(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.