Teresa wrote:

I doubt we’ll ever know the whole history of astroturf. I suspect it goes back further and spreads wider than most sane people have ever imagined.

I may be reaching here, I admit:

9. But Pilate answered them, saying, Will ye that I release unto you the King of the Jews?

10. For he knew that the chief priests had delivered him for envy.

11. But the chief priests moved the people, that he should rather release Barabbas unto them.

(That’s less than two millennia, anyway; I’m sure Making Light’s readers can do better . . .)

Posted June 10, 2005 1:39 PM by David Moles

Teresa wrote:
I don’t want to give myself undue credit for precocity, but I started noticing there was something funny going on when I was a kid reading my grandparents’ copies of Readers Digest. That was where I first heard about juries making ridiculous awards in personal-injury cases. It made interesting reading, but after a while it occurred to me that I never saw articles about reasonable and justifiable personal injury awards. Surely there had to be some? Likewise articles in which the IRS wasn’t a monster, and labor unions had some good reason to exist, and politicians weren’t all windbags, layabouts, and snake oil salesmen.

So... Corporate astroturfing is responsible for the "bad news sells papers" truism of human nature?

Posted June 10, 2005 1:57 PM by Steve Eley

As a graduate of Macalester College in St. Paul, I know a little bit about Reader's Digest, because the founder, DeWitt Wallace, had a father who had served as Macalester's president.

Wallace gave a great deal of money to the college and abruptly w/drew his financial support in 1970 when he discovered that the school was too radical for his tastes. [back story, I was told by Melvin Laird at a break during a deposition in 1980 (Laird at the time was a potentate for Reader's Digest)that Wallace had become incensed that money he gave the school was used to construct a co-ed dorm]

At any rate, my meanderings do have a point. DeWitt was kicked out of Macalester during his youth for bringing a cow up the stairs to the top of Old Main. At which point, given the way a cow's legs are constructed, it could not be brought down the stairs under its own steam. So the animal had to be slaughtered. Right there in the hall. Therefore it was with some shame but some inside chuckling when we students would contemplate the role of Reader's Digest at the college. And the public face of its founder.

However, Wallace was lured back into the fold in the late '70's after a Mac grad was named Miss America. Somehow that just softened him up.

So Reader's Digest. A little patchwork of the US.

Posted June 10, 2005 1:58 PM by hrc

I'm also a Mac grad--he left the college an immense amount of Reader's Digest stock when he died. At one point the endowment was valued at over a half billion. Then the stock tanked...

Posted June 10, 2005 2:06 PM by Chopper

Amazing connection. And the college is required by the terms of the trust to hang on to the stock, cannot sell it to diversify. It must be a horrible sensation to watch the value decrease and be unable to do anything about it....

Posted June 10, 2005 2:39 PM by hrc

I too read the Readers Digest as a small child--intially for the joke collections, and then later because it was deemed somewhat safe by the adults in my family but it was the first place I get could find out about all the really scary stuff in the world. I blame the Readers Digest for my paranoia about Scientologists (perhaps a well-founded paranoia, but that doesn't explain why I thought my parents were being recruited when they went to some empowerment training; I started making escape plans, you know, just in case.) And then there was the infamous family incident where I was presumed to have no knowledge of sex or rape or child abuse by certain extended family members, who were all disabused of this notion in the midst of a family reunion--this too can be chalked up to the Reader's Digest, which would relate harrowing stories of children being forced into closets for weeks on end and made to lick up their own urine. I was already a big fan of the Joe's spleen sort of article BEFORE Fight Club came out.

Still, I never quite made the same connect that Teresa made with the RD, although maybe a little bit more with my school newspaper experiences. (Try taking journalism courses in Utah about the first amendment and journalistic ethics, and then find out that the school has STOLEN your paper from its boxes because they disagree with an article that happens to be factually correct. True story. Happened to my class at least twice. Once in junior high and once in college.)

Posted June 10, 2005 2:48 PM by Piscusfiche

So... if they can't sell it, what good does it do them? Does it pay dividends? And if they can't sell it, does it matter what the price is?

Posted June 10, 2005 2:49 PM by David Moles

Why you're arguing about this when there's a white lady missing in Aruba is beyond me.

For cripes sake people, the Michael Jackson verdict could come through any minute now and here you are arguing about artificial grass!

Why, it makes me want to find a form letter to send to my Congressmen.

Posted June 10, 2005 2:50 PM by Stefan Jones

David, Steve: Spin we have with us always. Bad news does sell papers. Yes. But this is something different.

If it were just a matter of bad news selling papers, the bad news in question would be pointed in all directions, like a heap of jackstraws. RD's stories, consistently and over a period of many years, pointed in the same direction.

Rational Grounds thought it through further than I ever did, and suggested that tort reform was not only being driven by corporate interests, but was entirely their creation: " it seems tort reform, as a movement, is entirely concocted from corporate lobbying fronts." Could RG be right? Was tort reform ever an issue on its own?

I'm thinking maybe it wasn't. I haven't run across any recognizable remains of its original issues. It seems to have no history beyond the disinformation campaigns. Besides, if it had started out as a real issue, I can't think the people involved would have given it such an inscrutable name. So, now I'm trying on the idea that it's never been anything but the "we don't want to have to pay our legitimate legal judgements" movement.

Social Security's even creepier. I can't remember how old I was when I first heard that Social Security might run out of money. It's been a constant low-level worry in my life. Now evidence is turning up that that idea has been pushed via a decades-long coordinated secret campaign.

I'm shocked and offended to discover that there are sinister, shadowy organizations and cardboardy villains who've been plotting against me all this time. Bad art! Bad art! But it's bad art I can't sneer at in a review, or reject in the slushpile. This is real.

Simply appalling.

Okay, there are villains. There really are. There are villains who plot the downfall of the republic. They're out to get me. You, too.

Takes some getting used to.

Posted June 10, 2005 3:01 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Y'know the actual point of this mad profusion of astroturf orgs, don't you? It's to flood people with so much information that their capacity for handling complexity is overwhelmed.

When that happens (1) they lose the ability to make rational decisions on the matter at hand, and instead decide based on whatever they're told by somebody with an authoritative tone who reinforces their existing prejudices, and (2) they start to crave simple solutions, even (perhaps especially) brutal ones.

It's a technique well-suited to the current media environment. Lazy journalists can just quote a variety of sources on the issue and witholding judgement, allowing them to flatter themslves for presenting all sides of a complex issue, leaving the reader/viewer with a vague general impression that the issue is too complicated to actually understand. Lazy bloggers (Does Glenn Reynolds bother to actually read all of anything he links to?) can just skim over long MSM articles and pluck out the quotes that support their view, safe in the knowledge that the typical reader won't bother to actually follow the link.

Posted June 10, 2005 3:19 PM by Avram

Seriously:

When I'm in a dark mood, I wonder if this is it.

From here on out, any chance of progress and justice will be drowned out by massive bleats and howls, variations on the same time-tested crap that keeps people stupid, outraged, but paradoxically tame.

They've figured out our psychoneurological hot buttons, and how best to press them, and the future won't be a boot stomping on a face forever, but people being led around by a metaphorical ring through their nose, convinced that the way the rope is tugging them is the way they wanted to go anyway.

How else could you explain how a schlock novelist who writes about resurrected dinosaurs can suddenly become a quotable authority on the Greenhouse Effect?

Stefan

Posted June 10, 2005 3:25 PM by Stefan Jones

I remember my father telling me, when I was about ten or eleven, not that I shouldn't read Reader's Digest, but that I should pay attention to the way the stories repeated, in a regular and predictable cycle. Details changed to preserve an illusion of freshness, but not the basic stories, or the political viewpoint being advanced. And, yes, Piscusfiche, it's a pretty scary worldview, in a lot of ways.

Having my father point out that they had an agenda was tremendously helpful--although it did detract somewhat from the entertainment value of RD.

Posted June 10, 2005 3:47 PM by Lis Carey

In complement with the information overflooding, there's also that very sly use of one type of codification of discourse set with a content that doesn't usually match in people's minds/habits.
Too much of this, and suddenly nothing makes sense anymore.

