ADN, which has missed 100 stories this year, goes after a rising legislator who was quarantined out of Juneau

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The Anchorage Daily News has decided that “attendance” is going to be the number one issue in the South Anchorage House District 22 race.

In what appears to be an editorial decision to help a liberal challenger to upend conservative Rep. Sara Rasmussen, the newspaper says attendance is the top issue.

Not budgets. Not Permanent Fund dividend. Not crime. It’s attendance during quarantine.

Rasmussen says that COVID-19 rules in place in late March and April prevented her from returning to the Capitol, as she was in quarantine after she had been out of town to attend her great-grandfather’s 100th birthday.

The Legislature set forth rules calling call for quarantine for members if they had been Outside the state, but not for in-state travel. Rasmussen had traveled to Utah.

During March and April, the Capital City and much of the state was in lockdown and the entire state was paralyzed by fear of the coronavirus.

“Juneau was freaking out because a single cruise ship was planning to dock there,” said one Capitol observer. “The fear in the Capitol building was so great, the public was locked out of the building for the first time in Alaska history.”

Rasmussen was caught in limbo — healthy enough to travel, but ordered to stay away.

Stephen Trimble and the groups supporting Trimble say that Rasmussen missed voting on the operating budget.

That’s not true, but this is campaign season, so much gets said.

What’s more unusual is that the daily newspaper in Anchorage has chosen the attack on a rising star in the Republican side of the House by declaring attendance the issue, yet offering no substantive proof other than the opposing camp says it is.

Readers of the ADN have become accustomed to editorializing in news articles. But this?

“It’s non-story. Attendance in a year when students aren’t even going to school? Where is the headline on ADN about Hunter Biden and the investigation into money laundering? Where is the headline story about tens of thousands of dollars being spent by the largest and most powerful unions in the state to mislead votes on behalf of Democrat candidates?” said Tuckerman Babcock, former chairman of the Alaska Republican Party.

The headline on the ADN story might have been “Challenger attacks lawmaker for following Legislature’s rules.” But then, that would be a different newspaper altogether.

22 COMMENTS

  1. Disgusting yet typical of our Daily Rag newspaper. Luckily my neighbors and I in District 22 had Sara in our corner with our battle with FEMA to recognize our damage after the 2018 earthquake. When I have concerns Sara actually calls me back and has met me and my neighbors in person half a dozen times since she was elected. The two previous District 22 reps each promised to ‘meet up for coffee’ at Jewel Lake Kaladis but always found a way out of it. Sara is not a politician but a real person who happens to be in politics. A rare enough breed in our times! And the kind of person we need to send back there to keep those people honest. In contrast Trimble is for a state income tax, supports BLM, doesn’t know how many genders there are, is a fake Independent and chickened out of an informal in-person debate with Sara back in August because he knew he couldn’t win honestly. You go Sara!

  2. Where is the full story by ADN on Lt. Governor Byron Mallott’s resignation due to alleged child sex abuse? How about that event that ultimately brought down Governor Bill Walker? That should have been THE biggest story of the year.
    .
    Ryan Binkley needs to get with it if he intends ADN to be a credible paper. As it stands now, Binkley’s ADN is a mouthpiece of apology for Left-wing Democrats and a laughing stock for Republicans.

  3. When I first came to Anchorage over 25 years ago, A prominent businessman advised me that if I ever bought the ADN from one of the coin operated vending machines to grab at least 2 more copies and place them on top. That way others won’t have to contribute to their delinquency. With the exception of no vending machines, not much has changed.

  4. I had such high hopes to get the old ADN back after Rogoff bombed and Binkley made his purchase. It didn’t happen. I’ve quit reading it. You can’t even wrap a decent red with it.

  5. Yes Suzanne you are right.? ADN (The Washington Post Repeater) should have to declare its revenue from subscriptions, advertising & elitist subsidies as campaign contributions. The rag does not reflect in any way the views of the people that work and pay taxes. The balance is all the way to the ground on the left side of the fulcrum. Run by vicious dEMOCRATs..

