BOB PRICE: Unfamiliar drama on the Opinion pages
| Wednesday, Jan 27 2010 08:20 PM
Last Updated Thursday, Jan 28 2010 12:58 PM
There's usually not a lot of intrigue on the pages of the Opinion section, in this or any newspaper. Outrage, disgust, alarm, sarcasm, praise, gratitude -- yes. On a daily basis. But subterfuge? Duplicity? Not so much.
Ellie Light changed all that this week with a letter-writing campaign that was both sincere and deceitful. It also prompted me to ask someone, for the first time I can remember, "Are you a transsexual?" For the record, she is not. Ellie Light is a lot of things, but transsexual is not one of them, so far as I have been able to ascertain.
First, background: The letters page is among the most popular features of many newspapers. Managing the letters section can take a lot of time, however -- hours that can be wildly disproportionate to the amount of space those letters occupy. Letters must be edited for clarity and whittled for space, but the real time sucker is verifying that the person who claims authorship is the true originator. We ask for a full name, address, phone number and e-mail address -- not because we publish all of those details (we don't) but because we need to check back with the letter writer.
The most common problem is Astroturfing -- as in phony "grass roots" campaigns carried out by political organizations of assorted ideological stripes. Animal rights organizations, "tea party" activists, opponents of health care reform, same-sex marriage advocates -- all have, at one time or another, inundated editorial-page editors with cut-and-paste, "fill-in-the-blank" letters manufactured by others.
Ellie Light's letters were different, though. They were well written, but they hadn't been harvested from some talking-points factory -- not that I could tell. They were original. But something rang phony.
I received Light's letter in defense of the president, "Why we elected Obama," on Jan. 6, without an address or phone number. After two requests for that information, she replied -- somewhat to my surprise. She said she lived on a remote mountain road in Pine Mountain Club, a small community above Frazier Park near Kern County's southwestern corner. But she did not respond to my follow-up phone message, so I dropped it.
Then came the buzz about Ellie Light. Colleagues from the National Conference of Editorial Writers -- editorial page editors from one end of North America to the other -- were reporting an army of Ellies, each one giving an address that placed her in their circulation areas. More than 70 newspapers eventually published her letter -- The Washington Times, USA Today, The Baltimore Chronicle, Los Banos Enterprise, even The Bangkok Post -- yes, the one in Thailand. Many others, including The Bakersfield Californian, did not.
Fox News was hot on the story. "Ellie Light" was clearly a liberal phone bank of some sort, except the focus was letter-writing. David Axelrod-style Astroturfing, conservative commentator Michelle Malkin told Fox's Sean Hannity.
The conservative blogosphere went nuts. "If viewed like this: 'L E Lite' and you add a pause between the L and the E, it comes out like this: 'L Elite.'" A-ha! Liberal Elite! A numerologist-type weighed in with an alphanumeric formula based on the names Ellie Light and Barack Obama that proved "this was an effort to create the illusion that they are completely different people, when in fact there is no difference between them!" Yes, Obama has been writing letters to newspapers in his downtime!
I'd like to take credit for tracking down the real Ellie Light, but award those points to The Cleveland Plain Dealer, which identified the serial letter writer as health care worker Barbara Brooks of Frazier Park. Indeed, there she was in Kern County voter registration database, and on the street she'd provided me. Then the Plain Dealer investigated further and corrected itself: Ellie was one Winston Steward. And indeed, there he was in a Kern County property ownership database, at the same address as Brooks. I called again, and this time Ellie-Barbara-Winston answered, in what I initially took to be a two-pack-a-day voice. I still wasn't sure if this was a man or a woman, and actually considered the possibility that Ellie --still not quite forthcoming -- could have been both at one time or another. Finally, he came clean: Barbara was his wife.
"The name Ellie Light just popped up out of my head, although the hagiography that people have come up with has been very entertaining," Steward said, referring to bloggers' meanderings into symbolism and cryptography. "It's right out of Dan Brown and 'The DaVinci Code.'"
He said he directed his letters to fellow liberals who seem to be scampering away from Obama just when he needs them.
"My beef is really with the left," he said. "(They say) 'If Obama can just muscle past Congress, we can have all this.' It's not realistic and it's not fair. The left seems to think he can just get it all done. But now they don't want to look like a bunch of doe-eyed hero worshippers, so they're criticizing him, and you have people like (New York Times columnist) Frank Rich, who's supposed to be one of the good guys, saying 'It's time for Obama to stop deluding himself.'"
The time had come for Ellie-Winston to stop deluding newspaper editors, too, and I told him so. "Your plot got in the way of your message, I think," I told him.
"Yes," he said. "It did."
I called his wife, Barbara Brooks, at her ranch just east of San Antonio, Texas, to gauge her degree of complicity.
"I wasn't too happy with him," she admitted. "I told him he was going to get caught. But he's not any kind of political operative. He's belonged to political groups in the past and hates them because he hates going to meetings. He works nights, has trouble sleeping and stays up writing letters."
Some operative. But give Ellie Light credit for this: He put some intrigue back into the staid pages of the nation's Opinion sections.
Could Ellie Light have written herself into an awkward legal corner? Perhaps. It seems that Section 538a of the California Penal Code makes it a misdemeanor to write a letter to the editor using someone else's name. Might “Ellie’s” actions have sufficiently offended Kern County District Attorney Ed Jagels — a man not always enamored with this newspaper? No telling.
rprice@bakersfield.com
