In letters to the editor, too many copycats?

Anyone with an ardent desire to show support for US Supreme Court nominee John Roberts will find a useful tool in the Focus on the Family website. There, a "letter writing wizard" encourages visitors to choose from a selection of paragraphs to copy and paste into a letter to send to newspapers for publication. The website even includes a listing of papers throughout the country, so that a user can compose a 200-word letter, sign his or her name, and e-mail it to media outlets in a matter of minutes.

It may seem too easy to actually work. But if past efforts of Focus on the Family are any indication, the letter-writing campaign will achieve what the conservative advocacy group hopes it will - seeing its position repeated in print.

The group's recent campaign to end the Senate filibuster, for example, resulted in at least 31 such letters being published in daily papers across the country, including the Baltimore Sun, the Arizona Republic, and the St. Louis Post Dispatch - twice. It claims to have succeeded in getting hundreds of letters into print on different issues.

Focus on the Family is one of several advocacy organizations to use a technique called astroturfing, a play on the idea of fake grass-roots support. Newspaper editors say they first noticed the mass arrival of form letters about five years ago, although the practice of signing one's name to a newspaper-bound letter written by someone else is probably as old as newspapers themselves.

But astroturfing reached new heights during last year's presidential campaign, editors say, and it continues to thrive. The practice is no longer an occasional prank or attempt to shed light on a particular issue, but a common tactic used by groups across the political spectrum.

With many of those groups seeing their memberships growing, they find more and more people willing to dash off a copied letter.

"It is a serious and deeply bothering threat to the integrity of newspaper letters columns," says Frank Partsch, editorial page editor of the Omaha World Herald and a former editor with the National Conference of Editorial Writers (NCEW). "The integrity of our letters columns depends on the spontaneous discussion of readers. We don't operate these columns as bulletin boards for political movements or business promotion or special-interest crusades of any kind."

One of the more successful groups at placing letters in newspapers is MoveOn Political Action, the liberal advocacy nonprofit also known as MoveOn.org.

The organization claims that more than 35,000 letters to the editor were sent through its website pushing for the firing of White House political adviser Karl Rove. Nearly 60,000 letters went out during its campaign to prevent Senate Republicans from ending the use of filibusters. Ben Brandzel, MoveOn's advocacy director, estimates that 1 in 5 of those letters was published.

MoveOn doesn't explicitly ask its members to copy portions of its letters. In fact, its website contains an algorithm that prevents an identical letter from reaching the same newspaper. But the group does give a list of talking points, and those who wish to send letters frequently copy those in their own communications.

After MoveOn launched a letter campaign in June calling for a US timetable for leaving Iraq, at least 45 letters containing verbatim portions of its talking points appeared in newspapers across the country, including the Los Angeles Times, the Miami Herald, and the Seattle Post- Intelligencer.

Letter-to-the-editor campaigns are central to MoveOn's efforts, says Mr. Brandzel.

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