Is "Astroturfing" Dead?

The question arises in the context of the disruptions of and protests outside townhalls on health care, captured in videos that we highlighted in a post yesterday. It's no easy feat to figure out how to write about these outbursts and provocations. I know, break out the tiny violin. But here's a case where the political and journalistic conception of "astroturf" -- political organizing that looks to be grassroots but is actually driven and supported by some masked interest -- breaks down, in part because of the web, and there's no real workable framework to take its place.

We know from experiences that what we think we know about scale gets warped online. On the web, one-wo(man) endeavors can play like big businesses. Small blogs compete with big media outlets. Tiny political movements can look like big movements. And really, what do we mean to do when we apply metrics to political organizing anyway, given that "fringe" groups have a history of, you know, overthrowing colonial masters and the like, and otherwise changing history beyond the footprint they otherwise have in society? Sometimes the reverse happens. Some might chuckle when marijuana advocates take over a White House forum. But 41% of Americans think marijuana should be legal, so you have to wonder exactly who and what we think are so funny.

Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic has been wrestling with his commentators over this question of how much attention to pay the people are are, in an organized fashion, attending Democratic health care townhalls and roundly booing or otherwise agitating in some fashion. Ambinder says that while we're right to be skeptical of astroturfing, "technological change has very quickly shrunk the blade of grass, because it's much less expensive and much easier to start and sustain a movement." For their part, reports Politico's Jonathan Martin, House Republicans are pushing the idea that congressional Democrats are also building coalitions to drive how health care reform evolves in the states. Only what's happening on the left is organizing in cahoots with groups like SEIU, MoveOn, AARP, and Health Care for America Now (an umbrella group representing labor and a handful of progressive groups). Knowable, familiar organizations, who are treated by the press as legitimate because, hey, they get how they operate.

The same can't be said for Right Principles, which is circulating guidance for how those opposed to the health care reform legislation currently the focus on the Hill should get their questions heard at these forums. That seems to be what a group blog put together by a handful of conservatives. A dozen folks turn up at a rally somewhere, following the basic game plan that Right Principles lays out. The video of the engagement gets plenty of play on YouTube, the total cost of which is, if not nothing, minimal. So what? What does that mean, really? Hard to say really. Which is why we see some folks hunting for Big Pharma behind the curtain. That's an age-old "astroturfing" story that's easy to tell. But what about when it really is a few guys with a blog? What if it's a few guys with a blog, some help from Dick Armey, and the megaphone of Fox News thrown in? We hunger for ways of measuring how much of the political world's attention this sort of thing should get, about how "real" it is. Thus the obsession with getting head counts at every political rally that takes place, so much so that the National Park Service doesn't even bother counting. Our ways of counting online are similarly broken.

So how do we decide how much attention, in the Internet age, a noisy political faction should be paid? We can't count on using the amount of noise they're able to make as a judge, because certain strains of argument -- the most extreme and foreign, often -- get amplified to a greater volume than their merits warrant. Online, there's plenty of sound and fury signifying very little. Maybe we should ask folks to reveal the size of their mailing lists, though what that would tell us isn't all that clear.

So maybe, instead, we focus on the substance of the argument, rather than the hubbub it generates. Weighing the arguments that faction presents, like whether making weed legal might just give the economy a boost, or whether the health care reform legislation Obama is pushing will take the handcuff off euthanasia in this country, an argument we're hearing from some of these protesters.
And then try to take some measure of how widely and strongly held that sentiment is. That isn't going to quell charges of an anti-conservative, anti-normal people bias in the press, but it isn't the media's job to be liked. That approach would argue that some amount of attention on the so-called birthers is warranted. A considerable chunk of the American population questions whether Barack Obama was born in the United States, and that belief goes to the very heart of whether he's legitimately the president of the United States.
That's too provocative a combination to ignore.

That's hard work, as the saying goes. Reporting and commentating on various players in the health care debate is going to take engagement with the legislation itself, which is intimidating and not all that much fun. And the visuals stink. But it's more illuminating than letting coverage be driven by who shouts the loudest.