I was watching Fox this morning — yes, Fox — and they were back on the Alaska story I wrote about the other day: the second Dan Sullivan on the ballot, and the question of whether voters might split their votes between two men with the same name while Mary Peltola walks through the middle of it.
Jonathan Turley had been on earlier in the coverage, and what he said was the most interesting part of it. Filing for office means signing statements that are supposed to be truthful. Money gets raised and spent on the strength of those filings. If a candidacy was put up as a decoy, Turley said there could be criminal and civil consequences — possibly reaching beyond Alaska, to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee itself. I don’t know if it will come to that. But it’s a real story, with real stakes, and it deserves real coverage.
Then the coverage moved on, and out came the New York Times. What the Times has written about the race. What the Times’ analysis suggests. Offered up as if that settles something in Alaska.
And I sat there with one question: how many people in Alaska read the New York Times?
Not many, is my guess. Not many in Kansas, or Arizona, or Montana either. The Times and the Washington Post get called the papers of record, and on television — every channel, mine included — they’re quoted as if scripture settles an argument. But their real audience is each other: the people in New York and Washington who make the news, cover the news, and then read about themselves in the news.
You can see it in the coverage itself. Something happens in New York or Washington and it’s breaking news before the coffee cools. The same thing happens in Wichita and it needs a body count to earn thirty seconds. Apparently there are two towns in America, and the rest of us live in their suburbs.
Meanwhile, the country moved. People live in the West and the South now, and they get their information from a hundred places the panel shows have never heard of — some of it considerably better than what the panels are serving. The papers of record are faithfully recording a conversation almost nobody outside the room is still listening to.
So by all means, report the Alaska story. Turley’s legal angle alone makes it worth reporting. But don’t stand there and tell me it matters in Anchorage what the New York Times thinks about it. The only people who believe that are the people who write it — and the people who quote them on television.
Read more: