Astroturfing is a form of advocacy in support of a political, organizational, or corporate agenda, designed to give the appearance of a “grassroots” movement. The goal of such campaigns is to disguise the efforts of a political and/or commercial entity as an independent public reaction to some political entity—a politician, political group, product, service or event. The term is a derivation of AstroTurf, a brand of synthetic carpeting designed to look like natural grass.
Astroturfers attempt to manipulate public opinion by both overt (“outreach”, “awareness”, etc.) and covert (disinformation) means. Astroturfing may be undertaken by an individual promoting a personal agenda, or highly organized professional groups with money from large corporations, unions, non-profits, or activist organizations. Very often, the efforts are conducted by political consultants who also specialize in opposition research. Beneficiaries are not “grass root” campaigners but distant organizations that orchestrate such campaigns.
Back in May of last year the much loved Channel Nine commentator Ray Warren was up front about the amount of money he had lost through gambling over the years and said something needed to be done. “It annoys me,” he said frankly, “that gambling, as a vice, gets swept under the carpet as a destroyer of people and families. It hasn’t been attacked in the same way as tobacco. Certainly, you can bet safely, unlike smoking, but it is a very serious problem, and it annoys me that many people don’t realise how serious it can be if you let it get out of control. I’ve seen some very good friends of mine end up in psychiatric homes, others in jail, and it’s very sad what can happen.”
That was last year. Last week at the Semi-final he said:
“Not only has the Manly football club been doing great work on the field this season,” Rabs starts off, “they’ve also been very busy working with the community off the field.” He goes on to detail the commendable programs run by the Sea Eagles, being paid for by pokies, and then says the technology for the pre-commitment legislation is “untested”…
BIASED CALL
Cue Phil Gould, still as part of what is meant to be football commentary: “Yeah, the proposed mandatory pre-commitment that they’ve put forward is a rubbish policy. It won’t work. It won’t solve the problem they say they’re going to target, and it will do irreparable damage to the hospitality industry. It won’t work and it will hurt.”
This is all astroturfing – political advocacy of a corporate agenda (the clubs, hotels and pokies industry) masquerading as just good old blokie home-grown, barbie-conversation, grassroots personal opinion. Some guy from Ch 9 (I think) said he didn’t give them a “script”, just (wtteo) “some dot-point talking points”. For goodness’ sake, you employ people like Gould and Warren because they can take dot points and turn them into a script live on air, because they can take thin air and turn it miraculously into 3D bullshit. You pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars a year (if not millions) to do it. “Oi give ‘em dot points but I never ment ‘em to acksherly tork abowed ‘em. Yaw as fuggin’ shocked as Oi em! Oi mean, there sposedter jist sit there lookin’ like obese dickheads so the orjance ken oidennify with ‘em! Thass wot we pay ‘em for!”
Alan Jones is a master Astroturfer, feeding to his ignorant and needy audience the corporate/political agenda bullshit on which they grow, and then trying to sell the mushrooms he harvests as fresh green grass. And the climate change deniers’ arsenal is full to overflowing with fake “concerned citizens’” groups and bogus “Institutes” and “Coalitions”. But it is mostly made up of lies and distortions. Which brings us back to Phil Gould’s rant.
Here is Sir Roger’s advice on asylum seeker/immigration policy for Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott and the rest of Australia’s panicked, “pragmatic” [=unethical, immoral and stupid] political elite who are slavishly, and in terror, reacting to the unholy self-righteousness of the christian right, the egomaniacal commentariat and the ignorant unwashed. It comes straight from the bible so it might resonate with Abbott at least:
Sir Roger has been absent from his adoring public. He has been busy, of course, and apologises from the bottom of what is left of his heart; from what is left of Australian politics by the Australian politicians who have mercilessly and inexorably broken it.
Sir Roger has made a deep study of the state of Australian politics over the last few weeks and the Executive Summary of his report is one line:
Bastards, cunts and ferals.
All of the politicians making public statements in Australia now are liars and dissemblers, desperately competing to be the first to dig Australian politics to the bottom of the political sewer. They are weak, gutless, fear-driven cowards. And they all seem to be trembling with terror in front of the toxic opinions of the deranged, ignorant, selfish, self-loathing, self-soul-saving, racist, hate-mongering, xenophobic Christians of Sydney’s west and Melbourne’s army of lip-service christian bogans.
