Editorials

A recent issue of the snarky British magazine New Scientist discusses a concept we must have missed, one which clearly is a good description of the web-wired political landscape. The writer notes that some large entities, an oil company in the particular example, are starting fake grass-roots political campaigns to promote ideas advantageous to the promulgators, for example touting the environmental soundness of running cars on corn. (Where have we heard that one recently?) They generate email letters to the editor which seem to be from real people, but aren’t. This kind of faux-grass-roots politicizing is coming to be known as “astroturf,” after the simulated grass now seen on many an American football field.  

A newspaper like ours receives a fair amount of obvious astroturf, to be sure—the Internet makes it easy. But there’s an interesting category in between outright astroturf and genuine organic grassroots political communication. Is there a special name for non-organic produce? Probably not, but if there were, we might use it for some of the letter-writing campaigns we experience, clearly produced with the aid of heavy doses of synthetic fertilizer. 

There are various ways to spot these slightly-faux campaigns. There’s some kind of robotic letter-writing program which is beloved of many worthwhile people with whom we often agree. It produces a flood of one-graf letters to what seems to be a vast list of papers which insist on the two-hundred-word-soundbyte type of communication. But that’s exactly what the Planet doesn’t find terribly interesting: “Dump Bush now! The future of the nation is at stake!” Who around here would argue with that one, but how many column inches do we want to devote to endless repetitions of it? The format is a clue that most of the names attached to these letters are not those of people who actually read this particular paper, though they may have filled out a form with their sentiments for mass delivery.  

And we find out about some of these—ahem—artificially nourished letter-writing efforts because they’re solicited via email trees, and some helpful person on the email list forwards the solicitation to the Planet. Members of the Livable Berkeley lobbying organization, which is run mainly by professional planners looking for a second bite of the political apple, have recently been promoting correspondence on three projects dear to their hearts, the TJ-ville megaplex on University, the North Shattuck Plaza proposal and the Brower Center. It’s not that these letter writers are not sincere fans of what they’re endorsing, but when we see a bunch of letters with roughly similar arguments clearly manufactured from a master template, we do wonder how many we should print in our limited space.  

Another way we know that we’re being targeted is when the letters go to the wrong address. Letters intended for publication in the Berkeley Daily Planet should be addressed to opinion@berkeleydailyplanet.com, as our regular readers know, because the address is printed right here on the opinion pages.  

Over the weekend a bunch of letters from one perspective on the “new anti-Semitism” was sent to my personal email address. It doesn’t bother me from a privacy standpoint since this address is not a secret. But when this happens, we know that some advocacy group is drumming up letters from people who don’t normally read the paper. We just inform the writers that if they’d like their letters published they should send them to the opinion mailbox instead. But how many letters from an obvious campaign like this one should we run in print?  

There are other things going on in the world, and many of our regular local readers have been telling us in not-so-subtle ways that they frankly could care less about this particular controversy. Those who do care are passionate, but those who don’t seem to be pretty disgusted with some of the parties involved. Perhaps we should try to pretend for a while, à la Dr. Pangloss in Candide, that Berkeley is the best of all possible worlds, that ugly disputes which happen in other places don’t exist here.  

One piece of advice we should probably take to heart is to limit publication in our opinion section to letters and commentary about facts and ideas instead of attacks on personalities. Thus, “Jimmy Carter’s new book offers some valuable new information about recent history” or “There’s a mistaken date on page XXX of the Carter book,” not “Fourteen of Jimmy Carter’s former associates have called him an anti-Semite and you’re one too so there.” Or “The Oxford Street affordable housing project will provide safe and attractive homes for XXX families,” not “The people behind the referendum petitions are landlords and crackpots.”  

It is tempting, though, to take a perverse pleasure in allowing some correspondents to expose themselves in print as the idiots they clearly are—but there we go again, doing the same thing we’re criticizing! That’s not going to produce a better world any time soon, though it might make for an entertaining newspaper.