Press Release Journalism

I've done it myself, especially on deadline with space to fill--write a story prompted by a press release or a teleconference.

One still hopes the stories that result are honestly reported. If you read this blog, you already know  occasionally that doesn't happen at the Washington Post.

From Instapundit we learn that Mudville Gazette is writing about a supposed grass-roots effort by active military to petition Congress against the Iraq War--and that it appears to be a classic Astroturf campaign. In this case that means it's organized by professional antiwar groups who then proceed to deceive the public about its origins.

The Post was among the many papers thus deceived. At least we hope it was deceived, in Wednesday's Grass-Roots Group of Troops Petitions Congress for Pullout From Iraq by Ann Scott Tyson. Tyson is our old friend who comically described the National Priorities Project as a "non-partisan research group" in a story last year about nefarious military recruiting practices that magically appeared after an NPP PR blitz. The presence of a real-time "cost of war" clock, NPP publications with frank antiwar titles and a variety of other hints were not sufficient to convince Tyson otherwise (we eventually convinced ombudsman Deborah Howell that the story was a bit flawed).

Tyson's effort last week about the group called Appeal For Redress has nothing along the lines of the New York Sun's Active Duty GIs Being Recruited To Lobby Congress Against War. For example:

A staff member at Fenton Communications who requested anonymity said his company was approached last week by a longtime peace activist and former director of the anti-nuclear proliferation front known as SANE/Freeze, David Cortright, to publicize Appeal for Redress. Mr. Cortright is now president of an Indiana-based nonprofit group, the Fourth Freedom Forum, and his biography on the organization's Web site says he helped raise "more than $300,000 for the Win Without War coalition to avert a preemptive attack on Iraq in 2002–03."

Mudville has a lot more detail, including a quick change in the registration info for the Appeal For Redress website so that it's no longer linked to the Fourth Freedom Forum. Reasons you might not shout that from the rooftops include the following as reported by Discover The Networks.org:

We must ask ourselves why these [9/11] attacks have occurred, and what the United States has done to incur such wrath" - Fourth Freedom Forum President David Cortright

Oh, Cortright is mentioned in Tyson's story alright. Just not that quote, or that form of identification:

Madden said he and Hutton met and learned of the vehicle for expressing their views to Congress when they attended a lecture at the YMCA in Norfolk by David Cortright, the author of "Soldiers in Revolt: GI Resistance During the Vietnam War."

Whoa--close call.

Moving right along,it looks like there are some active and/or recently discharged military who are interested in this group. But the combined multilayered fact-checking resources of Ann Scott Tyson, staff researcher Julie Tate and assorted editors seem to have overlooked the men behind the curtain, and it ain't just Cortright--check out the lengthy Mudville Gazette post. In the meantime, since the Post prints press releases and lets free blogs do the digging, we will ponder what mainstream media's competitive advantage is supposed to be.