How else could you explain how a schlock novelist who writes about resurrected dinosaurs can suddenly become a quotable authority on the Greenhouse Effect?

"The specialist" effect of old. Anyone given the right title can be given that indecent power to tell anything without need to prove himself or his worth in the field he's supposed to be part of.

Now mix that with info overflowing and code displacement to brew one ugly potion.

Posted June 10, 2005 3:49 PM by MD²

Teresa: Thank you for the elaboration. I see your point. My cynical vertebra wants me to carry this on, to try to establish that it isn't just one ideological faction that does this, everybody buys opinions on the commodities market; but it's way too late on a Friday afternoon right now to construct a truly solid argument.

However...

Stefan Jones:
They've figured out our psychoneurological hot buttons, and how best to press them, and the future won't be a boot stomping on a face forever, but people being led around by a metaphorical ring through their nose, convinced that the way the rope is tugging them is the way they wanted to go anyway.

I see your point too. What I'm trying to understand is how you think this is any different from the past. Sounds like all of human history to me.

Posted June 10, 2005 3:54 PM by Steve Eley

Lis Carey: I think that's probably why my extended family considered the Reader's Digest "safe" -- not because of the topics covered, but the way in which those topics were covered.

Posted June 10, 2005 4:13 PM by Piscusfiche

DeWitt was kicked out of Macalester during his youth for bringing a cow up the stairs to the top of Old Main. At which point, given the way a cow's legs are constructed, it could not be brought down the stairs under its own steam.

Waitaminnit--Cornell has a story about some students doing this same thing, with the same stair problem, that I was told way back when when I toured the school as a potential freshman.

Which makes me wonder if both stories aren't urban legends.

Posted June 10, 2005 4:14 PM by Janni

Stefan, you must have missed the news that scientists have found a way of making aerosol Trust.

Posted June 10, 2005 5:05 PM by Marilee

What he doesn't mention, and it's surely germane, is that Koch Industries has the contract to keep the Strategic Petroleum Reserve filled, on commission and at obscenely inflated prices, despite the fact that the President has been asked to stop topping it off so folks can afford to gas their cars.

So he happened to have a little extra tucked away for just this sort of emergency.

Posted June 10, 2005 5:09 PM by julia

Janni: I don't know. I do know that cows can't descend stairs.

TK

Posted June 10, 2005 5:14 PM by Terry Karney

Rational Grounds thought it through further than I ever did, and suggested that tort reform was not only being driven by corporate interests, but was entirely their creation

Teresa, you do yourself a disservice. In fact, in your original article on Common Good, you did put forward the idea that tort reform could be a wholly artificial movement:

"In the case of Common Good, the agenda being pursued can be loosely grouped under tort reform, which isn’t a reform movement at all. It’s a massive lobbying and PR campaign surreptitiously financed by business interests."

Credit where credit is due, and all. Perhaps I'm interpreting a little too strongly, but reading through the CorpReform.com site certainly leads one to that conclusion.

Posted June 10, 2005 5:35 PM by Ben

The tort reform movement isn't only run by corporate interests, though a lot of it is. I read an e-newsletter called the True Stella Awards by internet humorist Randy Cassingham, who always provides links to citations on the cases he writes about. Randy is pretty even-handed, I think.

Posted June 10, 2005 5:47 PM by Lenore Jean Jones

Janni, there was a contemporaneous (meaning very old) news article about the incident in Q that was actually framed and posted on a wall in the Macalester alumni house when I stayed there back in the late '80's. If it was an urban legend, it was created at the time and not later, and a news source (horrors) bought the story. It may have been the St. Paul Pioneer Press, but it's been a few years.

Posted June 10, 2005 6:00 PM by hrc

I have a distinct recollection of reading an account of the Cuban Revolution, generally supportive of Castro and the rebels, in an old copy of Readers Digest.

It must have been published in that tiny gap between the crooks and the communists.

I suppose that now Battista is the Good Guy, since he too was running government-sponsored torture in Cuba.

Posted June 10, 2005 6:08 PM by Dave Bell

Janni: the cow story is also told of MIT, although further back (and possibly involving a crane instead of a butcher knife -- I read it a long time ago). This doesn't make it untrue, it just means that college students had something in common even before the September Effect.

Posted June 10, 2005 6:45 PM by CHip

Teresa, I'm sure you know who Edward L. Bernays is. Read about some of his accomplishments in his bio The Father of Spin and none of this will surprise you...

After a while you get so you can smell these fake groups a mile away. But the subtler stuff...? Who knows? I can remember you, years ago, giving me the whole "books are all going to turn into cornflakes" lecture, which, if you read Nicholson Baker's Double Fold, turns out to stem from a misleading film put out by the microfilm companies...Just goes to show we all have to examine out opinions carefully, and constantly ask ourselves how we know what we know...

Posted June 10, 2005 7:47 PM by Robert L

The Deep Cow Interview: Excerpts

He was not, as I had expected (and indeed been assured more than once), a Holstein. I was asked not to be more descriptive. "Do people really see any other breed?" he said with amusement. "You aren't going to hear the phrase, "There was a spotted cow on the grassy knoll."
"Why colleges?"
"College students are easy to fool. Most professors are only slightly less so, and I do not necessarily mean professors of animal husbandry. Ah, you're grinning. That always makes people laugh. Ditez-moi, la vache qui rit. But it's one of the primary purposes of humor: to deflate pomposity. Groucho as a college president -- magic. Groucho at the circus -- hello, I must be going."
"How many times have you done this?"
"Not half as many as reported. There's a sort of cachet to it in the United States; every town a Chelm. You don't find Swiss cows doing such things; they're too busy with finishing off Bretton Woods and defense planning. Italian cows are interested mainly in more Italian cows, stereotypical as it may be. French cows are great jokers, however. During the Occupation, many careless Germans found themselves upstairs in much the same predicament as American students. With a terminal case of l'esprit d'escalier, shall we say."
"I'm afraid I'm missing the connection."
"Because you aren't asking the question," Deep Cow said, with a rumble in his voice heavy and smooth as double Devon cream. "You always ask, 'what about the stairs?' You never ask, 'Where does the blood come from?'"

Posted June 10, 2005 8:05 PM by John M. Ford

PiscusFiche, I'm afraid I understand the business about making plans, just in case. Glad you're here.

Avram: Overwhelmed, yes; and damn the false parity of observing that "both sides do it" when one side is occasional and anecdotal, and the other side pursues it as an industrial process. I believe another associated mechanism is the constant belittling of people who work in government and/or follow the issues closely. Automatically not trusting them deprives all those overwhelmed people of sources of information and interpretation that could do them a lot of good.

Lis Carey, I'll swap your upbringing for mine. It would have been a vast relief to me to talk to an adult who could confirm that what I was seeing was real.

Julia: Teapot Dome again?

Ben, it was clear to me that the tort reform "movement" was a wholly sponsored subsidiary of the corporate world. The jump I didn't make was to imagine that it had never been anything else; that it wasn't a set of existing sentiments that had been co-opted and hugely inflated, but rather had been a fraud all along. I suppose the difference for me was, on the one hand, imagining people starting out doing normal stuff, then gradually moving toward corruption because they were lying to themselves about their own motivations and methods; and on the other hand, imagining people consciously deciding on a wicked plan, then carrying it out.

I'd put a lot of years into believing that there are no conscious villains.

Dave Bell: Occasionally I'd get hold of older copies of RD, and would notice the odd shifts in universal reality. I recall some stories about nice people living in Eastern Europe whose lives didn't revolve around escape to the West.

Robert, my "books are all going to turn into cornflakes" rant didn't derive from anybody's microfilm. It came of all the hours I spent researching 19th C. material at Bobst and Butler. That old woodpulp paper got shattery. I remember having to stop looking at a piece of litcrit because the book had gotten too brittle. Every time I turned a page, I could hear it snap off along the binding. I once tried to gently erase some stupid pencil markings on a page and had the paper shatter into little pieces like safety glass. And do you remember Tony the researcher? I could always tell when S.T. had him going after old material, because the copiers near Butler's main reading room would all be full of cornflakes.

