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These deceptive letters are known as "astroturf," implying
artificial grassroots support for a politician, a party or an issue.
Recently, the Republicans were caught at it when a Boston Globe reader,
Amity Wilczek, discovered that the Globe had been used for partisan ends
without its knowledge-it ran a GOP form letter expressing strong support
for President Bush's tax cut, signed by Stephanie Johnson of Milton,
Mass., on Sept. 12-and notified the paper. The Globe then learned it had
published four such letters since mid-October, and that dozens of
dailies around the nation had received identical or very similar
letters. Editors at the Globe were displeased when they realized they
had been snookered, and have since received more than 40 of the e-mails.
Howard Healy, who handles letters to the editor at the Times Union,
said in a recent phone conversation that about six of the GOP e-mails
had shown up in the Times Union's editorial inbox. "It's not
uncommon," Healy explained in reference to political form letters,
citing similar write-in campaigns to the Times Union in the past by the
Public Employees Federation over the issue of weekday parking in
downtown Albany, and by a vegetarian group against eating meat. He went
on to say that the use of computers has greatly facilitated the mass
dissemination of such letters, and that many newspapers are now alerting
each other to them.
Reached by e-mail for comment on the Republican National Committee
form letters, Catherine Mathis, vice president of corporate
communications for the New York Times Company, wrote, "We would not
knowingly print a letter that was part of this sort of campaign, and
since we get hundreds of letters every day, we certainly have no need
to. Our goals are to present a variety of views on different topics that
are genuinely written by the signees. The editors in the Letters section
call every person whose letter we want to print, and check the accuracy
of their statements. There is no foolproof way to make sure the product
of a political letter-writing campaign doesn't slip through, but we do
our best to make sure they don't."
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