Or worst best times?

No matter what a train wreck legacy media have become in these times, the early 21st century has to be summed as the best of times and the worst of times for news consumers.

It is the age of unlimited information and the epoch of misinformation. It is the winter of inter-tribal warfare and the spring of intra-tribal embrace. It is the season of partisanship and the season of party unity.

It is a time, to only slightly paraphrase the observations of Charles Dickens some 165 years ago, when we have everything before us and nothing before us. A time when we are all going direct to Heaven or we are going direct to hell.

Some things never change.

I got to thinking about all of this after dinner more than a week ago with a long-time journalistic colleague who’d shared the trenches in Alaska’s last great newspaper war some 40 years past.  It was a statewide battle that was, in some ways, a microcosm of the national scene for journalism these days.

There was the powerful Anchorage Times, the legacy media of its time viewed as staunchly conservative and committed to the development of what was then still considered ‘The Last Frontier,”, and the upstart Anchorage Daily News, a socially well-intentioned, environmentally friendly, California-owned newspaper that liked to think of itself as the voice of reason in the Far North.

These two newspapers were, however, different from the warring media of the moment in that their general, day-to-day reporting of most anything and everything was more alike than different. Or maybe it was simply that both spent more time focused on policy than politics, and there is a significant difference between the two.

The former is about getting things done to the benefit most if not all; the latter is about winning elections. And we are now in a time when winning elections is more important to many than getting things done.

That said, the internet has made so much more information available to everyone that those interested in the news can now often do their own self-reporting if they so wish. The preprint service MedRxiv has of this writing published 29,024 scientific “studies” on the SARS-CoV-2 virus that drove the Covid-19 pandemic that has to rank as the biggest story of this century given a body count that rivals that of the planet’s major wars of times past.

Anyone who wanted to go deep into the weeds could have made themselves an expert on Covid-19, but most didn’t want to go deep into the weeds. Too many were willing to do as they were told, and there is no telling how many died because of this.

Risk assessment

Any old folks who thought they could pull on a mask when the virus was raging and safely go about their business as usual were taking a grave risk. This was clear almost from the beginning.

Only six months after the pandemic began, Chinese scientists published a study documenting a “COVID-19 Outbreak Associated with Air Conditioning in Restaurant, Guangzhou, China.’‘ It showed the ducting in that restaurant moving the virus around to infect people several meters (close to 10 feet) from patient zero and warned that aerosol transmission in closed spaces was a danger.

“Virus transmission in this outbreak cannot be explained by droplet transmission alone,” they wrote. “Larger respiratory droplets remain in the air for only a short time and travel only short distances, generally less than one meter.”

Despite this, U.S. officials pushed the idea that “close contacts” were the main means of spread and suggested to Americans they would be safe if they masked up and stayed six feet away from each other.

Covid czar Anthony Fauci would four years later admit there was no scientific data backing the six-foot separation, and a variety of studies trying to document the effectiveness of masks conclude they might provide some help in slowing the spread of the disease but the evidence to support this conclusion was slim. 

Scientists are still arguing over this subject.

Trish Greenlaugh, which the publication Science in Oct. 2020 labeled the “high priestess of (the) U.K. masking campaign,” and colleagues out with a new study claiming that “masks are, if correctly and consistently worn, effective in reducing transmission of respiratory diseases and show a dose-response effect.”

Correctly and consistently are, however, huge qualifiers, and the whole masking issue sort of fades to nonsense if the government requires people to wear masks to restaurants where they must take the masks off in order to eat.

Then, too, there are the even bigger issues of age and physical fitness given that the vast majority of those who died of Covid were over the age of 50 – almost 94 percent in the U.S. according to data from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) – and already suffering from chronic illnesses or what came to be called “comorbidities.”

Despite these realities, the legacy media pushed the social distancing and masking narratives because government officials told them, too, and almost never mentioned the protection to be found by staying out of bars, restaurants and other enclosed spaces full of people, or getting off the couch to work on improving on one’s fitness given that appeared to be the most protective thing of all.

