Turf wars?

Abstract

The study analyzes professional disagreements over the value of `prepared' letters to the editor, or pre-written letters that supporters of advocacy campaigns can sign and submit to newspapers as their own opinions. Journalists derisively call such letters `astroturf' and disdain the `fake grass-roots' nature of such letters; advocates suggest such `sample letters' help more people to get involved in public discourse. Through an open-ended textual analysis of texts from both camps, the author finds a rhetorical struggle between the two groups that forms a hegemonic concordance through which letters-to-the-editor forums are seen more as battlefields to be defended or conquered than as sites for consensus-seeking debate, which in the end feeds or reflects the hostile and monopolistic nature of modern public discourse.