Pat Dougherty, the Guy Who Did More Than Any Other Person to Kill Journalism in Alaska, Brags About It

On Thursday, Pat Dougherty, Senior Vice President and Editor of the Anchorage Daily News bragged to a very small audience at Baylor University, his alma mater, about how he killed his newspaper, and did more damage to Alaska journalism than Joe Hazelwood did to Prince William Sound.  Unlike the hapless tanker skipper, Dougherty seems to be proud of it:

The Anchorage Daily News gained widespread attention for its coverage of Palin.

“She has been such a presence for the life of our newspaper,” Dougherty said.

The benefits received by covering Palin were mutual as the “paper was actually very crucial to the rise of Sarah Palin,” he said.

“The relationship between the paper and Palin was actually pretty good,” Dougherty added. “We had a few disagreements on policy, but really we were her strong supporters.”

 They really were.   And Dougherty made sure, every step of the way, that the real truth about Palin's divisiveness was either kept from the public, or attenuated into "he said- she said" bullshit.  According to Dougherty, when he took over the helm at the ADN, "the Anchorage Daily News had 104 employees."  Back then, in late 2007, I took him to task, when he wrote:

We take our responsibilities as Alaska’s largest news organization very seriously. Whether we are covering public corruption or the homefront consequences of the Iraq war, the effort to build a gas line or the effects of global warming in Alaska, we know that if we don’t do the story, it may not get done.

What a lie.  At that time, there were countlss stories being missed by the ADN, which were being covered elsewhere on the web.  At that time, the ADN was just tiptoing into a large on-line presence.  From the start, thanks mostly to Pat's dim understanding of technology, when bloggers scooped the ADN, Pat would whine about our veracity.  But when Palin went mainstream in late August 2008, the veracity of the ADN went down the toobz, mostly from Pat's one epiphany regarding electronic technology - mentioning or covering Palin brings hits to your internet site, which might transate, depending on how your site is configured, into financial benefits.

Dougherty at Baylor:

Everyone in the world was calling because nobody’s ever heard of Sarah Palin. A year after the announcement our paper had 175 million page hits online.

 Dougherty had his staff set up what I called their "Sarah Palin Shrine," prominently placed, so if one came to the ADN webpage, you could see it immediately, and click yourself there. While she was a VP candidate, it seemed unseemly enough, but after she came back to Juneau Wasilla in late 2008, they kept it up, which was poor taste at best.

In January, 2009, when Bob Poe filed for Governor, I asked Pat to either take the fucking disgustingly pandering niche down, or put up a Bob Poe shrine next to it.  In the letter, I listed all the things the ADN then had up that pimped for Sarah, as if they were for Poe's benefit:

There's a picture off to the upper left of this page. The guy in it is named Bob Poe. He doesn't get any free advertising from the Anchorage Daily News.


I'd like to suggest, though, that beginning tomorrow, you incorporate the following new features about him, like the ones you carry for free for his likely 2010 opponent in the Alaska Gubernatorial race at the ADN. You could file it at a place called http://www.adn/bob-poe/ Here are my ideas, so far:


Bob Poe photo galleries
A Bob Poe look-alike contest gallery (ADN readers could submit photos)
Poe and Me (pics of people with Bob)
Bob Poe's Seven Challenges
Poe Background
The Poe Family
Videos of Bob in Action
Bob Poe pardoning some animal while, uh, you know - another one is being.........
Our Favorite Bob Poe SNL skits
Some Recent Bob Poe YouTubes
Crowds Watching Bob Poe
And, of course -- Bob's interviews with French Prime Minister Nicolas Sarkozy


Sincerely,


Philip Munger

Dougherty's response was to move the Palin shrine within a week of my appeals to him.

During the past 40 months, I've written several posts here criticizing the ADN's unwillingness to address Palin's divisive nature, the importance of that component of her personality to her national appeal, or the relationship of that package to her critical fundamentalist beliefs. 

Joe McGinniss wrote about Dougherty's Baylor speech earlier today.  He is as harsh toward Pat as I am:

It’s long been obvious to anyone who’s paid attention to the rise of Sarah Palin from mayor of Wasilla to governor of Alaska and beyond that the Anchorage Daily News was her greatest enabler.

By turning a blind eye to her avariciousness, viciousness, venality and incompetence, the ADN allowed her to inflict herself, first on the state of Alaska, and then on the whole of America.

In an Aug. 31, 2008 profile of her, ADN called her, in a headline, “The Joan of Arc of Alaska politics.”
On Thursday, Oct. 20, 2011, in a speech at his alma mater, Baylor University, ADN executive editor Pat Dougherty finally ‘fessed up.

“She has been such a presence for the life of our newspaper,” Dougherty said.
He admitted–for the first time (to my knowledge)–that the ADN promoted Palin out of self-interest.

“Our paper was actually very crucial to the rise of Sarah Palin,” he said.
Lacking context, I can’t say whether he was bragging or apologizing.

But he said, “The relationship between the paper and Palin was actually pretty good…really, we were her strong supporters.”

Dougherty was clearly not apologizing when he said that after John McCain chose Sarah as his running mate, “Everyone in the world was calling…A year after the announcement our paper had 175 million page hits online.”

That was the ADN’s payoff for never telling the truth about Sarah.

 McGinniss quotes some of the same Dougherty statements I brought out above, but they deserve reiteration. 

Their coverage by reporters during the Wayne Anthony Ross debacle was thorough and honest.  Pat's editorial page was disgusting in its conclusion.

As Ross says, the attorney general does represent all Alaskans.

Ideally, Alaska's attorney general would be someone who embodies the best values of society, who respects the inherent worth and dignity of every law-abiding citizen.

Instead, Alaska is about to get an attorney general named Wayne Anthony Ross.

That didn't happen.  Dougherty's part in the ADN's role in Palin's biggest gubernatorial debacle  was somewhere between pathetic and lame, according to what I found out back then from reporters.

Joe McGinniss concludes his assessment of Dougherty's job performance so far with this:

If there were a Pulitzer for Public Disservice, Pat Dougherty’s ADN would have won it in a walk for every year between 2008 and 2011.

From 2005 to 2008, the ADN was merely negligent and incurious in allowing Sarah to rise like a souffle´.

From 2008 until today, the ADN has prostituted itself in pursuit of a better bottom line.
And its executive editor has finally admitted as much.

My concern is that he doesn’t–even yet–seem to see how wrong it was to so cynically betray his readers.

Mr. Dougherty, if you wonder why so few remain, don’t look at the national economy: look in the mirror.

“She has been such a presence for the life of our newspaper,” he said.

He should have added, “But because she cost us our credibility with our readers, she’s now become a major cause of our death.”

The ADN now has 22% of the employees they had when Dougherty took the helm there.  Faced with more layoffs, this zombie of an editor is now reaching for the big oil lifeline, by keeping people as ill-informed about oil pricing as he did regarding Palin's divisiveness. Alaska's most enduring muckraker, Ray Metcalfe, is letting the public know about this latest episode of Dougherty's "crucial role" in efforts to repeal AGIA.

I hope the ADN survives Pat Dougherty.  If he leaves before the new year, we may decide to renew our  27-year subscription when it comes up.