More on the anonymity debate

Antonio French of PubDef has an interesting take on the anonymous blogging controversy started earlier this week by an editorial from the Springfield News-Leader's Tony Messenger:

As someone who attaches his name to everything he writes and then often gets attacked for those words, I can definitely see the attraction in hiding one's identity. Without the protection of a large news organization, telling truth to power can be damaging to one's livelihood.

But however varied the individual reasons are for blogging anonymously, the reason that we blog in the first place is the same; because the mainstream media have failed and continues to fail everyday.

Missouri's political bloggers fill a void and no matter how the mainstream media may try to copy us, they will never be able to do exactly what it is we do.

Today's information consumers are the most savvy ever. They can judge for themselves the credibility of their news sources. And increasingly, more and more readers on the Web are relying on blogs for their news than on large newspapers that, sure enough, attach bylines to each and every boring, out-of-touch, and shallow news story they print.

Just because you sign your name to it, it doesn't make it suck any less.