All I Saw: A Native Alaskan’s Look at the Media Coverage of Palin and Wasilla

For a good media-savvy, liberal, that happens to be from Alaska, the last 10 months have been nothing short of depressing.

I’m an Alaskan. Born and raised. I lived there twenty years, and go back every year. My family’s from Wasilla. While I didn’t grow up there, my mother did. I summered there. My family is one of the oldest families in the town, and I’ve spent time there virtually every year of my life. My parents live on the old family homestead, at 42 mile Parks highway, and I own a sliver of it, right next to them, right across the lake from the now-infamous Wasilla Sports Complex.

Does this make me a Sarah Palin expert? No. I’ve shaken her hand, quickly and casually like you meet a politician, but I don’t know her. But being an Alaskan with deep Wasilla ties, I’ve followed her political career since the beginning. My mother served on the board of the library when Palin had her infamous censoring incident (the book in question, my mother says: Jon Stewart’s “America: The Book.”)

But it does make me a Wasilla expert, and in that capacity, I have come to learn about the sad state of the American media in a way I never thought I’d believe. I suspect this goes on all the time – when you have some knowledge of a subject or geography that is generally unknown to our nation’s journalism pool and then is suddenly thrust into the spotlight. Our family’s home town went from an obscure town no one heard of to a household word in weeks. It’s not the only time this has happened. Waco. Crawford. Hope.

But it’s the first and only time I’ve got to do an A-B test between reality and the media reporting.

The coverage has been abysmal. The recent coverage of the “Spenard Building Supplies” scandal is a perfect example. First off, it’s Spenard BUILDERS Supply. Like it says on their website. And they are not, and never have been, a contractor, as everyone in the state knows. I first encountered this on The Daily Beast, but they were pulling a story from the Voice, and all of them generally referenced “Alaskan Blogs” (which is a mystery in itself since the Alaskans would know better). As someone who trades in meme theory and viral marketing, this is fascinating. The incorrect name of this company – easily fact-checked by visiting their website now bubbles up some 1400 times in Google, many of them blog posts or news items. Also easily checked is the fact that SBS is not a contractor, as most of these articles imply.

Then there’s the context. The Palin camp response to the SBS scandal is comically perfect level-headed Alakan thinking, and includes some obvious facts that should have been in any original journalism about the subject. SBS was the only construction supply store in Wasilla at the time – everyone bought pretty much everything there. She wasn’t about to run for governor, she was about to run for lieutenant-governor. SBS is not Alaska-owned. These are all worthy points, but more than that, they were obvious to  every Alaskan immediately upon reading the original accusations.

This continues with the whole Todd Palin Alaskan Independence Party brouhahaha. Pick up the phone and call any Alaskan ever even remotely following politics and they will tell you that yes, it’s completely conceivable and not that weird for Alaskans to have flirted with that party and not believed in independence. After Joe Vogler, the party’s founder, died in 1993, the party got used for a lot of different things. Hell, we even had an AIP governor, Wally Hickel, that was an old Republican and never once called for even so much as a referendum about Alaskan independence while governor.

These are not partisan opinions. My family is as liberal as Alaskan families come. And the list goes on. This isn’t even including the flat-out insults the town has had to endure. Wasilla, presented as a sea of box stores and misery, yet is a town of under 13 square miles serving as the hub of an area of rugged beauty the size of West Virginia. Wasilla’s ugly because people don’t live there. They live outside it. It’s a supply post.

The sad thing is I don’t think anything new is going on here. I suspect the media always covers these things with this sort of C+ at best coverage of new topics. The only thing new here is that I can see it happening. And it’s depressing. And, worse, its making this dyed-in-the-wool liberal feel bad for Palin and start to agree about media accuracy. I doubt I’m alone. Is it bias? Laziness? Probably a bit of both, but dispiriting nonetheless.

Rick Webb, a native Alaskan, is the co-founder and COO of The Barbarian Group. He lives in New York.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.