Actually, I think the worst moment was when I was about to take some old books back to Bobst for S.T., and one of them slipped out of my hand and landed on the front steps of the Christopher Street offices. It came down squarely on the bottom edge (both corners) of the spine. The book exploded -- more than a third of the pages broke away from the spine on impact, and they flew in all directions. I was horrified. S.T. just gathered up the pages, tucked them back in and tamped them straight, and told me to be careful putting it into the returns bin.

Posted June 10, 2005 10:28 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

I have discovered, to my shock, that the lion-reform movement has been entirely engineered by a sinister cabal of gazelles and zebras, to protect their own selfish interests. Spread the word!

Posted June 10, 2005 11:59 PM by Dissent

About conscious villainy ....

The following may be a moot distinction. (I know I've raised it with you, before.) I don't think you have to assume Astroturfers (and some of our other politico-economic predators) consciously wish to destroy you -- to explain the motivation for what they do.

That they *don't care* whether you're destroyed, as a byproduct of their drive for wealth, power, and emotional security, seems more likely, to me.

This distinction suggests the possibility that individual "conspirators" may be operating with an infantile sense of affect -- combined with some adult reasoning power. Work on the sense of affect; and some of them may decide "I really don't have to destroy decent, innocent people to get what I need."

Superior economic, political and legal force may be required to stop people whose actions are effectively destroying you. But I'd argue not to abandon attempts at simultaneous moral suasion.

Posted June 11, 2005 12:07 AM by Lenny Bailes

Lenny --

The conscious will to destroy is there, in the eliminationist rhetoric, at the horror of living in the future, and in the active effort to remove all checks on the exercise of power. (Which is one of the core reasons the US eductation system is so bad.)

The objective is to not get to the future. They don't like the future; they can't avoid knowing that their axioms are wrong there.

They because it's a whole bunch of people with many different motivations and interests, and that one common cause of living in the world as they imagined it to have been when they were five and the world was good.

If this can be avoided, it will be avoided by overturning the Deicide of Progress undertaken by pursuing the Great War.

Posted June 11, 2005 9:40 AM by Graydon

Years ago, I read a novel for children called Midnight is a Place, by Joan Aiken. The villain in the novel is a creepy wheelchair-user who runs the local mill's union, or "Friendly Association". It's set in the late 18th-century, but the mill is surprisingly strongly-unionised: you have to join the union when you get a job there, no exceptions permitted, whether you are a 10-year-old girl or a young man.

The union, in the novel, is presented as an evil association for exploiting the workers: their real hope is for the mill's owner to die and a nice, enlightened young man to inherit and run the mill along enlightened-employer lines.

I think I was reading the novel for the second or third time when it occurred to me that this "Friendly Association" described in such damning terms was a union, and this confused me: unions, according to all my dad's stories about his father and his grandfather, were good. They didn't exist to exploit workers, but to enable workers to bargain collectively and get a better deal than if they'd tried to negotiate singly. I understood the theory and practice of union working quite well, and I was bewildered why Joan Aiken had constructed a union as a villainous association.

I asked my dad, who said that it sounded like she adopted the idea from the pamphlets that mill owners and other employers used to publish warning workers about the dangers of the union, at about that time: apparently there was a regular publication of warnings to workers that the union existed only to exploit them and take their money, and they ought to trust in the mill owners, who would take care of them.

So, yeah. Astroturf.

Posted June 11, 2005 10:35 AM by Yonmei

TNH: Now that I am (again) living in Eastern ^H^H^H^H^H CENTRAL Europe (my wife being Hungarian and our having executed our periodic "wait a minnit, maybe Hungary is better after all" move again this year) I am continually being struck by the discord of growing up in a Reader's Digest America and moving to a newly-enlightened Hungary. Don't get me wrong -- in the 50's and 60's, this was *not* a nice place to be a dissident, and in ways which make my fears for America feel a little foolish. (Things will have to get a lot worse before the Administration can send the police around to disappear someone at 4 AM with impunity -- and indeed, much MUCH worse before they could conceivably do it to any significant portion of the population.) But Hungary is just plain a nice place to live, and has been right through the worst of the Cult of Personality. Oh, granted, the system sucked and lots of people were killed in the middle of the night, but lifestyle-wise, well: the food here is great, the folk culture rich, the people have a basic sense of freedom that is unaffected by any fleeting thing like governments or centuries, and their sense of humor, while black, is solid. And a nation of 10 million is sort of like the national-level version of a small town; there's a sense of "we're all in this together" that you don't get in America these days.

The weird thing is this: while Reader's Digest has made my family certain that all Europeans want to emigrate to America given the faintest chance, and while I know, having lived here, that this isn't the case because Europe is actually a better place to live than America in most respects, here in Hungary there is this weird inversion: Hungarians really *do* all want to emigrate to the States (in the same way that Americans dream of cashing in and moving to the Bahamas). They want this for the most basic of reasons: the fences are made of sausage and the houses are made of ... oh, drat, my wife is asleep and I forget what the houses are made of, but it's the Hungarian version of the streets being paved with gold. And indeed most people know at least one young cousin who went to the States, got a construction job (probably paid in cash and not taxed), and got relatively rich. Therefore, the reasoning goes, all Americans are wealthy. Then they meet me.

So it's odd: Hungarians actually bought all that American propaganda through the 70's and 80's, and still believe it even though it's patently obsolete. Weird. Especially since any of them can now "escape" to the West, since there are no real borders any more. Well, nobody can get a visa for the US, of course -- all those Hungarian terrorists just begging to storm the battlements, I guess.

Lenny: it's always been my opinion that the villains actually rationalize their villainy by telling themselves that those hurt are simply not the right kind of people in the first place, or that the good people will avoid being hurt. And then not thinking too hard about it. OTOH, I remember learning about Shell Oil's campaign to actually kill villagers who had the misfortune to live on top of oil fields -- and realizing that sometimes, the villains really are just rapacious bastards, the kind we all thought had died out in the 19th century. They're just subtler now. Or actually, lately, not.

Posted June 11, 2005 7:36 PM by Michael

Teresa: OK, I'm sure this is all true. I have a memory of your telling me you'd seen some presentation about acid paper. Obviously, old books do sometimes get brittle. But the extent of the problem, and its solution, have been greatly exaggerated and distorted by the microfilm industry.

Or at least that's what Nicholson Baker says. He makes a convincing case.

Posted June 11, 2005 9:38 PM by Robert L

I read Nicholson Baker's book, but personal experience makes me side with Teresa. It's a good thing that the works of Euclid, Socrates, Aristotle, Shakespeare, and Newton weren't published only on acidic pulp paper. Imagine if the Odyssey had been printed that way only. All we'd have would be some statues of the stars of the reprise of the stage version, and urban myth that it had been one hell of a story. Wish we had even the just the graphic novels version of the Library of Alexandria. The burning of which has been mentioned in some Science Fiction, right?

Posted June 11, 2005 9:55 PM by Jonathan Vos Post

I've also seen, with my own eyes, the kind of brittleness TNH talks about. I own books I can't read because the pages will start falling out if I try to turn them. It's not all copies of the same edition, it's not all editions of the same book, but for a lot of popular ephemeral fiction (like much SF) the books and especially the pulp magazines are in real danger.

Posted June 12, 2005 1:21 AM by Tom Whitmore

From my viewpoint, the focus on astroturf avoids a central basic fact: much "common wisdom" is invalid; and much of the contents of our heads is not particularly reliable. We are all very vulnerable to belief without question, especially when we are younger, and the astroturfers take advantage of this. Of course, Teresa, you know this from painful personal experience with neurological problems and family and church deceptions. But it's true of most of us; we swallow too much, swallow it whole, and don't ask enough questions. I decided a few years back that it was simpler to believe less, and hold most belief in abeyance, waiting on validation. The interesting thing I find about this is that it seems to leave more room for truth; when one tosses random chatter, there is sometimes more room for music and silence.

