Hooper Bay, Alaska/PBS Frontline
Why reporting is now so lame
The truly sad thing about American journalism these days is the agenda-driven, narrow-mindedness that prevents reporters from seeing and reporting the complexities and the ironies of the stories they cover.
As a result, reportage ends up looking more like propaganda than news, and in the process helps reinforce the us-them, good guys-bad guys, victims-oppressors, simple-solutions nonsense that appeals to non-thinking readers, leaves intelligent readers hugely skeptical of the mainstream media, and helps drive the nation’s dangerous culture war.
Case in point, PBS Frontline coverage of “Alaska’s Vanishing Native Villages” so focused on global warming that it entirely misses how hydrocarbon fuels linked to global warming made life so, so much easier in those same villages from the late 20th Century on to the present day.
The screengrab at the top of this story is from a scene in the Frontline documentary. Combine it with Frontline reporter Patty Talahongva’s observation that “we went an hour away by snowmachine to Hooper Bay” to talk about climate change, and you’ll pretty well understand how much her story missed.
The hour was the travel time from Chevak, a village about 20 miles east of Hooper Bay on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. For nearly all of Alaska history and prehistory, a winter trip between the two villages was a labor-intensive, day-long journey, though probably less labor intensive in the days of old than today.
A hundred years ago in Alaska, it was not unusual for people to walk 20 miles or more in a day to get to where they wanted to go. Almost no one in Alaska, particularly in rural Alaska, hikes that far anymore for any reason.
The Alaska of 2025 is not the Alaska of the early 1900s when the late Hudson Stuck, author of the classic “Ten Thousand Miles with a Dogsled,” wrote that a Native man “had come 75 miles on snowshoes in one run, without stopping at all save to eat two or three times, at a continuous temperature of 50 degrees below zero or lower, to bring word that he had found a white man frozen to death on the trail; and on the Koyukuk that feat will always be counted to Albert the Pilot for righteousness.”
There are few left anywhere in the state who could go 75 miles on snowshoes in one run. A handful of ultra-endurance athletes who train for the Iditarod Trail Invitational, maybe, borderline crazies like Pennsylvania attorney Tim Hewitt; some Air Force pararescue jumpers who are constantly training for their primary “job” of rescusing pilots downed behind enemy lines by saving Alaskans in trouble in the wilderness as practices for such rescues; and maybe a few other folks among a ragtag collection of Alaskans who’ve worshipped at the School of Dick Griffith and decided to continuing strenuous, wilderness adventuring for the pure adventure, people like Luc Muhl, Roman Dial, Tim Kelley and less public others who’ve preferred to keep their adventures to themselves.
And even they wouldn’t venture 75 miles across a frozen Alaska wilderness to notify anyone of anything now that it’s possible to make a phone call or send a text from almost anywhere in the state with a satellite phone or often with a mobile phone thanks to the change fueled by hydrocarbons.
This change is what some would call progress and others evolution. But whatever it is called, it is a change that comes with both pluses and minuses as changes usually do.
A prevailing bias
Talahongva’s agenda-driven reporting failure in recognizing these nuances to the story of climate change in Alaska is only compounded by the whiteman-progress-bad, anything-‘indigenous’-good bias that running rampant on the left-leaning side of the mainstream media spectrum.
The belief there is that the homo sapiens who invaded North America from Asia 15,000 to 30,000 years ago were living comfortably in peace and harmony with nature in the New World before the invasion of the homo sapiens from Europe 1,000 years ago.
There might even have been some place where this was the case in North America. But the Yukon Delta at the time of white contact was most decidedly not that place.
Life there has always been hard due to the weather and the relatively low, ecological productivity of the far north for seven or eight months of the year. Life there was particularly bad, however, just before the first Caucasians arrived on the Delta about 200 years ago.
For 200 or 300 years prior to that, the brutal Bow and Arrow War Days raged in the region, according to archeologists studying the evidence of the time left buried in the ground and anthropologists who recorded the oral histories that lingered into the 20th Century.
Anthropologist Caroline Funk, meanwhile, has cataloged just how ugly and bloody the wars.
“The modern villages of Chevak, Hooper Bay, and Scammon Bay on the west coast of Alaska are located in an area often called the ‘Triangle,” she writes. “The Triangle is located between the Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers on a wide marshy plain bounded by the Black and Manokinak rivers.
“The villagers are Yupik in the broadest cultural definition; however, a distinction is made between the Cupik of Chevak and Hooper Bay and the Yupik of Hooper Bay and Scammon Bay.
