A new term has joined the jargon of the high-tech, media-smart political class: astroturf. It refers not to fake grass but to fake grassroots -- as in outpourings of public opinion made to look like spontaneous communications from the bottom but, in reality, engineered by spin doctors at the top. PNS associate editor Walter Truett Anderson, a political scientist whose books include "Reality Isn't What It Used to Be," is a fellow of the Meridien Institute on global governance.

Last year the politically hip coined a new buzz term: astroturf. In the sports world, astroturf means fake grass. In the world of politics, it means fake grassroots.

Making political astroturf has become big business in Washington, D.C., and the state capitals. The manufacturers are lobbyists, political public-relations firms and non-governmental organizations with political agendas; the factories, more often than not, are "boiler rooms" full of telephones, computers, and articulate hired hands whose job is to locate likely people and groups, whip up their enthusiasm on behalf of the organization's cause, and hand-hold them through the process of taking the desired political action. The result is a barrage of postcards, letters, phone calls and e-mail messages, all of which are dutifully reported as though they were spontaneous expressions of public opinion.

The art of astroturf lies in finding the right prospects, and in mobilizing arguments that will inspire them to act.

In his recent book, "Who Will Tell the People," journalist William Greider showed how this was done by one well-known astroturf manufacturer, a firm called Bonner and Associates, who were representing auto-industry clients during the Senate debate on clean-air legislation in 1990. The amendment being considered would have compelled the auto industry to improve the fuel efficiency of cars -- a move the industry said would also force it to manufacturer smaller vehicles.

Greider reports: "Vans and station wagons, small trucks and high-speed police cruisers, they were told, would cease to exist. The National Sheriff's Association was aroused by the thought of chasing criminals in a Honda Civic. The Nebraska Farm Bureau said rural America would be 'devastated' if farmers tried to pull a trailer loaded with livestock or hay with a Ford Escort." By this same strategy, further support was drummed up among groups representing handicapped persons and senior citizens worried about getting out of small cars with walkers, and among parents who wanted to use station wagons to drive children to school. The effort was focused on six states that had been targeted because their senators were wavering in their vote and might be more inclined to cave in to the auto industry lobbyists if they could later claim they were merely representing the wishes of their constituents.

Money, the mother's milk of politics, is also a great irrigator of astroturf. In the case of the clean air campaign, the Bonner organization not only subsidized telephone calls, but also paid airplane fares to Washington and hired a hall for a joint press conference in which leaders of some of the organizations that had been recruited expressed their common opposition to the proposed amendments.

Viewed from one perspective, the astroturf phenomenon appears to be a rather simple issue: the corruption of democratic politics by the moneyed interests. Greider writes of democracy itself having been "captured" -- "owned in large measure by relatively few interests, much the way that powerful industries came to own regulatory agencies." But, like so many other things in today's complex, shadowy political world, few things are so simple: political operators of all persuasions routinely orchestrate expressions of public opinion so they are not quite what they appear to be on the surface.

Letter-writing and telephone campaigns are regularly engineered by citizen's groups of all kinds. Many have become highly skilled at presenting issues in emotional terms that will stampede people to act, coaching them with suggestions about what to put into their letters or say in their phone calls. Political operatives on both left and right understand the value of finding some politically respectable group of citizens and persuading them to take a stand that has been conveniently prepared for them in advance. For example, when a group of clergymen recently announced their opposition on moral grounds to the patenting of biologically-engineered animals, the action was not inspired by one of their own number but by anti-biotechnology crusader Jeremy Rifkin.

The astroturf phenomenon has become such a familiar part of the political scene for two reasons. One is that public relations skills are now widely diffused. We have become a society of media manipulators. Another is that the organizations once expected to shape public dialogue and mobilize action -- the political parties -- have become irrelevant to the lives of ordinary people, leaving a leadership vacuum that the professional operators and political non-governmental organizations are only too happy to fill.

So everybody plays the game. In the world of high-tech media smart politics, it is increasingly hard to find any grassroots activity that isn't at least part astroturf.