No Comment — October 23, 2008, 7:07 am
SIGN IN to access Harper’s Magazine
ALERT: Usernames and passwords from the old Harpers.org will no longer work. To create a new password and add or verify your email address, please sign in to customer care and select Email/Password Information. (To learn about the change, please read our FAQ.)
Not a subscriber? Subscribe today!
Create a login here. Forgot password? Forgot email? More help here.
A bit more than a year ago, my mother-in-law moved to a small town north of Anchorage that has been much in the news lately. Her immediate complaint was that the local papers weren’t very good. As the former mayor of Wasilla got the Republican vice presidential nod, however, I took to reading the Anchorage Daily News most mornings, often clipping and circulating its articles to journalist and blogger friends. What I discovered was very impressive. ADN was indispensable to understanding the curious world of Alaska politics.
The reporting in ADN helped answer a critical question: Can local papers make a meaningful contribution to presidential election coverage? In an earlier series of posts, I discussed the local papers of one state that are not simply bad but actually appalling. They have led to the deterioration of that state’s political culture. But ADN provides a counter-example. It shows what a local paper with limited resources and reach can do, not only for its immediate readership, but for the country as a whole. In the 2008 presidential campaign, no local paper made a stronger contribution to our understanding of the presidential campaign. In fact I am tempted to put the Anchorage Daily News in head-on competition with industry leaders such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. The ADN took advantage of its position as the principal newspaper of Alaska and offered Americans a vigorous examination of the problems and scandals that affect the state’s politics. It was prepared to expose the sores that a less scrupulously professional paper would happily have covered up in deference to parochial interests. And it was unflinching but also fair in its coverage of and editorializing on Alaska’s native daughter, Sarah Palin.
Here are some of the pieces—both original reporting and opinion—that lead me to cite the Anchorage Daily News as the best local newspaper in campaign 2008 coverage:
More from Scott Horton:
No Comment — April 12, 2013, 11:11 am
A new report from Seton Hall University exposes government surveillance of attorney-client conversations
No Comment, Six Questions — March 18, 2013, 9:00 am
Rashid Khalidi on how the United States sustains the failure of the Israel-Palestine peace process
No Comment, Six Questions — February 4, 2013, 9:00 am
Alex Gibney on his documentary investigating the Roman Catholic Church’s handling of child sex-abuse cases
Percentage of the French who think it “somewhat” or “very” possible they will one day become homeless:
Neuroscientists found that sloths sleep around nine and a half hours a day. Previous research had studied only captive sloths, who sleep on average sixteen hours a day, possibly because they are bored and depressed.
A young man who lied to Berlin police about having lived for five years in a forest was revealed to have run away from home because he disliked his internship.