Posted June 12, 2005 3:49 AM by Randolph Fritz

Not all books get brittle because not all are made with acidic paper. But a lot of books, and not just paperbacks, are made from acidic wood-pulp based paper. The conditions under which the book is stored have something to do with how badly brittle the book becomes, too -- too much light, too little humidity, etc. But the pH of the paper is the most important factor. The acid oxidizes when exposed to air, creating a burning effect in the paper, which seems to be not only why it turns brown, but why the edges and especially corners get brown and brittle first. Sometimes a page will become so brittle it comes away from the book, when you try to turn it, in pieces, leaving crumbs of paper everywhere. It's true, it's happened many times, and they do even look a bit like cornflakes. It's not a myth. Libraries have even been known to spend lots of money trying to "deacidify" paper so that books will remain intact and usable.

Digital, electronic-based storage media -- CDs, floppies, tape -- don't last much beyond an average of seven years, according to a study I recently read. Microfilm, like vinyl records, is more of an analog medium and will last longer with proper care. Certainly microfilmed newspapers last much longer than actual paper ones, given not only the acid in the paper, but the wear and tear of folding, handling, etc. ("Tear" is sometimes literal, too. Many of our local newspapers on microfilm are missing parts of pages from where articles were cut from the paper before it was ever filmed.)

Microfilming also allows many libraries that never even existed in the 1850s, when the New York Times first began publication, to have a complete run of the Times, which is a great resource for history. Without microfilm, only a finite number of issues of the paper would exist, but microfilms can be copied and multiply. Now there's online access to the Times backfiles, which in theory makes it even more available, though the database is expensive so many libraries such as ours can't afford it.

The major negative of microfilmed papers, in my experience, is that sometimes the quality of the copying is poor -- too light, usually, or blurry. That's not true of the Times so much as for smaller, local papers, though.

My nephew is currently reading _Double Fold_ for one of his library school classes. (Same school I was attending when he was born. It must run in the family.) He asked me in an e-mail tonight if I'd ever read it. IIRC I read it in The New Yorker when it first came out. I was not impressed with Baker's arguments then and still am not. If you're running a research library with deep archives, that's one thing, and yes, in an ideal world keeping paper copies of everything would be nice.

But ordinary small-town or neighborhood public library, such as the one where I work, with security and space (not to mention budget and staffing) constraints is a much different situation, though, and keeping the back issues of newspapers in actual paper is not the way we'd want to do it. Raganathan's first law, "A book is for use," comes into play. Librarians can't preserve things to the extent that people can't use them, otherwise we're not libraries, just archives. Microfilm, online access, etc., makes things available without actually touching the originals, and so have their uses. What you lose in the "feel" of things,you make up for in access to the content.

Baker seems to put the actual physical sensation of The Book or The Newspaper or even The Card Catalog ahead of content, which is a much different attitude toward them than libraries usually have. We care more about The Content; what the book says is more important than how it feels or smells. After all, library books can get used over and over, dozens and even hundreds of times, and may eventually need to be mended or rebound. They lose that new car, er, book, smell very soon.

The weirdest thing of all to me, though, when I read Baker, was his catalog-card fetish. That's the only way I can describe his romantic arguments for keeping such an outdated and inefficient technology. Who the (expletive deleted) cares if Some Famous Author ever touched that card? Has Baker ever filed catalog cards? Or refiled them after realizing a whole run of them were in the wrong order, or because someone dropped the drawer? Or needed to make changes to the cataloging of a book, requiring erasing and/or retyping information on an entire set of cards (which can be as few as two or as many as you want to deal with)? Or had library users who thought it was easier to remove the card from the drawer -- or, even more aggravating, just tear off the corner with the call number! -- than write the information down on scratch paper when looking for a book? Yes, that latter was a real problem for us.

This is where computers excel above all else, and why I never want to use a card catalog on a regular basis ever again.

Posted June 12, 2005 4:52 AM by Lois Aleta Fundis

If you want long-lasting media, I think clay tablets are probably hard to beat. But I'm having troubling imagining a clay table catalog card stack...

Posted June 12, 2005 9:53 AM by Danny Yee

Lois: I went off to order a copy of Double Fold, as least it sounds interesting, and found reference to a 2002 book which seems to be a detailed critique of it. ("Vandals in the Stacks? : A Response to Nicholas Baker's Assault on Libraries"). Any idea if this is worth reading as a follow-through?

Posted June 12, 2005 9:55 AM by Andrew Gray

Hmm, with all these right-wing corporate fake grassroots organizations, I wouldn't be surprised if you started seeing Republican groupies walking down every street in America soon.

Posted June 12, 2005 10:52 AM by Kevin

There's an inverse correlation between density of information and survivability; there has to be, because density is surrendering redundancy to an increasing number of scales of physical damage. (A dust mote is as nothing to your vellum manuscript; it can be a real problem for a modern hard drive.)

The computer solution is to keep many copies in many locations and to roll everything forward as technology changes; it's going to be a real pain if the computers ever all stop, of course. There's already too much stuff to print.

(Just imagine printing full resolution prints of all the images Casini has sent back from Saturn.)

Posted June 12, 2005 12:07 PM by Graydon

Graydon:

"Just imagine printing full resolution prints of all the images Cas[s]ini has sent back from Saturn."

NASA has covered up the fact that budget slashing has allowed destruction of some priceless parts of archives of spacecraft planetary images. My confidential source, whom in this context I'll dub "Deep Impact," who has given me correct scoops for over 20 years, quotes an administrator who says "big deal; we'll send another probe to that planet in a few years." By the way, as googling reveals, I invented "Artificial Meteorite Strike Spectroscopy" as is used in the 4th of July comet/spacecraft collision, and published first (1983, refereed).

I have often found a single indexed document, or group of documents, missing from allegedly complete archives while being a paid "private eye" on research. For instance, Poindexter's PhD dissertation in nuclear Physics from Caltech's stacks vanished during Contragate. Records absent when I researched a Howard Hughes "autobiography" [published as by "J.P."]. Police records of my arrest at a Town Meeting (where I was both an elected official and a card-carrying reporter) for questioning narcotics sting bills amid the $250,000 cash dug up from the lawn of the Chairman of the Altadena Town Council, said police report dated the day BEFORE the arrest.

It's almost as if sinister Powers want some records to decay, and so encourage all to decay, a slow-mo Library of Alexandria.

But I digress.

Posted June 12, 2005 12:40 PM by Jonathan Vos Post

Whoops, date correction, 1993:

Jonathan V. Post, "Human and Robotic Precursor Missions to the Polar Icecaps of Mercury", Proceedings of The High Frontier Conference XI: Bringing the Vision of Space into Reality, 11th in a series formally known as the Space Manufacturing Conference, Space Studies Institute, Princeton, NJ, June 1993 [and see also the reference to this in "The Ball-bearing Bowling Alternative: Wild Strikes for Polar Ice", Mercury Messenger, Issue 6, July 1994, p.4 of 4]

Posted June 12, 2005 12:44 PM by Jonathan Vos Post

I actually enjoyed reading Reader's Digest in my early teens, because of the jokes, and the stories of the horrors of Communism were just an adventure epic. What started to creep me out was its attitudes towards race: every now and then it would come out with articles about black youth who had been punished by their peers for 'acting white'. This would not have bothered me if they had included at least one article on a person for whom black pride had been a motivation for self-improvement.

Posted June 12, 2005 3:59 PM by Sajia

I used to skim my aunt's Readers Digest, looking for the jokes and the quizzes and little vocabulary tests.

It seemed that in every issue there'd be a story about a man in an isolated spot who lost a limb to a threshing machine/cougar attack/car crash, who then had to pick up the severed limb and walk (or sometimes hop, depending on the limb) back to civilization. I'm not a born surgeon, and those stories used to make me go pale and feel ill as a child, yet those were the ones I always read through to the grisly end.

I'm not sure what the message of those stories was. Perhaps they were just about the image of the rugged individualist who doesn't need any stinking welfare handouts, convenient ambulance services or an even number of limbs.