“The Triangle area is a flat and watery landscape with the exception of Kusilvak Mountain and the Askinuk Mountains closer to the coast. The entire landscape is prone to flooding, subject to tides, and patchily covered in permafrost.”
This is where the Yuupit lived for a couple of thousand years divided by the sort of dangerous tribalism that was the norm in Europe in the days of the Roman Empire, and now seems at times to be threatening this country.
How the Bow and Arrow Wars began is not known, nor is exactly how long they raged although one hypothesis dates them to more than 500 years ago when what Funk called “a violent Yup’ik nation,” the Aglurmiut, swept through the area from the north before settling in the Bristol Bay area to the south.
But “whenever the precise beginnings,” she adds, “war began for the Triangle Yupiit deep enough in the past that it is considered a constant way of life in the oral histories.”
In one case, Funk describes a bloodbath of spiraling retribution that followed upon a boy accidentally losing an eye in an accident involving a dart.
“Soon the whole village was fighting,” she writes. “There was a camp nearby, Aurrvigmiut, where a man and his family resided. Earlier the man’s wife told him not to go to the village, but he went to the village for something and had taken part in the fight.
“The weather was clear that day. The woman came out of her sodhouse and saw a mist above the village. She went back in her sodhouse and told the children something was wrong with the village. The mist was steam from the blood of all the people.
“A man was seen crawling away. He may have been the only one left. He had a big hole in his stomach. This man crawled away with his intestines hanging out. His intestines would come out but when they got too long, the man would put them back in his stomach and keep crawling.”
Funk speculated that “a tradition of feuding combined with periods of famine may have fostered” an environment in which this sort of bloody violence became the norm, a theory to which Knecht’s archeological findings in the region have lent some weight.
Things are different now.
Life in the Triangle villages these days remains less comfortable than in American urban environments designed for comfort, but there are no more “periods of famine.” And though there remains a disproportionate volume of violence surpassed by only the worst of that in America’s inner cities, people in the Triangle villages generally live in peace which, was not a historic norm.
Funk specifically pointed out “the erroneous notion held among Westerners that Eskimos in general, and Yupiit in particular, are peaceful, loving individuals.”
Possibly nowhere does this “erroneous notion” run deeper than among those involved in the left-leaning side of the mainstream media, and in the case of Frontline, this can probably be blamed for Talahongva managing to overlook what drove the big change in Alaska that made life easier for everyone living in the north, and most notably so for those living in the remotest parts of the territory late to become a state.
When you think as the use of hydrocarbons as “bad,” it is hard to see that all the “good” that accompanied their discovery and use by our species.
Oil good
The discovery of petroleum as a source of fuel and the development of the oil industry saved whales from being hunted to extinction for whale oil. But the positive changes oil brought didn’t stop there.
He would 45 years later finger the infernal combustion engine as the biggest driver of change in the Alaska Panhandle. The same would by then be true of all of Alaska.
Long before engines were blamed for the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide now helping fuel global warming, and their role in making life easier for everyone was pushed aside, Alaskans embraced the machines for the way they could ease the agony of life in the cold, dark, unroaded north.
Anyone who has spent days packing heavy loads of moose meat to a river or lake, something relatively few have done, has some idea of what life was like in Alaska before the arrival of the internal combustion engine, but only an idea.
Back in the day, people didn’t just have to haul the meat to water to be loaded into a boat or an airplane. They had to drag the moosehide to water, too, then cut sapling trees with an ax and tie them together to build the frame for a moose-skin boat to float the meat back to a village or planned winter camp.
And the story was much the same with fish, once another Alaska food staple. Take it from the late Luke and Alice Demientieff from Holy Cross on the Yukon River.
In a 2002 interview with the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Project Jukebox just before their deaths, Luke talked about rowing 18 miles down the Yukon River to fish camp and then rowing back upriver with a boat loaded with salmon.
“Probably have to call search and rescue,” added grandson-in-law Eugene Paul, the man conducting the interview. His comment underlined just how much things have changed in the past 100 years.
The Demientieffs themselves were lucky to be able to make enough money to order a putt-putt, 5-horsepower outboard in 1939, which arrived via steamship the next year at Holy Cross. To have some idea of how much easier that made their lives, go row a skiff for four hours between any two points you wish.
Outboards like theirs were just coming into widespread use in Alaska prior to the American entry into World War II, and small boats – often square-stern canoes – powered by small outboards would remain a norm on the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers into the 1970s
High-powered jet boats have since taken over. And the change in winter travel has been even more extreme with a transition from the old and temperamental, pull-to-start snowmachines of the 1970s to new, technological marvels that start with the turn of a key and come equipped with heated handle grips.
