Astroturfing the Ether

Astroturfing the Ether

Grassroots organization and campaigning is as old as the typed word. When Martin Luther posted a list of qualms he had with the existing Catholic Church doctrine, he protested as someone with inside knowledge, but with little power given to him within the chain of command to change the institution itself. Grassroots is generally used to imply a movement built from the bottom up of the socio-political hierarchy. A movement that is not based in a traditional organization, where people come together for a common cause. Since the time of the earliest grassroots organizations where people have fought together for everything from religious freedom and labor rights to health and environmental protections, those with vested interests in the status quo have fought back. Sometimes powerful industries and governments are blatant about advocating for their interests however, often times they are not. When powerfully interested parties use front groups to advocate for their point of view, it is termed, 'Astroturf'. The debate over net neutrality is at its core between consumer advocates and telecommunication companies protecting their interests and vying for more control over the public communication infrastructure.

Net Neutrality has become more of an issue in recent years as complaints against Internet Service Providers have been brought to the FCC for blocking or throttling certain types of internet traffic. ISPs argue that they are throttling certain types of traffic such as file sharing to maintain all other traffic at a certain pace. Those for net neutrality see the ISPs actions as discriminatory and an attempt to control content. ISPs are arguing for the ability to tier and throttle traffic while the net neutrality groups are fighting to protect the open playing field the internet is predicated on.

Hands Off the Internet is one such astroturf organization that is totally funded by telecommunication companies and numerous other business interests. Hands Off the Internet was founded in 2006 to lobby against net neutrality. Currently it is co-chaired by Michael McCurry and Chris Wolf(Free Press, Nov 9, 2009,) . Michael McCurry also works for Public Strategies Washington, "a full service government relations and lobbying firm." (Public Strategies Washington, Nov 9, 2009) The member organizations of Hands Off includes, AT&T, ADC Communications, The National Association of Manufacturers, Sunrise Telecom, Inc, My Wireless, and The American Conservative Union among many others. Hands Off is just one organization among a team of groups being funded by the myriad companies with anti-neutrality interests. Other astroturf groups being funded by telecommunications companies include Freedomworks, Net Competition, Citizens for a Digital Future, and the American Consumer Institute. According to the site, the mission statement of Hands Off begins as follows:

"Hands Off The Internet is a nationwide coalition of Internet users, manufacturers and network operators united in the belief that the Net’s phenomenal growth over the past decade will continue if government does not attempt an unwise effort to regulate a market that is otherwise working to give consumers the choices, freedom, prices and diverse experiences they desire in the new age of the Internet."

There are many problems with this statement. First, for the claim that "internet users" are a part of the coalition appears to be a farce. Why, you ask? A functional grassroots organization or one supported in part by internet users would have a functioning mailing list. The button, "Stay Informed: Sign up for our mailing list" doesn't work and hasn't in weeks. Second, there is no where for any 'member' to contribute to their cause financially or otherwise. Third, there is no proof to the claim that government regulation will inhibit the type of growth of the internet that we have witnessed in the last 10 plus years is wrong. In fact the growth from the internet is due largely to the EXTREMELY low barriers to entry. Anyone has the ability to create a website/blog/internet business and it runs just as fast as every other site. As Internet Service Providers (ISPs) seek to gain the power to tier or discriminate content, the capacity for easy start up businesses and the free exchange of ideas will be greatly hampered as sites will be charged for the use of bandwith. Net Neutrality is the legal prevention of ISPs having the power to discriminate against content. I digress.

On Thursday Nov 5, 2009, I sent an e-mail to Hands Off the Internet with questions regarding their operations and their membership but have not yet received a response.