I just wish that the politicians would have the courage to say what they believed was right, and if necessary walk away, just walk away from all the glory of office for the sake of what they believe is true. And I think that’s what the public wants.
Yes of course it’s exactly what the public wants. But they’re not going to get it.
Are our politicians really the best we can get? Do we really deserve this bunch of cheats and liars, dick measurers and gutless wonders? Are these bastards, cunts and ferals really a true reflection of who we are as a nation? Is this today’s high point of Australian politics?
And now Sir Roger needs to lie down with Johnny, or Jim and try to forget.
Ex-Media-Princess Reba à Crook today expressed astonishment at the latest revelations in the murky Views of the World scandal.
“On behalf of the Worst of the News I personally gave Sasha a mobile phone to help her in our law reform campaign on behalf of her daughter.
“The suggestion that anyone at the nudespaper had the faintest idea of anything at all that ever went on at the paper or where the stories came from is an obscenity and unthinkable and quite possibly scurrilous. To even vaguely suggest that the News of the Worst holds anything but the very highest moral values or that it has ever done anything the slightest bit unethical, particularly under my tenure at the helm, I mean, any such suggestion is you know, abhorrent and particularly upsetting. Look at me! I’m tearing up. See my face leaking?
“How could I possibly have know what was happening at Murder News of the Sleazy Sex World? Especially with a great story like Sasha’s which had both murder and sex? I couldn’t possibly be seen to be anywhere near it? In any case, most of the time I was supposed to be running the rag I was having a bit of a social thing with a few politicians and Rupert at the time, so I’m not sure exactly who was steering the ship … does Mulcahy…Mohawk…Muckraker…ring a bell? I don’t know. I never met him, so help me god.
“I truly believe Mr Mulligatawny…or whatever his name is…didn’t even work for us. No-one at the Used Toilet Roll of the World remembers, or admits to, employing him. I think he hacked his way into our systems and planted his obscene and highly profitable stories without our knowledge. In fact no-one ever noticed, or if they did they thought someone else must have done it. You can’t blame me. I represent the peak of News Corp’s journalistic ethics. Rupert’s ethics. Need I say more?
“Anyway, I like to think I can still call Sasha a really good and truly close friend, even if she now utterly despises me and everything I stand for. I know I have been as good a friend to her as I am capable of being to any human being.
You know … everyone knows … Rupert Murdoch is an evil genius. And this latest move is certainly worthy of his deep-seated amorality. If Murdoch believes in anything he believes in two things: nothing and money.
His latest move is pure evil genius at his best, perfectly amoral and perfectly greedy.
The “red-top” News of the World was a lightning rod for all that is awful about Murdoch’s evil empire, his willingness not simply to condone – even apparently (at least to Sir Roger) to encourage – unethical journalism (as long as there is money in it) and unethical business practice (if there is money in it), but also to ignore the certainty of the toxic and socially destructive effects his work brings to the world. If there is money in it (see, for example, Fox News and Roger Ailes).
Is Murdoch personally responsible for the harm and hurt he brings to the world? After all, he’s just a businessman and not personally involved in the day to day journalistic decisions of his staff. If there is one thing Sir Roger has learned in his long years it is this: the nature of an organisation, the culture, the ethical sense, the attitudes, the mood, that pervade and really influence and direct the behaviour of all the people who work within it, spring from just one source and that is its leader. Everything in an organisation is a reflection of who – and what – the leader is. In a school, that’s the Principal. In a company, it’s the boss. And the News of the World with all its foulness, dishonesty, greed, inhumanity and deceit is a direct reflection of Murdoch. It’s inescapable because who he is as a man influences every part of what and whom he leads.
News of the World had become a huge and easy target for attacking the Murdoch empire generally. So what Murdoch has done is to remove the target. Now there is nothing to shoot at. News of the World had become a floodlit monument to all the real reasons why Murdoch and his megacorp would not be fit and proper controllers of a huge and influential satellite television company.
“What do you mean? What newspaper? I don’t see any so-called ‘News of the World‘.
