AstroTurf is an amazing product. It’s low maintenance, tough to destroy and long lasting.
If you don’t mind fake, it’s great.
When it comes to expressions of opinion, though, fake is destructive. Mass orchestration of opinion cheapens genuine public discourse and diminishes the exchange of ideas.
And, yet, more and more political action committees and other politically motivated groups are faking widespread support to promote their causes.
The Internet has made it deliriously easy for organizations to not-so-subtly suggest to folks that they should copy form letters and submit them as their own work to newspaper editors across the country. These bogus letters have earned the name “AstroTurf” because they fake grassroots efforts.
Organizations that promote these letter writing campaigns are slapping themselves on the back for their success. Why? Because they have duped thousands of people into plagiarizing and lying, people who assure editors that they actually wrote the letters themselves?
Newspapers, including the Sun Journal, have a long history of providing space to air readers’ opinions. Thousands of people write to this newspaper every year and we try to accommodate as many letters as possible. A lot of people make great effort and take enormous amounts of time to craft their letters because they have something important to say. These types of letters prompt debate, enriching community discourse on topics that are important to local people.
A letter writing campaign crafted by the National Republican Committee, Planned Parenthood and a host of other lobbyists and indiscriminately hurled around the country is no different than electronic spam that pops up on our computer screens. It’s no different than computers dialing phones and playing recorded messages at the dinner hour.
It’s cookie-cutter activism.
It’s fake and deceitful.
It’s easy and it’s wrong.
AstroTurf manufactures public opinion, it doesn’t reflect public opinion. It serves the interests of corporations and political action committees by playing the public for a collective fool.
Newspapers publish to serve readers, not special interest groups. Orchestrated opinion is worthless.
Seeing green
Erghhh, when will they stop tampering with the traditions of Fenway?
Marketers, ever mindful of a chance to make a buck, have proposed putting book-end advertisements on either side of the left field scoreboard and adding 280 seats above the famed Green Monster.
Home to one of only two manually operated scoreboards in the country, Fenway’s left field is venerable ground. Generations of Red Sox fans watched the magnificent Ted Williams and the thrilling Carl Yastrzemski perform athletic feats against the backdrop of that plain-Jane wall.
Now any chance for future poetic images could be sullied by garish Viagra and Mennen aftershave ads.
The Green Monster is an institution; leave it alone.
jmeyer@sunjournal.com
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