In 2006 Hands Off The Internet began airing commercials framing net neutrality as an infringement on consumer choice. If passed, net neutrality would lead to unnecessary government regulation meant to profit "big online companies" that want consumers to pay for internet infrastructure (Hands Off the Internet, Youtube Channel, Nov 9, 2009) . In another commercial produced in 2006 Hands Off claims that US companies have NEVER blocked content instead blaminig Canadian companies of doing so. In 2005, however, the American company MRC, LLC paid a settlement of $15,000 to the FCC for blocking customers from using the internet to make phone calls (Sarkar, Dibya, "Net Neutrality bill would bar net providers from slowing traffic", AP, Feb 14, 2008,). In 2008 the FCC upheld a complaint against Comcast for blocking file sharing ("Google Aims to Expose Network Meddling", Techweb, Jan 28, 2009). On May 22, 2008 the co-chairs of Hands Off, McCurry and Wolf, wrote an op-ed to the New York Times in response to a call for net neutrality, claiming that there are already rules and regulations in place to protect users from such "hypothetical problems".(McCurry, Mike, Wolf, Christopher, "Letter; Regulating the Net", New York Times, May 22, 2008) Conveniently, McCurry and Wolf fail to note these instances of ISP interference.

Astroturf organizations are not a new phenomenon. David Collison in his article "Corporate Propaganda: its implications for accounting and accountability," writes of many cases throughout history where business groups have intentionally concealed their identities as a source and published material to sway public opinion. According to Collison, this is a form of propaganda. One of his examples includes The National Organization of Manufacturer's (which is not so ironically, one of the member organizations of Hands off). In 1939 the organization was under congressional investigation due to their widespread and misleading campaigns against the growing labor movement. They published material that seemed to be from a third party objective source and distributed the information to churches, schools and community associations. Considering the outcomes for labor and business interests, the campaigns by NAM were successful in swaying public perception in their favor. Today groups like, "Citizens Against Food Taxes" and the "Clean Coal of America" coalitions are campaigns built to look like citizen movements, but heavily funded by industry insiders.

To the average TV viewer watching the Hands Off the Internet commercials it is not obvious who is funding the message. On the site the members are stated despite that it is not widely acknowledged as a well constructed extension of the noise machine with only business interests in mind. Through Hands Off the Internet, telecommunication companies get to frame the debate as an issue of excessive government regulation, the interest of big internet companies, or whatever will throw the average consumer off the trail. They have money to sink into national cable television spots and to dump hundreds of thousands of dollars into congress to support their position. Since 2006 Hands off has spent over $250,000 a year lobbying congress (Free Press, Nov 9, 2009,) . In such front groups dollars substitute citizen members, those with accumulated wealth will act to keep the wealth in their hands, regardless of public good. On the other side of the spectrum, organizations like Free Press and Save The Internet rely on small donations from tens of thousands of donors and the efforts of numerous individuals communicating to their congressional leaders their wishes.

Hands Off the Internet is an astroturf group funded by the telecommunications companies to advocate against net neutrality. It is funded by oligopoly telecom companies and is not widely supported by internet users. Hands Off like the other front/ astroturfs seek to confuse the debate around a consumer issue to sway the debate toward the favor of the industry. Fundamentally, as Collison posits, this takes away from real grassroots organizations and muddles the national debate to the detriment of real socially democratic values. When these powerfully interested parties use front groups to advocate for their point of view, they are effectively laying Astroturf into the grassroots conversation; they create artificial confusion in the public by constructing the appearance of citizen debate.

Reaction Paper 1

Understanding Media Studies
Fall 2009


Collison's, "Corporate Propaganda: its implications for accounting and accountability" is a solid historical and economic case study overview of how powerful corporate entities have maintained and expanded control through the use of propaganda to the detriment of social-democratic values.

Propaganda, as defined by Collison (pg 856), "is a tool that can be used by powerful interests, often covertly, to support and proselytize a prevailing ideology." This paper does go into other uses of the term "propaganda" that have been applied throughout history. However, for the point of his paper, Collison emphasizes the covert use of media outlets by corporate interests to persuade public opinion toward the favor of capitalist entities and principles, among the other uses of the term "propaganda" throughout history. Specifically, the message that has been emphasized and reiterated and forced upon the public as a virtue via corporate propaganda, is the principle which emphasizes the Maximization of Shareholder Value (MSV) above all else. Collison also points to an inadvertent form of propaganda at the basis of the MSV. That being the misinterpretation of the fundamental capitalist text, "The Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith.

