Posted on 01/27/2010 4:15:33 AM PST by Kaslin
The declining (or is it dying?) newspaper industry has suffered another blow to its image as punctilious skeptic with the motto "If your mother says she loves you, check it out." It turns out, a pile of American newspapers can't manage to check out the most basic information about people who are flat-out using their pages to push political agendas.
A person with the name of "Ellie Light" has been successfully published with the same letter in at least 68 newspapers defending President Obama -- defrauding the editors by using local addresses. Reports have "her" published in two papers overseas.
Who is "Ellie Light"? We know this much: "She" is a fraud.
Is this an official White House or Organizing for America campaign? Is it simply a dirty trick? Is this brass-knuckles (and dishonest) politics from the DNC? Or an unauthorized Obama groupie? Some investigating conservative bloggers have found several candidates for the mysterious "Light" writer that could be connected to Obama.
But the liberal, pro-Obama media won't address this. This story hurts Obama, so they'll spike it. Count on that.
The media should care. Remember how upset they were at "video news releases" being offered as real news by the Bush administration? And how they fulminated against PR. firms being paid by the Pentagon to report the good news to the people of Iraq? If this Astroturf can be connected to Team Obama, then newspapers should do the connecting.
The "Light" chain letter was loaded with excuses for Obama. "Today, the president is being attacked as if he were a salesman who promised us that our problems would wash off in the morning," said a version of Light's letter in the Chillicothe (Ohio) Gazette, claiming a Chillicothe residence. "He never made such a promise. It's time for Americans to realize governing is hard work and that a president can't just wave a magic wand and fix everything."
The Cleveland Plain Dealer blew the whistle on the Ellie Light scandal. "She" lied about "her" location more than discredited reporter Jayson Blair of the New York Times, and may have lied more about "her" identity than "Anonymous" Joe Klein, the author of "Primary Colors." The story was an Internet sensation: in fact, it was the hottest article ever launched on the Plain Dealer website at Cleveland.com.
"Miss Light" demonstrated that liberals apparently care more about results than about troublesome notions like honesty. She complained about being caught by Sabrina Eaton, a Plain Dealer reporter from Washington: "I'm sure such domesticity and small-mindedness would make Sarah Palin quite proud."
"Light" made no serious attempt to reply about her dishonest addresses when questioned by Eaton. Instead, "she" just made more political proclamations: "The letter I wrote was motivated by surprise and wonderment at the absence of any media support for our President, who won a record-breaking election by a landslide less than 18 months ago, and now, seems to be abandoned by all, supposedly for the infantile reason that he couldn't make all of Bush's errors disappear in a day."
No one should let the errors of these 68 newspapers disappear in a day, either.
Some newspaper editors might make excuses about their sloppiness. In a recession, with newspapers facing layoffs, perhaps they think readers should sympathize if they don't have a staff person devoted to verifying the addresses of letters to the editor. But how hard is this? It doesn't take eight hours a day to verify the handful of letters these newspapers publish daily. An intern could do this before lunchtime.
You cannot escape the truth. These newspapers -- dozens of them -- were caught with their ethical pants down.
Some might argue that "Ellie Light" may not be a member of the local community, but her sentiments could be understood as representative of the Obama-loving segment of the population. Newspapers are best advised not to go there, especially when they are on the verge of collapse. If newspaper editors are going to band together to work on the problem of credibility with their audience, they're going to have to convince readers that real people in their communities are writing the letters.
Some media analysts suggest that the traditional letters-to-the-editors page is devolving in the age of the Internet, where the commenters are routinely anonymous or use phony names. Are newspapers lowering their standards to the Internet era? If so, it's bizarre that the Old Media continuously lecture the New Media for their lack of professionalism when they are failing to accomplish even the most basic accuracy and fact checking.
The "Ellie Light" scandal was also broken in the newly accountable era of the Internet: The Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter started it all with a simple Google search.
EVERYTHING ABOUT ZERO IS A FRAUD, FAKE, MANUFACTURED.
and he is the biggest fraud
Hell, we understand this perfectly. It's called "fake but accurate."
Sadly, the Des Moines Register probably would have tried to track "her" down as part of an effort to hire yet another Obama-stroking columnist.
Mr. niteowl77
This would be the "fake but accurate" defense? ;)
The most interesting thing about this is that there is apparently only one Obama supporter in the entire world.
I wonder if Hitler would've ascended to office if the Internet existed in the 1930s. It seems the wheels are falling off the Obama Express.
Oops! You beat me to it!
Fixed.
It also lost the respect and earned the contempt of honest people.
“The most interesting thing about this is that there is apparently only one Obama supporter in the entire world.”
Brilliant observation, and one who has a tougher job than the president.
When I write a LTE, I need to provide an address, phone number and I get a follow-up call or two to confirm the information before it gets published. The Portsmouth Herald, one of the duped papers, refused to publish my letter back in 2007 because i wasn’t home when they called (submitted right before vacation and my MIL answered the phone while we were on a cruise). But they publish a letter from a fake guy, posing as a fake woman writing from a fake address with fake contact information.
Michale Smerconish (sp) had “Ellie Light” on yesterday and said she was a Travelling Nurse......and thought it was just the EDITORS of the paper that LIFTED her letter!! hmmmmmmmmmmmm....who do we believe on this????? NEITHER !!
So far, it seems per other threads, that 2 females and one male have come forward, each claiming to be Ellie Light.
One claimed she was a traveling nurse. However, the numbers just didn’t add up. She said she traveled on 13-week assignments in various cities. To write LTEs ‘locally’ to 68 newspapers during various 13-week assignments, she would have had to be on assignments for over 200 years.
[The Obama machine thinks the American people are dumb enough to buy this kind of excuse.]
17 years actually.
Anybody want to discuss the significance of “her” name?
Except the MASSIVE debt he's running up and the future prosperity that he is stealing from our children and their children.....
This sounds like a RICO investigation since this screams of collusion at all 68 of these papers.
"Pants on the ground, pants on the ground. Lookin' like a fool with yer pants on the groud!"
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