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.

Should we trust Journalists?

Those who read newspapers (online or on paper) and particularly those who write from them should read “Flat Earth News” by Nick Davies. The news factory and “churnalism” is something we all face in an era where the deadline no longer exists.
The way the US government and CIA manipulate the media is not new (as I well know from my time in Nicaragua, Honduras and Panama in the mid-1980s) but across-the-board control of all messages certainly is. Beware of the over-friendly spokesperson (which is not the same as friends who happen to be spokespersons).
Just as insidious is the gradual takeover of “news” by private PR firms and in-house “communications” people, supplanting the real “source”. Journalists must protect their sources from in-house message-massagers. Evading the bastards is often a joint effort.
As for readers: when you read the newspaper can you really tell what is genuine news, what is planted or what is a completely made up event for the purpose of being in the newspapers?
I still go by the maxim: “news is what they don’t want you to know”. But updated for the internet age, it should perhaps be “news is what you can’t find out through google.”