And this sort of reporting is, depressingly, the biggest change between the legacy media of yesterday and that of today which is by accident or design so willing to be spoonfed the news by government spokespeople that it has become almost another arm of the government.

See the recent Alaska bear mauling widely reported to be near a non-existent “Abernathy Cabin” along the Resurrection Trail on the Kenai Peninsula.

There is no “Abernathy Cabin.” But once the Alaska State Troopers issued a statement saying the attack had taken place near the Abernathy Cabin everyone from the Anchorage Daily News to Men’s Journal, People magazine, YahooNews and many others echoed the communique.

No reporters bothered to ask “where the hell is the ‘Abernathy Cabin,” or type “where is the Abernathy Cabin” into Google’s search bar. Google’s AI will now tell you the Abernathy Cabin ” is located along the Resurrection Pass trail in Alaska,” which would be news to anyone who knows the structures along that trail.

Google’s old search engine can, meanwhile, can find no reference to such a cabin and largely results to directing searches to Abernathy Farm in “Fallout 4,” a video game, although an Abernathy, Texas house associated with paranormal activity also pops up.

As someone familiar with the Resurrection Trail, I admit to thinking the troopers might be referring to the “East Creek Cabin” public use cabin the U.S. Forest Service maintains near Abernathy Creek along that trail, but that isn’t where the attack happened.

It took place near what was once called the Abernathy Camp used by hunting guides, now gone, who took hunters into the area with horses. The camp is now overgrown, but there are some wall tent frames still standing with tarps covering them.

This nonsense was obviously a small thing given much of the other nonsense the legacy media reports these days, but the earlier discussion of the decay of journalism had already left me suffering from a little melancholy, something to which I am usually not prone, when this misreporting sent me off in search of where the hell the attack actually happened, which in turn triggered some memories that only heightened that melancholy.

Alaska’s small world

As it turned out, the hunter attacked by the bear, 32-year-old Tyler Johnson, was the son of former Kenai National Wildlife Refuge ranger Chris Johnson, the first responder after I was attacked and injured by a brown/grizzly bear on the Kenai long, long ago. That sort of deepened the melancholy with thoughts of how much worse things could have turned out for me.

I was hunting alone. Tyler was lucky to be hunting with his dad.

Tyler appears to have been attacked by a sow with a cub. The Johnsons didn’t see the cub, but one was later found in the area after they killed the bear. I was alone and approached by two nearly full-grown cubs and then attacked by their mother.

Tyler managed, with help from his father, to kill the bear with a 10mm semi-automatic handgun, a weapon I now sometimes care for bear defense given the semi-auto’s compact size and the round’s success in stopping a number of bear attacks. At the time I was attacked, however, I was carrying a far more powerful .454 Casull with a scope with which I had been hunting moose.

Unlike Tyler, I was lucky to have gun in hand when the bear attacked, but I waited way too long to shoot, foolishly confident the bear would break off the charge if I held my ground, and then somehow missed her with a shot fired when she was a few feet from contact.

Tyler was able to pull his weapon from a holster as the bear was charging, but ended up shooting himself in the leg in the process. Compared to this, I was less lucky and more lucky.

The bear ran me over, fortunately in the process biting into the scope on the Casull rather than me. She did rip my jaw open with a claw as she stomped over me, but released her grip on the scope, which allowed me to maintain possession of the gun as she spun around and grabbed me by the lower leg.

My only thought at the moment was “OK, just don’t shoot yourself in the foot.” The next round from the Casull went into the bear somewhere just about her head at which point she let go of my foot, tried to get up, staggered and rolled downhill and away from me with the cubs, thankfully, following.

All of which was good given that the Casull jammed due to the bullet on the third round in the cylinder jumping the crimp of the cartridge. I managed to wrap up my leg wound and hike out to a lodge near the Kenai community of Cooper Landing, and eventually recovered from the bear bite.

Tyler had the help of his dad in summoning a rescue, and he is now recovering from his wounds. And I’m left remembering how lucky I was that the second round from the Casull smoothly rolled into place under the hammer and that the two yearling or two-year-old cubs didn’t decide to take over the attack their mother had begun.

