Not long ago a letter to the editor required three things: time, an idea, and the ability to put it into words. All three impediments have been swept away. Once American bedrock, today a letter to the editor is often a chunk of computer-generated boilerplate.
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I read the message on January 24, waited a few days, then did a computer search of the nation’s newspapers. The canned language hadn’t overrun the letters pages of America. But like spam, it sometimes got through.
I found the GOP boilerplate posted online in close to its entirety as a letter from a reader in Saint Charles to the Kane County Chronicle and as a letter from a reader in Marseilles, Illinois, to the Times of Ottawa. The reaction on the Times site was quick and fierce. The first poster to comment sneered, “I don’t believe our President has a clear plan on anything” and called Bush’s State of the Union speech “political hog wash.” The second asked, “Are you talking about George Hitler Bush?”
At GOP.com the text is not just standardized but calcified. The rhetoric I found on the “Write News Editors” page hadn’t been coined to hail Bush’s State of the Union speech–it had been dusted off. My search for key phrases took me to bartcopnation.com, where a gloating “CarbonDate” was fielding virtual high fives from other posters who admired his detective work. CarbonDate had spotted a letter in his hometown Green Bay paper that claimed Bush “has a clear plan for victory in Iraq,” that “we are making tremendous progress towards this objective,” and that withdrawal, “as some Democrats in Washington propose, would send a dangerous signal.” CarbonDate explained that he’d sniffed the telltale odor of “Astroturf” (as distinct from grass roots), had tracked the same “freshly fertilized GOP talking points” to papers in San Antonio, Lafayette, Indiana, and Lawrence, Kansas, and had identified the common source–GOP.com.
She continues, “I don’t think it’s necessarily that these are people trying to be malicious. They’re thankful some organization is trying to help them–‘Gosh, they’re giving me good words to put together.’ But in the end I’d rather have a letter that’s not the best written but is original.”
