This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2013, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Thanks to online sleuthing by Tribune assistant news editor Steve Mohlman, the mystery woman erroneously depicted by a conservative political action committee as Utah's Mia Love has been identified.
Drum roll, please: The young woman misidentified as the Saratoga Springs mayor and once-again congressional hopeful is Tiffinni Young, a politician in her own right who lost in her bid for a seat on the Dallas City Council in 2009.
So how did Tiffinni Young become Mia Love?
Call it a comedy of errors perpetuated by political and entertainment blogs.
It began with a frivolous December 2009 ranking on the InfoBarrel entertainment blog of the 10 most attractive female politicians — a list that included former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu.
Each contestant was identified with a sentence or two and an accompanying picture. The last two on the list were Young at No. 9 and Love at No. 10.
The pictures were listed in order, running from the top of the page to the bottom. The candidate's name was listed in bold face above her picture, so the name Mia Love, while appearing above her picture, also was directly below Young's picture.
Then, the NewsOne for Black America blog lifted that picture of Young for its top black female politicians feature and with it the name in boldface, Mia Love.
And so Tiffinni Young became Mia Love.
Next up? The Black Girls Club blog featuring a liberal take called "Black Girls Behaving Badly," which took on conservative black women.
"I've had [Mia Love's] picture [actually Tiffinni Young's] saved to my computer since the day before forever, because I wasn't sure how to even begin to talk about this Black woman who's a Mormon from Utah running for Congress," wrote the blogger.
It gets better.
The City-data.com blog made the case that the mainstream media was deliberately trying to make conservative politicians like Mia Love look bad by choosing unflattering pictures to run.
To make its case, the blog ran the picture of Tiffinni Young with the caption, "This is Mia Love."
Then, below that, it ran a picture of Mia Love with the caption: "This is how ABC chooses to depict her."
So, according to this blog, ABC was trying to make Mia Love look bad by running an unflattering picture. But ABC was just running the picture of the real Mia Love instead of the fake Mia Love that the conservative blog preferred.
Lastly, the Salt City Sinner blog wrote a piece critical of Love's comments about President Barack Obama during her speech at the August 2012 Republican National Convention and called her a hypocrite for calling the president the food-stamp president, describing that comment as a racist "dog whistle."
That blog contained video of the real Mia Love giving her speech.
Then it ran the still photo, of course, of Tiffinni Young.
So throughout cyberspace, both on the left and the right, Tiffinni Young has become Mia Love.
That's how the independent PAC, the Conservative Campaign Committee, got the wrong picture on its fundraising mailer, which it says it is conducting to help Mia/Tiffanni beat Jim Matheson in Utah's 4th District in 2014.