The Replies to "An Open Letter to Alan Boraas, Amanda Coyne, Krestia DeGeorge, Mark Dent, Andrew Halcro and Sheila Toomey"

About a week ago, Progressive Alaska wrote to six Alaska writers who had commented in articles, an op-ed, a gossip column tidbit and in a news aggregation, about Rep. Mike Doogan's (D - Spenard) outing of the identity of AK Muckraker, the award-winning pseudonymous blogger who maintains The Mudflats blog.

The questions were these:

1) - Why do you believe it did not merit mentioning in your article or articles that there might be concerns about Rep. Doogan's use of state resources to name a critic?

2) - Why did you not question who had provided the information to Doogan?

3) - Are you now pursuing either of the two above issues?

First of all, I'd like to thank all six for responding, one way or another. I'll print the answers here, going from shortest to longest.

Mark Dent, Alaska Newsreader editor, Anchorage Daily News:

I called Dent, when I didn't get an email answer by Monday afternoon (April 6th). I transcribed the conversation, and emailed it to him:

PA:

PM: Do you intend to answer my email?
MD: Absolutely not.

PM: Is there a particular reason why you won't?
MD: I'm at the bottom of the totem pole at the ADN.

PM: Sometimes you just post links, as an aggregator should.
Sometimes you add comments that could be considered "commentary." Is
there a rubric you follow on approaching this?
MD: I've got no comment.

PM: Is there a set of guidelines you are supposed to follow when
linking to local blogs at the Newsreader?
MD: I've got no more to say to you on anything.

Mark Dent emailed back, writing:

Phil, that's not an accurate transcription of your questions or my answers and you well know it. -- Mark

I responded:

Feel free to correct it, if you have specific phrases you remember.

I'd be happy to make a copy of the legal pad page and drop it by the ADN on my way on work in the morning. You may have said other things besides what I wrote down, but everything I wrote is absolutely accurate, unless you can somehow convince me otherwise.

Phil

On Tuesday morning, I dropped off a manila envelope with a copy of the page from my notebook, recounting the conversation with Dent.

Later Tuesday, I contacted gossip columnist Sheila Toomey. Here is my transcript of the conversation, and Toomey's reply:

PA
I called you today at 1:35 p.m. at the ADN to find out if you had
received my email re Rep. Doogan and the ethics of his using governmentresources to reveal somebody's name to the public, and your coverage - or lack thereof - of that issue in your weekly gossip column.

You stated, " I did. I don't have any comment."

When I asked why, you responded, "I don't really have a comment. I really don't. Thanks, bye, bye.'

You then hung up before I could ask anything further.

If you wish to correct my notes, please be my guest.

Warmest wishes,

Phil Munger

Toomey replied:

Seems about right.

Here is Andrew Halcro's response:

1) - Why do you believe it did not merit mentioning in your article or articles that there might be concerns about Rep. Doogan's use of state resources to name a critic?

If Doogan was receiving communications through his official email, directed to him by the Mudflats blog, from people who were asking him to take action as a State Representative (i.e. pressure to continue to push the Troopergate issue or taking him to task for not), Doogan arguably had the right to respond in the same channel, as a lawmaker.

Although I disagree personally with how and why he did it, I don't believe it violated any ethics rules.

2) - Why did you not question who had provided the information to Doogan?

I feel it's irrelevant. Doogan's first amendment rights give him the same right to out Mudflats as it does Mudflats to start an anonymous blog.

As I wrote in my blog:
There is a bit of irony within the story of the outing of Mudflats; Rep. Doogan's right to free speech gives him the same right to out a blogger as the blogger has to try and keep themselves anonymous.

As a blogger I commonly mention unnamed sources. In fact the Troopergate story was based on the input from people who never would have talked to me unless their comments were not for attribution.

3) - Are you now pursuing either of the two above issues?

No. Governor Palin has criticized me in front of God and country a number of times and I'm still blogging and she is still clueless. It's not who Mudflats is that has contributed to the huge success of her blog while putting herself in the cross hairs, it's her great writing style and what she has to say.

Here is Alan Boraas' response:

Mr. Munger,
Though the title given by someone in the Daily News made it seem the
article I wrote was about Rep. Doogan's "outing," the primary focus of
my column concerned the practice of astroturfing which I believe
jeopardizes the veracity of internet commentary. I used the AKMudflats
"outing" as a way to discuss astroturfing and the problem of
corporations or special interest groups to pose as an individual
commentator or blogger when in fact they are paid writers whose job is
to discredit opposition points of view through anonymous posts often
containing disinformation.

I'd like to hear more discussion about why it is important to write
under a pseudonym and, if its important, how to prevent the type of
astroturfing I described.

Thanks,
Alan Boraas

ps - didn't mention AKMudflat's name in my article so didn't get into the
question of whether the information was accurate or who provided Rep.
Doogan with the information

I don't intend to write further on this subject in the immediate future

Here is Amanda Coyne's response:

Phil: Tony [Hopfinger] and I both wrote stories, so we both answered your questions.

1) - Why do you believe it did not merit mentioning in your article or articles that there might be concerns about Rep. Doogan's use of state resources to name a critic?

