Ellie Light

On Monday, neurosurgeon and Tea Party favorite Ben Carson officially threw his hat into the 2016 presidential race and after his announcement, Conan O’Brien mercilessly attacked his conservative ideology on his late night TBS program. Conan smeared Carson as “an African American and also a member of the Tea Party. Yeah. Making him the only African American who wants to go back to the way things…

On December 18, in covering the aftermath of the official report on the terrorist raid on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya which killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, the Associated Press reported in the first three paragraphs of its coverage that "Three State Department officials resigned under pressure," identifying those who had stepped down as "Eric…

CBS anchor Gayle King, an admitted friend of Michelle Obama and a donor to Mr. Obama's reelection campaign, trumpeted the President's record during an interview with Nicholas Ballasy of The Daily Caller on Saturday: "President Obama has done everything that he said he was going to do, and I think people keep forgetting that....if you ask me, I think President Obama is doing a very good job…

Debating the fallout of the Obama administration's attempt to squelch Arizona's popular immigration law before it goes into effect later this month, CNN's Campbell Brown on July 6 challenged a chief advocate of the law with a multi-pronged assault, only to see her attacks thwarted and her "misinformation" corrected.In a blatant contradiction, Brown dismissed State Senator Russell Pearce's (R-Ariz…

After getting caught with their pants down on letter-to-the-editor pages, newspapers around the country apparently haven't embarrassed themselves enough yet. Instead of admitting Ellie Light's submission should never have gotten published, editors have recently tried to save face by using remarkable spin: opinion pages are a "privilege" that people should be thankful for, even if they are full…

Managing Editor's Note: The following was originally published at Greyhawk's Mudville Gazette blog on January 25, 2010. Wow - growing evidence that multiple identical letters appearing in multiple different newspapers under multiple names implies some sort of astroturf campaign. I'm shocked, shocked I tell you, at this development. The story of "Ellie Light" was exposed in the Cleveland Plain-…

As Austin Powers would say, "it's a man, baby!"A male health care worker from California outed himself to the Cleveland Plain Dealer yesterday as "Ellie Light," the pro-Obama letter writer who duped nearly 70 newspapers into publishing his letters.The Plain Dealer's Stephen Koff has the story:A man who identified himself as Winston Steward, 51, of Frazier Park, Calif., says he made up the name "…

Three days ago, NewsBusters contributor Candance Moore wrote about pro-Obama letter-to-the-editor spammer "Ellie Light" who had duped some 40+ papers (the number stands at 68 now), into publishing nearly identical letters that praised the president. In each case, the writer claimed to hail from cities or towns served by the local newspaper's print circulation.Today, Fox News Channel's "America's…

In January, an anonymous person supposedly named "Ellie Light" launched a massive PR campaign on behalf of President Barack Obama.The goal appears to have been to infiltrate as many newspapers as possible to spread pro-Obama propaganda -- as if the press needed the help. Light's plan was simple enough: write a compelling letter to the editor, pretend to be a concerned reader in the region, and…