The American Association for Justice - that's the big trial lawyers association, a huge friend of the Democratic Party - has been caught doing some "astroturfing." That's the term for using a website to enable supporters to send seemingly original but in fact verbatim and identical letters to the editor. The Wall Street Journal's Law Blog serves up the the details.
While Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) and the rest of the House Financial Services Committee peppers SEC chief Chris Cox and and his commissioners with questions today on securities regulation, citizens across the country are flooding the nation’s newspapers with letters to the editor, outraged that the Bush administration has thumbed its nose at protecting investors.
Or are they? The Law Blog has caught wind of at least eight virtually identical letters to the editor recently published in local newspapers across the country. This letter — each one authored by a different person — has appeared in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer; the Wichita Eagle; the Contra Costa Times; the Marion Chronicle Tribune; the Colorado Daily; the Sun Chronicle; the VC Reporter; and the Tribune (San Luis Obispo)...
The letters appear to have been the handiwork of People Over Profits Grassroots Action Center, a Web site "proudly sponsored by the American Association for Justice (AAJ)” (formerly known as ATLA). The site urges citizens to “fight back against powerful corporations and special interests’ propaganda about the civil justice system” by writing a letter to the editor of your local paper. It makes the process easy, providing users with form letters on such topics as “the SEC Should Protect Investors not Greedy CEOs” and an online system where the organization submits the missives on the letter-writers behalf.
This handiwork — lobbying efforts set up to create the appearance of being a “grassroots” movement — has been given the pejorative label of “astroturfing.” Mark Flanagan, opinion page editor at the Sun-Chronicle in Attleboro, Mass., told the Law Blog that the paper never would have printed the letter if he knew it was a form letter. Merry Nye, the letters editor at the Post-Intelligencer, says she too would never have ran it.
The trial lawyers' "astroturfing" is an attempt to mislead newspapers. Online letters-to-the-editor tools are fine - Fred Thompson's presidential campaign website, www.imwithfred.com, has a particularly good one. But Thompson's website doesn't provide the text of the letters - it trusts the users to say what they think and believe in their own words.
I bet if you Googled the names of the senders of those "astroturf" letters, you'll find not mom-and-pop investors outraged at the Bush administration, but trial lawyers with a vested interested in protecting the "jackpot justice" status-quo in the legal system that enriches trial lawyers.
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