by Sheldon Rampton
At the same time that corporations fret about the threat of Internet activism, they have become Internet activists themselves. Jack Bonner, one of the gurus of corporate "grassroots" PR, now offers his own website design service to assist clients such as the Western Fuels Association, which represents the coal industry and coal-burning electric utilities. To generate e-mail opposing a global warming treaty, Bonner designed www.globalwarmingcost.org. Between its launch in September 1997 and its discontinuation in May 2001, Bonner said, the website "generated literally tens of thousands of e-mails in support of our client's position."
Upon visiting the site, visitors would answer a few questions about their zip code and profession. The website used the answers to generate customized letters to each member of the visitor's Congressional delegation, saying, for example, "I am a farmer which you represent. I ask you to reject any effort to stiffen the United Nations Global Climate Change Treaty."
"How do you recruit these proven activists? By creating an activation Web site, not an informational Web site ... a site that exists solely to create activists."
--grassroots PR guru Jack Bonner
There was no way, of course, to send a message supporting the treaty. Visitors to the website only got to choose two things: their occupation and the amount they were currently spending on gasoline, electricity, heating oil and natural gas. The website would then spit out letters to elected officials with customized amounts plugged in estimating how much the constituent's fuel bill would rise if a climate change treaty was passed.
What was the methodology behind Bonner's estimates of fuel cost increases? The website didn't say. Explaining things would be a waste of time, according to Bonner's strategy for recruiting "online activists."
"The first reason to go to cyberspace is to recruit activists, many of whom you would not be able to find through other means," Bonner explained in a September 1998 article for Campaigns and Elections magazine. "In the last 14 years, we have explored, I am confident, every method short of voodoo to recruit credible, quality supporters on a great variety of issues. And in all this time, and all these campaigns, we have never found a more cost-effective method of recruiting activists than the Web. . . . How do you recruit these proven activists? By creating an activation Web site, not an informational Web site . . . a site that exists solely to create activists. A site that does not pretend to present a detailed wonklike discussion of the merits and intricacies of an issue, but a site that, in a very upfront manner, is an advocacy site, geared solely to recruit activists."
No Free Lunch
By "credible, quality supporters," Bonner means people who are "willing to put their name and address within the communication." Grassroots PR firms have already tried the "spamming" technique that internet marketers use to send identical e-mails to millions of internet users. In 1998, however, Bonner commissioned a study showing that the average congressional office disregards 80% of the e-mail it gets because the messages are not from constituents or lack names and addresses.
In March 1998, Juno Online Services announced the launching of the "Juno Advocacy Network," adding yet another twist to the corporate takeover of the internet. Like Bonner's site, it helps companies target people who are willing to let them put their name and address on political correspondence.
For years, Juno has been in the business of offering "free" e-mail services to its 4.6 million subscribers. In life, however, few things are truly free, and Juno is no exception. When subscribers sign up, they provide the company with detailed demographic information such as their age, income and interests. Juno uses the information to target subscribers with on-line advertising. Through the Juno Advocacy Network, it also tries to turn them into political activists.
"Through the use of detailed demographic and psychographic data collected from all Juno members when they create their Juno accounts, organizations will be able to target precisely the subset of Juno's subscriber base to whom a given issue is relevant," announced a Juno news release on March 31, 1998.
Juno president Charles Ardai touted the service as a step into cyber-democracy, the creation of "an unprecedented dialogue among all participants in public affairs. Citizens can communicate with their senators and representatives; organizations focused on certain issues can communicate with the citizens affected by those issues; and there can be real accountability, as citizens are kept informed by e-mail about how their representatives are voting on the issues that matter to them. Before the Internet, establishing this sort of web of instant, efficient communication would have been impractical. Today, it's the cutting edge of participatory democracy."
As with Bonner's websites, however, the "participation" in this "participatory democracy" is controlled from above by Juno and the companies that buy its lists.
Flash Floods
The internet has also created a new type of political activism, dubbed "flash campaigning" by the
New York Times. Focused on hot news topics and making use of e-mail chain letters and online petititions, flash campaigns can be created quickly and reach hundreds of thousands--even millions--of people in a matter of days.