No NoW, no NoW staff. Do they keep the documents? Or shred them (you know, for commercial-in-confidence reasons)? Can they be sued? For example, by Milly Dowler’s parents or any number of celebrities and politicians?
Murdoch has sacked hundreds (presumably) of staff at NoW. Not too much sympathy there for people who were willing to sell their souls for a shiny penny and the privilege of shitting into the same sewer as the Great Hero. But he hasn’t sacked the one person he ought to have: the ex-Editor – in the big seat when much of the worst phone-tapping was going on – who is now Chief Executive of News International, Rebekah Brooks. He can’t fire her, of course, or release her to the wolves (unless there’s money in it) because she is, like the now arrested and out-on-bail Coulson, another magnificent product of the Murdoch School of Business and Journalistic Ethics, the arsepaper previously known as News of the World.
Murdoch has done all this not out of ethics or integrity or even shame, or even to protect the “good name” of his companies. It is to try to protect his attempt to obtain control of BSkyB and if people get hurt? Too bad.
As we know, but just to remind ourselves, the row over the News of the World was re-ignited this week when it was revealed that it had paid people to hack into the voicemail of 13-year-old Milly Dowler, who was murdered in 2002.
How must Louise Casey, Commissioner for Victims and Witnesses, feel?
Last Sunday, 3 July, under a bellowing, finger-wagging News of the World article [IN DEFENCE OF DIGNITY - opposite a picture of a sexy girl showing not quite so much dignity as breast] moralistically slamming “ruthless lawyers” for berating murder victims’ families “in the wake of the Milly Dowler trial”, “the nightmare ordeal faced by thousands of witnesses and innocent victims of crime” and “the shameful treatment of Bob and Sally Dowler”, she wrote in NoW:
“Many of us felt such compassion for the brave family of Milly Dowler and anger at the way they were treated in court.
Sadly for me, although I was shocked and appalled, I wasn’t surprised.
When I started working for the rights of victims I thought I was unshockable. But what I have found over the last year has made my jaw drop.
Like most people I assumed that families who, like the Dowlers, have had their lives ripped apart by criminals, would get all the help they need….
What I discovered is they are often not given the support, care or consideration they deserve. Many are still treated as if they are an “inconvenience”, and this can make their grief worse…..
…They deserve to be treated with humanity, dignity and most of all a bit of respect.
So when my report comes out about the treatment of families like these, I ask that you be shocked too…
The next day, 4 July, the story broke in the Guardian that Scotland Yard had discovered Milly Dowler’s voicemail had been hacked by journalists and private investigators of the newspaper Louise Casey had so helpfully and passionately contributed to. They had deleted messages – potential evidence – to free up space for more juicy messages. The deletions misled family and friends into thinking that Milly was still alive.
We bet Louise Casey’s jaw really did drop when she saw that. They probably had to give her smelling salts to bring her round. And a bucket for her shame.
The worst that can happen to Murdoch is probably much too little and now almost too late, for the wrinkled old caricature of (or perhaps inspiration for) Emperor Palpatine, as retribution for the global damage he has done to civil society, let alone the personal grief he has caused during his foul, oh-so-long (and, to an Australian, deeply embarrassing) career. It would be easy to wish there really were a hell for him to be consigned to, “into the fire that never shall be quenched: Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched”. Wikipedia says he’s Catholic, but he probably thinks god works for him.
For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
Oh, I dunno, about $US8 Billion?
Late Breaking: The Guardian newspaper is now also reporting an executive from News International – News Corp’s UK wing – has deleted four or five years worth of emails between staff and their bosses. Might that be illegal? Given the police investigation? Perverting the course of justice (well, British law, anyway, which increasingly is an ass)?
And Brooks told angry staff on Friday, “Yes, we’re in a very bad moment but we will continue to invest in journalism.” Her logical error is that to “continue” to do something you must already have been doing it.
STOP PRESS
Alison Frankel on the Reuters website says,
…Rupert Murdoch’s soon-to-be shuttered tabloid may not be obliged to retain documents that could be relevant to civil and criminal claims against the newspaper—even in cases that are already underway. That could mean that dozens of sports, media, and political celebrities who claim News of the World hacked into their telephone accounts won’t be able to find out exactly what the tabloid knew and how it got the information.