First, we believe it's Mudflat’s right to post anonymously. We also believe it was Doogan’s right to name her. We have no evidence that Doogan violated any ethics rules, etc. But that’s not to say that it isn't worth looking at. However, like other independent journalists and bloggers, we have full-time jobs and can only report so many stories in a week for Alaska Dispatch. Lately, we haven't had much time other than to brief stories, edit and post blogs from our contributors, and/or write commentaries on topics we know something about and believe in. In our limited coverage of Mudflats, we wrote a short post about Doogan "outing" her and referenced a story on the issue that appeared in the Anchorage Press. We just didn't and don't have time to do more. (The Dispatch is a labor of love at the moment, so we tend to do stories that most interest us.)

2) - Why did you not question who had provided the information to Doogan?

We would have done so if we suspected the information was false. Just after Doogan sent out his newsletter, Mudflats revealed her name on her blog. This confirmed Doogan's information and we felt comfortable posting a short piece that included Mudflats' name.

3) - Are you now pursuing either of the two above issues?

See first answer.

Here is Krestia DeGeorge's response:

Phil:

If you’ll permit me a long-winded and roundabout response, I want to start by observing that—as one commenter on our site pointed out—the arguments around this issue have tended to break along mainstream media/new media lines. As much as bloggers and commenters tend to look at a paper like the Press as a monolithic old media institution, I can assure you that some of the folks at large, straight news outlets often view us little more than bloggers in print.

I think that truth probably lies somewhere in between. With a newsgathering staff of three, we hardly have the kind of horsepower to throw at a story that the ADN or KTUU does. On the other hand we do have a recognizable name and a distribution system that gets us in the hands of people out in the community that might not otherwise stumble upon our web site.

So we’re in a unique position to examine how the internet and other new technologies are changing in the media landscape without getting caught in that unhelpful “MSM vs. blogs” stereotype (not that that hasn’t kept people from trying to cast us in one camp or the other). And this dust-up—with Doogan citing one theory of journalistic ethics and a community of bloggers and their commenters another—seemed like an instance where we could add something to the discussion.

In this case, at the point I’d written my article, there’d been several blog posts written. Mudflats’ posts in particular had comment after comment of emotional writing piling on about how evil Doogan was and what a saint Mudflats was and what a travesty this was, each feeding the others’ sense of outrage.

I can understand people having an emotional reaction to what happened, but it seemed to me that in the frenzy that followed there was a widespread absence of critical thinking (not a complete one, mind you, just a widespread one) in the rush to sanctify Mudflats and vilify Mike. (And I use the word “sanctify” purposefully here, because the tone of the discussion reminded me a lot of discussions about the finer points of religious orthodoxy among pious folk in other settings.) Specifically, those commenters uncritically accepted the two premises that anonymity is an indispensable component of the freedom of speech, and that that speaking one’s mind—even if the opinions are relatively straightforward ones—is a dangerous thing to do, at least for a liberal.

The point of my column was twofold. First, simply enough, I wanted to let people who might not read Ear or Alaska’s network of liberal bloggers know what had gone down.

And second, I wanted to get some of those already involved in this discussion to think a little bit more critically about what they were saying—especially on those two topics I hinted at a moment ago: First, whether anonymity is as important to the existence of democracy as many of commenters claimed and whether it might not have some downsides, and second, whether the spectre of threats and harassment are good reasons to enter the public dialogue anonymously. When it comes to that second one, I can’t make that decision for someone else, but I believe it’s at least worth pointing out examples of people who faced very serious risks and chose to use their real names anyway.

Which brings us, finally, to your questions: you asked why I didn’t explore the use of government email by Doogan (as a possible ethics violation) or the source of his information. I didn’t do so because those discussions were already well under way in comments sections when I joined this dialogue and I thought it more productive to bring up points that had yet to be addressed. (And neither of questions fit into the narrow scope of those new points that I chose to write about.)

As to your third question—whether or not we’re currently pursuing stories about either—the answer is no, at least not actively. We’re also not actively pursuing any story about potential APOC violations with regard to Jeanne’s hitherto undisclosed link to Alaskans for Truth through her husband.

I expect that someone will file an ethics complaint against Doogan, and someone else will file an APOC complaint against AFT. I also expect that neither will be upheld.

But I could certainly be wrong, and if I am—in either case—we’d likely reconsider whether to run some kind of story.

It’s worth pointing out two things about the Press that are relevant to this last response: The first is that while the Press strives to add some original reporting to the public dialogue, we never claim that everything we do is hard news, or that it all strives to be “objective” journalism. In the case of these columns of mine, they tend to be more lightly reported and rely more heavily on opinion and analysis. I don’t think I’ve ever pretended otherwise.

The second is that we don’t share the ADN’s burden as a “paper of record.” We have limited resources when it comes to staff as well as space and we use them in whatever way we think is most beneficial and interesting for our readers—which occasionally means not continuing to publish lots of updates on stories we write.

Boraas, Halcro, Coyne and DeGeorge responded with considered answers. Dent, I believe, is concerned about the safety of his job, and did not want to engage a person who he has been told or he has noticed, can be highly critical of his employer.

Toomey surprised me, but not much. Perhaps she objected to my categorization of her column on the Mudflats flap as "meretricious."

image of Mudflats regular, Brian the Moose.