Did 'Ellie Light' Light Your Fire?
Posted on Feb. 2, 2010
Background: The Cleveland Plain Dealer recently reported that a letter in support of President Obama and signed by an "Ellie Light" had appeared in newspapers around the country. The story became an Internet sensation after it was picked up by the Drudge Report, and has been used by some media critics to discredit the newspaper industry.

Did any of you receive or print the letter? We know that the National Conference of Editorial Writers urges its members to help identify and make others aware of what is called AstroTurf. Did that process work here? More importantly, what are the things you can do as editors to assure readers that they aren't getting canned material that is really political propaganda? How much time do you devote to verifying the authenticity of a submitted letter? Is this getting more difficult to do in an age when e-mail has become prevalent? And finally, is there a gut instinct that tells you a letter is a phony?

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Email Burr

Richard Burr is editor of The Detroit News' op-ed page and is president of the national Association of Opinion Page Editors.

Richard Burr: The Ellie Light e-mail highlights two problems: one about verifying the existence and real names of letter writers, and one about the growing trend to opine anonymously.
 
The Detroit News did not run the Ellie Light letter. It had no city of residence listed, and an e-mail inquiry wasn't returned. We prefer letters from writers in Michigan, but occasionally publish letters from outside the state when the arguments and writing merit it. So the Light letter went dark.
 
I do have several ways of identifying whether a letter is AstroTurf or not and whether a letter writer is real. But at a certain point, newspaper editors need to acknowledge that the growth of the Internet, which accelerates the spread of arguments on public policy issues, is going to result in a certain sameness among some letters.
 
Just because an argument resonates with a bunch of letter writers, does this mean it is "political propaganda" and unworthy of print? Frankly, I'm more worried about verbatim copycat letters than the fact that seven letter writers find a particular argument persuasive. If an argument gets too repetitive, you edit down the number you print.
 
The Ellie Light letter also exemplifies the rush toward anonymity among some letter writers. In this case, if I understand published reports correctly, a California man signed the letter with the name of his wife because he was worried about getting a reaction from people who knew him. Yet he craved the attention that publication gave him.
 
Part of this problem is that some letter writers don't want to take responsibility for the arguments they make in print. Another is the very real possibility that some hothead will Google a name and hound the letter writer with intimidating phone calls. I have had at least two or three people indicate they have been called out of the blue by somebody and thought The Detroit News had given away their phone number. We didn't. A name and city of residence was apparently good enough for the persistent.
 
The result, for me, is a diminishing supply of letters. I used to fight this trend by getting signed comments from our Web site forums. But the forums are losing their luster. Participants are allowed to sign on with screen names, and most prefer to identify themselves this way. So there is "smoking catnip" from Trenton, "Lib antagonist" from Clinton Township, "NoKoolAidForMe" from Otsego, "The Wolfman" from Milford and the now-antiquated "UM fire Carr" from Dearborn. I have to go through a special system, find their e-mail addresses and ask permission to use their comments as a letter under their real name. I have about a 10 percent success rate at getting a "yes."
 
A couple of news and TV competitors actually have a practice of publishing or broadcasting comments with the only identification being the nicknames. Does it sound as weird to you as it does me to hear a TV talking head say on a breaking news story: "Here's some reactions from our viewers. 'Still Crazy After All These Years' says 'President Obama's State of the Union address broke no new ground'"?

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Email Hughes

Dick Hughes is editorial page editor/Inside Business editor of The Statesman Journal in Salem, Ore.

Dick Hughes: Letter standards vary dramatically by the size of the newspaper. Small newspapers publish almost every printable letter. But at the nation's largest newspapers, due to the volume received, hundreds of hand-written or typed letters may go unread each day, along with some e-mailed letters.

As a smaller newspaper, we print probably three-fourths of the letters we receive ... from readers in our two-county main circulation area. So if a letter arrives from Hilljim, Va., we aren't going to publish it. Thus, much of the so-called "turf" we automatically toss because it isn't local.

Ellie Light's "letters" were too long and seemed generic.

Another clue is when a letter comes to my work e-mail address, or to the general newsroom e-mail, instead of our letters-to-the-editor e-mail. (For reasons that elude me, a lot of turfites frequent advocacy Web sites that send the canned letters to me instead of letters to the editor.)

Over time, we get to know our regular letter writers. Back in the days of paper, I always recognized letters from one man because he wrote in cursive on yellow legal pad. Once I established his identity, I never bothered to check ... until the day he switched to white legal pads. I called, just to make sure, which gave him a chuckle.

We probably verify 60 percent of our letters. That's done by calling the writer.

Years ago, I shared a hospital room with the mayor's brother-in-law, who told me he'd used fake identities to write letters under assumed names for years, even though at that time we had a clerk who checked IDs.

Our publisher, a former editor, has suggested that newspapers spend too much time verifying letters, which is why we've cut down on the ones we physically verify.