If News of the World is to be liquidated, [British media law star Mark] Stephens told Reuters, it “is a stroke of genius—perhaps evil genius.”
My mother used to ask me if I wouldn’t prefer to work in a bank. In those days it was a safe occupation – safe as a bank, literally. A job for life with almost guaranteed promotion. I don’t think she was joking.
Both her brothers – my uncles – worked in banks and eventually became bank managers.
She married a doctor. His job was secure as long as people got sick or had babies.
Her father was an Anglican minister. He’d always have a job as long as there was a god – or as long as people believed there was.
I think my mother wanted me to be safe. She worried about my creative, artistic, unworldly temperament. If I relied on it, it might not lead to stability and security. The bank was safe if unexciting and the school system was the ideal training for future decades of boredom and repetition.
And that’s how parents tend to think.
First we want our children to be safe.
Second we want them to do well and succeed.
Third we want them to be normal and fit in.
And we want them to find someone nice to settle down with and raise a family (for the most part).
We encourage our children to be reasonable and more or less ordinary; to be realistic. That’s the way it works, that’s the way things are, that’s the recipe for survival and success.
Mediocrity.
And that’s what schools are exceptional at producing.
Nothing important or worthwhile that has ever been achieved in the world has been achieved by reasonable, realistic, mediocre people. They have been achieved by people prepared to be unreasonable, to see beyond the realistic to the possibilities and to fight to achieve them.
And that’s who our children are before we school them.
Indeed, says Sir Roger, schools are not only exceptional at producing these results. That is their primary function and the original purpose of the compulsory education system in Prussia to which all modern education more or less owes its tradition. Obedient hardworking bureaucrats, obedient unquestioning factory workers. Today’s office slaves.
Bruce Petty once somewhere said (or was it, drew) something close to, “Having reproduced the species, efforts are made to have it employable as cheaply as possible. Through persistence and determination many survive these deformative years and go on to be average.”
Wimbledon parallels Australian politics for tennis tragic Sir Roger on this Men’s Finals day.
So in a nutshell, the way Australian politics is going at the moment, Labor is 2 sets to love down, and down a break early in the third.
Julia really has to drink a cup of concrete and harden up if Labor wants to survive till the next election and win the Championship. They have to play their natural game instead of their strategic, academic game, stop listening to the opponent’s cheer squad and fire down a few aces. Or the Anti-Christ will become the new Champion.
Louis CK on being white. Sir Roger nearly choked on his Château Barréjat, spat out the truffle-marinated baby’s nipples…before realising it was shockingly true.
This is a heads-up that Roger Waters’ The Wall is heading to Australia and NZ early next year.
It’s been a phenomenon in the US and Europe and the shows are certain to be booked out especially with only one concert scheduled in each city at this stage.
After more than 100 dates across North America and Europe, Roger Waters’ The Wall Live tour has become a phenomenon, selling out venues everywhere and drawing rave reviews from fans and critics alike.
Now comes the exciting news that fans in Australia and New Zealand will get a chance to see the show for themselves, when the tour heads down under early in 2012. This new leg of the tour will begin in Perth, AU on January 27 and will wrap up in Auckland, NZ on February 20
If you don’t want to miss out you can sign up for pre-sale tickets through Ticketek or through the Roger Waters The Wall website.
Here are the current dates:
Jan 27
PERTH – BURSWOOD DOME
Feb 01
BRISBANE – BRISBANE ENTERTAINMENT CENTRE
Feb 07
MELBOURNE – ROD LAVER ARENA
Feb 14
SYDNEY – ACER ARENA
Feb 20
AUCKLAND – VECTOR ARENA
See you there!!! And here’s a little bit of background:
Sir Roger does not wish to marry a man. To put it another way, while Sir Roger and Dorothy have many good friends in common, Dorothy and Sir Roger are not Facebook buddies. And Sir Roger does not think that his personal preference for his own life is of any moment or interest whatever in what another human “should” or should not do or be permitted to do, particularly in the area of human personal relationships. It is quite simply none of Sir Roger’s bloody business. Sir Roger’s opinion is irrelevant. So, very much, is Julia Gillard’s. Even more so is Tony Abbott’s.
