Editorial Pages Fight 'AstroTurf' With Listserv

By: Charles Geraci For years, editorial page editors at newspapers across the country have battled "AstroTurf" -- form letters to the editor generated on political Web sites and by other means, then passed off as original submissions. The AstroTurf moniker came because the letters are considered fake grassroots initiatives. But The National Conference of Editorial Writers (NCEW) is taking the issue seriously.

On its NCEW e-mail listserv, some 600 subscribers who are mostly editorial page writers and editors, can alert one another of suspicious letters. In fact, this is the most consistent topic on the listserv. Boilerplate letters are sometimes easy to spot by "Googling" selected phrases or sentences.

At least 20 daily newspapers have run form letters recently, including the Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat and Chronicle; the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; The Idaho Statesman of Boise; The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle; the Quad City Times of Davenport, Iowa; and The Gainesville (Fla.) Sun.

After The Anchorage Press, an Alaskan weekly, learned that it had unwittingly spread AstroTurf, an editor's note earlier this month responded saying, "We feel used. We feel violated. We were duped!"

The AstroTurf campaign has been mainly waged by the Bush-Cheney campaign, although Kerry's team has put "talking points" on its Web site for supporters to reformulate and send to newspapers.

One editor recently wrote to the NCEW listserv in analyzing a suspicious letter: "I can't say I've seen it verbatim, but I've seen a version so close -- perhaps identical -- that if I were a professor and a student turned this in, I'd fail him for plagiarism."

Another subscriber to the listserv, an editor at a large Texas paper -- who said he had 536 suspicious letters in a file -- observed that he'd witnessed an "interesting" trend: "I'm seeing a lot of anti-Bush letters from the Bush site, meaning, I think, that antis are logging on and using that engine to generate letters."

Many papers this month have run letters from readers who often merely "cut and paste" text from Bush's re-election site. Visitors to the Bush-Cheney site are encouraged to "write your newspaper editors," although it could be more accurately described as "mail your newspaper editors," for their is little or no "writing" required.

Users are also provided with a list of papers in close proximity to the visitor.

One of the three available letters this week reads: "America has a choice: It can continue to grow the economy and create new jobs as the President's policies are doing; or it can raise taxes on American families and small businesses, hurting economic recovery and future job creation." This was printed nearly verbatim (two words were omitted) by the Tucson (Ariz.) Citizen on Aug. 12.

The paper was also duped six days earlier, with another letter.

One paper, The Star of Tinley Park, Ill., ran all three pro-Bush letters as one submission. The headline: "With this president we're moving in the right direction."

Another editor posted this message from a reader, whose submission was not printed by The Bellingham (Wash.) Herald: "While I respect your point of view, I'm not sure you fully understand and appreciate why so many people send copies of modified letters already written by someone else. I suggest it is worth being thoughtful about what 'authoring' really means in today's world. The old model would be someone sitting down and drafting a message that is completely their own -- different from anyone else's. In today's world of instant connectivity and grassroots movements that utilize the Internet, I suggest you would be better off using a slightly different model for what 'authoring' means. For example, the fact that someone takes the time to read and chooses to send it after adding some of their own thoughts to a letter circulated via the Internet does, in my mind, constitute an 'original' letter in today's high velocity world."

The listserv's Webmaster, Dan Radmacher, editorial writer at the Sarasota (Fla.) Herald-Tribune, notes that through the listserv, around 600 editorial writers from across the nation have daily contact with one another. "It's a lot more than just notifying each other about Astroturf," he explained.

Asked why the suspicious letters have been a persistent problem at newspapers, Radmacher said that the majority of papers have not been affected. But he added that the larger-circulating papers "have an incredible amount of letters coming in and some slip through the cracks."