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Ellie Light...
El-light...
Elite.
coincidence?
Someone or something stinks!!
1/24/2010
Still More Astroturfing: Gloria Elle and Jan Chen Write the Same Anti-Republican, Pro-Obama Letter; UPDATED: Two More Pairings Found; UPDATED AGAIN: Four Pairings Total, and One Is a Triplet!; UPDATED AGAIN with Countless Other Examples
Filed under: General — Patterico @ 1:06 pm
Now that people are paying attention, the Astroturfers are coming out of the woodwork:
Jan Chen of Seattle writes to the Northwest Asian Weekly (a small Asian paper serving the Seattle area):
As one listens to the Republican anger over health care reform, one can imagine an anti-government protester cheerfully paying premiums on insurance policies that drop you after you make a claim, or happily sauntering out of an emergency room that denied them treatment because of a coverage problem. One can imagine a town hall sign-waver enthusiastically forking over most of their pay to bill collectors after suffering a catastrophic injury, thinking, “Wow, the free market system is great.”
Meanwhile, Gloria Elle writes to the Baltimore Chronicle — on the same page as Mark Spivey and Ellie Light:
As one listens to the Republican anger over health care reform, one can imagine an anti-government protester cheerfully paying premiums on insurance policies that cancel you for making a claim, or happily sauntering out of an emergency room that denied them treatment because of a coverage problem. One can imagine a town-hall sign-waver enthusiastically forking over most of their pay to bill collectors after suffering a catastrophic injury, thinking, “Wow, the free market system is great.”
Jan Chen and Gloria Elle certainly have a similar writing style, don’t they?
By Edwin Chen
Jan. 24 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama has tapped David Plouffe, who managed Obama’s White House campaign in 2008, to help embattled Democrats in this year’s mid-term congressional elections.
“We want all our best players on the field for 2010, and he is the best of the best when it comes to marrying strategy and tactics,” said David Axelrod, a senior White House adviser.
The Sheboygan Press, which published Ellie Light's infamous letter on January 17, admitted Tuesday that its opinion editor failed to follow company protocol of confirming Light's identity.
Joe Gulig, the paper's resident watchdog, claimed to have started the process by asking for information, but never followed through to see if the phone number was real. The paper admitted that the fiasco "affects credibility" and apologized to their readers for being sloppy.
The letter we received did not include a hometown for the writer, nor did it include a phone number for verification purposes, both of which we require in order for a letter to be considered for publication. We sent a reply e-mail asking the writer to provide that information, which was done in a subsequent e-mail on Jan 10.
But here is where we made a mistake and the reason for an apology to our readers.
Opinion Page Editor Joe Gulig, whose job it is to verify letters, did not fully follow through seeking verification of the letter and published it on Sunday, Jan. 17.
According to the column, Gulig explained that "the letter was well-written and made sense," apparently so much so that it was worth the embarrassment of ignoring policy.
That, incidentally, is exactly the same reason given by Politico's Ben Smith as to why he didn't bother vetting Light either:
A couple of weeks ago I published an articulate, unsolicited email from, as I wrote, "someone named Ellie Light."
It was one of several such e-mails I'd gotten from a Yahoo account under that name, and the author didn't respond to a request for more information. That didn't really bother me - the author wasn't making any factual claims, or personal ones, just an argument.
In other words, Light was able to bypass the confirmation process in at least two places simply by writing a pro-Obama spiel that the editor enjoyed. It "didn't bother" Smith that someone refused to confirm their identity as long as their letter was articulate....
Nonetheless, hats off must be given to the Sheboygan Press for being brave enough to apologize. Out of 68 publications that carried Light's work, only a small handful have addressed the issue for their readers.
And if you're looking for pressure to come down on the papers for a response, don't expect the mainstream media to help. On Monday, the Los Angeles Times used its blog to cover Ellie Light - not to criticize lazy editors, but to brag that mainstream newspapers were still so influential:
As the sparring continues over what Ellie Light means, let's pause to celebrate this remarkable if overlooked aspect of the story: at a time when newspapers are in economic free-fall and the future of the industry is said to be in doubt, turns out that quaint anachronism called The Letter to the Editor still pack some punch.
Smack in the middle of a nationwide epidemic of unscrupulous editors publishing fishy Obama propaganda, the LA Times predictably found a way to celebrate.
That's your mainstream media hard at work, folks.
A male health care worker from California outed himself to the Cleveland Plain Dealer yesterday as "Ellie Light," the pro-Obama letter writer who duped nearly 70 newspapers into publishing his letters.
The Plain Dealer's Stephen Koff has the story:
A man who identified himself as Winston Steward, 51, of Frazier Park, Calif., says he made up the name "Ellie Light" to protect himself from criticism and possible physical attacks, and used fake addresses across the country to get local newspapers to publish his letters.
"I am Winston Steward and have been sending the letters from Ellie Light," he told The Plain Dealer in an e-mail late Tuesday, following a phone interview in which he said the same. "I hope this ends any confusion and sets the record straight."
The man identifying himself as Steward scoffed at that, saying the letters were merely his way of speaking up for Obama when sensing that support for the Democratic president was waning.
Originally posted by endisnighe
reply to post by Benevolent Heretic
Oh BH, do not go there.
Fox or Faux news, was vilified that they were able to get away on that lawsuit, regarding the dissemination of falsehoods, regarding the reporters that were whistleblowers.
Both sides need to come together and state that patent falsehoods are a detriment to free speech.
A minimum of a first page retraction in the boldest of fonts, needs to be a forefront of cases such as this.
I would call for legislation that when a falsehood has been exposed, that the disseminator of said falsehood, needs to post it 50 times the coverage of previous lies.
What say you?