In the world of PR, grassroots activism describes community action for or against a project or policy. Astroturfing, by contrast, is when industry-backed PR professionals use actors to pose as local activists, because media outlets treat normal people protesting differently than corporate-sponsored spokespeople. This distinction is rarely so cut and dry, though.
For example, sometimes the fossil fuel industry's henchmen will go to a small town considering a renewable project and scare the community about the supposed dangers of wind turbines, kicking off fears of a non-existent "wind turbine syndrome" and turbo-charging toxic Facebook groups fighting the project.
Other times, movements that may have begun as a grassroots pushback against a renewable project then get noticed by the professionals, who swoop in and essentially turn the grassroots into astroturf. And that's exactly what we're seeing unfold around a proposed wind farm in Lava Ridge, Idaho.
It starts with a conservative lobby group like CFACT somehow finding the money to send someone to Idaho, where a proposed wind farm is getting a little pushback from the "Stop Lava Ridge Committee" (which is mostly a Facebook group). One of the committee members is named Dean Dimond, and CFACT did a video with him as well as a podcast on the project.
The expenditures that go into such a production (plane tickets, hotel rooms, video equipment and someone to operate it, editing, etc.) aren’t for the 10,000 views on CFACT’s video, though.
In reality, the video essentially served as a pitch to Fox News, and in this case, it was successful. Just days after the video was published, Fox’s Jesse Watters did a segment on the Lava Ridge project that featured Dimond. One day after that, Fox then also covered Stop Lava Ridge’s efforts on its website and headlined a quote from Dimond about how wind turbines will "destroy the desert."
Then, to keep the drumbeat going, the Daily Caller followed suit with a hit piece on the wind farm project, describing two of the anti-wind activists as a local farmer and rancher, neglecting to mention their recent appearances on Fox News or that they're working with an anti-wind advocacy group, something that even Fox disclosed.
From here, we'll have to see if the organized denial network picks up Dimond for further astroturfing or if he decides to keep it legit and stay grassroots. Either way, it seems pretty clear from this initial burst of traction that CFACT went to Lava Ridge and found a Dimond in the rough.
