The Anchorage Daily News shared Biden’s victory in the presidential election on the cover Panda’s story, a cat who turned up at a hardware store in Alaska 10 days after she disappeared in Washington. I don’t normally read the Alaskan press, but this date required an expansion of the information field.
I was reminded of this after reading that the Anchorage Daily News is the inspiration for Alaska Daily, director/writer Tom McCarthy’s new homage to local journalism. If in Spotlight the work of the Boston Globe was instrumental in exposing the sexual abuse of Catholic clergy, here it is the Anchorage newspaper that launches the investigation into attacks on Indigenous women, ignored for years by Alaskan authorities.
That it’s an ABC product, despite premiering on Disney+, where it shares an evening of television in the United States with Grey’s Anatomy, explains its lightness so much – it’s closer to the domestic warmth of Lou Grant than the elitist gibberish of The Newsroom – like the clichés that burden their characters. There is a lack of subtext, everything is screamed, there are no gray areas; Problems such as the media’s collusion with power or its lack of independence are barely hinted at. McCarthy is less interested in twitching his fangs than in unveiling a journalism with paltry budgets and glutted workers reporting on a jam competition with the same enthusiasm — and ethics — as the humiliations endured by local women — or the Misadventures of a blind kitty. Professionals who don’t respond to anonymous investment funds, but to the neighbors they share a bar with. Their work on the streets is essential, they are or should be the first ditch against fake news and self-serving misinformation poisoning social networks and when they go away we will be closer to darkness.
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