Monday, April 26, 2004
The Grass Is Always Greener When It Isn't Real.
Next time you open your local paper and see an op-ed piece by an expert academic, read it with a healthy dose of scepticism. Because as one Washington Post reporter was dismayed to learn:
the "by" in a scholar's byline may well be a ruse, a duplicitous means of inducing a lobby-authored, lobby-funded piece into print and onto the public agenda.
Well, gee. Imagine that.
It turns out, though, that there's a small industry devoted to the recruitment of professors and other high-credibility names willing to sign their name to a PR firm's essay for publication in order to sway public opinion. The technique is really part and parcel of a staple of the PR trade: Astroturfing.
The article singles out a nuclear industry PR firm, but Astroturfing happens every day at in other fields. It would be interesting to see a similar "literary DNA" analysis of other expert op-ed pieces on other topics.
Here's a dirty little secret: it even happens behind the scenes among military bloggers. Yes, Virginia, there is a vast, clandestine milblogging conspiracy. We'll sometimes email each other about a particularly interesting or entertaining subject, or about a good cause that deserves publicity, or another milblogger who's down and can use some support.
I don't think Astroturfing is always necessarily a bad thing, provided a system of disclosure is in place and the reader knows what he's getting. But advocates and activists need to organize, too. And helping people express a message they already substantially agree with is just part of living in a marketplace of ideas.
I mean, if astroturfing disappeared tomorrow, then the only thing PR firms would have left to do is come up with more stupid stunts.
And do we really need that?
But now that the Washington Post has exposed the practice (not that it was that big a scoop to begin with), I don't think it's unreasonable to expect opinion page editors to do a little due diligence, and input a key sentence or two into Lexis/Nexis or Factiva to make sure material hasn't been rehashed from another piece under another byline, and thus their paper is not being used as an unwitting tool to decieve their readers.
The technology to do that exists now. Indeed, companies specializing in anti-plagiarism software are undergoing a post-Jayson Blair boom, as editors vow to prevent what happened at the Times from happening at their newspaper.
So...
Write your local paper and tell them no more excuses.
:-)
Splash, out
Jason
the "by" in a scholar's byline may well be a ruse, a duplicitous means of inducing a lobby-authored, lobby-funded piece into print and onto the public agenda.
Well, gee. Imagine that.
It turns out, though, that there's a small industry devoted to the recruitment of professors and other high-credibility names willing to sign their name to a PR firm's essay for publication in order to sway public opinion. The technique is really part and parcel of a staple of the PR trade: Astroturfing.
The article singles out a nuclear industry PR firm, but Astroturfing happens every day at in other fields. It would be interesting to see a similar "literary DNA" analysis of other expert op-ed pieces on other topics.
Here's a dirty little secret: it even happens behind the scenes among military bloggers. Yes, Virginia, there is a vast, clandestine milblogging conspiracy. We'll sometimes email each other about a particularly interesting or entertaining subject, or about a good cause that deserves publicity, or another milblogger who's down and can use some support.
I don't think Astroturfing is always necessarily a bad thing, provided a system of disclosure is in place and the reader knows what he's getting. But advocates and activists need to organize, too. And helping people express a message they already substantially agree with is just part of living in a marketplace of ideas.
I mean, if astroturfing disappeared tomorrow, then the only thing PR firms would have left to do is come up with more stupid stunts.
And do we really need that?
But now that the Washington Post has exposed the practice (not that it was that big a scoop to begin with), I don't think it's unreasonable to expect opinion page editors to do a little due diligence, and input a key sentence or two into Lexis/Nexis or Factiva to make sure material hasn't been rehashed from another piece under another byline, and thus their paper is not being used as an unwitting tool to decieve their readers.
The technology to do that exists now. Indeed, companies specializing in anti-plagiarism software are undergoing a post-Jayson Blair boom, as editors vow to prevent what happened at the Times from happening at their newspaper.
So...
Write your local paper and tell them no more excuses.
:-)
Splash, out
Jason
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