I wish we had a program that would automatically "verify" letters submitted by regular readers. I envision it being a combination of a writer always using the same e-mail address and also including some type of code with the letter. The letter could even go online immediately, with a reader-written headline. If anyone has such a system in place, I would welcome it. I'm reluctant to approve a letter simply because it comes from a recognized e-mail address, as we all know how easily an e-mail address can be faked. (If you don't know, just send me your e-mail address and I'll find a way to distribute it to a few uncarefully selected scammers around the world.)

Here's a link to our letters guidelines.

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Email Labbe

J.R. Labbe is the editorial director of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and a past president of the National Conference of Editorial Writers.

J.R. Labbe: The Star-Telegram received several letters purported to be from Ellie Light but printed nary one of them. They came without an address and weren’t in response to a local issue. That’s two strikes that don’t necessitate any further work on my part. 
 
That’s not to say we don’t publish letters on national or international issues; we do. But priority is given to local writers on local topics and “Ellie’s” letter came without the information we require for consideration: author’s full name, home street address, city of residence and daytime and home telephone numbers for verification purposes. When there are scores of other letter writers who manage to follow our simple rules for consideration, I don’t devote much time to those who don’t.
 
The age of e-mail may mean the possibility of more “AstroTurf” mail but it’s also the age of being able to verify authorship electronically. Where once we called the writers of letters we were considering for publication to verify they had indeed penned that 200-word treatise on gun rights, now we can run electronic checks to match up names with home addresses and home telephone numbers. It is an incredible timesaver. Cell phones present a hurdle as more people forgo landlines to their houses, but we can still verify the vast majority of our letters without trying to chase down people via the phone.

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Email Price

Robert Price is editorial page editor of The Bakersfield Californian.

Robert Price: I did not run Ellie Light's letters, although it turns out, but for one small detail, I could have, should have and may still.

I received her "Why we elected Obama" letter on Jan. 6 without an address or phone number. After two requests for that information, she replied, somewhat to my surprise. I, too, had this one pegged as turf. But she did not respond to my phone message, so I dropped it.

Then, after I learned many others had received Ellie Light letters, I investigated further. The address she provided -- a remote, dead-end mountain road near a small retirement community at the far edge of our circulation area -- was almost possible: the obscure street existed but the number, though close to reality, did not. The ZIP code indicated a real P.O. Box, but its owner had never heard of Ellie Light. It seemed possible that the writer was at least familiar with the area she claimed to live in.

Then, when others shared a phone number for Ellie Light that matched the one she had provided me (a cell phone in adjacent Los Angeles County), I figured I was getting warm. This time I got an answer on the first ring. First, in what initially struck me as a two-pack-a-day voice, “Ellie” identified herself as Barbara Brooks of Pine Mountain Club (Frazier Park, Ca.). There she was in the voter registration database, on the street she had claimed to live on. But in a second conversation later that day, she confirmed what the Cleveland Plain Dealer had reported: She was a he, Winston T. Steward, a health care worker. And there he was, in a property ownership database, listed alongside Barbara Brooks as owning a parcel on the street “Ellie” had provided as evidence of residency a week before.

Steward was afraid his Confederate flag-flying neighbors would not look kindly on his public support for President Obama — and the sheriff’s response time in his neck of the woods was not good. My dilemma: Now that I have verified, to my satisfaction, that Steward is the true author of the letter, and a reader in my paper's circulation area, should I go ahead and publish his letter? All requirements seem to have been satisfied, and my faith in this often-aggravating system of verification has been vindicated. Or do I reject this and future submissions on the grounds that Steward has been deceitful and evasive — and could (though unlikely) still be jobbing me? Should editorial page editors disqualify letter writers who behave unethically?

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Email Austin

Harry Austin is editor of the Chattanooga Times editorial page, one of two daily editorial pages in The Chattanooga Times Free Press.

Harry Austin: We did not receive the Ellie Light letter, but we do get many political turf letters – far too many, and the trend is worsening.

They are usually – if not always – identifiable. Turf letter arguments typically come in e-mail (a bane of the Internet age); and most seem either canned, or too well organized and pointed, as compared to our readers’ authentic, spontaneous letters.

Some are well done; others aren’t. But they tend to come in waves by people who read the same site generators and are plugged into the same issues. There are plenty of ways and sites to fact-check them and their authenticity. And if we’re in doubt, we call the writer.

Our regular verification process for letters helps catch turf letters. We require a writer’s full name, address and phone number for verification purposes, and we contact writers about their letters when we have questions or need them to trim their letters.

Letters are initially logged in and put into our computer system by an administrative aide/secretary. That takes care of the bulk of the letters work, and I edit them for appropriateness (almost any topical issue counts), clarity, length (200 words), spelling and facts. Editing letters can take substantial time, particularly in election seasons.

Some writers who send turf argue that their letters, though lifted or aided by a Web site, express their beliefs; they say we should run them for that reason. I still object: too many get copied, and using them degrades our page’s credibility. In fact, some readers not only recognize turf; they call or write response letters to scold us for letting a turf letter slip in, and promoting the propaganda pushed by the letter. I agree with their criticism, and use it in rejecting turf to offended contributors.

