Saradise Lost - Chapter Three - The Challenge to Our Alaska Media

Having spent hours and hours on the phone since Friday with reporters and writers from the USA, Canada and Great Britain, and having read dozens of excellent articles about Sarah Palin and scores of awful ones, in the Outside media, I'm learning a lot. My first post-choice post last Friday, This Changes the Most In-Flux Political Environment in the USA, reacted mostly to early cable news and wire service coverage of the announcement by McCain in Ohio.

But over the weekend, while the MSM press first string is usually gone from the job in Alaska, a challenge to our veracity, professionalism, memory and intelligence that dwarfs even the Ted Stevens indictment, has occurred.

Reporters from around the country are interviewing Rick Steiner, the UAA professor whose battle against the Palin administration last year over state correspondence on the status of Polar bears, the Anchorage Daily News consigned to the Alaska Ear column. A reporter is flying here from the UK to - among other things - interview John Stein, the Wasilla Mayor who built the city government structure Palin got credit for. A blogger named Jane Hamsher is getting into more details about Palin's past vindictiveness than our local reporters have yet scratched since the Monegan fiasco began. Sam Stein, a Huffington Post columnist, was able to determine from a few hours of basic research, that the McCain team had not investigated Palin's Wasilla administration's history in the Frontiersman. I was thinking of checking on that Tuesday, but Stein had it figured out by Friday!

I could go on and on with examples like this. The important point on the above instances is that these reporters and writers are doing a good job, by and large. I've had to answer many questions about Alaska and Palin based on misunderstanding, ignorance or prejudice toward the governor or the state, but the best of these people try to get it, and want to understand us.

Alaska progressive bloggers, especially in dealing with comments to our national-level essays, or in observing the media and blogs throw out one inaccuracy after another about our state, and about Sarah Palin or the Palin family, have to stand up against false information and false impressions.

My feelings about Sarah Palin have always been mixed. I find her totally unsuitable for this job possibility. Yet, several times this weekend, I've found myself defending her and Wasilla, in comments about her potential candidacy.

Robert Dillon pointed out the growing insidiousness in left blogs, grasping at anything they can find, to slime a person and family with a rumor, that, remarkably enough, started early last spring, in far right Alaska GOP circles. Yet Dillon was careless in attributing the DailyKos story to Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, which is untrue. The story was penned by a DailyKos diarist, named ArcXIX.

I've already written that I feel this choice of Palin is dangerously irresponsible. I'll continue to fight it. With the truth.

In a way it is scary. I've been critical, upset, angry, goddam mad and over the top about a lot of Alaska politicians, talk show personalities and editors, in the 10 months of Progressive Alaska. But, I have to say, there's something about Sarah Palin that makes some nutty people in the Valley way more nutty, in what they would do to stick up for her.

image by Dennis Zaki, who is busy, busy, busy....