Cut-and-Paste
Propaganda Infiltrates Opinion Pages
By Paul Farhi
Reader, beware! Some of America’s newspapers have become
unwitting conduits for campaign propaganda. Thanks to some nifty Internet technology, the campaigns of President Bush and John F. Kerry are making it easy for their supporters to pass off the campaigns’ talking points as just another concerned citizen’s opinion. Pro-Bush or pro-Kerry letters bearing identical language are flooding letters-to-the-editor columns.
The Repository has had to resort to doing Google searches on key phrases from submitted letters to the editor. That, and they now call to ask you if the letter is entirely in your own words and whether it uses any other source. Plagiarizers (or cutters/pasters) are banned from the letters page for a year.
Harsh, but it was apparently necessary.