Posted June 12, 2005 7:51 PM by Niall McAuley

" . . . every now and then it would come out with articles about black youth who had been punished by their peers for 'acting white'."

Ah, yes. The famous "I Am Joe's Excuse to Stay a Bigot" series.

Posted June 12, 2005 8:00 PM by Stefan Jones

I can't help it.

Why, with all these cows at the tops of buildings (and I'm not even going to think about how they persuaded the cows to do that) didn't anyone think of building a ramp down the stairs for the cows to go down?

It could be argued that the stairs were too narrow/steep, but in that case, I think they'd be too narrow/steep to persuade the cow to go up.

Cows must be pretty good at going down slopes - otherwise there'd be a lot of cows stuck at the tops of hills.

Off to do some research...

Posted June 12, 2005 9:21 PM by Margaret Organ-Kean

Andrew, I haven't myself read "Vandals in the Stacks? : A Response to Nicholas Baker's Assault on Libraries" but if you're really interested in librarians' response to Baker's assertions, you might want to read it. Cox teaches at the school my nephew is attending but I'm not sure if he's the prof for the course Darryl (said nephew) is taking. I am going to refer Darryl to this entire thread when I write back to him.

Posted June 12, 2005 11:56 PM by Lois Aleta Fundis

I started reading Reader's Digest for the jokes, when I was about 8 or 9 I think -- and still read it sometimes, mostly for the jokes. I also read a lot of the condensed books, both the ones at the end of the magazine and, starting the summer I was 9, the Condensed Books set (my Mom subscribed to it). Since I wanted, at that age, to be a doctor when I grew up, the "I Am Joe's Body Part" articles were another favorite of mine, although I wished they'd do more "I Am Jane's..."

(Nine going on ten, that was, the summer of 1960, a seminal year for me. Became a baseball fan and a follower of politics that summer too. Mom worried about me reading adult books and then decided the really adult stuff probably went over my head. And this was the Condensed ones, which already had the more risqué -- for the 50s and early 60s! -- bits cut out.)

Of course, at our house the trouble was keeping me from reading stuff!

Anyway, I was already becoming a little suspicious of RD's political viewpoint by sometime shortly thereafter, though I don't know that I could have described it well, or would have dared to try to anyone I knew at the time, except that it seemed too insistent, like trying to convince ... who? their readers? themselves? It was sort of like when our minister -- I was brought up Methodist -- was going on about something that surely the congregation already knew and presumably believed. "Preaching to the converted" might have rung a bell if I knew the term at the time.

By the later 60s, I used to get into some loud political arguments with My Mom the Republican, but I still read RD for some of the less political stuff. (Things worked out though, and Mom eventually surprised me by voting for Mondale in 1984, which turned out to be her last election.)

Posted June 13, 2005 12:21 AM by Lois Aleta Fundis

Of course, in the UK, we not only have RD, but the Daily Mail & Daily Express, neither of which I can read without throwing them across the room... I have a complusion to deconstruct every story in them, every single one has a subtext promoting fear.

Every
single
day

Don't get me started on their coverage of the proposed religious hate law...

Posted June 13, 2005 9:13 AM by Pete Darby

There's also the "Center For Consumer Freedom" which is run, staffed and directed, not by consumers, but by amalgamated corporate interests

You know it's time to pull the plug on media when you find yourself unable to tell if they're stealing ideas from cyberpunk, or the other way around.

Posted June 13, 2005 11:48 AM by Josh Jasper

NASA has covered up the fact that budget slashing has allowed destruction of some priceless parts of archives of spacecraft planetary images. My confidential source, whom in this context I'll dub "Deep Impact," who has given me correct scoops for over 20 years, quotes an administrator who says "big deal; we'll send another probe to that planet in a few years."

And of course the appearance of a planet never, ever changes from year to year...

Posted June 13, 2005 3:15 PM by Robert L

What Lois Said re: acid-free paper, newspapers, and libraries.

And Pete, you may have seen it already, but one of my favourite random generators is the Daily Mail-o-matic. "WILL THE E.U. GIVE THE ELDERLY CANCER?" and other vital questions of our time!

Posted June 13, 2005 3:31 PM by Northland

Lois--
I don't have the time or the ability to make Baker's arguments as well as he can himself. Double Fold is a polemic, but it makes a great deal of sense, and is very entertaining reading.

Baker's quarrel isn't with microfilm and computers per se, but with the wholesale destruction of older materials (yes, including card catalogs) in favor of the newer, and in many respects inferior, ones. I have certainly used some of the specific online materials he talks about (Cornell's online version of its run of Scribner's Magazine, for example. I have also had a job reading and researching microfilm materials in the US Department of Labor's library for many weeks. As far as I'm concerned, microfilm has really little to recommend it beyond its smaller volume. It can decay just as paper can, it's cumbersome and tiring to use, it is not a random-access medium, and the original images are more often than not poorly captured.

I can only restate one of Baker's basic arguments: for a small fraction of the millions and millions that are spent on destructive microfilming, one could rent a huge warehouse out in the sticks and store everything that's destroyed there, to be supplied on request.

Posted June 13, 2005 3:37 PM by Robert L

Robert, I have a small difference of opinion with that last sentence:

for a small fraction of the millions and millions that are spent on destructive microfilming, one could rent a huge warehouse out in the sticks and store everything that's destroyed there, to be supplied on request.

No, one really can't. Libraries have struggled with this for years. One of my first management jobs was to plan a remote storage facility for a library. The storage facility was to be located in the basement of a building less than five city blocks from the main library.

Here are the large issues that I encountered (the small issues were like the nine billion names of God, and just as annoying):

1. Most buildings are not equipped for preservation purposes. The air-conditioning system was hugely expensive to install and had ongoing maintenance expenses.

2. We had endless complaints from faculty and grad students who claimed they found most of their stuff by "just looking around". But when you are trying to maximize use of space, you use compact shelving. And compact shelving is massive and hard to move even when motorized, and only a couple of aisles can be open at any one time. So, no browsing. Materials had to be transferred to the main library upon request or in certain cases they could be used in the Rare books room three floors up. BTW, compact shelving is also very expensive, especially if you want to install the one that STOPS when it encounters a body (highly recommended, really!).

3. Staff. To fully operate a storage facility for retrieval you need at least one person per floor (if your floors are regular sized) at least for every hour the main library is open. If you are a large academic library you are open at least 10 hours a day seven days a week. Minimum staff: two to retrieve plus someone to make regular runs to deliver materials. And you can't hire minimum wage drones. BTW, student assistants are unreliable: they disappear at the worst possible time, i.e. when they need to do their own research and pass exams, which is likely to be one of your busiest times. So, three salaries plus benefits, including night and weekend differentials. We never came close, and even though we could, and did, never take more than 72 hours to deliver something, we got endless complaints about that too.

4. Insurance. Oh boy, the insurance. Because the items would be transferred by van, everything and everyone had to be insured six ways from Sunday. Ultimately, that got so expensive that the staff person had to use the University student buses to transfer materials (storage facility near dorms).

When you add up the amount of money invested by my library and take it into account as an ONGOING expense...well, I could have microfilmed the whole nine floors of the library and made it available to all the students as a one shot deal.

The case Lois is making--and go, go, go, woman!--is that although it is wonderful to preserve books (and my library did, we had a wonderful rare books room with some fantastic specimens), libraries are usually engaged in the business of providing information. We try to preserve what we can, but it's impossible to preserve all AND make it available at the same time.

Microfilm has a shelf life of AT LEAST 75 years. It can be read easily most of the time, and if your library has a computer with some basic digital equipment, it can be as clear as the day the original was printed. It makes ideas accessible to large numbers. And that's what libraries are about.

Sorry about the length of the post, everyone.

