Astroturfing and the News

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Former News Anchor Sharyl Attkisson

Some ten years ago, CBS News anchor Sharyl Attkisson was considered an accomplished and trustworthy investigative journalist and correspondent. Around that time, she gave several TED Talks about manipulating media messages. She mentions how companies pay and lobby on different levels to push their corporate interest. Corporate Interest might be paying for ‘the science’, ‘the reviews’, and different layers of firewalls along the route. Astroturfing in that connection is when companies or organizations pay for favorable social media messaging by ‘influencers’ pretending to be regular people, unbiased reviewers, and do-gooders who just happen to be getting money or nonmonetary advantages from corporations for their good work. Some other organizations might fight this through their ‘paid crisis actors’ claiming the danger of this or that. Basically, when people defend the indefensible, they are probably incentivized to do so. They are trying to sell something to somebody.

But Astroturfing is also prevalent in mainstream media. Sharyl goes on to mention Wikipedia, which has set up a system of checks and balances to make sure that the combined brainpower of editors would always lead to a system of truth. This might actually be true about many of the Wikipedia articles out there. However, certain Wikipedia articles are heavily monitored by astronomers. They are monitored and edited by people paid for by corporate interest to make sure false information does not get corrected. This happens most likely with knowledge of Wikipedia Foundation – the media company. On the one hand, they are promising that the power of open-source brain mass prevents this from happening, but on the other hand, their own survival might depend on taking money from certain companies or foundations.

Richmond Standard

We have two very local examples of how corporate interest dominates newspapers these days. The Richmond Standard is a hyper-local, small newspaper across the Bay in Richmond, where Chevron happens to have a refinery. Over the years, Chevron had many violations of air and water regulations. Their refineries are regarded as some of the worst polluters in the country – and pollution is often highest in low-income neighborhoods surrounding them.

“They consider me Voldemort“

So Chevron hired a PR company to help with a more positive sentiment and favorable public opinion. And to make up for all the pollution harming low-income neighborhoods, the Richmond Standard is a perfect tool to point to positive stories how Chevron is giving back to these communities with a few donations here and there. Now Chevron could give the money directly to these communities, but they prefer giving the money to Singer Associates, which is much better in doing the virtue signaling for them. And you might end up with a few more regular people defending Chevron because of their “philanthropy” – which is astroturfing at its finest.
Chevron’s one-man newsroom

Of course, Chevron argues that people can’t call the Richmond Standard a PR Trojan Horse, as Chevron has always been very open about its involvement in this newspaper. Congress, however, wasn’t too impressed by how PR companies help prevent action on climate change.

ClimateRWC

Singer Associates has been running Chevron’s online newspaper since 2014 and must regard it as a success. So much so that Singer used the same concept in Redwood City. Singer has been working with clients like Stanford, Jay Paul, Sims Metal, Recology, Caltrain, Bart, POST, and probably a few more companies and organizations interested in and around Redwood City. Similar to the Chevron PR paper in Richmond, it isn’t too far-fetched to assume that ClimateRWC didn’t give you the most critical or most honest information when any of Singer’s clients were concerned.

One of the projects Singer’s clients wanted was the Harbor View project, but they also used as much public funding as possible to improve car-centric transportation in that area. Projects that make little to no sense when considering climate change, urbanism, or transportation were celebrated by ClimateRWC. Namely, projects like Woodside Interchange, Ferry Service, and Blomquist Extension Bridge are very closely related to the idea of more development in wetland areas. Without a huge Cargill development out there, Ferry Service, highway widening and a very expensive bridge over a wetland area make little to no sense for Redwood City’s current residents. Somebody is still dreaming about the Cargill Saltworks project. Another administration change and that project might be back on the table.

Independence of News

Journalism is often referred to as the Fourth Estate. In a working democracy, newspapers serve an important function of control over the other three powers. But running a newspaper with real journalists is expensive. What happens if somebody with stupid money offers to buy the newspaper and pay for all expenses? How about if the guy owning Amazon buys the Washington Post? What if the Salesforce guy pays for Time Magazine? What if a biotech billionaire owns the LA Times? What if the Epoch Times is run by a Chinese cult? What if Wikipedia is financed through foundations connected to Google, Facebook, Musk, Soros? Is that better or worse than having the boss of a major media company also become mayor of New York City?

“Relying on a benevolent owner to cover expenses, year after year, is not a viable long-term plan.”
Jen Hodson

Richmond does have another newspaper – The Richmond Confidential. This particular online website is run by UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. However, this school was founded in 2009 through a grant from the Ford Foundation. And taking money from the Ford Foundation could bring certain ethical dilemmas with it. Would the Confidential dare to report about Henry Ford’s antisemitic background or the Ford family’s historic and current part in GHG emissions? Would their reporters favor car-centric projects over Active and Public Transportation – like ClimateRWC has? What if the Automotive Industry just pretends to care about the World’s Road Safety effort? Could Berkeley report on it?

Shamed be whoever thinks ill of it

There are plenty of different viewpoints around this. It is often hard to understand the various conflicts of interest. Is a politician getting money because somebody likes their point of view, or is their point of view based on the money they receive? Nobody tells you who is working for whom; the flow of money is often hidden. It could also be very open, of course, to make it look more innocent. People on city councils, planning commissions or school boards could just be salaried employees of Google, Facebook, Stanford, some developers, etc. Or “the salary” could be for sitting on city councils, planning commissions or school boards and taking certain votes.

In a world where no one can be trusted, it is critical to check your sources—and the sources of your sources—and who might pay for the sources of these sources. After her employment situation had changed, Sharyl herself turned somewhat away from her investigative roots and dove into some of the same conspiracy theories she was warning against.

Will Artificial Intelligence fix this problem?

Back when Al Gore and I invented The Internet, we thought it would help people to find information more easily and then make better, more informed decisions. Unfortunately, we were wrong. The Internet did not make humans smarter; humanity dragged the internet down to its level. Will Artificial Intelligence (AI) come to the rescue? Microsoft launched an AI named Tay in 2016 – just one day later, Twitter had turned the AI into a Nazi. It didn’t take long after the release of ChatGPT for users to find out that AI got dumber after more interaction with humanity. While testing it, Artificial Intelligence has lied to me so many times now, apparently AI is “hallucinating” way more than people know.

Google’s previous CEO Eric Schmidt thinks AI might make things worse. After some consolidations, the biggest players in an AI-driven social media world might be Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and Twitter. Currently, these companies benefit the most from all the money spent on real and false advertising, including fake news, influencing, astroturfing, firewall advocacy, TikTok challenges, and whatever the future holds. If these companies aren’t willing to clean up their act today, why would their AI tools – based on much of the astroturfed social media input – do any better? It is way more likely – AI ethics be damned – that the AI will be optimized to use even more water and electricity to make even more money for these AI companies. Somebody has to pay for the truth. And if the truth doesn’t sell, you just go the other route.

“Money makes the world go round.“
Liza Minnelli, Cabaret

More Information

U.S. Congress: The Role of Public Relations Firms in Preventing Action on Climate Change
Harward: Who owns Mainstream Media?
Columbia: Journalism Review
UC Berkeley: Richmond Confidential
Sharyl Attkisson: Astroturfing (youtube)
Sharyl Attkisson: Fake News (youtube)
BigCommerce: Why your business should avoid Astroturfing

Editor’s Note: The views and opinions expressed in all blog posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Redwood City Pulse or its staff.