When support is Bogus

One of the big eye-openers in Nick Davies’ “Flat Earth News” is the appearance of AstroTurf organisations, so called because their grass roots aren’t real. Bogus front organisations are something we have suspected exists but could never be sure about.
PR groups have created “a mass of pseudo groups to fabricate activity on their behalf” says Davies. The tobacco industry started the trend, and not everyone was fooled. But they are now everywhere and include big ones like Cancer United (to push Roche’s anti-cancer drugs in Europe), American’s for Constitutional Freedom (for the porn industry), Agricultural Biotechnology Association (for the GM foods industry) and many, many more.
The Union of Concerned Scientists (real!) found that between 1998 and 2005 ExxonMobil spent $15.8 million on 43 different front groups.
My American friends may be aware of AstroTurf “events” in townhalls around America pushing the debate on healthcare, a concerted attempt to attack Obama’s policies.
Journalists working on international affairs have long been aware of AstroTurf thinktanks such as the Heritage Foundation, but this is a whole new ball-game.
The moral is: do you know what you are looking at when you look at a interest group’s webpage? Always ask yourself “can this be AstroTurf?”
Groups which have a lot of money disproportionate to their size may well be AstroTurf.