Nearly 70 newspapers and other media outlets have now been identified as publishing the same pro-President Obama letter to the editor, according to a politically conservative blog that's documenting this growing journalism scandal. So far, 18 Gannett papers and websites are on the list, including USA Today; 10 are in Wisconsin alone, where editing and printing have been consolidated at regional production hubs.The Gannett papers are nearly 26% of all those outlets that published the so-called Ellie Light letter, even though GCI publishes only 84 U.S. papers -- just 6% of the nation's 1,400 dailies. (The Gannett percentage may be higher, since the current total of nearly 70 includes non-newspaper publications.)
At least two of the Wisconsin papers -- The Reporter and The Post-Crescent -- have now published a correction online, saying Light provided false information after the paper called a California phone number to verify her letter.
In a new comment, Anonymous@12:17 p.m. wrote: "It doesn't matter one bit to me if it was an organized campaign. Someone in the news didn't do a job, and that's how all this stuff got printed. This is a perfect example of, 'good enough is good enough.'"
Here are the 18 Gannett papers identified so far:
- USA Today
- Argus (South Dakota) Leader
- The Californian at Salinas, Calif.
- Chillicothe (Ohio) Gazette
- Daily News Leader, Staunton, Va.
- The Daily Times, Salisbury, Md.
- The Reporter, Fond du Lac, Wisc.
- Green Bay Press-Gazette, Wisconsin
- Herald Times Reporter, Manitowoc, Wisc.
- Mansfield (Ohio) News Journal
- Marshfield News-Herald, Wisconsin
- Oshkosh Northwestern, Wisconsin
- The Post-Crescent, Appleton, Wisc.
- The Sheboygan Press, Wisconsin
- The Spectrum, Utah
- Stevens Point Journal, Wisconsin
- Wausau Daily Herald, Wisconsin
- Wisconsin Rapids Tribune
The Stevens Point Journal printed the same letter three times in one week (all three signed Ellie Light):
ReplyDeleteJan. 13: http://www.stevenspointjournal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=20101130409
Jan. 17: http://www.stevenspointjournal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=20101170302
Jan. 21: http://www.stevenspointjournal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2010100120188
All four central Wisconsin newspaper printed the same letter three times in one week. All three letters were signed by Ellie Light.
ReplyDeleteJan 13 in The Post-Crescent.
ReplyDeleteEllie identified herself as being from Algoma.
Jim, you said this: Seven are in Wisconsin alone, where editing and printing have been consolidated at regional production hubs.
ReplyDeleteAs far as I know, the editorial page decisions and "fact" checking are still done at the individual sites, at least for the Wisconsin East group. Doesn't make the goofups any easier to swallow, however.
1:29 p.m.: Where does copyediting and page production take place?
ReplyDeleteIf all the editorial decisions are made independently, then how did the four central Wisconsin newspaper print the same bogus letter, the same three days (Jan. 13, 17 and 21)? That just seems like one person screwed up instead of four people screwing up the same way three times.
ReplyDeleteThe risk here is that newspapers may discontinue running letters to the editor in print, rather than continuing to invest in any kind of fact-checking. In that scenario, publishers would replace letters with often-anonymous comments on websites that rarely get vetted at all.
ReplyDeleteFond Du Lac is curiously off the list of WI papers to have run the letter.
ReplyDelete1:49 p.m. I said "East," which isn't "Central."
ReplyDeleteI'm quite surprised that the Sulphur Springs News Telegram didn't somehow wind up in all of that. Seems like all the radio outlets around here are being bought out by clear channel, why not our other local news sources. Thanks for the info. Billy, hope all is well with you and your paper!
ReplyDeleteAllen Elmore
My guess - and this is just a guess - is that the papers that got scammed probably DID call "Ellie Light" to verify she was a "real person." However, it's very easy to fool that verification call by providing a cell phone. If the paper questions why it's an out-of-state number, just say you got it when you lived in State X and that you don't have a landline. Do some Googling and find a local apartment complex and list that as your address. Boom, the paper got fooled. So easy and simple.
ReplyDeleteAfter all, how many people do we know who have out-of-state cell numbers and lack landlines? I can think of five co-workers in my newsroom alone who fit that description. It's a perfectly reasonable scam story.
So did these papers fall down on the job? Some of them may have. But I'd wager that most just got played.
And so, who is Ellie Light? Does anyone know?
ReplyDeleteEditor's Note
ReplyDeleteA correction on this letter will appear in the Jan. 26 edition of the Oshkosh Northwestern. Ellie Light does not reside in Oshkosh. When she was contacted by telephone by the Northwestern to verify her letter to the editor, she provided false information. Her phone number is from a California area code outside Los Angeles. The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported Jan. 22 that Light's letter has appeared in more than a dozen newspapers across the country, all listing hometown addresses for the newspaper.
http://www.thenorthwestern.com/article/20100121/OSH0603/100120188/%3Cb%3ECORRECTION-%3C/B%3E-Letters--Obama-said-fixes-would-not-happen-overnight
When I heard about Ellie Light last week, the first thing I did was go to our archive to see if she'd gotten her letter into our paper (The News Journal at Wilmington).
ReplyDeleteThankfully, she hadn't. Last I knew, we still demanded verification of a letter writer's identity before we'd publish it. I hope that's still the case ... but twixt the layoffs and the furloughs, one wonders how long we'll be able to continue that.
The worst part is the central Wisconsin papers printed the letter even though the city of residence listed for Ellie Light was not in any of the local areas. She listed the same cities that were printed in the eastern Wisconsin papers (100s of miles away)
ReplyDeleteJeff: The way the Web sites for the Gannett Wisconsin papers works makes it look like something it's not. When you search for a story or name from any of the sites, it returns that story from any of the other sites, and wraps it in the name of the site you searched from.
ReplyDeleteSo if you go to www.stevenspointjournal.com, they didn't run it three times on different days, those are the days each of the other papers actually ran it.
Jim: Copy editing and page production takes place both at central locations (for most news pages) and the individual papers (editorial and some feature pages).
Maybe the larger point is that the content of the letter fit nicely with the editorial stance of the newspaper.
ReplyDeleteAs an intern at a Gannett paper in Florida paper in the 1990s, we often received letters from local residents that were clearly written as part of a broader campaign. Abortion was a common theme, and local residents were asked to re-type a boilerplate letter that came from a national office, localize it, and send it to the newspaper.
Most of these were not published because they were not timely or relevant to stories that we were covering at the time.
This particular letter from Ellie Light gained so much traction with editorial page decision-makers because it's asking for voters who supported Obama to take a deep breath and realize that hope and change is on the way, but takes time.
I suspect that many of these newspapers read the letter, liked the message, were impressed that it came from someone in the area ("we have such well-informed local residents who can write!", verified the information and went with it.
The question is whether a similar negative letter would have made it into the print edition. My guess is - not likely.
11:05 a.m. That's not the case at my paper. It's so right-leaning that they chose not to endorse for the last presidential election, since they couldn't bear to say the Democrats had better candidates. They offered some lame excuse as to why they didn't endorse, however.
ReplyDeleteOnly the Sheboygan Press, Oshkosh Northwestern and Door County Advocate actually printed the letter. The search engines for all 10 papers are linked, so a search for "Ellie Light" at any GWM site will turn up the illusion that the letter appeared three times in every paper.
ReplyDelete