Saturday, September 08, 2007
Propaganda 101 #3
Astroturf - Fake Grass Roots Effort
On August 23 2007, the Washington Post carried an article titled "Left, Right Proxies Push on Iraq"
The proxy fight over the Iraq war grew more crowded yesterday with the launch of Freedom's Watch, a lobbying group that will mount a $15 million advertising and grass-roots campaign to maintain Republican support for President Bush's policies.
Freedom's Watch's ads include images such as this one, and they emphasize the sacrifice of U.S. troops and their families.
You can read the rest of the story here.
This propaganda effort has launched a number of their ads on YouTube
In one of their videos the continue to claim that Iraq attacked us on 9/11, even though that claim has been disproved time and time again.
In another video, a mother who lost her son in Iraq claims that we are making progress in Iraq and that if we give up now, we would be throwing away all the efforts that thousands of men like her son gave in trying to give freedom to Iraq. I thought everyone knows that Iraq does not have self-rule and that their constitution was designed by oil men like J. Paul Bremmer to allow the US to take their oil.
In the third video, the group claims that attacks on congressman Craig were made due to the progress he sees in Iraq. Congressman Craig was criticized due to his harsh anti-gay stance and then himself getting caught soliciting sex from an under-cover officer at an airport.
All the ads come across to seem as if they were sponsored by a grass-roots movement. Such fake grass-roots movements have been termed "astro-turf"
# posted by Konrad Roeder @ 9/08/2007 05:22:00 PM