Posted June 13, 2005 5:44 PM by Emma

Margaret: cows can handle \gentle/ slopes; in mountainous areas you raise sheep or goats instead, mostly. (That's mostly. Unlike the people who've only read Heidi I've actually seen cows in summer pasture near the top of an Alp -- but that was in an area that a sturdy 2-wheel-drive vehicle could reach by the convenient road. And I don't know that they raise the same breed of cattle, or whether the calves get more experience in scrambling and traversing.) The standard pitch for stairs is 7" rise for 11" run, which would make a pretty steep slope for even a human being to walk down without steps. I also figure that building and applying ramps that could take the hoof loading of a cow would be a lot of work and a lot of effort -- not just putting the lumber together, but making the surface rough enough that a hoof wouldn't skid on it (or the cow refuse to go down it). I won't claim it's impossible because I've never tried, but I suspect it's more trouble and money than simple butchery.

Posted June 13, 2005 6:47 PM by CHip

CHip: cows can handle \gentle/ slopes; in mountainous areas you raise sheep or goats instead, mostly.

This whole thread makes me think of what happens when cows coincide with steep slopes. Glad I wasn't on that highway.

Posted June 13, 2005 8:04 PM by Larry Brennan

Far from the earliest example, I'm sure, but I'm reading Macaulay's History of England at the moment(*), and I've just come across a classic astroturf ploy:

There was scarcely a market town in England without at least a knot of separatists. No exertion was spared to induce them to express their gratitude for the Indulgence. Circular letters, imploring them to sign, were sent to every corner of the kingdom in such numbers that the mail bags, it was sportively said, were too heavy for the posthorses.

That's James I trying to enlist the support of Nonconformists against the Church of England, for anyone who's curious about context. (There's also a great claim-and-counterclaim PR fight between the Court and the Church - but that's just dirty politics, not astroturf.)

(*) Why, yes, I have been reading Ken MacLeod's Blog. Why do you ask?

Posted June 14, 2005 9:18 AM by Sam Dodsworth

The California Correctional Peace Officers Association did quite a bit to support victim's rights associations and three strikes laws, both with the intent of getting more people imprisoned for longer.

Link

Link found at Marginal Revolution.

Posted June 14, 2005 11:50 AM by Nancy Lebovitz

Cows and steepness: Consult the Montana Rancher for the real scoop:

http://www.nowherethoughts.net/sarpysam/

(I've emailed to ask the question).

Charles Koch & libertarian history

In the middle 1970s, Koch began investing heavily in getting the libertarian message out.

He founded and funded The Cato Institute

http://www.mediatransparency.org/funderprofile.php?funderID=9

"Following in the footsteps of their father, a member of the John Birch Society, the Kochs clearly have a conservative bent. Charles Koch founded the Cato Institute, and David Koch co-founded Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE) [now FreedomWorks], where he serves as chairman of the board of directors. David also serves on the board of the Cato Institute. The Koch foundations make substantial annual contributions to these organizations (more than $12 million to each between 1985 and 2002) as well as to other influential conservative think tanks, advocacy groups, media organizations, academic institutes and legal organizations, thus participating in every level of the policy process. Their total conservative policy giving exceeded $20 million between 1999 and 2001"

More at People for the American Way

Also at that time, Koch brought Reason Magazine to San Francisco.

Sourcewatch on Reason Foundation.

Also a good historical review in The Think Tank as Flack The Washington Monthly 2001
David Callahan, to be found at a Cheating Culture page.

Posted June 14, 2005 12:06 PM by liz

There's a certain irony that the original post was addressed to counter-protests around a "Rock the Vote" event. But "Rock the Vote" itself was founded by "members of the recording industry" who were upset about "censorship." In other words, they were engaged in corporate lobbying against any restrictions on their business dealings. And all along, that organization has mostly been about old and powerful people chiding young people into voting for liberal causes. Nothing wrong with that, except for the pretense that it is a movement originating from young people themselves.

Teresa derided the notion that both sides do it (i.e., sponsor "grassroots" organizations that actually represent the interests of rich/powerful people). Well, I could list any number of left-wing organizations that are (or were) examples of astroturf on that definition. Most significantly, all of the groups that agitated for "campaign finance reform" (even less of a grassroots issue than tort reform). (See also here). The Million Mom March. Rock the Vote (see above). Catholics for a Free Choice. I could go on and on and on.

I mean, think about it: How often does the Kansas guy working night shift at the 7-11 get together with his hunting buddies and start up a nationwide grassroots organization? Never. So-called "grassroots" organizations are almost always founded and financed by the rich and powerful, who then attempt to draw on popular support (or at least pretend to do so). And what do you know, they even use "PR and marketing firms" to get their message out. I don't know why any of this should be shocking.

Posted June 14, 2005 2:38 PM by Jack V.

Jack, I think there's a fundamental difference you're glossing over. For example, moveon.org was started by a couple of high-tech entrepeneurs with no political experience. They simply wanted to cause a change in politics. They seem to qualify as a true grassroots efforts. The fundamental difference is that groups like moveon is lobbying for something that doesn't directly help their bottom line. Corporate lobbyists for the tobacco industry is a different breed than "rock the vote".

Posted June 14, 2005 3:09 PM by Greg London

Jack V: So-called "grassroots" organizations are almost always founded and financed by the rich and powerful

Yeah, that League of Women Voters sure sounds like it was started by the rich and powerful. And those high-falutin' Amnesty International and Medcins sans Frontieres richie-riches too.

Not to mention the billionaires who bankrolled Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos.

There are lots of real grassroots orgs out there, and lots of big ones got started that way. Not everything gets bankrolled by the likes of Charles Koch, Altria or ExxonMobil.

From where I sit (a not unbiased place) it looks as if most centrist/liberal grassroots are real and most conservative/neocon ones (excepting some of the fundamentalist groups) are astroturf.

Posted June 14, 2005 3:50 PM by Larry Brennan

Well, as I already said, "Rock the Vote" was indeed founded by well-heeled artists who wanted to help their own bottom line.

Anyway, I didn't refer to Moveon.org. But since you bring them up, I never said that grassroots organization is impossible. But even with Moveon, one could write an equally conspiratorial piece about how billionaire currency speculators are trying to manipulate the issues, blah, blah, blah. In other words, on the rare occasion that an actual grassroots organization has any success, it draws the interest (and support) of the rich and powerful who see a way to further their own interests.

Posted June 14, 2005 3:52 PM by Jack V.

I define a grassroots movement as one being done by a lot of people because they (individually) want to. If it's funded and organized from "above" then it's astroturf, whether the goal is increased corporate profits or an "improvement" (from the viewpoint of the funder) in a political process.

Posted June 14, 2005 4:10 PM by Seth Breidbart

Larry --

Same response: I never said that grassroot organization was literally impossible. Just that it most definitely happens on both sides (as was most prominently the case with campaign finance reform). Your counterexamples do nothing to disprove my point.

And a few quibbles: 1) Markos Moulitsas? How is he a grassroots organization?

2) "Not everything gets bankrolled by the likes of Charles Koch." True, but not necessarily as to your particular examples. The League of Women Voters gets huge amounts of money from the Ford Foundation, the Pew Foundation, and all the typical liberal equivalents of Charles Koch.

Posted June 14, 2005 4:18 PM by Jack V.

I think you're missing the most important aspect of astroturf: it's fake. That's the whole point of the metaphor, you know. Astroturf is fake grass.

An astroturf organization is, among other things, one that pretends to be something it's not. It's a lie. Lies are common in politics, but they're not universal. The easy cynicism of "they're all liars" is both false and destructive, and people who believe it are making themselves stupider. No, politicians and political activists aren't all liars. It's important to be able to tell the difference between organizations that are more or less what they claim to be and ones whose very names are lies.

Posted June 14, 2005 4:24 PM by Matt Austern

An astroturf organization is, among other things, one that pretends to be something it's not. It's a lie. Lies are common in politics, but they're not universal. The easy cynicism of "they're all liars" is both false and destructive, and people who believe it are making themselves stupider.

