A moose in attack mode/Craig Medred photo

Believing things doesn’t make them true

Update: A state medical examiner has now determined that Homer’s Dale Chorman died of a single blunt blow to the back of head and/or cervical spine after being charged by a moose.

“Based on everything we know from the report of the friend who was present at the time, from this examiner’s report, and from viewing Dale’s body ourselves, we have every reason to believe his death was extremely quick,” his son, Dale, posted on Facebook today. “It’s also worth noting that while most moose kicks are not fatal, Dale had a condition called ‘ankylosing spondylitis,’ which may have weakened his spine and made it more vulnerable. That last part is speculation on our part.”

A blunt blow to the back of the head would be consistent with the actions of a moose caught in a February 2023 video in Anchorage. That moose ran down Tracy Hansen while on her nightly walk with her dog and just before making contact slashed out with its left leg as if to knock her out of the way.

“I thought someone had not been paying attention and hit me with a bike or something,” Hansen later told KTUU.com, but upon seeing the moose running down the path in front of her Hansen figured out what had happened.

She was much luckier than Chorman. Her injury required three stitches and she suffered with headaches, but she was soon back walking her dog.

The original story is below.

More than 25 years ago, an Alaska outdoor writer named Chris Batin decades penned a commentary for “Outdoors Unlimited,” the official publication of the Outdoors Writers Association of America (OWAA), arguing that people in the business he was in needed to be given the latitude to write “News Fiction.”

Batin, now a travel writer, was a man ahead of his time.

While freelancing for the Anchorage Daily News (ADN) in the 1980s, he was discovered to have embellished an Alaska fishing story.  This led to an investigation that found other stories written by Batin had questionable factual backing. Batin defended himself by arguing that he was only doing what a lot of outdoor writers were doing to create “better” stories.

Some time was spent investigating this defense, and it was discovered there was some truth to Batin’s claim. The ADN parted ways with him anyway, but Batin went on writing for other outdoor publications and a few years later authored the column for the OWAA on the need for news fiction.

His argument boiled down to this:

News Fiction, as he termed it, helps to make for more engaging stories, and there is no dishonesty involved in taking an anecdote from say a quail hunt in Georgia and using it in a story about grouse hunting in Vermont if the anecdote is true.

This is what might be called the “if it could have happened, it is true enough” standard. It has today been augmented by the “personal truth” standard as a young reporter at the Anchorage Daily News (ADN), unaware what the imprimatur of a legacy newspaper once meant, pointed out to me after writing a story full of misinformation provided by a source with an agenda.

This was OK, it was explained, because “while it might not be the truth, it was her truth.” How the reader was to make this distinction is unclear.

But these are the standards that now seem to broadly apply to a lot more of today’s journalism than to the journalism of the 1980s or 1990s.

Who done it?

Enter an Alaska man sadly found dead, reportedly with no apparent injuries, after being charged by a cow moose. His death became a global story because it is so rare for someone to be killed by a moose.

Whether he was actually killed by the moose is unclear.

A companion with the dead man, 70-year-old Dale Chorman from Homer, said he saw the moose charge but “did not witness the attack, so authorities cannot say if the moose killed Chorman by kicking or stomping him, or a combination,” as the New York Post reported.

The Post story would have been more accurate if it had put a period after him instead of adding the phrase “or a combination,” as well. But it didn’t.

It’s possible, too, that the story told by the Post and many, many other publications could eventually prove true or partially true. But at this time, the claim that Chorman was stomped to death is an assumption, not a fact.

Along with there being no witnesses to an attack, Tom Kizzia, a one-time reporter for the ADN long ago and a friend of the dead man told the Associated Press (AP), “there was no evident trampling, and they didn’t see any signs of trauma later when they recovered his body.”

Kizzia said in an email there are thoughts that Chorman might have suffered a heart attack.

Chorman remained a very fit outdoorsman even at 70 and had no known health problems. But people are known to die of stress-induced heart failure. A peer-reviewed study published in the European Cardiology Review in 2015 reported that most of the people who feel victim to these kinds of heart attacks in Germany were women, but noted that data in the U.S. indicated men were twice as likely to die from such an event.

