Two smears against Governor Palin, one on YouTube, is a proven false rumor about Palin that she belonged to an Alaskan separatist movement was professionally prepared by a PR firm linked to the Obama campaign. When several blog watchdog groups found this out the video was pulled from YouTube. The voice-over artist on this video has worked directly for the Barack Obama campaign (his name hasn't been revealed yet). The PR firm being linked to this is headed by David Axelrod. The firm is named AKP&D Message & Media and has a write up in the March '08 issue of Business Week. His Chicago-based political consultancy business, ASK Public Strategies, is in the same building as AKP&D, but it's unclear if ASK is owned and run by them; they've refused to release their business information. Axelrod is Obama's chief campaign adviser. Another story to have surfaced is that Palin supports gay rights, which was allegedly from an anti-gay right wing group. Sarah Palin Supports Gay Rights is the web site that carried this news. A reporter by the name Jim Treacher followed the links to the source of the page and ended up at FightTheSmears.com, the official Barack Obama website that's supposed to be defending him against smears. The "Jesus was a community organizer" "Pilate was a governor" statement that got spread all over has been linked to "a reader" on the Daily Kos, an extreme left wing blogsite, and was astroturfed.
Monday, September 22, 2008
Astroturfing and Sockpuppets
"Astroturfing" is the attempt to create the feeling of a grassroots movement by planting stories around the web through the use of paid or volunteer spammers, when what is really happening is that a campaign or supporters of a campaign is putting out misinformation or just out and out lies. The online characters that put their names to these are called "sockpuppets".
Two smears against Governor Palin, one on YouTube, is a proven false rumor about Palin that she belonged to an Alaskan separatist movement was professionally prepared by a PR firm linked to the Obama campaign. When several blog watchdog groups found this out the video was pulled from YouTube. The voice-over artist on this video has worked directly for the Barack Obama campaign (his name hasn't been revealed yet). The PR firm being linked to this is headed by David Axelrod. The firm is named AKP&D Message & Media and has a write up in the March '08 issue of Business Week. His Chicago-based political consultancy business, ASK Public Strategies, is in the same building as AKP&D, but it's unclear if ASK is owned and run by them; they've refused to release their business information. Axelrod is Obama's chief campaign adviser. Another story to have surfaced is that Palin supports gay rights, which was allegedly from an anti-gay right wing group. Sarah Palin Supports Gay Rights is the web site that carried this news. A reporter by the name Jim Treacher followed the links to the source of the page and ended up at FightTheSmears.com, the official Barack Obama website that's supposed to be defending him against smears. The "Jesus was a community organizer" "Pilate was a governor" statement that got spread all over has been linked to "a reader" on the Daily Kos, an extreme left wing blogsite, and was astroturfed.
Two smears against Governor Palin, one on YouTube, is a proven false rumor about Palin that she belonged to an Alaskan separatist movement was professionally prepared by a PR firm linked to the Obama campaign. When several blog watchdog groups found this out the video was pulled from YouTube. The voice-over artist on this video has worked directly for the Barack Obama campaign (his name hasn't been revealed yet). The PR firm being linked to this is headed by David Axelrod. The firm is named AKP&D Message & Media and has a write up in the March '08 issue of Business Week. His Chicago-based political consultancy business, ASK Public Strategies, is in the same building as AKP&D, but it's unclear if ASK is owned and run by them; they've refused to release their business information. Axelrod is Obama's chief campaign adviser. Another story to have surfaced is that Palin supports gay rights, which was allegedly from an anti-gay right wing group. Sarah Palin Supports Gay Rights is the web site that carried this news. A reporter by the name Jim Treacher followed the links to the source of the page and ended up at FightTheSmears.com, the official Barack Obama website that's supposed to be defending him against smears. The "Jesus was a community organizer" "Pilate was a governor" statement that got spread all over has been linked to "a reader" on the Daily Kos, an extreme left wing blogsite, and was astroturfed.
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2 comments:
Hi. Thanks for the mention, but I'm not a reporter and I didn't find the connection between the Palin site and Fight the Smears. I think you're on the right track, but I just don't want people giving me credit for the work of others. Thanks again!
Are the Jim Treacher that has shown up as the person that exposed this? If so, are you a blogger, lawyer, were you working with someone? I wrote this just to get this out to my small corner of the world, friends that don't have the time I do to follow up on stuff. Thanks for the info.
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