Politics: Astroturf Grows Enemies

The GOP astroturf phenomenon has warranted a response from the Boston Globe’s Ombudsman. (To learn more about this campaign to plant letters to the editor in hundreds of newspapers, visit a fairly exhaustive list here.) The Ombudsman column, written by Christine Chinlund and carried on Sunday in the Globe, explained thusly:

Four times since mid-October the Globe has unwittingly published letters that were written not by the local folks who signed them, but by the Republican National Committee. The same letters, all praising President Bush, also appeared verbatim (or nearly so) in papers across the country, each signed by a person in that paper's area.

And

''Readers have a right to assume that what they read on the letters page is not canned public relations material,'' she says. Thus, she has instituted a new policy to confirm original authorship on any letter that could be part of an organized campaign.

The Internet may be part of the problem, but it can also be part of the solution; I'd suggest adding regular online searches of key phrases in any suspect letter, to quickly identify already-published duplicates.

Good for them. Unfortunately, people in the non-profit public interest world as well as those in the big smelly universe of political outreach know that astroturfing will continue as a practice. They also know, if they have been paying attention, that the most common form of electronic outreach, where your constituents fill out a form to send some nice pre-written email to their policymaker, is rapidly declining as policymakers learn to put less stock in that kind of constituent mail. The astroturf to the editor system has been in use for years as well, and hopefully, the attention generated by the “genuine leadership” email will return the world of constituent mail and letters to the editor to the people actually committed to typing a letter up, signing it and sending it to their newspaper or Senator through the regular mail.