I shouldn't have to repeat myself. Nonetheless, here again is an article about the false "grassroots" movement that was created to favor campaign finance reform. Let me quote the article:

The news media's treatment of foundation involvement in public policy may have changed forever on March 17. That was the day the New York Post published "Buying 'Reform': Media Missed Millionaires' Scam," an account by one of its columnists, Ryan Sager, of the massive spending by several mainstream foundations to secure passage of the 2002 overhaul of campaign-finance laws and to keep the issue alive.

Mr. Sager told his readers he had discovered "an immense scam perpetrated on the American people by a cadre of left-wing foundations and disguised as a 'mass movement.'" Foundations like Ford, Open Society, Carnegie, Joyce, and MacArthur, he noted, had spent some $123-million from 1994 to 2004 to secure passage of the campaign law.

More than $40-million of that money, Mr. Sager said, had come from the Pew Charitable Trusts, where the program officer in charge had been Sean Treglia. Mr. Sager quoted from a videotape of a lecture Mr. Treglia had given at the University of Southern California in which he explained just how Pew had built support for passage of the campaign law.

Mr. Treglia said the foundation had made grants to "create an impression that a mass movement was afoot -- that everywhere they [members of Congress] looked, in academic institutions, in the business community, in religious groups, in ethnic groups, everywhere, people were talking about reform."

To maintain the illusion of a spontaneous upwelling of support for changes in campaign financing, Mr. Treglia said he "always encouraged the grantees never to mention Pew."

Can you explain -- referring to actual facts and evidence -- why it is stupid to believe that the campaign finance crowd did exactly what Mr. Treglia admitted?

Posted June 14, 2005 5:49 PM by Jack V.

Jack, who do you think Catholics for a Free Choice is funded by? It's not the Vatican, that's for sure! And just because the League of Women Voters gets funding from foundations, that doesn't mean those foundations began or run the organization. You might want to read a bit about the League's history and that it has active state and local groups all over the place. (Even, um, Hong Kong?!) Also note that the LWV was founded in 1924, and the Ford Foundation in 1936. Who came before whom?

As for Rock the Vote, whatever its origins, it's popular on a grassroots level because the fight against censorship is important, freedom of speech being in the Constitution and all. Are you pro-censorship, Jack?

A lot of "astroturf" groups, on the other hand, are brand spanking new and seem to have little or no real membership outside of their parent organizations.

Astroturf has its uses. It makes nice carpeting on your front porch. But it doesn't belong in politics (or in baseball, but that's another rant). At the very least, let's not let the people who make it fool us into believing it's real grass.

Posted June 14, 2005 5:54 PM by Lois Fundis

Jack V - My point was that the League of Women Voters started out when women's suffrage was a new and scary idea - hardly the sort of cause that would get secretly funded by robber-barons. And I have a hard time thinking of the Ford Foundation as being particularly liberal. Also, their grant process is transparent, unlike the fake right-wing organizations that are funded through multiple layers of shell organizations.

Mr. Moulitsos founded dailykos.com, an increaslingly influential grassroots community of liberal Democrats. When members of that community agree on something, you can count on phones all over Congress to ring. It's a true grassroots organization, and it isn't paid for by shadowy people with hidden agendas.

Astroturf does happen, but it happens far more on the right than among liberal and centrist organizations.

Oh, and the idea behind Rock The Vote may very well have had an agenda (all interest groups do), but their goal was to get real young people to register and cast real votes. Not to make stuff up and send identical letters to newspapers all over the country with local names attached. There's a fundamental difference in honesty between the two approaches.

Posted June 14, 2005 5:59 PM by Larry Brennan

Lois -- your comments are mostly irrelevant. Whether "Catholics for a Free Choice" is funded by the Vatican has nothing whatsoever to do with whether it is a true grassroots organization. And whatever gave you the idea that I'm pro-censorship? Even if I was, that would also have nothing to do with the origins of "Rock the Vote."

Larry -- fair points, but you're missing a bigger point. People keep insinuating that astroturf doesn't happen on the left, at least not worth paying any attention to. I keep pointing out that there is indeed astroturf on the left, most prominently with regard to campaign finance reform. Neither you nor anyone else, apparently, are able to disprove this point. So instead, you mention a few liberal organizations that are (or once were) "grassroots." For the third time, so what? None of that undermines the fact that (for example) rich liberal activists spent $123 million on manufacturing the impression of grassroots support for campaign finance reform.

Posted June 14, 2005 6:25 PM by Jack V.

Jack V - You're playing the false equivalence game. Nobody's arguing that astroturf doesn't happen on the left. No one needs to disprove anything.

It's a question of who's doing more astroturf, more consistently, with dollars that are harder to trace and behind more Orwellian organization names. Clearly, the right wing has embraced this tactic more strongly than the left.

Just because everybody lies doesn't make all lies morally equivalent.

Posted June 14, 2005 6:40 PM by Larry Brennan

> People keep insinuating that astroturf
> doesn't happen on the left

Ah, well, when you make a nice strawman like that, it's pretty easy to knock down. And since you leave yourself a huge backdoor exit with the highly subjective term of "insinuating", I'll not try and press reality upon you and simply have you retreat and say "I told you so". Suffice it to say that whether anyone is insinuating anything here, you picked the most pointless cause to rally behind.

Posted June 14, 2005 6:43 PM by Greg London

hm, Larry beat me to it already...

Posted June 14, 2005 6:45 PM by Greg London

There's a big difference between founding or starting an organization, and joining it. Astroturf organizations like Citizens for a Sound Economy (or countless other examples) often have no membership at all. They have a mailing address, which is an office that is shared with a dozen other organizations. They may have one or two employees, or a few high-profile spokespeople to treat with the media. They probably have a board of directors larger than their staff. They don't have members, they don't collect any revenue from any source other than their single funder. Yet they maintain that they are a broad-based organization with wide public support. That's a lie.

MoveOn was founded by rich entrepreneurs, yeah. But it really is exactly what it says it is: an organization with millions of members, which has a large staff. There's really an organization there, not just a Potemkin village. The League of Women Voters has 130,000 members in the national, state, and local chapters. That's a real organization, no matter where the funding comes from (and most of the funding is from membership dues or true non-profit foundations).

The difference between LWV and CSE is day and night, and any false equivalence between them because there might be rich people involved is complete and utter horseshit.

Posted June 14, 2005 7:43 PM by Alex Cohen

Besides, what's wrong with rich people? The Republicans and their apologists really need to stop relying on the politics of envy.

Posted June 14, 2005 7:51 PM by Matt Austern

It's a question of who's doing more astroturf, more consistently, with dollars that are harder to trace and behind more Orwellian organization names. Clearly, the right wing has embraced this tactic more strongly than the left.

How do you know? Evidence, please.

A bit of elementary logic, for comparison's sake: If you claim that Kansas has an abundance of lakes compared to Nebraska, it does not prove your claim if you (1) merely point out a couple of lakes in Kansas (while neglecting to say anything about Nebraska), or (2) merely point out a couple of towns in Nebraska that don't have lakes (while ignoring the fact that some towns in Kansas might not have lakes either).

In other words, if you're claiming (as is everyone here, apparently) that the so-called problem of "astroturf" is so much more prevalent on the right, it does not prove your claim to (1) point out 1 or 2 examples of right-wing astroturf, or (2) point out that a couple of left-wing organizations are not astroturf. What you need to do -- and what no one has even tried to do yet -- is COMPARE the two. I.e., tally up all right-wing organizations, all left-wing organizations, analyze to see which ones are astro-turf (and this must be done honestly, without ignoring proven examples from the left), and then compare to see which column is greater. You might weight the columns by dollars.

Posted June 14, 2005 8:53 PM by Jack V.

Jack V - Yet another bit of sophistry. Demand data, data and more data, but provide only one data point yourself. Guaranteed to put your opposite number in the debate on the defensive. Sorry, not going there.

Posted June 14, 2005 8:57 PM by Larry Brennan

Alex: There's a big difference between founding or starting an organization, and joining it. Astroturf organizations like Citizens for a Sound Economy (or countless other examples) often have no membership at all. They have a mailing address, which is an office that is shared with a dozen other organizations. They may have one or two employees, or a few high-profile spokespeople to treat with the media. They probably have a board of directors larger than their staff. They don't have members, they don't collect any revenue from any source other than their single funder. Yet they maintain that they are a broad-based organization with wide public support. That's a lie.