Responding to the Bush/Gore election deadlock, for example, partisans for each candidate had dueling websites up and running within days after November 7. The conservative site, named www.AlGoreLost.org, urged visitors to join a petition supporting Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris in her attempt to block a manual vote recount. Meanwhile, at www.ActForChange.com, the pro-Gore petitioned that recounts must continue and that Harris should recuse herself.
There is often more to websites like these than meets the eye. Although they appeal to public interest in an immediate hot-button issue, the designers of these campaigns realize that the short-term campaign is largely a recruitment vehicle to collect names for future appeals designed to play on their political sympathies. The pro-Gore website, for example, was affiliated with Working Assets, the long-distance phone service provider which markets itself as a supporter of progressive causes. At the bottom of the form where petitioners are asked to provide their name, address and other contact information, a statement appears noting that "ActForChange/Working Assets does not sell, trade or release your e-mail address to others," but adds, "We may e-mail you information in the future about Working Assets."
Working Assets deserves credit at least for disclosing how it plans to use the information it collects, and for including a detailed privacy policy as part of the website. The same cannot be said, however, about AlGoreLost, which failed to disclose that it was run by the Eberle Communications Group, owned by direct-marketing guru Bruce Eberle. The website also failed to provide any information about its policies regarding privacy and possible future usage of the personal information which website visitors disclosed when they added their names and e-mail addresses to the petition.
Eberle, who got his start raising money for Ronald Reagan in the mid-1970s, describes his company as "one of the oldest and largest direct-mail fund-raising operations in America." In 1999, his firms mailed more than 40 million solication letters, mostly on behalf of conservative causes.
His clients have included Pat Buchanan's 1992 campaign for president; Stacey Koon, one of the Los Angeles police officers convicted in the 1991 beating of Rodney King; Ollie North during his losing Senate bid in 1994; Paula Jones, the former Arkansas state worker whose lawsuit accused President Bill Clinton of sexual harassment; and conservative Missouri Senator John Ashcroft (now U.S. attorney general).
Dishonoring the Dead
Eberle's fund-raising activities have also drawn repeated charges of ethical misconduct, the most notorious of which was a campaign in the 1980s that used phony prisoner-of-war sightings to solicit money from veterans for former Air Force Col. Jack Bailey's "Operation Rescue," which claimed to be on the verge of saving American POWs still being held in Vietnam. One solicitation took the form of a "handwritten letter" signed by Bailey, who claimed to be writing from aboard his rescue ship, the Akuna III. "Please excuse the handwriting. But I'm writing at a makeshift desk on the deck of the Akuna III," the letter read. "The China sea is tossing and rolling." In reality, the letter had been written by Eberle, not by Bailey, and the Akuna III (which was not even seaworthy) had been docked for more than two years.
Eberle's direct mail appeals enabled Bailey's group to raise $2.2 million between 1985 and 1995, of which 88% was actually spent on "fund-raising expenses" instead of rescue missions (and of course, no rescue mission ever actually succeeded in rescuing anyone). When these facts surfaced during a Senate committee hearing, the revelations prompted outrage from Vietnam veterans on the committee including John Kerry, who termed the operation "fraudulent, disingenous and grotesque."
Republican Senator John McCain offered similar sentiments. "In my opinion they are criminals and some of the most craven, most cynical and most despicable human beings to ever run a scam," McCain said. "They have preyed on the anguish of families, and helped to turn an issue which should unite all Americans into an issue that often divides us."
Eberle simply shrugged off these charges, claiming to have "one of the highest reputations for integrity in the business."
Two-Bit Operation
One of Eberle's more recent gimmicks was a website called
2bits4conservatives.com, through which he promised to contribute 25 cents to the "conservative cause of choice" for each visitor who visits his site. "It may only be two bits, but if enough conservatives send my quarters it could add up to real money," he stated.