Or there could be other explanations for his death. As Kizzia put it to the AP, “I think the medical examiner’s going to try to figure out exactly what happened, whether it was just (a) single blow in the terrible wrong place or something (else).”

That “something else” is important here because there is a big difference, especially for journalists, between believing what you want to believe and reporting facts. And the simple fact at this point is that nobody knows what killed Chorman.

For all anyone knows, he could have tripped, fallen and died as a result given that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) notes that “unintentional falls are the leading cause of injury and injury death among adults aged 65 and older.”

Some of those deaths involve traumatic brain injuries that do not always appear obvious.

The brain smacks into one side of the skull, a blood vessel ruptures and the result is what is called an “acute subdural hematoma.” “Acute subdural hematoma develops rapidly, most commonly after serious head trauma caused by an assault, car accident, or fall. It is a very severe brain injury that typically causes unconsciousness, and it is fatal in about 50 percent of cases,” according to Dr. Howard LeWine, the chief medical editor for Harvard Health Publishing.

But someone tripping, falling and dying while trying to flee an angry mama moose is not as titillating as the headline from California’s left-leaning Sacramento Bee proclaiming “Charging moose kicks and kills man taking photos of newborn calves, Alaska troopers say.”

And there are those in the journalism business today who would argue it doesn’t matter. Chorman had an encounter with a moose. He died as a result. Whether the moose killed him or not is a small thing. This is still a good teaching moment to show people moose can be dangerous.

This is the “good intentions” argument. Good intentions are the grease on the slippery slope between fact and fiction. Washinton Post reporter Janet Cooke was full of good intentions in 1980 when she wrote a story about an 8-year-old heroin addict living in a drug “shooting gallery” with his mom and her boyfriend.

The story could have been true. Some could argue the “good intentions” case would make it true enough. But it was discovered to be a well-intentioned fabrication. Cooke was fired at the Post, discredited and saw her Pulitzer taken away.  She would later be described as the “Fabulist who changed journalism,” though it is unclear that she changed anything at all.

The general media attention to concentrating on what is true versus accepting what might be true changed slightly in the years after the Cooke fiasco, but we’re in a different world today.

Credit due

The publications reporting Chorman was kicked to death are only partially to blame here, however, given that the source that started all of this speculation was the Alaska State Troopers.

Troopers on Sunday published a six-sentence dispatch item saying they had “received a report of an adult male who was attacked by a cow moose in Homer. The cow moose charged two men, kicking one of them.”

Legacy news media took it ran from there.

John Dougherty, an “information officer” stationed in the Central Alaska city of Fairbanks about 500 miles north of the coastal community of Homer where the confrontation with the moose took place, was credited as the author of that Trooper post.

Where he got the information that someone had been kicked is unclear and really doesn’t matter. Troopers have some history of offering explanations for why people died in wilderness-type accidents in Alaska before they know how those people died.

Whether Dougherty made the assumption Chorman was kicked by a moose or a trooper dispatcher decided this was the case or a trooper wrote this in a report somewhere is irrelevant. When there is a confrontation with a moose after which someone ends up dead, it’s natural to assume the individual must have been kicked or stomped by the moose.

Reporters are trained (or used to be) to never assume because of the old saying that “it can make an ass out of “u” and “me.” But information officers aren’t reporters despite now regularly doing the jobs of such. They do most modern-day news gathering with journalists then rewriting their work to create the “news.”

Back in the days when reporters thought of information officers and public relations (PR) operatives as “flaks” or “flacks,” reporters kept in mind that the first responsibility of these people is to keep their bosses happy, not to accurately report the news. That idea faded as the term flak/flack came to be judged “pejorative.” 

Much of this was likely due to so many one-time journalists becoming flaks/flacks for government entities, social advocacy organizations or businesses of some kind. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in May of last year reported there were 275,550 people employed as “public relations specialists,”  or more than six times the 45,020 people employed in some form of journalism. 

PR has so thoroughly stolen the show that PR executives are now worrying about a shortage of journalists to whom to pitch stories and talking about the “need to rely more on owned content,” as the Bear Icebox agency puts it. “This means your company blog, your social media channels, your email newsletters and any other ways you communicate in a digital capacity. It puts a greater emphasis on content creation in order to share your messages directly to your target audience.”