Collison notes that the textbook education of accounting and finance students is focused completely around the crux of the maximization of shareholder value (MSV) above all else. The MSV among other precepts in finance and accounting texts are written as uncontested facts when they are indeed contestable. In reaction to this capitalist mythology that permeates such text books and as Collison shows later, our collective consciousness, he sifts through Adam Smith's, "The Wealth of Nations". Overall his selection of texts from "The Wealth of Nations" were important for showing how the neo-classical interpretations of Adam Smith misses important historical context and the integral humanistic values that were a part of Smith's tome. The free market is not one with no rules as is implied by modern pro marketers, the free market is one in which there are no monopolies, charters, and land trusts. Those entities actually restrain free movement and association, much like the large corporate entities that today exist (and own large media shares) and continue to have a vested interest in business as usual. Collison points to a modern example of the dissonance between Smith and modern corporate interests, (pg 862)"Financial Times contributors are fond of words like "ominous" to describe real wage rises: such words are not used to describe profit increases. This is a distinction that did not commend itself to Adam Smith, who berated recipients of profits for their double standards in complaining about wage costs while remaining silent about the costs of their own rewards.

Constant repetition of only selected parts of Adam Smith's classic economic work with little regard to the historical context and the actual values from which he was writing helped to create and maintain a skewed and monopolistic marketplace. One in which labor, public health and environmental concerns are easily written off as Bolshevism. Collison uses examples from the "Wealth of Nations" to prove his point and brings Smith back into the conversation at various points throughout the paper to reiterate the dissonance between capitalism in the last 100 years and what was laid in the original text.

Through the use of a historical examples, Collison ties together how the bastardization of Smith was brought into being and then used to initiate and justify propaganda campaigns which in effect defeated democratic social movements and undermine real democracy. As a particularly salient case study, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) was created by corporate entities to change public opinion against the strikers. From the methods that NAM employed they appeared as an authoritative grassroots organization and used language to discredit the strikers and unions during early turn of the century labor unrest. As a response to corporate interests losing their footing in the public realm, NAM had done a scary yet excellent job at passing off disguised information to everything from schools to newspapers a 1913 Congressional investigation found.
Thus they were effective in discrediting movements aimed at creating social benefits and value. According to Collison during times with higher levels of social unrest hegemonic powers fought back through covert propaganda campaigns to ensure that power remained in their hands, (pg 870) "In the war's aftermath business propaganda was again put work....The Dominant themes were the same as those of the 1930's: symbolic linking of business free enterprise with democracy, the family, the church and patriotism and identifying government regulation of business and those who supported such steps with communism and subversion.

Collison notes numerous studies both historical and recent of manufactured stories being presented as news without the public knowing the original creators. He also sights a study from 1997 by Carey detailing how US business was spending $1 billion dollars a year on "grassroots propaganda. A current example of this falsified grassroots propaganda can be seen in such campaigns as, "Americans Against Food Taxes" <http://www.nofoodtaxes.com/> whose members include Coca Cola, 7-11, and Burger King. The historical pattern of passing off business favored information is not a thing of the past as we would like to believe, as we recall in recent years the blow out over the creation of fake news by PR groups sent to news programs and aired as news, without any disclosure as to the origin of the video (Center for Media and Democracy, )

These examples are a key part of the success of such propaganda. According to Collison, (pg 857)"...one of the simplest and most powerful techniques of corporate propaganda is based on flagrant deception - the simple concealment of the involvement of the sponsors of propaganda. This deception is acknowledged as being part a of a process, along with the fact that news organizations do rely on advertising dollars and thus are limited in their abilities to report on stories that would negatively effect their advertisers and essentially their bottom line as a money making industry.

All considered, Collison made his point well. That being that hegemonic control over the means of communication and the messages heard through those channels is in detriment to social democratic forms and that it is important in being able to recognize the patterns utilized by corporate propaganda in order to work towards a more socially democratic society. However, to be slightly critical of Collison, he only mentioned the use of propaganda in accounting and finance text books early on and seemed to barely touch on the topic in other sections, despite the title of this article. I think perhaps Collison wrote the paper first and added the mention of accounting text books to get the paper published in this journal. Which, to a certain point could compromise the integrity of the entire article. However, because as whole the article is so well referenced and his logic is solid throughout Collison succeeds in getting his point across and hopefully enlightening his readers.

Collison, David J, 2003, "Corporate Propaganda: its implications for accounting and accountability", Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal, Vol 16, pg 862, Dundee UK, University of Dundee "