Sir Roger was shocked this evening, however, to hear a Labor Party heavy claiming on the 7.30 Report that Labor shouldn’t approve gay marriage because if it did Labor would lose 10-15 seats in Queensland. So stuff doing what’s right. It’s all about staying in power.
Now, Sir Roger can understand that a political party would argue that you have to win seats to form government.
The question is, to form government to do what exactly?
The answer can’t be to form government in order to stay in government. Nor can it be simply to keep the other mob out. There is no vision, leadership, or social progress in that. It is morally bankrupt.
The point of winning the privilege of forming a government is so that you can do good things, so that you can do what’s right, not just so that you can be in power. You don’t sacrifice what’s right on the altar of Power.
This Labor backroom zombie has, like almost the entirety of the Labor machine, lost sight of what it’s all really about and what really matters. It’s people like him – once again, basically the entire Labor machine – who are responsible for the decline of the party. They’re not going anywhere. They’re just clinging to power.
The other question is, why a gay or lesbian person would want to be “Married”, other than the financial/legal benefits? If they want to publicly affirm their love for each other in front of their friends they can do that already and more cheaply than a full-on wedding. Why would they want to ape the straight community’s rituals? Why would they want to be just like stuffy old straight people, or like Mum and Dad? It would surely be easier to pass legislation that confers non-discriminatory economic/legal rights on all people. If the big problem for straight people is just calling it “marriage”, why not just call it something else?
Of course, legislation that confers equal, non-gender-specific economic/legal rights on all people in whatever combination of relationship, where it is not in law now ought to be.
But as Sir Roger says, it’s none of his bloody business and the government(s) should stand away and get out of our bedrooms. Their job is to manage infrastructure like education, police, power and health and not to legislate morals. After all, being politicians they can hardly claim the high moral ground. In most cases in every party they are among the least moral and most dishonest (let’s just say “sleazy”) members of the community they are supposed to serve. Just look at Tony Abbott.
The Pacific solution didn’t work. We know that. It made too many people go mad (unless, of course that’s the point and Tony Abbot is in favour of that).
Here’s an idea! While Julia and Tony are cat-fighting over who can think up the most brutal, vicious and inhumane treatment of people seeking asylum in a newly hard-hearted Australia (which means a newly cowardly, afraid, and therefore xenophobic {please explain?} Australia) Sir Roger Migently has had his research team develop a unique, elegant and ingenious solution to the twin problems of
1) unwanted boat people invading our shores with their disease, barbarity, terroristic predispositions and, frankly, brownness, and
2) the ruthless cruelty of sweet, moistly brown-eyed “Australian” cattle by Indonesian butchers.
Sir Roger’s team’s elegantly simple solution is …
a) send the (as one is assured by any number of radio shock jocks) queue-jumping, cashed-up, economic refugees to the Indonesian abattoirs where they will get the treatment they deserve for daring to imagine Australia as a generous, civilised, welcoming and friendly country that would honour its international treaty obligations, and
b) send the cattle to Malaysia where they will be looked after with care and loving attention, receive a nice identity tag and won’t be caned or anything unfriendly like that.
What do you think, readers?
P.S. We find it an interesting insight into the Indonesian “mind”-set that the country values the punishment due a human excrescence at least partly responsible for, and certainly and admittedly supportive of, the murder of something above 250 mostly-non-muslim mostly-foreigners at a maximum of 15 years in prison with perks; and the punishment due a stupid young man who was taking drugs out of Indonesia away from their children, and killed no-one, as death by firing squad. By the way, thanks again to our old friend and at least now happily ex-commissioner of the AFP. Mick Keelty, for setting up the sting and setting up the young man to be shot to death.
[By the way, apparently when we say we don't believe in the death penalty we mean we don't believe in it for Australians in Australia but we love it for Indonesians and their guests.]
Please explain to Sir Roger how these corrupt Indonesian politicians, judges, police and bureaucrats (or in other words the Indonesian establishment) are our “friends”. How do we get into bed with people with these values without throwing up? Are we as a nation really that greedy? What do the people who pursue these arrangements take to vomiting when they make their deals? RM (Kt)
