Telling the gas story

Bias is an accusation frequently hurled at the press, usually combined with some sort of charged political descriptor such as "conservative" or "liberal." While it almost seems cliched by now to lob this kind of criticism at our news media - not least because they sometimes, actually, deserve it - there are still plenty of untapped reserves of media blunders to keep things fresh for news naysayers. Lately, I have been reminded of another kind of bias: lower-48.

The Associated Press ran a story on Sunday (May 20) that trumpets the new gasoline prices that are currently ravaging consumers and that, even when adjusting for inflation, are without precedent in the United States. (Our national-average, regular gas price is now $3.18/gallon, which beats out the second-highest, inflation-adjusted rate of $3.15 from 1981.)

Considering the particularly strong American reliance upon automobiles and thus upon gasoline - and our cripplingly close ties to the Middle East nations that produce this gas - it is certainly understandable that many news organizations would be eager to report this as headline news. Forbes Magazine, for instance, picked up the story. So, too, did ABC News, which not only posted it on their website, but also continued to run it as the lead story in the 2-minute national-news feeds we receive from them at our radio station. (To give this a sense of perspective: high gas prices beat out Israel retaliating against Hamas, the increasing probability of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' resignation, the departure of Paul Wolfowitz from the World Bank, and the acidic press-release battle between former President Carter and current President Bush.)

In other words, this rise in gas prices has implications and importance far beyond the immediate effects to the average daily consumer, and the national news folks (at AP) were on the ball when it came to recognizing this significance. In their eagerness, however, AP displayed a kind of bias that I think would escape the attention of most folks back home. It's not that the facts are wrong, per se; it's just that the story lacks the perspective needed for truly national news.

One of the final paragraphs of yesterday's AP story reads:

Nationwide, the lowest average price for regular fuel was $2.87 in Charleston, S.C., and the highest was in Chicago at $3.59 a gallon.

I live in Nome, Alaska, which, while not the model of urbanity you'd expect from any "city" in most states, is still big enough to have a large population of drivers, and more than one gas station. While on a walk Saturday afternoon, I passed two of the stations, and made a mental note of the gas prices. At the cheaper of the two, unleaded regular attracts customers at $3.93 per gallon.

The situation in many places in Western Alaska (outside of Nome) is even worse. Prices for fuel have reached incredible highs within the past 12 months. This affects not only our driving expenditures but also the overall cost of living - especially for a region that depends upon this pricy fuel for heat during the Arctic winters. Skimping on heat to save money is an option you'd rather not entertain when it's -30 and windy outside.

Ironically, Alaska has received much national attention in recent years because of the ongoing controversy over whether to drill for oil in the state's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The 19 million acres of the refuge are home to the greatest diversity of plant and animal species in the entire Arctic, as well as petroleum reserves.

If Alaska is worth mentioning as a benefactor of oil, but not worth mentioning (alongside, say, Chicago or Charleston) when it receives the blunt end of our oil-addicted culture, does that mean what goes on within the state - as opposed to what flows out of it - is irrelevant on the national stage?

Hardly.

Like in the U.S. as a whole, Alaska's relationship with oil has been a double-edged sword for decades. The drilling and distribution of oil has been a source of economic boom (such as the building of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline in the 1970s) but also environmental bust (Exxon Valdez and many similar incidents, not to mention the continued maintenance and leakage issues with the Pipeline itself). Native American subsistence lifestyles have been repeatedly damaged by often-irresponsible drilling practices, and although oil has brought Alaska billions of dollars, our state dependence upon that same oil has also resulted in an often-unstable economy.

The lessons of Alaska's experience with oil - and the state's evolving history with oil corporations, from gas prices to gas spills - has environmental and economic ramifications far beyond our state borders, and far beyond how much money Nome residents need to fill up their tanks. Our American relationship to oil has "spilled over," both literally and figuratively, into many of the problems faced collectively by all 50 states - from climate change to the Iraq war to corporate and government accountability. Alaska's oil narrative mirrors that of its parent country, and it serves as a cautionary tale against exactly the kind of blind subservience to oil that has now come home to roost in America - whether in eroding glaciers or eroding support for the Iraq occupation.

So you'd think that the problems faced in Alaska - objectively worse, when it comes to gas, than almost anywhere else in America - would merit at least a phrase or two in the AP story that keeps getting such fantastic airplay on ABC News. After all, our state is by far the biggest in the nation; we're as wide as the distance from Tallahassee, Florida to San Francisco, and twice the size of Texas. And plus, we provide a substantial proportion of the national oil; just one region in Alaska (Prudhoe Bay) provides 17% of our domestic production alone. Right?

But I guess AP just couldn't fit us in. Either that, or their conception of "national news" is about the same as they held in December 1958, when the "nation" still meant the 48 contiguous states from Maine to California.

