In a letter I received today from Ohio Republican Party Chairman Robert T. Bennett, he promised that the Ohio Republican party “will initiate letters-to-the-editor, phone calls to local radio stations, website postings” whenever a Democratic presidential candidate appears in Ohio media.
Given the Republican Party record of planting identical, national party-written letters to the editor with fraudulent claims of local authorship in newspapers across the country, we should consider Robert T. Bennett’s letter to be a warning. If you see a letter to the editor in an Ohio newspaper, and if that letter is disparaging of a Democratic presidential candidate, you’ll have to ask yourself whether it is actually an original letter written by the person in whose name it appears. GOP Chair Robert T. Bennett has warned us that it might be something else altogether. But personal questioning of these letters isn’t enough. We’ll have to check those letters and make it known when a piece of fake-grassroots astroturf shoots up, so that coverage of presidential elections in Ohio remains as free of unethical, manipulative shenanigans as possible.
