The Slippery Slope from Channel One to Astroturfing

Jeff Wunderly

jwunderly@gmail.com

"Free" corporate-sponsored news. Image by: obligation.org

At the risk of dating myself...

    I was working as a construction trainer with at-risk youth in 2004 when the United States invaded Iraq for the second time. The local Vocational School had the donated use of classroom space for the instructional portion of the program, so the school served as our home base. As chance would have it, the school installed a closed-circuit television system called Channel One while we were there. Our group would watch one of the brief news broadcasts each morning. The programs were generally pleasant, verging on sterile, with very frequent runs of the exact same set of commercials from Pepsi and the armed forces (and I think one or two more that I can't remember). Images of US troops handing out bottled water to Iraqi civilians followed immediately by an Army recruiting ad sticks in my mind. None of the content or approach struck me as particularly egregious, but it did seem pretty odd in a schoolroom setting. That was my first experience with Channel One, and little did I know at the time that they had been installing their 'free" systems in schools around the country for years at that point and would continue to produce their brand of corporate-sanctioned news until 2014. 

Muddy waters - king of the data blues!

    In a Sept. 2014 article for Financial Times titled, The Invasion of Corporate News, by Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, the author discusses the blurring of lines between news and marketing. The news produced by private companies, or "brand journalism," has only grown in prominence and acceptance since my early encounter with closed-circuit schoolroom TV. He explains that the public relations industry is eclipsing journalism in sheer numbers employed, as well as in compensation to those employees. Driven largely by shrinking revenues and pressure to generate 24-hour content, media organizations have become a primary outlet for corporate-created stories. "Native advertising," Mr. Edgecliffe-Johnson argues, where paid advertisements look like actual articles, have taken the traditional "advertorials," or editorial advertisements, to an entirely new level of deception and potential harm. 

It looks like natural grass...

    In the field of communications, the term astroturfing has come to refer to fake grassroots movements or organizations that are actually orchestrated by big business and big money. Author George Monbiot writes in his 2011 article in the Guardian titled, "The need to protect the internet from 'astroturfing' grows even more urgent," that, "the web gives companies and governments golden opportunities to run astroturf operations: fake grassroots campaigns that create the impression that large numbers of people are demanding or opposing particular policies." The questionable practice of introducing advertising into the classroom has been far surpassed by sophisticated campaigns to sway personal opinions that reach into every corner of our lives. Mr. Monbiot explains that common astroturfing tools and techniques include establishing fake social media groups popularized by PR staff posting to multiple fake accounts, to paying questionable "professionals" for questionable "opinions," to actually paying people to fill-out public crowds and lend false impressions of public support or condemnation. 

It's not the fall so much as the landing that hurts.

    From my perspective, it seems an unfortunate but perhaps inevitable downward spiral of trust and accountability that has accompanied the digression of much of popular media from biased angles and convenient deletions, to outright fabrication and brutal manipulation; seemingly without regard to personal or social consequences.  Questions of transparency and accountability loom large in an age of social media influencers and YouTube instructional videos. At this point, questions are many, and answers are few.