Isn't it supposed to be the source of the story who wants anonymity? Not in the case of some political bloggers who want to be the man or woman controlling things behind the curtain.
Sadly, some elected officials it turns out, are happy to let these hucksters keep pulling one over on Internet readers.
Alice Lara, for instance, who was just elected to board that oversees the Maricopa County hospital, tells New Times she knows the identity of the person who interviewed her for the right-wing blog site sonoranalliance.com. And she won't tell.
The "reporter" who prepared the Q&A with Lara, "Candie Dates," has written a handful of other short political blogs for sonoranalliance, always under the pseudonym. Yet the article about Lara states that Dates was "able to sit down" with Lara. I asked her about that, hoping this "self-professed blabbermouth," as Lara calls herself on her Web site, would spill the beans on Dates.
She immediately contradicted the "sit down" part -- the Q&A was e-mailed to her and she never sat down with Dates, she says. But she does know Dates, and also knows the writer wants to remain anonymous.
"I'm not going to tell you" who it is, she says, adding that she would call the "source," meaning Dates, to ask if it was okay to reveal his or her name. That was on Friday. She never got back on the question.
Maybe she wrote the softball questions herself. It is also no stretch to imagine that either her boss or someone doing the bidding of her boss wrote them.
In her day job, Lara's the secretary for longtime Republican campaign strategist and consultant Stan Barnes. -- Ray Stern
