Anonymous Bloggers at Sonoran Alliance Take Heat From "Peers"

The steam keeps rising over at the Sonoran Alliance blog, the site of a tiff between conservatives that we told you about last week. The underlying issue is a familiar one to readers of this blog: We've been on Sonoran Alliance's case for months for its bad habit of...

By Ray Stern

March 30, 2009

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The steam keeps rising over at the Sonoran Alliance blog, the site of a tiff between conservatives that we told you about last week.

The underlying issue is a familiar one to readers of this blog: We've been on Sonoran Alliance's case for months for its bad habit of allowing anonymous authors to masquerade as journalists, and we were pleased to see blogonaut Greg Patterson take up our cause.

Here's a sample from Patterson's post:

Let me be clear that using a popular blog to attack someone anonymously is one of the lowest forms of cowardice.

We agree, though we've mentioned several other ways anonymous political blogs can be abused -- namely, that politicians are using them to produce inaccurate propaganda. As we've reported, one elected official -- Alice Lara of the Maricopa County Health Care District -- played along last year by letting herself by interviewed by one of SA's faceless cowboys.

Scroll down for some of our previous coverage on the topic:

Elected official won't reveal identity of interviewer

SA defends use of anonymous writers

Chewie's report on banned Bible study at DES

Chewie gives up on Bible study story

(Note -- Chewie has admitted the name "Chewie" is a pseudonym for several different authors).

Anonymous SA blog gets blowback by Republicans

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Ray Stern is the former news editor of Phoenix New Times. He worked as a newspaper reporter in Arizona for more than two decades. He's won numerous awards for his reporting, including the Arizona Press Club's Don Bolles Award for Investigative Journalism.