The Anchorage Daily News has never liked Anchorage Municipal Manager Amy Demboski. The newspaper has a pattern of partisan bullying of her as a candidate, as an assemblywoman, and now as Anchorage’s city manager.
During her race for mayor in 2015, the newspaper wrote a story questioning the paternity of her child.
“What media source goes back 20 years and questions the paternity of a child born to a teenage mom?” Demboski said. The ADN did, and said her teenage divorce “suggest” that she was not truthful.
On that news day, ADN sent out reporters who staked out the front entrance and back entrance of the Demboski campaign office all day long, waiting for her to come out and declare the paternity of her child. It was savage journalism.
When Demboski busted a guy who was destroying her campaign signs, and confronted him for cutting her picture out of a sign, the ADN made a big deal about her holstered pistol, saying she was “laying in wait,” which is a legal term for ambushing.
The man was a mental case and was using a box cutter to cut Demboski’s picture off her signs, so of course she was going to have protection on her.
Then there was the Greg Jones incident. Jones, a Democrat candidate running for office, was asked by Demboski on her radio show about a national article detailing his relationship with Socialist Bernie Sanders and Muslims of America. She was characterized by the newspaper and leftists on the Assembly as an Islamophobe, someone with a prejudice against Muslims.
After then-mayoral candidate Ethan Berkowitz said on the radio during the show that he and Bernadette Wilson hosted that he had no problem with a father marrying his son, Demboski was asked by another radio host what she thought. She told the radio host that she didn’t know what Berkowitz meant by that.
The ADN wrote it up as if Demboski had pushed the “fathers marrying sons” narrative. Later, radio host Wilson produced the audio clip that showed that Berkowitz had, indeed, said that he didn’t care if fathers married their sons. All Demboski had done was acknowledge she heard it on the radio, saying, “maybe you should ask him.”
Now, the ADN is going after Demboski for her management style as the city manager.
Must Read Alaska asked Demboski for her response to the ADN editorial demanding her firing that she is used to the newspaper attacking her.
“The truth is when they are scared, when you’re effective or when you are winning- they will always attack. This is what draining the swamp looks like. I will not be deterred, distracted, or bullied. Bring it on,” Demboski told Must Read Alaska.
