Would you believe that big business and the GOP might collude together to help push the tax bill over the line by organizing a major astroturf campaign of “letters to the editor” designed to make it appear that average citizens think the GOP tax bill is the best thing to ever happen to America?You should, because it has been happening...for a long time and it is getting worse.
Media Matters is out with a report on how it worked:
In the midst of the congressional debate over its wildly unpopular tax plan, Republican leaders attempted to create the impression of a “drumbeat” of support by touting opinion pieces from “real Americans” and “state leaders.”
“The drumbeat for tax reform did not waver over the long Thanksgiving weekend,” proclaimed a press release about “state leaders” from Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan’s office, which included that “West Virginia’s state director of the National Federation of Independent Business, Gil White, doubled down on the benefits to small businesses in the state” in an op-ed.
“Across the country, real Americans recognize what they stand to benefit,” read a press release from the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate Committee on Finance, which cited op-eds from National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) West Virginia director Gil White and Dan Lloyd, the plant manager for Procter & Gamble's Green Bay, WI, manufacturing facility.
But those op-eds were deceptive cut-and-paste jobs that appeared virtually word-for-word in other publications by different authors and were part of a pro-corporate tax cut media campaign by a deep-pocketed business lobbying group and one of the largest corporations in the country.
That last line refers to Procter & Gamble
Procter & Gamble has been placing virtually identical op-eds supposedly written by different authors arguing for corporate tax cuts in newspapers across the country. (snip)
In recent weeks, the company has been helping place op-eds by manufacturing plant managers across the country in their respective newspapers that tout the alleged benefits of cutting corporate taxes to the economy (numerous economists disagree). While those op-eds all have different authors, they are virtually the same except for a few sentences about the P&G plant in the area. The North Carolina-based website Greensboro 101 first noted the similarities in a December 11 post.
And then to give things extra play, the GOP itself got into the act by using social media to promote the bogus commentaries even further — folks like Sarah Huckabee Sanders (who also famously tweeted during the run up that the “average middle class tax payer” would reap a $4,000 refund if the bill passes).:
Wisconsin plant manager explains how the tax cut bill is going to empower American companies and workers to WIN AGAIN
7:08 AM - 28 Nov 2017
North Carolina GOP Congressman Mark Walker promoted an op-ed in the News Record via a press release….an op-ed that was essentially a carbon copy of the Green Bay Press Gazette article cited by Sanders, save for slightly different information relating to details of “local” P&G facilities in Wisconsin and in North Carolina.
Here in western PA, you can pretty much count on seeing a regular flow of op eds and letters to the editor supposedly coming from industry trade groups supporting the fracking and industrial production industries….groups which have, for well over a century, helped make this part of the state leaders in air and water pollution. These same groups have managed, repeatedly to stave off Democratic efforts to impose an extraction tax on oil and gas, despite the fact that the state has a massive and growing deficit and the fact that PA is the ONLY oil and gas producing state in the country without such a tax. And they have continually won extensions on grandfathered regulations allowing them to continue polluting air and water with waste products.
Editors of the NC and WI papers said if they had known the pieces they ran were essentially duplicates produced by P&G, they would not have run them.
The Editorial Page Editor at the Salt Lake Tribune got burned by the practice and now has placed P&G on a blacklist.
HOW CAN THIS PRACTICE BE COMBATTED?
I would propose that tools to fight back against this practice may well be immediately at hand, and in many cases, free of charge:
In recent years, academia has begun to attack the growing problem of plagiarism by using Internet tools. For lazy students (and academics, and even op ed “writers”) the Internet has made it easier and easier to cobble together essays, term papers and op-eds pieces using the hard work of actual experts (or sources of bogus facts).
(I have had numerous letters to the editor accepted by my local Pittsburgh paper and they do take the time to call me to verify me, but that practice alone could easily reach “the local P&G plant manager” who readily agrees that he wrote the submitted piece, but fails to detect that the same piece is or will soon be submitted to other local papers across the country under different names.)
I would urge the American Society of Newspapers and other print and electronic trade groups to work together to spot and root out such practices.
- Join together in the use of a designated plagiarism detection site (either existing or of their own construction).
- Submit all proposed LTEs and Op-Ed submissions to this site as part of their review process. Nothing gets printed before it has been subjected to this review process. Assuming widespread industry membership, the site can immediately spot duplicate entries between pending submissions and bogus pieces that may already have run.
- Adopt a universal industry policy that any individual or trade group found to have participated in submission of such material will be blacklisted from any and all future submissions as was done by Salt Lake City.
It is clearly in the best interests of ALL newspapers, especially smaller home-town papers, to participate. Smart PR folks know that a piece in the really local paper can have powerful influence on home town opinions and is quite frankly a form of subtle, but very effective faux news to help them shape opinions to their own needs. (“Hey, if the local plant manager says this is good for growth and jobs, that sure sounds convincing to me.”)
It is also clear that astroturf specialists can multiply the impact of such pieces by getting White House press secretaries, area congressmen and legislators, and business and community leaders to urge their social media networks to “check this out,” further spreading its pernicious impact.
- Social media watchdogs need to identify posts that promote lies, duplication and plagiarism and urge network operators to remove it.
- At the same time, hashtag campaigns (#thisisastroturf) can help flag pieces identified as bogus.
In an age in which “free speech” is increasingly a form of “armed combat” between citizens and civic interest groups, competing against well organized and very wealthy trade groups, PR firms and special interest forces guided only by a goal of winning for their clients, as opposed to the public good, it is more important than ever that our critically important home town media can work to root out the rot.
The problem of astroturfing is not a new one, but it has become much more pernicious and powerful with the advent of the internet, social networking, and worse yet, bot-generated messages (as witness the apparent bot campaign in support of killing net neutrality). I encourage other Kossacks and indeed all social interest groups to address this problem through sharing of information, ideas and cooperation.
Your ideas to help combat the problem are encouraged here.