REPORT The antecedents of this political blog run back, through intermittent gaps, back to about 1994 - it has been Ridenbaugh Press since the beginning - and that surely makes it one of the older blogs, online years before the term "blog" was born. Even many of the leading national blogs have been around less a decade; many of the highest-traffic have six or seven years of existence. The medium of blog is in its infancy.
Newspapers were at that stage in the 1700s, especially the later part of that century and the early years of the one following, and in those days they looked and read a lot differently. Facts were interspersed among opinions and aphorisms, and the people now revered as founding fathers were targeted with mud that makes even our recent elections look sickly sweet. Routinely, writers on matters public used pseudonyms, even when almost everyone knew who they were anyway. Ben Franklin probably fooled none of his neighbors masquerading as Silence Dogood. Eventually, newspapering became a bigger deal and a more established deal, and professional standards tended to rise. No regulation was necessary.
![]() Stephen Hartgen |
Newly-minted Idaho state Representative Stephen Hartgen, R-Twin Falls, is a former publisher and editor of the Twin Falls Times News, and other papers around the country before that; and just about everyone who wrote an opinion for those papers - like other conventional daily papers - had to sign their name to what they wrote. (Excepting of course the "institutional" editorials, which as at many other papers bore no signature and were often strongly worded indeed, but we'll move past that.) As the Idaho Statesman's Kevin Richert wrote some days ago, Hartgen "is drafting a bill to require bloggers to post under their real name, and require online commenters to do likewise. In essence, Hartgen wants online commentary to more closely resemble newspaper opinion pages, where letter writers are generally required to identify themselves." (more…)