In regards to lying, you have some explaining to do. Specifically, why have you made these charges against "Citizens for a Sound Economy"? I have never heard of the group, but judging from their website, they have 24 staffers, several state chapters, and 700,000 members. Do you have any evidence to suggest that they are lying, or otherwise overstating their organization's scope?

Posted June 14, 2005 8:59 PM by Jack Vinson

Jack V - Yet another bit of sophistry. Demand data, data and more data, but provide only one data point yourself. Guaranteed to put your opposite number in the debate on the defensive. Sorry, not going there.

Fine, then. You concede that you have no factual basis for your argument. Fair enough.

Look, say that someone shows up and says, "Democratic politicians are usually more corrupt than Republicans." If he's going to defend that claim, he has to be able to prove something about the relative numbers. It would be pathetically inadequate just to point to one or two corrupt Democratic politicians, as if there were no honest Democrats and no corrupt Republicans.

Posted June 14, 2005 9:29 PM by Jack V.

The burden of proof is on the person making a claim.

It is impossible to prove a negative.

Posted June 14, 2005 9:38 PM by James D. Macdonald

Do you have any evidence to suggest that they are lying, or otherwise overstating their organization's scope?

Yes I do.

Also, you point to the site for FreedomWorks, yet another such group, which recently merged with CSE. So the numbers aren't really relevant.

But that's all beside the point. They could have five hundred staffers -- lord knows they can afford them. The basic point is whether they claim to be a grassroots group -- which CSE does -- yet receive a vast majority of support from corporations -- which CSE does (85%, according to documents obtained by WaPo). That's astroturf.

Now I'm not saying they don't have a right to exist. But it's clear that their approach is based on deception: maintaining the appearance of a grass-roots-driven organization, when in fact it is both a creation of and maintained by the existing corporate power structure.

This really isn't that difficult a logical argument.

Posted June 14, 2005 9:48 PM by Alex Cohen

The basic point is whether they claim to be a grassroots group -- which CSE does -- yet receive a vast majority of support from corporations -- which CSE does (85%, according to documents obtained by WaPo). That's astroturf.

Well, it's confusing when you keep radically changing the definition. Just a while ago, you characterized "astroturf" as a group that in fact has no members, no staffers to speak of. Now you characterize it as a group that has thousands of members and potentially hundreds of staffers, but that happens to get a lot of funding from large non-member donors.

Use that definition if you want, but be aware that (as I pointed out above) a LOT of left-wing groups likewise get their funding from equivalent sources.

Posted June 14, 2005 10:02 PM by Jack V.

Jack - No such concession made. You've basically swept in, and decided to make a series of Alice in Wonderland arguments. This stuff may work over on Powerline, but it doesn't here.

Or, in short, why don't you do the heavy lifting and let folks here pick at your data? After all, it only takes one omission or slight error to invalidate the entire data set. Well, at least for the NRO crowd it does.

Posted June 14, 2005 10:21 PM by Larry Brennan

Well, it's confusing when you keep radically changing the definition.

Maybe you ought to lie down for a while.

Posted June 14, 2005 10:29 PM by Alex Cohen

Jack, please, the entire basis for your argument consists of nothing but logical fallacies:

"People keep insinuating that astroturf doesn't happen on the left,"
Nobody actually made that claim. You invented it as a weak argument to easily knock down: strawman

"I keep pointing out that there is indeed astroturf on the left, most prominently with regard to campaign finance reform."
This is a version of Tu quoque

"How do you know? Evidence, please."
This is an argument from ignorance

And in the end, you seem to be disagreeing for no apparent reason, other than to say "yeah, well, democrats do astroturf too" and playing games with definitions so that CSE fits your definition for a grassroots group. You conveniently glaze over the difference between moveon.org, which has large donors but also has massive numbers of people doing petitions, making calls, donating time and money, and CSE which has large donors and massive numbers of phantom members that don't do anything. If you want to argue they are equivalent, just know that the folks here a bit too savvy to fall for those sorts of games.

Posted June 14, 2005 10:42 PM by Greg London

This argument is easily settled.

The right creates more astroturf organizations than the left does because the right has more money.

QED.

Posted June 14, 2005 10:42 PM by Bob Oldendorf

Greg -- your post would be more convincing if you had managed to identify and correctly define even one logical fallacy.

I said above: People keep insinuating that astroturf doesn't happen on the left, at least not worth paying any attention to..

This is true, starting with Teresa's original post, one of her follow-up comments, a post by Matt Austern, and a post from Larry Brennan. If you read their posts, you'd think that astroturf was solely a phenomenon of the right-wing. They are insinuating -- not "stating," but "insinuating" -- that it's not worth "paying any attention to" any left-wing astroturf. This is not a straw man; it is what they were insinuating.

"I keep pointing out that there is indeed astroturf on the left, most prominently with regard to campaign finance reform."
This is a version of Tu quoque

Nope. Just flat-out wrong. You don't even remotely understand what I've been saying. Here's what a genuine "tu quoque" fallacy would look like:

"Astroturf is a bad thing; here's an example of right-wing astroturf."

Response: "But left-wing organizations do it too."

That response is a fallacy, because the mere fact that left-wing organizations do it too doesn't disprove the original proposition that astroturf is a bad thing.

But here's how the actual argument has gone:

"Right-wingers do astroturf all the time, way more often than the left."

Response: "Oh really? Who says that your judgment of the proportions here is correct? Here's a specific example of left-wing groups spending $123 million on astroturf, and not just on penny-ante groups either, but on a successful project to get Congress to pass a law."

That is NOT a "tu quoque" fallacy. Instead, it is directly responsive to the original proposition that left-wing groups hardly ever engage in astroturf.

"How do you know? Evidence, please."
This is an argument from ignorance

Nonsense. People demand evidence all the time. As they should, when faced with dubious arguments and a refusal to even acknowledge counter-evidence.

Posted June 15, 2005 12:46 AM by Jack V.

Jack V: you infer from their posts that they didn't think left-wing astroturf is worth noting. This is not the same as them insinuating that left-wing astroturf is not worth noting. There's a difference.

I read them as saying there's a lot less of it on the left; and subsequent posts indicate that yes, they know there's some.

I'd love to see a serious statistical study determining how much astroturf there is on each side, and would gladly engage in doing such a study if you're willing to pay an appropriate salary for the next three months of full-time professional statistical work. Until then, I'm going with what feels right to my gut -- I see a hell of a lot more of this on the right than on the left. If the right has successfully captured the "patriotism" and "anyone can become a success" memes, the left has captured "astroturf".

Posted June 15, 2005 6:48 AM by Tom Whitmore

Jack V: Tom W suggests a research project for you. You can do the heavy lifting and we can critique your data and your analysis. Sounds like more fun than listening to you either misunderstand or willfully misinterpret me.

Bring it on!

Posted June 15, 2005 9:13 AM by Larry Brennan

I'm still waiting for some examples of left-wing astroturf groups from Jack. Remember, the most important criterion is deception. For example, yes, George Soros gave a ton of money to Americans Coming Together, but it was front page news.

Your one claim so far is Rock the Vote. Here's a helpful starting point:

"Rock the Vote is a non-profit, non-partisan organization, founded in 1990 in response to a wave of attacks on freedom of speech and artistic expression. Rock the Vote engages youth in the political process by incorporating the entertainment community and youth culture into its activities."

Who else?

Posted June 15, 2005 9:28 AM by Alex Cohen

Alex: I'm still waiting for some examples of left-wing astroturf groups from Jack.

Scroll up and kindly read any of three previous posts from me. Catholics for a Free Choice is a prime example that I already mentioned. It even fits the first definition you announced (and then promptly abandoned). I.e., a group with no meaningful membership that nonetheless successfully gets quoted in the media as if it represented large numbers of people. See here and here.

For another example that I've mentioned repeatedly, look for the words "campaign finance reform."