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Daniel Weintraub: The Internet might catch big parties napping

(Published Aug. 30, 2001)

When the nation's largest teachers union gathered at the Los Angeles Convention Center July 3 to consider a proposal to make schools safer for gay and lesbian students, hundreds of protesters rallied outside to denounce the resolution.
The picketers' presence seemed to influence the National Education Association delegates, who set aside the controversial resolution and voted instead to establish a task force to study the issue. But the protest was important for another reason: It was the final link in a long chain that demonstrates the Internet's potential as a tool to generate political activism.
While the major political parties have struggled to use the Internet to their advantage, grass-roots groups with enthusiasm beyond their budgets are finding that electronic politics can be a powerful force. The old and inefficient telephone tree is giving way to e-mail lists and computers that can send a letter or news alert to thousands of people in seconds. It is a trend that might reshape politics, bringing more people into a newly decentralized -- and democratized -- process just when many experts have concluded that the nation suffers from a near-terminal case of apathy.
Many of those who attended the Los Angeles rally last month, for example, were drawn there by e-mail alerts from the conservative Capitol Resource Institute, which organized the event.
The institute heard about the gay and lesbian resolution from Focus on the Family, a Washington, D.C., Christian group that has a Web site, an electronic newsletter and a daily radio show.
Focus on the Family first learned of the resolution from the Cybercast News Service, an electronic news organization funded by conservative foundations as an alternative to the mainstream press.
How did Cybercast know about the proposal? From an exclusive report in the Communique, an electronic publication of the Education Intelligence Agency. The EIA is an impressive sounding outfit that in reality is one man with a telephone, a personal computer and a high-speed Internet connection in an office in his suburban Sacramento home.
That man is Michael Antonucci, and he is on the cutting edge of what will probably be a wave of Internet-based political activism. Part reporter, part researcher, Antonucci is a throwback to the early days of the Republic, when journalism was primarily the province of political partisans. It is people such as he, on the right and the left, who supply the activists with the information they use to prompt interested citizens to get involved.
Antonucci has found his niche as a full-time watchdog of the country's teachers unions. His newsletter, published each Monday except when he's on vacation, is read by some of the top policy-makers in the Bush administration, education reporters for mainstream newspapers, conservative foes of the unions -- and the union officials it so often lambastes. The newsletter is free, but it serves as a loss leader to promote Antonucci's business as a researcher and consultant.
He's a journalist with a point of view, says Kathleen Lyons, a spokeswoman for the National Education Association, who confirms that Antonucci's work is widely circulated within the union. He's much more of an advocate than he is a journalist. He writes well and he gets his stuff out.
Antonucci, 42, a former Air Force navigator and registered Libertarian, says he has a personal list of about 3,500 people. Each of those people, he says, have their own lists. It's a little bit hard for me to get a handle on how far it's spread.
Karen Holgate, policy director for the Capitol Resource Institute, did not know that Antonucci was the original source of the tip that led to her rally in Los Angeles. She sent a version of the item to a few thousand people, who in turn forwarded it all over the country.
The Internet is the lifeblood of what we're doing, she says. People who have never been involved before can now be politically active from inside their family room, wherever their computer is.
None of this is a surprise to Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation and a longtime advocate of using the Internet in politics. Alexander herself is a mix of reporter and activist, sniffing out developments and distributing the news to a list of opinion leaders and regular folks.
The grass-roots activists have been honing our skills with e-mail newsletters for a number of years now, she says. The mainstream parties are just beginning to catch on. They don't see the value in exponential marketing, the idea that you tell two friends and each of them tells two friends. The underdogs are doing it a lot better than the big dogs.
This is a whole new world forming out there below the radar of American politics. Guerrilla journalists, alternative news services and political activists are feeding off one another to break down old barriers that made politics the private game of an elite few. Soon this world is going to latch on to a big issue and explode into the mainstream. The big dogs will be caught napping.

The Bee's Daniel Weintraub can be reached at (916) 321-1914 or at dweintraub@sacbee.com.

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