Yesterday's Anchorage Daily News Newsreader feature celebrated tomorrow's 40th anniversary of the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King by directly linking to an Alaska White Power and hate site. The site, which I'm not going to name or link to has such front page features as the full text of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf (in HTML), a category called "White Nationalist Websites," and others that purport to tell the "true story" of Dr. King.KUDO's Aaron Selbig (who is owed the thanks of the community for having aired "the tape" last month) and I commented at the newsreader about this. Aaron and I discussed it briefly on Aaron's KUDO call-in program.
When Robert Dillon linked to this site last year, I commented at Dillon's site, and Dillon responded with an acknowledgment that this hadn't been intentional. Let's see if the newsreader shows that much class in today's edition.
I've been intending to find a time when there might be context to conversations I had last month with the station manager at KFQD and the Editorial Page Editor at the ADN, Matt Zencey, about Dan Fagan's hate comments on KFQD on March 14. When I pointed out to Zencey, that by giving Fagan a cross platform set-up where he touts his ADN relationship on KFQD, and his KFQD hate program is listed in the ADN, that Zencey is a participant in Fagan's hate and racism, Zencey defended not only Fagan's right to his views, but the views themselves. Zencey further showed his qualifications as an editor by defending the quality of Fagan's writing style with zest.
Meanwhile, yesterday I got a preview of today's feature article in the Anchorage Press. It is a fairly thorough piece by Monica Bradbury, called Into the Sky, about Nick Begich, Don Young's predecessor in the U.S. House's AK-AL seat, and the father of Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich, and the rest of the Begich kids who have had such positive influence on Southcentral Alaska over the years.
Good Job, Anchorage Press!
Fix it, Anchorage Daily News!
Update - Thursday 11:45 a.m: Today's ADN Newsreader is up. No apology or indication that anyone there is considering one. Waiting on a call back from ADN Assistant Managing Editor David Hulen on this, after speaking with Terry Carr, who assures me the linking to the hate site yesterday was inadvertent. I told Terry, whose work I generally admire, that I strongly feel an ADN apology to the community is in order.
Update - Thursday 1:45 p.m: Just off the iPhone with David Hulen. Excellent discussion. The ADN has removed the link to the site some of us found abhorrent. They have posted the following at today's newsreader:
Readers: On Wednesday, Newsreader linked to an analysis of the Anchorage municipal elections on a locally written blog. Readers informed us later that the blog we linked to contains links to other sites with white supremacist and racist views. I wasn't aware of the nature of that material on the blog when I linked to it; I was focused on an individual post concerning spending in the city election. We have removed the link from the Newsreader and apologize to anyone offended that we linked to the site. -- Terry Carr
Bravo, ADN!!
image - a Jena Six noose
5 comments:
linking to blogs is like sexual relations in the age of AIDS--you are linked to all the linkers to the links of your links. There's going to be interconnections between sane and odious sites, because (as the Chinese say) "even a broken clock is right twice a day"--sometimes even a generally crackpot site will have a semi-sane post, which gets linked to by saner bloggers, etc. etc. So I think it's good the ADN removed the link, but not a surpries that a link to a link might have material that doesn't pass muster. Your post, by the way, makes it sound like ADN linked directly to the hate-site, instead of linked to a site that linked to it. Get accurate!
They linked directly to a hate site. It is an Alaskan site. Some of their essays are very racist. They also prominently link to other, very well-known hate sites. Sorry if I didn't make that clear from the first. I thought I did.
Bravo for brining it up, dude, and for pressing the ADN on it.
I'm sure it was inadvertent on Terry Carr's part and I'm glad they responded by taking it down.
People like the hater need to leave our state.
why can't zencey see just how awful he and ADN look with their embrace of fagan? i mean, don't take my word for it, ask practically anybody and you'll get this painful look. it really bugs me that ADN and KTUU [and KSKA, for that matter] try so hard to maintain some illusion of a diversity of viewpoints that they'll consider giving a platform to someone like that. it poisons the overall approach and their image. one of my co-workers who watches more TV than i do said, the first thing KTUU will do after lefties retake the assembly will be to go out and ask someone like randy reudrich to explain what happened. man. i'm so eager to tune in local right-wing talk show hosts, so they can tell everyone what i've been thinking.
thank you
sohbet
muhabbet
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sevgi
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