This has the ingredients of a big story, and the potential for being an interesting test case. Democratic State Rep. Mike Doogan, still smarting from an email campaign on his office after rebuking constituents and others over Gov. Palin and Troopergate, today outed the most celebrated Alaska political blogger.
I can't for the life of me figure out why. Doogan was a popular Metro columnist for the Anchorage Daily News from 1980 to 1994. His column used to appear on Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Many of us used to drop what we were doing, scoop the paper off the porch and read it before anything else. He used to do what bloggers do today -- ferret out graft and corruption and write about it from an informed insider perspective, adding knowledge gained from research and study. I used to think the Alaska corruption scandal might have been revealed long before the FBI got involved and the story finally broke to the public in 2006, had Doogan still been on the job.
After he retired from the column, he carved out a niche writing mystery novels, before running for the State House himself and serving three terms representing the Spenard area of Anchorage.
His treatment of email inquiries at least makes a mockery of basic netiquette, even if he hasn't violated any privacy laws with his sawn-off keyboard blasts.
Curious, indeed. Makes me wonder if he is O.K.
My name is Clark Yerrington, BTW, not that it should make any goddamned difference. It's still a free country, supposedly.
UPDATE. I don't know any details about Doogan's motivations. See Progressive Alaska and Shannyn Moore for more. Mudflats came out of nowhere almost a year ago, and it is pretty much just a concerned citizen's personal blog about Alaska politics. It became widely read after Gov. Palin was selected as McCain's running mate. Mudflats has been linked on the dKos main page blogroll since September, and Ak Muckraker's writings have been occasionally cross-posted at HuffPo. It's witty, not at all vicious or vindictive and helped the rest of the country understand Alaska better than they once did.
The larger question is: do bloggers have a right to protect their anonymity? Doogan has obviously made up his mind on that already.
