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.
Check it out: an excellent Astroturf essay by William Klein, a political consultant who has written extensively on the corruption of the political process by spin.