Industrial Strength Astroturf
via dKossack Morgan Sandlin, an account in Salon by a Dutch reporter in the tradition of Nellie Bly, who went undercover with the McCain campaign and was assigned to write glurgy astroturf fictions to be forwarded around as genuine letters from ordinary Americans that would be sent in to newspapers in order to sway public sentiment by peer pressure.
(Long-timers may recall that it was encountering a sample of higher-grade astroturf, the WND essay blaming the Shuttle crashes on "Environmentalists" - which reminded me oddly of an earlier fiction, the claim that DDT didn't really harm birds, which was piped into conservative Catholic papers in the '90s - and which turned out to be by an Olin Chair [of BS] - that is, a professor paid by the former makers of DDT - that helped get me into political blogging.)
(Long-timers may recall that it was encountering a sample of higher-grade astroturf, the WND essay blaming the Shuttle crashes on "Environmentalists" - which reminded me oddly of an earlier fiction, the claim that DDT didn't really harm birds, which was piped into conservative Catholic papers in the '90s - and which turned out to be by an Olin Chair [of BS] - that is, a professor paid by the former makers of DDT - that helped get me into political blogging.)