Pols, nonprofits step up robotic "turf"

Campaigns invite supporters to send canned email letters to the editors of every publication on a list, and harvest the personal information for fundraising solicitations.

By Linda Seebach

You may have heard it said that if you look around the poker table, and you can't spot who's the sucker . . . you're the sucker.

Sorry, but if you're one of the hundreds of people who sent canned letters from the Obama campaign's website to Florida newspapers in advance of the 2012 Republican primary, you're the sucker.

Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers received almost 600 of these Jan. 27-31 with subject lines like "When the GOP comes to town," or "Nice of the GOP candidates to visit" (the two most common ones). They purported to come from people all over the state. Some of them were clearly phony; do you believe there's a street called "Tighty Whitey" in Largo? Me neither.

But most were from real people who got an email sending them to one of the campaign's websites, fl.barackobama.com/Write-a-letter*, where they found a form letter already written for them. The soon dismantled site said coyly, "Note: Revising the letter and making it your own greatly increases the chance that a newspaper will publish it," but most people don't do that; they just fill in their personal identification, and click "send."

Why does that make them suckers? They've given their contact information to a political campaign and now and forevermore they'll be getting fundraising appeals. You know how when you buy something from a catalog, and then you get catalogs from a dozen other companies? Like that.

We don't publish canned letters if we identify them as such (not hard to do, when we get the same one from hundreds of different people). And many of them aren't from our circulation area anyway. But why should sites like this care? They've already harvested your information so they can hit you up for money.

It isn't only Democratic political campaigns that work this way; many nonprofit advocacy groups do the same. Newspapers that get this stuff call it "astroturf" � fake grass-roots � and letter editors around the country share the information online so they won't be tricked into publishing plagiarized letters, which is what they are. But this was the first time I encountered one that was clueless on such a grand scale.

Though these fake letters looked as if they come from an individual's email address, they all originated from the website of a PR firm called bluestatedigital.com, which proudly claims the Obama campaign as one of its clients. It was started by retreads from the Howard Dean campaign � remember him? � and if this debacle is a sample of their professional expertise, they haven't learned much. Except about getting you to trust them with your verified contact information, of course. They're good at that.

I emailed bluestatedigital (twice) at the address they give for media contacts. No response. And I talked to a volunteer at the Obama campaign who promised to pass my comments to somebody who could do something. "Wow!" he said. "Six hundred emails? That must be really annoying."

Why, yes; it is. And annoying people at newspapers is not normally a sound strategy for a political campaign, but I suppose nobody at Obama Central cares, as long as your money keeps rolling in. They may not even know. The thank-you note they sent in response to my test message to this paper � yes, it did arrive via bluestatedigital � was "signed" by Betsy Hoover, identified as the "digital organizing director" for the Obama campaign.

There was a form for feedback, but it was only for people whose letters were actually published, and whoever Hoover is, she can't seriously think papers are going to publish any of hundreds of identical "letters."

And if you write your own letter, we're glad to hear from you.

  Linda Seebach is a letters editor for three Scripps newspapers in Florida. Article used by permission.
She has said AOJ members may use her article, and suggests inserting a summary of local letters rules as a new last or next-to-last paragraph.

Online list was buzzing

Editor's follow-up: During discussion of this on AOJ's members-only online discussion list, columnist Jonathan Gurwitz of the San Antonio Express-News said Texas newspapers were "being carpet-bombed with turf letters on reproductive rights. We stopped counting at 20,000 emails. I�m guessing we received around 30,000, and some are still coming in."

He provided an exact URL to the source of that avalanche, an organization that offers advocacy services, including letters campaigns, to nonprofits. I have omitted its identity because we do not know whether it is harvesting addresses. *The Obama site exists but says that campaign (the "fl" in the address) has ended.

Members of the list have been sharing alerts about artifical "grass-roots" mail � "turf," short for paper or digital "AstroTurf" - for at least a decade. The current deluge is a cyberworld outgrowth of lobbyists' paper-pushing practices dating back, by some accounts, at least as far as the Nixon administration. The term is sometimes attributed to Texas Sen. Lloyd Bentsen (1985).

Politicians (in the good or neutral sense of the word) get a ton of it. Here's a link to a timely column, Interest Groups, Lack of Facts Are Taking Over, by AOJ member Dick Hughes tinyurl.com/7vnpjpq

The mess was described hilariously by the late syndicated columnist Molly Ivins. Her 1995 column is archived at sites including the Seattle Times:
http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19950717&slug=2131762

Recent discussion on our list indicates that the volume of automated digital junk mail to editors � "robo-turf" to some of us � has increased dramatically. - John McClelland]

The Masthead, published since 1948-49 by the National Conference of Editorial Writers, now the Association of Opinion Journalists. Winter 2012 published February 23, 2012, at opinionjournalists.org (c) 2012 AOJ