Citizen Journalists Get to the Bottom of 'Ellie Light' Deception While MSM Snoozes

Two very reliable web sites (Patterico and Politico) are reporting two different versions of the same basic story: The identity of Ellie Light.

From Ben Smith:

Well, the mystery may be over. A woman who said her name was, in fact, Ellie Light called this morning into the radio show of Michael Smerconish, a national talker based in Philadelphia who has been friendly to Obama, to clear things up.

“I’m only me,” she said, identifying herself as a traveling nurse who works for 13-week stretches at hospitals around the country, and whose primary residence is in Southern California.

“I need to own up – I did misrepresent my home town in some places,” Light told Smerconish. Her logic in faking the addresses is one familiar to advocacy groups: “If I thought it was written by a neighbor of mine, I would give it more credence.”

Ben Smith is merely reporting what this woman says, but aren’t her words a little self-serving here? And, also, the name ‘Ellie Light’ has been searched and ‘googled’ more than Lindsay Lohan up-skirt pictures… how did none of us find this nurse in all of our quests? And a search of the names of registered nurses in California turns up a lot of “Light”s, but no “Ellie Light.”

Enter Patterico:

Someone on Facebook named Barbara Brooks (a pediatric nurse) claims that Ellie Light is . . . her husband. She writes on her Wall:

Don’t think you can make a difference? Well, my husband wrote letters to newspapers under a pen name “Ellie Light” and over 42 newspapers published the letters and now Ellie Light is the most searched name on google. I don’t agree with using phony names, though. But then he isn’t a Mennonite . . .

The same comment was left on Left Coast Rebel yesterday at about the same time.

Reader Joseph D. e-mails with a complicated chain of evidence linking her to an earlier comment left at Left Coast Rebel’s blog, under the screenname Winston44. Joseph D. says:

The corresponding twitter account has one friend, Jerry Schaefer, from Long Beach, California (the same town as some of Ellie’s claimed residences.) Jerry’s facebook showed one friend named Winston,Winston Steward. Under Winston’s friends, Barbara Brooks claims to be his wife and that he is Ellie Light.

There are a couple of reasons why this account wrings a little truer. First, there is the connection between Mr. Steward and various editors from newspapers around the country. They can be seen on the Winston44 Twitter account.

Also, the fact that Mr. Steward is not calling in to a radio show to reveal himself suggests that he is, in fact the more likely source. It seems to me that the real Ellie Light is anonymous for a reason and if, in fact, there is some connection to the White House, or to a political action committee funded for the sole purpose of promoting the President and his agenda he would certainly not want that to be uncovered.

I spoke with “Joseph D.” earlier today. In keeping with the spirit of Big Journalism and the idea that interesting, news-worthy stories are left un-explored because they do not fit into the world view of most publishers or editors in America’s newsroom, the man who uncovered this story is neither a reporter nor a private investigator and he has no political axe to grind. He is a citizen armed with a computer and the internet.

“It took me a couple of hours, you have to be willing to track down a lot of leads until you find something,” he told me in an exclusive interview this morning. “I started with Winston44’s Twitter account and I started looking at his followers and the people he was following. There were a lot of media editors from all over the country. Someone who follows him is from Long Beach, maybe that coincides with the IP address everyone was looking at.”

I asked him how the Winston44 Twitter page led him to Winston Steward. “One of the people following him on Twitter had a Facebook page. I looked at their friends and one of them was named ‘Winston Steward.’ When I looked at Winston Steward’s friend list I saw the status of one of his friends, Barbara Brooks claiming that her husband (Steward) was Ellie Light.”

“Joseph D.” says that he is a regular and loyal reader of the Big Blogs at Breitbart.com and his new found love of investigating was inspired by our very own Gary Hewson whose exploration of Martha Coakley’s record added to the undermining of the Democrat’s ill-fated Senate campaign.

So, which Ellie is the real Ellie? It could be both… or neither.

It has always seemed possible that ‘Ellie Light’ was more than one person. Especially if you buy into the supposition that this effort was coordinated either from the White House or from that other Soros-funded leftist cess pool, Media Matters. In fact, finding out that there is more than one Ellie Light almost confirms a coordinated plan, doesn’t it? (unless you believe that there are as many Ellie Lights as there are Jeremiah Wrights and Malik Shabazzes and Bertha Lewises and… well you get it).

But Big Journalism still wants to know why so many newspapers nationwide were so quick to publish these letters. The only logical answers are:

1. The letters were so well written and so original and made such creative and revolutionary points that editors across the land felt it their duty to share them with their readers.’
2. The letters arrived with some sort of ‘special handling instructions’ compelling the editors to run them because.. oh, I don’t know… maybe some very important people in the government stressed how much they would appreciate it if they would.
3. Editors receive so few letters in support of the President that when they got one from Ellie, they ran with it because finally they had something to balance out all of the letters critical of the Obama Presidency.

In my opinion, #1 is highly unlikely and #2 and #3 are pretty damning to this administration so don’t expect to hear them as the explanations.

Either way, as Patterico wisely points out:

Don’t get carried away with focusing on a single person. This isn’t about one person, but about identifying deception generally.

Amen, brother. And, thankfully, citizen journalists like Patterico, Gary Hewson and our new comrade “Joseph D.” will continue to uncover the deception.