Who You Callin’ Un-Anonymous? Slow news day. You might as well get lost in the intricacies of the “Betty and Veronica” Weinergate Web whodunit with Patterico. He’s feeling very prosecutorial, speculating that Weiner might go to jail if he is somehow behind fake identities of two girls (or “girls”) who claimed to have contact with him.* Seems a stretch. It’s motive enough to just find the truth. Brian Stelter has a Page One piece in the NYT today on how “Updending Anonymity, These Days the Web Unmasks Everyone.” So why don’t we know who Betty and Veronica are? For that matter, why don’t we know who Dan Wolfe, the far more important person who captured the fatal Weiner mistweet, is? Dan Wolfe says Dan Wolfe is his real name! He talked about his custody battle. He gave his approximate age. If he can’t be tracked down then Web anonymity seems alive and well. …
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*–Patterico is withering in his criticism of the NYT‘s Jennifer Preston, who now declares she is “open to all possibilities” as to the identity and motives of “Betty and Veronica,” but whose tendentious lede paragraph leered crudely at only one possibility, the one that made conservatives look like dirty tricksters:
At least three months before the revelation that former Representative Anthony D. Weiner was sending lewd messages and photos to women online, a small group of self-described conservatives was monitoring his exchanges with women on Twitter. Now there is evidence that one or more people created two false identities on Twitter in order to collect information to use against him. [E.A.]
Yes, there is “evdence'” that these possibly fake girls were “against” Weiner. But as Patterico notes there is also powerful evidence that they weren’t–at one crucial point they tried to defend him. I suspect Preston is victim of the traditional NYT left-slanted editor’s lede rewrite, in which her geniuine scoop was tarnished by her superiors desire to score a point against the bad guys. (See Dean Baquet’s remarks remembering the late Robin Toner’s complaints about her NYT editors: “Every hour, a new set of instructions on what the story should say came from New York …” )
Update: Ace of Spades has an admirably clear summary/update of all this. He seems to feel the mystery is close to a resolution. …