They Install FieldTurf These Days

07:30 PM May 29, 2006

Back from Memorial Day weekend -- where "back" means "still stranded in Ithaca, N.Y. with a balky transmission" -- there's a spot to remark on a piece that caught our eye on the way out the door.

Independent-Minded Conservative (tm) editor David Mastio drops a dime on SaveTheInternet.com for running "astroturf" in the form of a letters-to-the-editor tool -- our tool, as it happens, though it could be anyone's (and he's hit others as well: the nascent naughty list is here).

This is apparently Mastio's newly-minted crusade, to bathe mass-messaging campaigns in the awful glinty light of truth.

Needless to say, we expect to see our domain well-represented in the weeks ahead. Consider that full disclosure.

The letters in question here are ones sent by actual people to actual local papers -- SaveTheInternet has used "clickover talking points" (sidebar nuggets that can be clicked directly into the editable composition box) which are meant to provide thematic guidance and handy evidentiary support while allowing the user to edit a ready-to-email letter to the editor into his or her own words. That's the preferred behavior. The statistical reality for any such campaign is that many senders won't bother with the editing. But it's nevertheless the case that it's a tool to help people concerned with the issue send a genuine letter to their actual local paper.

Most anyone in the DemocracyInAction network would probably call that "organizing", not "astroturf".

But the distinction is very much in the eye of the beholder. All organizing aims to increase the breadth and impact of a community position. "Astroturf", well, has the same aim and a lot of the same plays. Blurriness between the two resolves to the advantage of astroturfers: telcos, to take the instance at hand, most ardently desire in the eyes of policymakers a bogus cancel-each-other-out equivalency on the popular sentiment meter.

From the standpoint of an editorial desk, though, the line is pretty bright. A letter to the editor submission that uses the same text as a related letter published somewhere else sins against God's law and Nature's: note his use of the not-quite-accurate journo-profanity "plagiarized".

I did my time at a local paper, and know where he's coming from. Papers intend the letters page for a genuine community discussion: letters to the editor that actually originate in K Street chop shops (a practice long predating the Internet) are a bane of the trade. Thanks to the Internet, these can be easier to search and intercept. Also thanks to the Internet, they can be a lot easier to generate.

Since Mastio's hanging his hat on a mission to reinvent the stodgy old editorial page for the information era, I think he could do better than calling these "plagiarism" and leaving it there. Online LTE tools, after all, have simply adapted this new medium to the practices of the old; imperfectly, yes, but papers too are groping to adapt themselves, and could perhaps engender new forms of conversation with different practices. (Easy for me to say.)

But that disagreement is beside the point for this particular space. The watchdogging itself is a welcome (and inevitable) addition to the space, and e-activism coordinators are well-advised that Mastio's perspective, or something close to it, lurks in wait at the receiving end of LTE campaigns.

And scribes tend to long remember slights ...

Update:  Mastio seems primarily interested in defending his "plagiarism" position by portioning out blameworthiness -- perhaps the least interesting and elucidating way to scrutinize the forces resculpting opinion-shaping and the conflicting interests facing incumbent public spaces like the letters page -- and he does so in great detail here.

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