We want to keep our letters forum fair and honest and dedicated to original letters. We do not knowingly let writers misrepresent themselves and devalue the page. So we look every day for turf, and kill it when we find it.

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Email Larabee

Michael Larabee is Letters and Local Opinions Editor of The Washington Post.

Michael Larabee: We work hard to keep letters from bogus writers from making it into the paper. A check of our submissions archive shows that we got a letter from “Ellie Light” on Jan. 15, but it wasn’t put into consideration for publication. I like to think we would have caught it if it had been, but I know our system isn’t fool-proof. Our primary defense is an able staff member – John White – who vets all letters and raises a red flag when something doesn’t add up. In those instances, he uses a combination of gut instinct and e-stalking doggedness (voter registration databases, real estate records, good old Google) to probe for fake names and addresses, undisclosed conflicts of interest and the like. He’s kept a lot of bad apples out of print.

How important is this in an era when stories online grow these long tails of anonymous, unvetted, unedited reader commentary? Looked at one way, you could make an argument for lowering our guard and making the letters file more freewheeling. We draw the opposite conclusion: If letters to the editor make sense in an Internet world, it’s because they’ve been vouched for by us -- names are real, any conflicts have been disclosed, facts have been checked. For readers to have confidence that this is true, we definitely have to keep the Ellie Lights at bay

AstroTurf is a little trickier. As I understand it, Ellie was a lone gun, not an AstroTurfer. We see the telltale signs of the campaigns coming in, and, yes, 500 letters using the same talking points are not really what we’re looking for. But one person’s AstroTurf can be another’s local reader who just happens to be using a portal provided by a cause to make an original point. We don’t want to be closed off to new ways for readers to talk back to us. The key is to connect with the writer and find out where he or she is coming from.

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Email Radmacher

Dan Radmacher is editorial page editor of The Roanoke Times.

Dan Radmacher: To my knowledge, we did not receive the letter. I know we didn't print it. I did a brief look back through my archive of NCEW list-serv messages and saw no mention of that particular letter before it made the news. The list-serv is a great tool for sniffing out turf, but a lot of it does come down to gut instinct. Some letters just feel like they've been written by a special interest rather than an actual reader. When we're proofing our letters page, someone will sometimes write, "Smells like turf" next to a letter. The best way to verify that something is turf is to Google an unusual sentence or two to see if the phrase pops up on some Web site's talking points, or in another newspaper's letters section.
 
Absent that kind of smoking gun, turf can be hard to expose. Finding out if a letter writer is who she says she is has gotten a little easier, thanks to the Internet. You can look the address up on Google maps or the phone number on a reverse directory. I remember in pre-Internet days actually driving out to see if an address existed (one of the anti-meat letters that actually got NCEW into the turf-hunting business, as I recall). The address was a phony. That's a lot easier to figure out these days.

One distressing thing about the Ellie Light episode was the assumption by some that newspapers were willing accomplices in the subterfuge, when in fact we spend a lot of time and effort trying to sniff out such fakery -- which is rampant from both ends of the political spectrum.

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Email Sanford

Otis Sanford is editor for opinion and editorials at The Commercial Appeal in Memphis.

Otis Sanford: We did not run the letter by Ellie Light. It apparently did not come to us. Coincidently, we used you have a copy editor here named Elli Light a few years ago. She has since retired. I don't think it is the same person, obviously.

We devote some time to verifying letters given our limited staff. We insist that all letter writers provide their name and telephone number and we call them back to verify before publishing. We can usually tell when a letter is part of an organized effort but is more difficult to determine if one is completely phony. We think that by calling the writer back to verify, while not foolproof, is the best way to make sure you are getting authentic letters.

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Email Runyon

Keith L. Runyon is editor of opinion pages and book editor at The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Ky.

Keith Runyon: We did not run the Ellie Light letter in The Courier-Journal, and the editor who screens letters doesn’t remember it coming in. Quite honestly, however, it could have slipped in and I am not critical of those who printed it. This newspaper is the target of any number of organized campaigns – and it is not easy to screen out some of these, especially when they recruit writers in our own circulation area. Since we rarely run letters from writers who do not live in Kentucky or Southern Indiana, we are somewhat protected.
 
We require a daytime phone number for verification, although we do not call everyone who writes in. Most of them are regulars and we come to recognize their names and publish them without making a call. But others, especially those with odd names or highly controversial content do get verification calls. A few times, either I or our letters editor have called writers to ask whether they were part of a campaign, since we received an almost identical letter from someone else. Every time we’ve done that, the writer denied complicity, but generally we don’t run letters if they are too similar.
 I’ve been supervising letters here for almost 24 years, and I think the evidence of campaigns has increased, particularly as a result of groups like MoveOn, the Conservative Coalition and Right to Life. There is no ideological difference – everybody tries to organize letter-writing campaigns.