Hang Right Politics

Posted by Kathy on February 23rd, 2007 in Blogging, Blogging Friends, Campaign promises, Dirty Politics, Dirty Tricks

You’ve heard of grass-roots? For so many of us bloggers, the grass-roots mean the endless hours we spend searching out stories, countering the bias of the MSM, and getting information out that the media otherwise won’t cover. We try to produce posts that reveal facts and challenge our readership to think. These are often opinion pieces, we make no pretense of our bias, but we are genuinely behind the opinions we express. Nobody is paying us to say things.

It’s common practice these days for campaigns to hire bloggers to capitalize on the information highway. Hillary has Scott Daou – a fellow I’m fond of since he sent us lots and lots of trolls in our early days. He didn’t like our name. Edwards had some bloggers – and maybe he’ll try again – I understand there are still some bloggers on the left before whom Hell is not yawning, although I don’t have any names.

Many of our guys on the right have blogging experts. An all around good guy and a blogging hero of mine Patrick Ruffini is working for Rudy Guiliani, Ankle Biting Pundit’s own Patrick Hynes is working for John McCain.

But with all the chicanery found in campaigns these days, and with the anonymity of the internet, there is major temptation to turn our grassroots blogging into astroturf – a little fake activism for the promotion of a candidate or misinformation for his/her opponents.

The Boston Globe reports (gleefully) that this might damage the credibility of the blogosphere. Alan Wirzbicki reports that there has already been some fishy activity:

WASHINGTON — Erick Erickson has been running the popular blog Redstate.com long enough to know what his readers’ postings sound like: red-meat conservative rhetoric served up with a little dash of populist anger.

So when postings from an unknown writer on the site showed up praising Senator John McCain — one of the site’s least-popular Republicans for his deviations from hard-core conservative orthodoxy — Erickson thought he smelled a rat.

Or maybe a sock puppet, shill, or a troll — Web slang for bloggers who pretend to be grass-roots political commentators but instead are paid public relations agents.

The author of the pro-McCain articles on Redstate.com, Erickson determined after a Google search, was a Michigan political operative whose firm worked for McCain’s political action committee.

We do have certain tools at our disposal if we smell a rat. No one at this website has accepted any compensation for anything and in fact put our own time and money into it, our opinions are free of charge, just what we were paid to form them. We have different favorites in the upcoming campaign. And we’ll debate them, but I stand behind the integrity of the bloggers at HRP. We have loyal readers and regular commenters, and from time to time we welcome a new voice. But there is no astro-turf here.

“This is going to happen more and more, and blogs are going to have to be vigilant,” Erickson said in an interview. “I expect there will be commenters jumping in and trying to build negative campaigns to cause scandal for the other side. That’s my fear.”

The Internet has already become a prime target for such manipulation. Tom Rosenstiel , the director of Project for Excellence in Journalism , said the growing influence of political blogs, combined with the relative ease of posting negative information anonymously, make them “irresistible for dirty tricks and attack politics.”

“Candidates, history shows, will do anything they can to win. The only downside to a candidate is getting caught,” he said. But the downside for blogs could be far greater, because the blogs’ credibility rests on the idea that they represent unvarnished grass-roots opinion.

Public relations agents are attracted to the blogosphere because Web comments “can fly under the radar and have no fingerprints attached to them. They have the impression of being citizen-based and independent, and if the conditions are right, what’s in the blogs can influence the mainstream press and have a real echo effect on a campaign dialogue,” Rosenstiel said. “I think the impact is going to be that when the 2008 campaign is over, blogging may be damaged.”

I disagree. I don’t think blogging will be tainted – and I warn anyone who tries it – you will damage your campaign when caught. I certainly think less of McCain after what was attempted at RedState – and who would have thought I could have thought less of him? I thought he hit rock bottom on global warming. The Globe underestimates us – and then uses a prime example of why astroturfing the blogosphere will not work. Bloggers will be wary and will be watching.

For the presidential campaigns, however, the stakes may prove too high to resist. About 15 percent of Americans get their political news online, according to a January study by the Pew Foundation, but political consultants said that percentage was higher among the party faithful who knock on doors, attend rallies, and make campaign donations. A good reputation among activists who get their news and views online, political strategists say, will be a crucial asset in the early stages of the primaries.

“You need to engage them as if they are any other powerful constituency,” said Peter Greenberger of New Media Strategies, an Arlington, Va.-based consulting firm that works with candidates and corporations to improve their image on the Internet.

The blogosphere is powerful – let’s work together to keep it clean.

Be sure and check out Patrick Ruffini’s latest post on website campaigns.