About the same time they appeared on the scene, along came the all-terrain vehicles now ubiquitous in Alaska villages.
As a friend in in rural Alaska observed after watching the Frontline show and noting what it missed, “villages are no longer full of howling huskies, just snarling snowgos and four-wheelers. I think the three-and four-wheelers revolutionized village life more than even the snowgo and massively fattened up the population, too.”
Almost nobody walks far in rural Alaska village these days unless they are forced to do so. The situation is such that if you visit a village and decide to walk, someone almost invariably offers a ride on an all-terrain vehicle or snowmachine because walking has become an abnormal activity.
Largely as a result, the incidence of type 2 Diabetes has exploded in predominantly Native rural Alaska.
“…Alaska Native adults are almost three times more likely to have type 2 diabetes compared to white adults,” according to the Centers for Disease Control. Diabetes is now far more of a threat to the lives of those living in Alaska Native villages than global warming. Too many folks are destined to die well before climate change harms their village.
But the issue of failing Native health, or failing American health in general linked to what has become the widespread sedentary lifestyle in the U.S. isn’t really on the agenda of any news organization because it would involve telling readers and viewers of both the political right and left something they don’t want to hear:
“You people need to get off your fat asses – whether plopped down in the driver’s seat of a motor vehicle, a sofa in front of the TV or a chair behind the computer – and get moving!”
Still, Alaska Native villagers, while haunted by type 2 diabetes and other chronic diseases tied to a lack of physical activity, are at least lucky in one regard in the mess of our times. Their personal transportation vehicles – though each emits “as much (greenhouse gas) as nearly 100 automobiles,” according to the Environmental Protection Agency – don’t kill at the rate of on-road motor vehicles that seemingly kill with impunity.
The Alaska off-road, vehicle death rate of less than 3 per 100,000 is about a quarter of the state’s on-road, vehicle death rate of 11.2 per 100,000 despite a state off-road kill rate that is the worst in the nation. The difference here is an illustration of how dangerous American roads have become.
Every 15 months as many Americans perish on U.S. roads as died in the jungles of Southeast Asia over the course of the almost two-decade-long Vietnam War.
One can make a strong argument that those infernal combustion engines of DeArmond have done far more harm in roaded America than in unroaded Alaska where Frontline fretted about climate change forcing people to contemplate relocating from lowland areas threatened by rising seas.
This, inevitably, was portrayed through the victim model, as if villagers and their machines had done nothing to add to the volume of greenhouse gases and if as villagers had forever lived where they do as comfortably as they now do.
They didn’t, and they haven’t. Hooper Bay today isn’t even where it once was.
“Yup’ik Eskimo people were historically very mobile, following the migration and
seasonal availability of subsistence resources,” a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) profile of the community notes. “Early Eskimo names for the village
included ‘Askinuk’ or ‘Askinaghamiut,’ referring to the mountainous area between Hooper Bay and Scammon Bay.
“The traditional village was located on a hilly point of land near the present-day community. During an expedition through the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta in the winter of 1878-1879, American Edward Nelson provided the first written report of the village. The 1890
U.S. Census found 138 persons in Hooper Bay living in 14 homes.”
This was the number the surrounding wild lands could support. Today, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are more than 22 times as many homes (314) and 10 times as many people (1,375) because the changes powered by oil allow food and other goods to be flown in to support this many.
No matter what a citified reporter from Frontline might want to believe, there are not 1,375 people living a subsistence lifestyle in Hopper Bay because the Hooper Bay area does not produce enough wild food to support a population anywhere near that size.
That these people might need to relocate because a rising North Pacific Ocean threatens to bring increasing flooding to Hooper Bay is sad, but whether it is sadder than the fate of others elsewhere similarly affected hinges on one’s perceptions of victimhood.
They were offered 75 percent of the value of their property to help them relocate. The request in Alaska is for the federal government to spend far, far more to move entire villages.
The Alaska Native Health Tribal Consortium is lobbying for federal funding to the tune of “$4.3 billion in 2020 dollars” over the next 20 years to support fewer than 40,000 Alaska Natives living in villages such as Hooper Bay that are “off the road system” and either need to be relocated or barricaded against the rising seasons.
A glossy, January 2024 report on “The Unmet Needs of Environmentally Threatened Alaska Native Villages” argues this is a government responsibility because the government encouraged people to settle in the villages where they now live.
