Astroturf

One of the most effective rhetorical moments I can see in my mind's eye--although, alas, I have forgotten the context--is that of Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen icily glaring across the conference table at somebody and saying: "I am old enough to know the difference between 'grassroots' and 'astroturf'."

This morning Teresa Nielsen Hayden tells us to go read Rational Grounds:

Making Light: More astroturf: In "Deceiving Us Has Become an Industrial Process," the weblog Rational Grounds has far exceeded the old post of mine he quotes, Common Fraud, in examining how pervasive corporate-sponsored fake grassroots organizations have become:

Josh Marshall is currently beating the drum against Koch Industries... reading his comments I was bowled over by the number of astroturf groups involved in this little network. You've got Social Security for All, who are actually Americans for Prosperity, who are actually the Independent Women's Forum.... Citizens for a Sound Economy (now merged with Empower America to become Freedom Works)... they also had a hand... lobbying for the tobacco companies going back to 1994.... The bizarre advocacy network the government has worked up for No Child Left Behind is probably more famous... Armstrong Williams and the illegal fake-news blocks the Bush administration put out.... The Medicare and Armstrong parts of this saga are run through a PR and marketing firm named Ketchum.... Democracy, Data & Communications... oodles of DDC fronts.... All those stories about wacky lawsuits and outrageous settlements? Lies.... I have to wonder - how many of my opinions about my world are bought and paid for?

Answer: a lot of them, unless you've gone through and cleaned out every compartment. I don't want to give myself undue credit for precocity, but I started noticing there was something funny going on when I was a kid reading my grandparents' copies of Readers Digest. That was where I first heard about juries making ridiculous awards in personal-injury cases. It made interesting reading, but after a while it occurred to me that I never saw articles about reasonable and justifiable personal injury awards. Surely there had to be some? Likewise articles in which the IRS wasn't a monster, and labor unions had some good reason to exist, and politicians weren't all windbags, layabouts, and snake oil salesmen.

I doubt we'll ever know the whole history of astroturf. I suspect it goes back further and spreads wider than most sane people have ever imagined.

Comments

[fightingdem]

Is there anyone but me who thinks if we limit campaign contributions to individuals only (and limit the amount) that many of these "organizations" will simply dry up. I recognise that the purpose of astroturf organizations are primarily propagandistic but they do serve to spread donations to willing pols.

[monkyboy]

I think the selling of false opinions goes way beyond just astroturf groups now. The leaking of false information to innoculate a poltical problem is an artform in itself these. The "fake" Newsweek story on Koran abuse, Dan Rather's Bush National Guard Story, etc. were so effective they must be a strategy.

Don't forget, it's not informed voters who are the target of these deception's, but people who get their info in soundbites...

[wkwillis]

I think that it was about two generations after American politics became ideological instead of geographical. 1900 or thereabouts?

[latts]

Ah, Reader's Digest... predigested crap for unaccomplished readers. I also read it at my grandparents' house, usually in a tree near the driveway because there was nothing else to do there except allow myself to be criticized relentlessly by my grandmother. Luckily, the RD worldview never took with me, maybe because I associated it with mean-spiritedness.

[Lewis Carroll]

As far as I can tell, the mother of all astroturf phenomena was the Family Research Council or Media Resource Center or whichever one it was being behind 99% of the "indecency" complaints that the FCC received about some television program, a collection of complaints which Powell used as fertilizer to cultivate outlandish fines against, and prophylactic self-censorship by, commercial broadcasters.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/08/politics/08climate.html?ex=1275883200&en=22149dc70c0731d8&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

Bush Aide Softened Greenhouse Gas Links to Global Warming
By ANDREW C. REVKIN

A White House official who once led the oil industry's fight against limits on greenhouse gases has repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that play down links between such emissions and global warming, according to internal documents.

In handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003, the official, Philip A. Cooney, removed or adjusted descriptions of climate research that government scientists and their supervisors, including some senior Bush administration officials, had already approved. In many cases, the changes appeared in the final reports.

The dozens of changes, while sometimes as subtle as the insertion of the phrase 'significant and fundamental' before the word 'uncertainties,' tend to produce an air of doubt about findings that most climate experts say are robust.

Mr. Cooney is chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the office that helps devise and promote administration policies on environmental issues.

Before going to the White House in 2001, he was the 'climate team leader' and a lobbyist at the American Petroleum Institute, the largest trade group representing the interests of the oil industry. A lawyer with a bachelor's degree in economics, he has no scientific training.

The documents were obtained by The New York Times from the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit legal-assistance group for government whistle-blowers....

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/09/opinion/09thu2.html

A (White) House Party for Lobbyists

President Bush moved quickly after the 2000 election to fill many of the important environmental and energy jobs with corporate lobbyists who had spent their careers trying to weaken the laws they would then swear to protect. Most were vetted by Karl Rove and Dick Cheney. The result has been an erosion of the regulatory framework protecting the country's air, water, public lands and wildlife, combined with a chronic unwillingness by the administration to address difficult environmental issues.

Anyone needing evidence of industry's influence need look no further than Andrew C. Revkin's article in Wednesday's Times involving the handiwork of one Philip Cooney, an important but heretofore obscure official who serves as chief of staff of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

Mr. Cooney spent his immediate pre-White House years as a lawyer at the American Petroleum Institute, where he helped organize the oil industry's fight against limits on greenhouse gas emissions from factories and automobiles. Mr. Revkin reported that Mr. Cooney had been fighting the same fight in his new job by sanitizing government reports in an effort to cast doubt on the link - a link accepted by mainstream scientists - between climate change and the emissions caused by burning fossil fuels....

[Cranky Observer]

FDR certainly parsed the truth very carefully during his day, particularly in the 1940-1942 period. But has there ever been any Presidential administration in the past which had anything like the antics of Fleischer and Scottie? I would actually prefer Baghdad Bob; at least I knew exactly where he stood and what his motivations were.

Cranky

[Oskar Shapley]

Everyone who read Stauber and Rampton's "Trust us, we're Experts" and "Toxic Sludge Is Good For You", will know the difference between 'grassroots' and 'astroturf', too.

[Ralph]

We should consider this also in the much bigger context of media manipulation and ownership. Sidney Blumenthal's column in the Guardian (Nixon's Empire Strikes Back, June 9) also available at Commondreams.org is very enlightening on this question. Taking off on the Deep Throat controversy ignited by Vanity Fair's revelations about Mark Felt, Blumenthal says that Nixon's imperial dreams have come to fruition with the George W Bush presidency. He says the Felt who expected to be J E Hoover's successor at the FBI, organized a band of like minded conspirators to thwart Nixon's dream of a takeover of constitutional restrictions on the presidency.

[mndean]

I read RD as a child, and what of it I could remember was much like what appeared above, with a couple of additions - The "ooh, neat" stories on weaponry (the last one I remember was on the B-1, heh), and quack medicine like, "Cancer Cure Found!!". It was supposed to be, I guess, uplifting or something, but it just sparked my cynicism after I found what a load was being peddled.

[MTC]

But then came DeLong and Hayden and Marshall and Wolcott and Setser and Fafnir and Billmon...

...and they kept alive the hope for a new, better and more honest world.