If AP and the national news media do, indeed, display a flawed perspective on what "national news" fully entails - because they mentally truncate the non-contiguous states from the nation in the first place - I would assume that this omission is unintentional. But most examples of bias are just that: unintended failures of objectivity. Whether they're political or regional biases, they share the effect that a particular group or point of view is being overlooked. No matter where we live or on what part of the political spectrum we fall, we have a common aversion to bias because we know that it results in a good story not being told.

Unfortunately for those lucky enough to pay only $3.50 for gas, it's a story that shouldn't be ignored.

And if it takes another Exxon-Valdez-like incident - or another Iraq-War-like foreign entanglement - to awaken the lower 48 to the relevance of Alaska's story, such a revelation may be too little, too late.

Until then, I guess Chicago folks paying $3.59 will have to qualify for front-page news. I mean, could you imagine anything more inconvenient than high gas prices on Memorial Day weekend?

Koyuk

Now that I'm finally writing again, I'd be remiss not to talk a bit about a recent trip I took for work last month. The regional competitions of the Native Youth Olympics were being held in Koyuk, Alaska - one of the villages on the Yukon River - and I was lucky enough to cover the event for our station.

Like almost all of the villages and towns in Western Alaska, Koyuk is inaccessible by any road system, so getting to this village of some 300 people means taking a small plane from Nome. I've been on small planes before, but never one this small. The maximum passenger capacity was about a half-dozen, allowing for an intimate space from which to view the vast, still-snowy and icy landscape below our wings.

A regular part of daily life in this region, the "milk run" routes of these small planes -- running passengers, mail and cargo from village to village -- play a unique role that aviation does not take almost anywhere else in the world. The bush pilots are a vital lifeline, and this becomes immediately apparent when you see a village, like Koyuk, emerge in the distance from an otherwise uninterrupted landscape of open tundra, sea ice, snow, and scattered trees. Without the planes, each village would be largely on its own.

But I digress - the plane ride was just the first of many amazing experiences on this assignment. The games themselves are fascinating. The Native Youth Olympics involve junior and senior high school students competing against each other in a series of athletic events that relate in a particular way to the traditional subsistence lifestyle of Alaska Natives. The games are incredibly strenuous and demanding; the "Two-Foot High Kick," for example, tasks participants to jump up in the air and use both feet, together, to kick a suspended beanbag whose height off the ground is gradually increased. The winner is the one who can kick the highest. This event, and other variations on the kick, relate to hunting activities, in which different kinds of kicks were used as non-verbal means of communicating between the members of a hunting party.

The games began Friday evening and concluded Saturday night. I tried to keep as close to each successive sport as I could, writing down impressions and results and conferring with the officials overseeing the event. Saturday came the time for live reports, and just before 9am, 12noon, and 5pm, I called into the radio station and gave a brief run-down of the recent event winners. Sunday, I filed one last report in the morning, to be recorded and replayed later that day.

While I waited for my afternoon flight back to Nome, I walked around Koyuk a bit and tried to get a sense of the village. One of the immediate differences is that, lo and behold, there are trees here! Nome is just outside of the tree line (because of the permafrost in our soil), and thus has almost no trees of any kind; but Koyuk's soil is apparently just hospitable enough for some evergreens (although I noticed they never get too tall).

Despite long days (late nights for the conclusions of sporting events, and early mornings to file live reports), it was a great weekend, and a definite highlight of my time thus far in Western AK.

Breaking up

After a hiatus of nearly six months, this blog is vastly overdue for an update.

It's May, and spring is finally winding its way into Western Alaska. The season is bringing with it melting snow, long days, and temperatures that are finally allowing Nome folks to walk to the post office or Wells Fargo in light jackets, without hats, gloves, or earmuffs.

For a long while now, the snow that we've had since October has been making its long, drawn-out exit, stage right. Around early April the temperatures finally rose above freezing long enough for the mounds of snow to start turning into rivulets and pools on the ground, making for liberal amounts of chocolate-brown mud on virtually all of the streets of the Gold Rush City.

This week, the temperatures finally broke into the 50s and even strayed above 60 on a few brief, glorious moments. As the snow makes its last stand, the mud is drying back into khaki-hued dust, the schools are closing their grade-books on another year, and locals are getting primed for summers spent at fish camps, hiking on the verdant tundra, and fishing in the nearby rivers.

Across Western Alaska, as the snow is going away, so too is the ice on the rivers and seas. The radio is broadcasting a daily report on this gradual process of ice disintegration, which lends to this entire season the label "break-up." One of the signals of spring in Nome, indeed, was seeing the Norton Sound's white ice finally give way to the midnight-blue waters beneath.

Meanwhile, we're still four weeks from the summer solstice, but the days are already exceptionally long. As I write it is just about 1am, but a powder-blue twilight lingers over the eastern sky, and fades into a rouge-colored glow over Russia, to the west.

It's a beautiful time to be in Nome.