  6. The ADN, no matter who owns it, or what name it calls itself, has always been a Lefty rag.
    They have always hated our Republican politicians, and been nothing more than a Democrat propaganda
    sheet.
    And they always wonder why they can’t sell newspapers in a Red state.
    You can’t fix stupid, and you can’t fix dishonest reporting.
    A few years I stopped buying it even to just get the crossword puzzles.
    I cannot in good conscience financially support a dishonest Leftwing propaganda publication.

  7. Fine, there’s a disparity in what you’d like to see covered but complaining “the reporting is editorialized”? Hello, Pot. Can’t you at least own your own bias and patterns of reporting?

  8. This is exactly why I terminated my subscription a long time ago. ADN has eliminated every chance to present the news in a balanced forum. Thanks to Suzanne and Must Read Alaska, we get the real news…..Who needs ADN?

  9. I am openly pushing Kyle Hopkins of the ADN to follow up and tell Alaska the details of why former Mayor Ethan “Peethan” Berkowitz pulled up stakes and ran like a howling dog in heat.
    Hopkins , PROPUBLICA coupled with Ryan Binkley, Andy Pennington, and Tom Hewitt (ADN Hierarchy) are all hooked into “we will never tell what we know” for Berkowitz, Byron Mallot and Crazy Bill Walker.

    Let’s face it gang — the democrats no matter what state or what level from which they operate, are controlling our destiny right now (because we let the slime balls take control and keep it) and will continue UNTIL we decide to take that control away from them. ACTION is the only avenue

    Do not complain about what they do —- Take action and do something about it.

  10. So did she miss that many votes or not? A missed vote is a missed vote, whether or not there was a legitimate reason why right?

  11. I am really sick of the media telling me what issues are important, what is #1. National media tells us Covid is all that matters, now ADN says attendance. Just give me the news, all of it, not just what you think is most important, as it is always based on your agenda. I can make up my own mind. (This is why I don’t read ADN. If I want to know what the Washington Post and New Your Times prints I can find it online. Get rid of those and do more balanced local reporting and…. well. We can always dream….

  12. It appears that Sara (Oh God! Not another Sara(h)!) has only herself to blame for unwisely leaving the state on the day after legislative leaders advised against travel outside Alaska by members and two days after the House Speaker said, “It is strongly suggested that personal travel outside of Alaska also be curtailed,” Apparently there were several members of the legislature that could see that traveling out of state on the cusp of a pandemic might not be a good idea.
    Now, I can sympathize with wanting to visit a very elderly relative on his 100th birthday. But, as a legislator, does she not have a duty to perform as a representative of the voters (let’s not suggest Don Young be her template)? The result of her trip to Utah was that she had to quarantine until March 31 and thus missed pretty much every vote taken during the abbreviated legislative session, which had ended two days earlier.
    I can see why it is tempting to use this as an argument that she is being “picked on” by the
    big, bad ADN, but I can see that this is the ADN pointing out that she should have been astute enough to know better. If she weren’t, why would one want her as a member of a deliberative body? Other than that she would be a reliable, ideological vote. None of which excuses her behavior.
    Probably not the story Sara would like to have in response to the headline “Challenger attacks lawmaker for following Legislature’s rules.”

  13. All politically impacting news from ADN Is engineered and calculated and if something doesn’t fit their paradigm then it’s simply ignored. Reporting news seems very secondary. Sadly they do have some very good writers and even a couple pretty good journalists but everything goes through the gate keeping agenda focused editors. We subscribed for one year right after the ownership change, optimistically hopeful. Well sadly our hopes were dashed pretty quickly and won’t renew.

  14. I am voting for Sara and I encourage all those that want proper representation to vote for her as well. We need to get some conservative, thoughtful people in Juneau to get this state back on track or we won’t have a state anymore, it will be a jail. We will be trapped in a failed policy in a failed economy with a failed government.

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