Who Is Ellie Light: Plain Dealer Reporter Details Obama Operative and Astroturfer

Cleveland Plain Dealer Reporter Blogs ^ | January 23, 2010 | Sabrina Eaton

[PittsburghAfterDark]

An interesting phenomenon has been occuring in various newspaper "Letters to the Editor" pages. A woman with the same name has had letters published in no fewer than 9 newspapers praising Obama while using various city and location residences.

Now it's one thing if the person(s) name was something like John Brown, Steve Smith, Amy Jones or any other number of common name combination. However the name being used is Ellie Light.

This may seem like much about nothing except for one small thing. The only Ellie Light that FReepers were able to locate by Lexis-Nexis or internet searches were a reporter that used to write for the Bergen Record.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2435422/posts?page=18

This reporter, the Cleveland Plain Dealer's Washington bureau head, Sabrina Eaton has published several email exchanges with "Ellie Light" on her personal blog on cleveland.com. These exchanges are on the source URL for this post.

This is a very troubling development. Until it is known who "Ellie Light" the following questions are obvious.

- Who is behind the pseudonym "Ellie Light"?

- Is someone from the White House, Democratic party or a close ally employing someone conducting this kind of work?

- Why are newspapers failing to contact letter(s) to the editor to verify name, address/location and phone number and instead relying on email exchanges?

- Can you imagine these questions not being asked if they were the same name, publishing the same letter to the editor in various newspapers around the United States praising a Republican President?

I give major kudos to Sabrina Eaton for doing some true reporting and investigative work. I would be opposed to any White House or political party conducting such a campaign. This is a dangerous trend that's been revealed; newspapers are verifying even less and less information that they publish.

I urge Ms. Eaton and FReepers to stay abreast of this story and not let it die.

[visualops]

LOL! you’re exactly right

[onyx]

She’s duly exposed now. That’s for certain.

I’ve pinged you to another serious plot we’re following.

[OafOfOffice]

I’m game...whats the plan stan?

[LA Woman3]

El-lie....THE LIE!!

I didn't think of el as Spanish for "the". The lie! Perfect!

[Chickensoup]

I thought all letters to the editor of bigger papers were verified

[Abigail Adams]

Hoping someone will pick up on this!

[TaxPayer2000]

Results 1 - 100 of about 2,720,000 for ellie light.

ellie light- 26th most popular search in the past hour.

[cripplecreek]

[Enchante]

here’s a thought for FReeper sleuthers: “Ellie Light” must have emailed all these “letters”???

b/c if they were sent in snail mail then almost none of them would have had a “local” postmark when received at these dozens of MSM locations?

[assuming (1) that “Ellie Light” did not jet all over the country to all those locations to mail letters with local postmarks all over; and (2) that at least some of all those 40+ papers would actually have someone who pays attention to postmarks of letters to the editor??]

ok, so imagining for a moment that all or most of these “letters” would have been emailed, doesn’t that mean that all of those different papers must have the sender’s IP ADDRESS recorded on their various network/email servers???

I’m no techie but I know I’ve read that blog editors etc. can retain and compare IP addresses when there are issues of strange online happenings??

SO, if all these so-called “news” organizations must have the IP address(es) of sources of these “letters” then it should be rather easy for them to “investigate” the source of these letters if they can be pressured to do so?

I know that liberal MSM will not WANT to find the source of this apparent astroturfing fraud, but perhaps they can be shamed and embarrassed and pressured into doing so from public exposure??

this is all speculative if I’m wrong about the letters being emailed and/or whether IP address records could be accessed from those various “news” organizations......... but if someone here knows how such investigations can be conducted, maybe a focus on IP addresses would help to solve this little mystery??

[onyx]

Pinging to # 149.

[AmishDude]

My guess is that you are correct, that they were emailed. I think you have to be of the 80+ crowd to snail mail a letter to the editor these days.

Ironic, actually, but it’s the truth.

I’m not sure that without real work, that they could find it out. My guess is that it comes from the same gmail account.

[Enchante]

again I’m no techie, but I don’t think the potential anonymity of a gmail or yahoo account etc. matters to the IP address issue........ IF some of these news organizations can be pressured to really pursue the matter and to compare the relevant IP address(es) then (I think? maybe?) there are a lot of things that can rule in or rule out about where the letter(s) came from..... I don’t know enough about this stuff but there might be some way to sort through it on a tech level....

[AmishDude]

I’m not a techie either, but I’m not sure that the newspapers can find the IP themselves and I don’t know that they’d go through the trouble to shake down Google or Yahoo.

I am amazed that she used an obviously false name for all of these letters. I mean, “Light”? Seriously?

[My Favorite Headache]

Stunning...Beck’s head is going to explode.

[Tucker39]

Could this be a play on words?

Suppose the name Ellie actually stood for the letters, L.E.? What meaning might L.E. mean in politics or in political or governmental circles? Once THAT is deduced you can connect that answer to LIGHT and see what meaning is there, if any.

[Jude in WV]

This seemed to fit to me.

http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/225459

[PA Engineer]

Google gave me the Flickr page of "Ellie Light". This may be a good piece of the puzzle. Save the photos. I have noticed other references disappearing today. Pages that were there in the morning are now gone.

[Dacula]

WOW! We caught one more liberal, progressive, democrat, socialist in another lie.

We are good. One out of how many? this is just the first time we caught ‘this’ issue. Good gosh, there are a million more that go by and are not even noticed.

think illegal aliens

government employees

...

[Piranha]

Light/SUNstein.

[Tunehead54]

I noted elsewhere that if any of these letters were standard emails then the header could be very helpful in identifying the culprit and contacting the “duped” newspapers/blogs using shame to get the info may be an approach ... ;-)