For anyone who wonders why President Donald Trump’s regular and often erroneous rantings about “fake news” resonate so well with a certain segment of America, here’s a reason why:
“Bear meat is no delicacy, and hunters almost never eat it.
“But that did not stop two Alaska men from going after some big game over the weekend. It didn’t go well.”
The first sentence is factually wrong. Most bear meat in Alaska is eaten as it is elsewhere in the country. The state of New Jersey, which once had a big debate about whether it’s growing bear population should be hunted, now publishes its own bear meat cookbook.
But the problem here isn’t just the factual inaccuracy.
There is a cultural divide in this country. The media regularly reinforces it. And Trump plays to that.
The president doesn’t have net approval ratings in Texas, Wyoming, the Dakotas, Missouri, West Virginia and much of the South, or in Alaska for that matter, because of his blue-collar roots. He has none. He’s a rich guy from New York with weak moral values who grew up in privilege and got ahead by playing the system.
He is also, unfortunately, the best that people who work with their hands could hope to get, and they know it.
Instead of denigrating working Americans for a lack of regeneration, Trump promises to “make America great again.” And every time the mainstream media mocks him for that phrase, every time the mainstream media demonstrates its – not his – class distinction, the greater grows the cultural divide.
“…You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” Democrat presidential candidate Hilary Clinton so famously observed in the run-up to the election. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric.”
Trump did, and he does, and for a lot of those people it all, sadly, seems like nothing more than payback for a long period of offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric directed their way.
A bear’s revenge?
Picking up on CNN’s account of the hunting accident that left 28-year-old William McCormick in intensive care, Robin Andrews, a writer at Forbes, wrote this:
“The latest story of a big game hunt gone wrong, as spotted by CNN, could be summed up by not one, but two clichéd phrases: be careful what you wish for, and revenge is a dish best served cold.”
What better to do with a story about a husband, father and soldier from Indiana injured in a bizarre Alaska hunting accident than to make fun, right?
”…McCormick and 19-year-old Zachary Tennyson were out hunting, armed with (presumably) rifles. They then spotted a bear above a ridge, which they promptly shot. Before they could declare victory, however, gravity befell the ursine creature: the bear rolled down the slope towards them, knocking off not-insignificant amounts of rocks as it did so,” Andrews wrote.
“McCormick was ultimately struck by the bear, as well as one of the rocks his wounded beastie had dislodged.”
Declare victory? Wounded beastie?
Ah yes, a story about a couple of country bumpkins who got into trouble. Let’s have fun with this.
“Mature black bears can weigh up to 350 lbs, while brown bears can tip the scales at more than 1,000.
“But that did not stop two Alaska men from going after some big game over the weekend. It didn’t go well.”
CNN did not mention why the story changed or write a correction for the original that was by today a week old and still alive in plenty of places elsewhere in the tubes. The bear actually weighed a couple hundred pounds, according to Alaska State Troopers.
Ghost editing
CNN is not alone in the practice of ghost editing. It goes on in online media all the time these days, and it only adds to the sense of distrust. It is as if reporters and editors believe no one will notice.
When the Alaska Dispatch News was imploding in Anchorage more than a year ago, Alaska Public Media described it as a newspaper with a circulation of 41,684. Where that number came from was not reported. At the time, ADN publisher Alice Rogoff could only dream that the circulation was that high.
After the reporter was queried about the sources for the number, all references as to the newspaper’s actual circulation magically disappeared. If you go back and read the story now, you will find only that the “state’s largest newspaper” was filing for bankruptcy.
And how many people were subscribing to the state’s largest newspaper? The story doesn’t say.
If you watch closely, you will see this sort of thing going on at most news websites. Almost every day, the media seems to do something to undermine its own credibility, but the problem is especially acute in rural and small-town America where it isn’t limited to ghost editing and constant errors.
Beyond the city lights, as the Alaska bear-hunt story well illustrates, the big city media takes liberties. It too often mocks the intelligence of the people in the Heartland, jokes about their leisure time activities, and denigrates their values. If Clinton had looked inward, she might have observed redneckophobia among the elite.