“During the 20th century, a variety of socio-economic influences led to the consolidation of population and the development of stationary villages. This settlement has in turn, impacted the ability of Alaska Native people to adapt to a rapidly changing environment.”
They now need a total, federal bailout, the report argues, because “most Alaska communities do not collect taxes and, therefore, do not have the financial capacity to contribute toward a cost-share. Projects to address environmental threats should receive one hundred percent federal funding.”
Socio-economic influences led a lot of other people to live in places now threatened by warming-induced changes. Some of them live in homes in other states that have already been swallowed by the ocean. Government assistance has been limited.
A 2022 report prepared for the North Carolina Coastal Resources Commission estimated that 750 structures were at risk along the coast of that state, according to WHQR public media in Wilmington, Del. Some of those houses have since been claimed by the sea.
With the debris from ruined houses littering beaches, the former homeowners are reported to be sometimes seen as villains rather then being offered help, but coastal scientists Braxton Davis told WHQR that’s not fair.
One can only wonder what tax-paying, penalized property owners suffering Atlantic coast losses thought of the Frontline report from the far north Pacific Coast, particularly given that on an individual level, it’s possible some or many of them added less greenhouse gas to the atmosphere than individual residents of the YK Delta.
There are now villages in areas where only 100 years ago the inhabitants were nomadic because they pretty much had to be.
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Thank you Craig for the thoughtful article. I, however, want to challenge the idea that agendas are the primary problem with modern reporting. I do need (or want) my daily newspaper to be largely free of agenda. We need a steady diet of who, what, where, when and why without favor. However, Craig Medred has an agenda. You always have, but it has become more obvious as you have transitioned from the ADN/Alaska Dispatch to your own platform. Without spelling it all out, I just think it’s obvious that you bring a strong agenda to the following subjects: pedestrian street design, physical activity, dog racing, ignorant reporting and salmon ranching (and other fish war subjects). In the past I remember a pretty strong agenda regarding outdoor self-rescue.
My point isn’t to criticize you for your agenda. The reporting you bring to these subjects is beyond excellent. But, they are subjects you seem to care deeply about and you have a perspective that is well founded, but is not universally held among others with knowledge on the subject. Because you care about these issues you have spent a career becoming well informed and you share both your perspective and knowledge with your reader. It’s delicate for me to tell you what you know and believe, but do you fundamentally disagree with the above analysis?
The problem with the reporters mentioned in this article isn’t really their agenda – it’s their ignorance on the subject. Perhaps their dishonesty, but it’s probably mostly ignorance. I suspect that, because of an agenda, they and their editors are willing to make assertions that “feel” true. Without an agenda, there would be no incentive to report on a subject one doesn’t know much about.
Up here in Fairbanks, Richard Fineberg passed away last year. His decades of reporting on the oil and gas industry in Alaska is some of the most important journalism ever produced in this state. He had an agenda from Day 1 and was heavily biased – but he also informed readers to an extreme degree and generally didn’t let his bias cloud the facts. His biases need to be taken into account, but his agenda didn’t negate his reporting so much as it informed it.
Sorry for the long post, but the media ecosystem would suffer if you (and others) became a neutral observers.
Dan: It’s hard to underestimated the ignorance problem, and ignorance and agendas sort of feed off each other.
And then, too, there’s this as explained to me by a young reporter at the Anchorage Daily News after I informed her she’d quouted someone deliveirng a flat-out, pretty easily documentable tidbit of misinformation: “Well, it might not be your truth, but it’s her truth.”
I can’t remember what exactly that tidbit was, but it was on the order of claiming Robert F. Kennedy Jr. never suggsted vaccines cause autism. What journalism school taught that this sort of thinking, I don’t know. But it’s out there not now as bright as the night.
Thanks Craig. I was in a meeting several years ago. which was mainly made up of rural people, younger people in their 20’s and 30’s and some from urban communities like myself. Long story short. One young person after another and got and spoke. “We need to go back to our old ways”, “we need to follow our traditional ways” “we have to live our subsistence life style” and so on. The discussion went on for about and hour. With many of the same talking points from 20-30 year old’s. Then an elder in the back corner of the room raise his hand. He was recognized as an elder and asked if he could speak now. The young mediator was eager to hear him speak. Paraphrasing, he said. I have listen for and hour, about how wonderful it would be to go back to the old days. Live off the land and water. Raise our families traditionally and teaching them about our ways. The ole days were not fun. It was hard. We went to bed many times hungry and sometimes we did not eat for days. We didn’t have houses. we had to haul water every day. We had no electricity. there was no store. No i don’t think i want to go back to the good ole days. Then he sat back down.
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