Ridenbaugh Press/Northwest

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.”

Newspapers as they are now, that is. Except for the “institutional” unsigned editorials.

How far such a measure would get is unclear. Probably Hartgen will get some sympathy from some other legislators, though whether they’d want to undertake this particular crusade is more doubtful. Especially as the near-impossibility of enforcement, and the likelihood of an overturn in court, becomes clear.

Maybe – and this would be more understandable – Hartgen’s point simply is to draw some attention to the matter of anonymity, to the point that debate can be a race to the bottom if you don’t have to show your face before hurling invectives. We’re not entirely unsympathetic there; this blog encourages commenters to use their real names, or something close to them. But in common with most blogs, we don’t require it; engaging in the debate generally seems worth the lack of knowing who the person is. (Personally, we tend to take arguments more seriously when we do know who is behind them. Our guess is that we’re not alone in this, and that may be one of the self-correcting factors in the arena over time.)

Hartgen certainly has riled the blogosphere, though. Richert, a long-time newspaper guy (who once worked for Hartgen), registered his disapproval. Conservative blogger Adam Graham (who’s far from anonymous, and who in general is likely to agree with Hartgen on many other matters) pointed out the tradition of pseudonyms, and closed with the thoughtful suggestion that “the way to combat bloggers you don’t like is by encouraging a wider circle of people to become involved, not regulating the heck out of it.”

A sound enough point, but the definitive smackdown of the real-names-leads-to-civility argument comes from Goldy (a nom de blog, but very widely known in Seattle and beyond to be David Goldstein) at Horse’s Ass: “See, I’ve never blogged anonymously, and I have absolutely no problem sticking my name on a post, no matter how uncivil, ugly or inflammatory. So suck on that” – at which point he proceeds to show show what a highly visible, named blogger is fully capable of.

A serious suggestion: Hartgen, who has been a journalist for many years, definitely ought to join the growing number of state legislators who blog. Under his own name, of course. We’d bookmark it.