“The Media Bubble Is Worse Than You Think,” they reported in Politico Magazine in June 2017. “We crunched the data on where journalists work and how fast it’s changing. The results should worry you.”
Their basic conclusion was that journalists now cluster among the upper class in or around a handful of big American cities, and they reflect the views prevalent in their environment.
“The national media really does work in a bubble, something that wasn’t true as recently as 2008,” they wrote. “And the bubble is growing more extreme. Concentrated heavily along the coasts, the bubble is both geographic and political. If you’re a working journalist, odds aren’t just that you work in a pro-Clinton county—odds are that you reside in one of the nation’s most pro-Clinton counties. And you’ve got company: If you’re a typical reader of Politico, chances are you’re a citizen of bubbleville, too.
“The ‘media bubble’ trope might feel overused by critics of journalism who want to sneer at reporters who live in Brooklyn or California and don’t get the “real America” of southern Ohio or rural Kansas. But these numbers suggest it’s no exaggeration: Not only is the bubble real, but it’s more extreme than you might realize.”
The problem only seems to have gotten worse as the Trump presidency has progressed and increasingly polarized the nation.
Now when someone in the hinterlands is seriously injured in an unusual hunting accident, it’s something to joke about or mock. If a copy machine blew up in a New York office and seriously injured someone would CNN write a story like this:
“Copies are ancient technology, and nobody makes them anymore.
“But that didn’t stop a New York office worker from pushing the copy button. It didn’t go well.
“Boom!”
Of course not. It’s not funny when people are seriously hurt.
A bear is a bear is a bear
And exactly who says bear meat is no delicacy?
“Infused vodka palace Russian House has a special treat this week: bear meat,” the Austin (Texas) eater reported last winter. “The restaurant will be serving black bear meat sourced from California….”
The CNN story has a link to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game website for “Brown/Grizzly Bear Hunting in Alaska,” which might have led to CNN reporters’ conclusions on bear meat. If you prowl around there, you can indeed find another page that says “some game meat has received a bad reputation for palatability. For example, many hunters shun bear meat. However, most hunters who do eat black and brown/grizzly bear say the meat is usually good or very good, unless the animal has been feeding on fish. Regardless of what a bear has been eating, its meat should always be well cooked to prevent trichinosis, a parasitic disease (also found in domestic hogs) that can infect humans.”
This could be where CNN staffers most likely writing from “the Boston-New York-Washington-Richmond corridor or the West Coast crescent that runs from Seattle to San Diego and on to Phoenix,” as described by Schafer and Doherty, got the idea that hunters “almost never” eat bear, although even that is a step beyond “many hunters shun.”
And, of course, as anyone in Alaska knows there is a big difference between black bears and brown/grizzly bears. Most of the latter prey heavily on fish. A lot of the former subsist on greens and berries.
Grizzlies, of which there are about 30,000 in the state, are not widely eaten, although there are Alaska Native tribes that have historically consumed grizzly bear, and there is little doubt that in the tough times of the old days all tribes ate grizzly bears at some time because if you are hungry enough you will eat almost anything.
And all tribes have a history of killing grizzlies for their fur as do the white men who arrived later in Alaska.
Black bears, on the other hand, are regularly shot for food. For a long period of time in Alaska history, black bears were considered village meat and shot any time they ventured too near a village.
In a historical context, this no doubt had a lot to do with the fact bears often cause problems. If, for instance, you are trying to dry salmon to keep you alive through the winter you don’t want to risk allowing bears to get close enough to steal it.
And if the bear can provide even more food plus a fur blanket to keep you warm in the cold, all the better. But how would the 73 percent of online reporters living in the aforementioned corridor or crescent know this?
They wouldn’t. So they’d write a story about some doofus hunting bears for undefined reasons who is almost killed by the bear setting off a rock slide that rolls down on him. And they wouldn’t think twice about it because facts are unnecessary when you’re smarter than anyone involved.