Zach Exley

Zach Exley is a specialist in 'grassroots' internat campaigning. He worked for the Kerry campaign against George W. Bush. In 2005 he worked in the Labour Party election team.

Zack Exley

The 'Garbage man', Zack Exley

Previously, Zack Exley was Organizing Director at MoveOn.org. Prior to working for MoveOn, he was the creator of Internet parody webites, including the gwbush.com site and a cnndn.com, a financial parody site that was closed following a successful lawsuit by the CNN cable news network. He worked as a union organizer for five years around the Midwest and South in the mid 90's.

In February 2005, it was revealed that the British Labour party hired Exley, and:

Labour has hired an American spin doctor known as the "garbage man" for publishing pictures doctored to show George Bush taking cocaine. The party faces controversy over "dirty tricks" after it said Zack Exley, 35, is working full-time on its campaign.
He is notorious in Washington as an expert in the use of the internet to spread black propaganda. President Bush was moved to call him a "garbage man". Other stunts included fake photographs of Mr Bush smoking a joint and spoof articles by him.
—Francis Elliott, "No 10 in new dirty tricks row over role of US 'garbage man'", The Independent, Feb. 27, 2005.

Blair was advised by a whole raft of US spin doctors in 2005, but unlike the Tories this was kept largely out of the news during the campaign. Democratic Party volunteers from the United States joined Blair's campaign, including Clinton's pollster Stan Greenberg, a veteran of previous Blair campaigns; Zack Exley, who directed John Kerry's online campaign; Karen Hicks, a key organizer of Howard Dean's New Hampshire campaign; and longtime Democratic party adviser Bob Shrum, who ran Kerry's presidential campaign.^[1]

External links

• Early article by Exley on how the Web is changing political organizing: Zack Exley, "Organizing Online" Mother Jones, December 9, 2000.
• Aparna Kumar, "Will CNN Site Spoof Crash?" Wired News, February 1, 2001.
• For the story on Exley's CNNdn parody, visit the Internet Archive: http://web.archive.org/web/20021201192124/http://www.neirp.com/

Resources

• William Dinan Undercover in New Labour Spinwatch, 24 May 2005.
• Francis Elliott, "No 10 in new dirty tricks row over role of US 'garbage man'", The Independent, Feb. 27, 2005. Also at [2]

^ 'Britons Vote With War in Iraq on Minds' Thursday May 5, 2005 10:16 PM, AP Photo LPE105 By ROBERT BARR Associated Press Writer, http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-4985606,00.html

• http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/01/30/new_labours_internet_dirty_tricks/
• http://www.spinwatch.org/modules.php?name=NukeWrap&page=/plog/blog_index.php&height=5000