The real purpose of 2bits4conservatives, of course, was to collect names for future fund-raising appeals. In order to give a quarter to one of these causes, visitors to 2bits4conservatives gave Eberle their name and e-mail address. By signing up, they also indicated which cause they would be likely to support in future appeals.The list of causes to which Eberle promised to "give" his quarters were his own clients such as the Linda Tripp Defense Fund; the Freedom Alliance, run by Oliver North; the anti-environmental Mountain States Legal Foundation and the Southeastern Legal Foundation; Radio America, an all-conservative nationwide network of radio stations; and the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, which purports to defend police officers who have been unfairly accused of brutality.
Endorsements for Sale
Eberle also owns the Omega List Company, which manages and rents mailing lists of potential donors. Beginning in mid-2000, it began selling similar services for Internet fund-raising, boasting that it is "a pioneer in the endorsement e-mail field."
The Omega List website (www.omegalist.com) features a presentation by conservative talk radio personality Blanquita Cullum, explaining how "endorsement e-mail" blurs the boundaries between paid advertising, opinion polling and on-air talk.
"You do what you do best!" Cullum says. "Get on the air and talk to your listeners! Drive them to your website by conducting a daily survey or a contest on the topic of your choosing." Eberle's "polling wizard" software then captures the names of respondents so that they can be hit up for money.
"What happens next is a cakewalk," Cullum says. "Omega will call you with an opportunity to send an endorsement e-mail to your list . . . and receive a royalty for lending your name to a cause, organization or product you believe in. . . . Omega gives you their specialized software absolutely FREE and presents you with an opportunity to earn an extra $25,000 or more annually."
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On Eberle's website, talk radio personality Blanquita Cullum explains how she makes money by endorsing conservative causes. |
Be Counted For a Sucker
Another conservative direct-mail fundraiser, Richard Viguerie, has also gotten into Internet appeals. Sometimes labeled the "reigning dean of direct-mail fund-raising for the conservative right," Viguerie has been a conservative organizer since the Goldwater campaign of 1964. He has raised money to campaign for prayer in the public schools, Ollie North and the Nicaraguan contras, and has opposed gay rights, abortion rights and "weird art." His clients also include Judicial Watch, an organization that spent the 1990s attempting to insinuate that Clinton was responsible for the murder of individuals including Vincent Foster and former Commerce Secretary Ron Brown.
Viguerie's company is American Target Advertising, based in Fairfax, Virginia. Like Eberle, it has a history of questionable fund-raising practices. American Target was investigated in 1994 by U.S. postal inspectors for giving a group of elderly people just $93,000 of $ 1.3 million raised during a campaign drive to "save Medicare."
Viguerie's Internet operations have included ConservativeHQ.com and a website called BeCounted.com, which says its mission is "to empower Joe or Jane Sixpack again. BeCounted.com gives Americans the power to state their views and opinions, and gives decision-makers the means to hear what they have to say."
On the surface, BeCounted.com looks like an online opinion poll, but like Eberle's operation, the real purpose of the polling is to collect names and addresses for use in fund-raising campaigns. Visitors to BeCounted.com are asked to submit their opinions on a hot issue of the day, but the survey itself is meaningless, since there is no attempt to ensure that the result reflects any kind of representative sampling of the public.
To participate in the surveys, BeCounted.com requires visitors to register by providing their name, saying it needs this information to "prevent someone from 'cheating' in one or our online petitions or polls by voting more often than the rules allow"--even though the surveys are unscientific and are not used for anything other than enabling Viguerie to collect names.
If you sign up, BeCounted.com will start bombarding you with e-mail pitches. Some of the e-mails are simply commercial spam, offering "incredible deals on wireless products and services" or "a win-win offer from Rogaine." Most, however, combine right-wing activism with opportunities to part with your money, inviting you for example to "sign a thank you card to Jesse Helms"; "help the Boy Scouts against political correctness" (by donating to scout troops that continue to discriminate against gays); "celebrate Earth Day by countering radical environmentalist propaganda"; or buy books, videos and audio tapes about topics ranging from the Chinese communist threat to Fox commentator Bill O'Reilly's latest musings.
