woo hoo!

The blogs got the story first. The first news story was Mike Magee’s in The Inquirer.

Running a Google search turns up 31 identical letters praising the latest Bush tax cuts in identical language. Every single one denounces Democrats’ “class warfare rhetoric”; every single one praises Bush for “genuine leadership.” Of course, that count misses newspapers whose letters to the editor don’t appear online. Could this be one enthusiastic person sending out a lot of letters? If so, it’s hard to see why that letter got signed with 31 different names.

Furthermore, as Paul Boutin’s excellent blog points out, this letter is only the latest in a series. Gary Stock documents other bursts of identical pro-Bush letters, appearing in journals from the Cape Cod Times to West Hawaii Today: 12 in September (claiming Democrats had a secret plan to raise taxes), 20 in November (praising Bush’s agenda for Congress). The October letter (30 Google hits)praises Bush’s stand against Iraq.

I can’t believe this isn’t front page news in the dead tree papers–doesn’t anyone out there read Blogdex?

There are two kinds of organized mailings, both called “Astroturf” because they imitate grassroots support.Both kinds involve lots of folks sending on a form letter they got from some group they support. But one kind is meant to be informative, the other is meant to be deceptive.

Informative astroturf sends a lot of the same form letters to some politician so that politician can count up how many people support the point of view.

Deceptive astroturf disguises its form letter as a personal, heartfelt opinion, sending one copy (each signed by a different person) to each of many newspapers or individuals. The recipients aren’t meant to guess they are reading a PR firm’s carefully-worded message. Propagandists call this way of disarming suspicion the “Plain Folks” effect.

There’s a very big irony in the recent exposure of deceptive Republican astroturf by bloggers and by Mike Magee at the Inquirer.

The irony is the Bush team is sending out astroturf with intent to deceive–after denouncing and refusing to consider more than 700,000 messages sent to them in an open, appropriate way by members of environmental groups–because they were form letters and not “original.”

Check out this New York times story, sent to me by my environmentally-friendly daughter Mickey. Registration (free) is required, so let me just quote for you the astroturf-relevant bit:

“… the [Clinton-era] Forest Service actually relied on public comment when it developed its “roadless rule,” intended to protect 58 million acres of undeveloped national forest from most commercial logging and road building. It drew 1.6 million comments, the most ever in the history of federal rule-making. Almost all the comments — 95 percent — supported the protections but wanted the plan to go even further, which it eventually did.

But the Bush administration delayed putting the rule into effect and sought more comments, receiving 726,000. Of those, it said that only 52,000, or 7 percent, were “original,” meaning that the administration discounted 93 percent of the comments. The rule is now being challenged in court.”