As bad as that might sound, it might be better than the way much PR now gets news-washed through the present delivery system, and most especially government-spun PR.

Little of what government mouthpieces report gets checked, and even when it does, journalists are often reluctant to point out the potential problems with the “official” report. The AP, while recording Kizzia’s observations that there were no obvious injuries to Chorman in the fifth graph of its story, led the story with “an Alaska man “fatally attacked by an enraged moose.”

What is vs what might be

As noted earlier, it is certainly possible this is what happened. But the news isn’t supposed to be another version of Charles Dickens’s “Scrooge: A Christmas Carol” heavy on the vision of “what could be.”

Moose do attack people in Alaska. No doubt about that. And they injure quite a few, sometimes seriously. A woman from Nikiski was stomped nearly to death three years ago after foolishly trying to reunite a moose calf with its mother instead of letting the cow find the calf on her own. 

An Eagle River woman nearly died in 2017 after her dogs startled a cow moose with calves and the cow decided to attack her. Anchorage Police had trouble chasing that moose away from the injured woman, but eventually did and she survived. 

Most people, however, survive. Moose, unlike bears, don’t knock people down and, on rare occasions, try to devour them.

When the Alaska Department of Fish and Game put together a “Living with Wildlife in Anchorage” report 25 years ago, it said that more than 100 people per year were charged by moose in the state’s largest city, but the number injured was small and the number killed even smaller.

“Five to 10 are estimated to result in human injuries each year,” the 1999 document reported. “Since 1993, two people have been killed by moose.”

There have been no deaths reported in the years since. Bears, on the other hand, have killed two people in predatory attacks in the Anchorage area in just the last seven years – one in 2017 and one in 2018; and there have been at least two other predatory bear attacks in the state in the past 10 years.

No one should get the impression that moose are the big, friendly animals they can sometimes seem to be, but they’re not exactly the killers that bears are. Moose are far more likely to maim you.

A friendly Anchorage neighbor/Craig Medred photo

The statistical reality is this: 100 moose charges per year for 31 years in Anchorage would equal 3,100 moose charges resulting in two deaths. This count is probably also low in that a lot of moose charges are never reported. (Editors note: The author has never reported any of his to officialdom.)

But just using the 3,100 charge number, the odds for being killed by a charging moose are 1 in 1,150, making it statistically far more likely that Chortman died from that “something else” than that the moose killed him given what is now known.

Deadly moose attacks so rare they haven’t even piqued the interest of Wikimedia which maintains files for “deaths due to” attacks by alligators, bears, boars, buffalo, bulls, cattle, cougars, coyotes, crocodiles, dogs, elephants, fish, insects, leopards, lions, orcas (killer whales), rhinos, snakes, tigers and wolves.

The coyotes were reported to have accounted for two deaths. The list for those killed by bears is long as is the list for alligators, which killed three people last year and four the year before. Alligators, like bears, sometimes see humans as prey.

Moose do not.

That said there is a very graphic video on YouTube of an elderly man being trampled to death by a moose on the campus of the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA) in January 1995. His was one of the two deaths reported in the 1999 Anchorage report. The other was an elderly woman found dead in her yard after apparently trying to protect her dogs from a moose.

In the case of the dead man at UAA, it must be noted that instead of curling up into a ball and covering his head to protect himself after being attacked, he tried to fight off the kicking animal, thus exposing himself to greater injury. And he was on a paved surface which provided no give when he was hit by body blows.

Chorman, who was highly experienced around wildlife, would be unlikely to make such a mistake. He would have known to curl up and cover his head with his arms for protection as soon as the moose made contact – if it made contact – and he was on softer ground.

So why the rush to claim the moose killed him? Simple. It makes a better story.

It will be interesting to see how the legacy media handles this if it turns out that Chortman wasn’t killed by the moose but sadly died of some other cause while trying to flee a moose doing what moose do when trying to protect their young – charge at the potential predator to try to scare it away.

This, it should be added, is why it’s always wise to flee from a worried momma moose, or any moose for that matter when the air on its neck and back stands up – as in the photo above – to illustrate its irritation at a human coming near.