At the time of Tyler’s bear attack, I largely discounted how close to home all of this hit, and then Paul Jenkins died.

The old journalism

Most of those who remember Jenkins will probably recall his time as an editor of the Times or possibly later of the now-defunct Daily Planet, an online publication started by Anchorage media activist Mike Pocaro, and now archived at Must Read Alaska. 

But I still remember Jenkins, along with Bruce Bartley, as the anchors of an active and aggressive Associated Press (AP) bureau in Alaska’s largest city in the 1980s when the AP was something of the Sgt. Joe Friday – “all we know are the facts, ma’am” – of national news. 

Jenkins and Bartley were likely more conservative than any reporter you are likely to find working for a legacy news organization these days, but more than that, like most journalists of their day, they considered their role to be that of reporters not stenographers or commentators.

The AP went a little overboard about “commentary” in those days. I worked a brief stint for the news agency in the state capital and well remember longtime AP bureau chief Ward Sims going ballistic when I used the word “fubar” to accurately describe whatever it was the Legislature was making a mess of at the time.

The story containing the word had barely gone up on the “wire” that connected the teletype machines that moved the news around the world in those days before Sims had me on the phone demanding to know if I knew what “fubar” meant.

I knew exactly what it meant, but gave Sims the modern dictionary definition: “thoroughly confused, disordered, damaged or ruined.” That only set him off. He promptly launched into a lecture on how it was a word the AP didn’t use because of its origin with the U.S. military during World War II.

The word was originally an acronym for “fucked up beyond all reason” or repair, though most people had forgotten this by the 1980s and the history is now so long gone that Men’s Health has to ask “What Exactly Does FUBAR Even Mean, Anyway?”

Jenkins and Bartley knew the rules at the AP better than I did, however. They also understood that getting the facts straight means first getting the facts. They’d never have written about an “Abernathy Cabin” that didn’t exist because the first thing they would have done upon being told of anything happening at an Abernathy Cabin would have been to locate said cabin.

This would have quickly led them to the discovery there is no Abernathy Cabin. But that was then and, well, we are in the now. And sometimes the now can be a little hard to stomach.

Bartley and Jenkins, who did time in Vietnam, also benefitted from life experience which so many journalists today lack. They come straight out of journalism schools into legacy newspapers where they usually stay until the excitement of the job wears off and the reality of the much higher pay in public relations hits home.

And with no old editors left to yell at them across the newsrooms with questions such as “what the hell does this sentence mean” or “where the eff is this Abernathy Cabin” – such behavior would surely be considered abuse or bullying these days – OJT has become practically nonexistent.

It’s a sorry state of affairs with societal costs. The legacy media of old at least got more of the facts right and provided people a generally similar set of facts around which to discuss social and economic policies. Now news organisations like MSNBC and Fox News paint distinctly different portraits of the U.S. with both often flawed by horrible reporting as is so much of today’s journalism.

Some might remember how much of the media went crazy about “The Blob,” a huge pool of unusually warm water in the North Pacific late in the last decade. It was supposed to decimate Alaska salmon returns, but the five-year. average Alaska salmon harvest for “The Blob” years – 2013 to 2018 – ended up at close to 205 million fish per year.

The Blob is now history. Cooler water has returned to the Gulf of Alaska and the rest of the North Pacific, and the 2024 Alaska commercial salmon harvest is today in danger of coming up short of 100 million for the first time in this millennium.

That story has been on my radar for some time. I can get to it next having finally recognized the emotional toll that thinking about the decay of journalism took. I didn’t write anything for more than a week, something that has only happened once before in the last 40 years or so.

That’s when I took some time off from the Anchorage Daily News to build a house in the Hillside. Strangely enough, the latest “vacation,” if you can call it that, also found me turning to construction projects.

Sometimes the best way to deal with the media today is to ignore it, but of course that comes with its own costs. It might to be nice to believe ignorance is bliss, but there is no evidence to support that conclusion.