An email petition claims that Congress is about to cut funding to public media outlets PBS and NPR and that circulating the petition will help save them.

See the petition here.

Set the Way-Back machine for 1995: the Republicans had just won a majority in the House of Representatives to go with their majority in the Senate and political utopia beckoned to them.

Words like 'revolution' were bandied about and no political sacred cow seemed safe.

The Republican majority was particularly eager to reduce the size and influence of government. A time honored tactic of politicians is to offer up a 'trial balloon,' make a policy proposal in the press to gauge public reaction. If the reaction is not positive, the politician can back away from the proposal without investing too much political capital it.

Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich floated a trial balloon to cut off federal funding of PBS and NPR in January, 1995 saying, "I personally would privatize all of them" on ABC's 'This Week.' At stake was PBS's $200 million federal subsidy.

As a political gambit, it was a failure. Public reaction was quick and overwhelmingly negative. It also motivated two college freshmen at the University of Northern Colorado to send out an email petition to gather 'signatures' in protest.

After a few weeks of bluster Gingrich and the House Republicans quietly dropped their plans to cut off public broadcasting and moved on to other political matters.

But the email petition did not stop. It circulated in 1996. And 1997. And 1998, 1999 and 2000. It's still circulating now in 2001 even though no political threat to PBS and NPR has been mounted since 1995. But many of the variants of the 'Save PBS/NPR' email petition still bear the email address of the University of Northern Colorado students.

Are email petitions ever an effective tool of political protest? The Urban Legend Zeitgeist would have to say, no, by themself they are a waste of perfectly good electrons.

How does a politician judge communication from constituents? Here's what one politician, Senator Dick Durbin (Democrat, Illinois), says:

"The most powerful form of communication from constituents is the face-to-face comment. "Then it's a personal letter or phone call. After that is a huge dropoff to preprinted postcards, and well below that is the paper petition."

As you can see, email petitions don't figure in Durbin's list.

Durbin's scale of political importance of communication is graduated by the effort put into communication. The more effort a constituent puts into communication, the more importance a politician attaches to it. Forwarding an email petition rates well below paper petitions on the effort scale.

There is another political axiom in play here: all politics is local. Why should a politician care about a petition, email or paper, that is signed by a people that don't vote in his or her district?

• PBS Should Spend Money on Privatization, Says Gingrich from The Tech.
• When you get an e-mail petition, think delete from the Chicago Tribune
• Do e-mail petitions work? from Salon.com
• The Case of the Pointless Petition from About.com

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