The mostly anonymous hacks at the right-wing blog sonoranalliance.com take issue with a recent Valley Fever post about their use of unnamed writers, blabbering in an article yesterday that New Times ought to worry about selling more tattoo parlor ads.
Look, it's a fact that we and others who read sonoranalliance.com occasionally find something interesting on the site. The blog recently broke the story about Kirk Adams becoming the new state House Speaker, for example.
But with politicians and their hired guns growing ever more Internet-savvy, the public has a right to know whether what looks like a new article is nothing but campaign propaganda.
Sonoran Alliance claims its writers are unpaid -- and expects you to swallow that on faith. In fact, as New Times pointed out, the Q&A with Alice Lara could have been written by Lara, her political consultant boss or someone she paid to do it, for all the reading public can tell. At least one part of the article was apparently made up: Lara says she and the writer did not "sit down" together, as the article states. Rather, the Q&A was e-mailed to her.
Sonoran Alliance declares that:
Several of us work in federal, state, county and city government while others have worked on high-profile political campaigns or for non-profit organizations. It is because of the key positions in which we serve, that it is in our best interest to write under pseudonyms.
This kind of argument is fine if Sonoran Alliance used its space to reveal abuses of taxpayer trust in government or non-profit organizations. But that's not what the blog does -- it's a right-leaning, ongoing political diatribe that supports conservative causes and candidates while blasting Democrats and liberals.
The fact that several of the blog's writers worked on "high-profile political campaigns" is a reason to distrust their use of anonymity, not embrace it.
