Volume 5, number 8, September 2003 Say What? "I am in control here." Thus spake Al Haig on March 30, 1981, the day President Ronald Reagan was shot. In clearly forgetting his grade-school civics lesson on the constitutional chain of succession, the Secretary of State provided journalists with something of a dilemma: how to report the comments of a high-ranking official that are so widely off the mark. Whatever duty a journalist holds to report the remarks of an influential newsmaker is balanced by the responsibility of contextualizing those comments. A good reporter wouldn’t dream of letting such an inaccurate statement go unchecked, yet just as parody is killed by its own explanation, some such statements can stand alone, containing precisely enough lunacy to be self-mocking. Indeed, few reporters had to inform their audiences that Haig was off his rocker. Here in Alaska, tales of mind-numbing public pronouncements abound. Until Governor Frank vacated the nation’s capital for the state’s last year, the Beltway triumvirate of Stevens-Murkowski-Young spent over two decades uttering absurdities too numerous to count. Though often good for a chuckle—like the time during the pipeline debates of 1969 when Sen. Stevens, in a pique of anti-environmental rage, informed a panel of scientists that "there are no living organisms on the North Slope"—occasionally our Congressional delegation let slip wrong-headed comments on issues deadly serious. This month, on the second anniversary of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, let’s look back at our very own Frank Murkowski and Don Young, and their ridiculous comments shortly after 9/11. Within hours of the attacks Murkowski, then a U.S. Senator, was questioning the potential link between oil imports from the Middle East and the funding sources for terrorism. His speculative and prejudicial comments came long before any credible, not to mention conclusive, link to the region could be established, and were firmly rooted in the senator’s long-standing advocacy for opening ANWR to development. Amid much misinformation and rampant speculation that chaotic day, Murkowski’s opportunistic comments still attracted some media attention. Yet one recalls the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, when politicians and pundits alike quickly seized on the belief that brown-skinned foreigners just had to be involved. The reality, of course, proved much more difficult for knee-jerk commentators to accept: the bomber was a clean-cut kid from Buffalo, New York, and a military veteran at that. By Sept. 14, 2001, Murkowski was still pressing a connection between oil imports and terrorism. An article in the business section of that day’s Anchorage Daily News noted the senator’s intent to investigate funding sources for both Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Incredibly, when readers of the ADN turned to the opinion page of that very same edition, they found a column by Murkowski advising: "We should not presume to know the terrorist planners’ identity with certainty. We must be careful not to prejudge any group." Never mind that he had been doing exactly that since only hours after the attacks. Representative Don Young did his senatorial colleague one better on 9/11 with remarks that caused one commentator to surmise the congressman had gone "straight to nutville." The statement, made only hours after the attacks, must be read in full to be believed:
This writer engaged a lengthy correspondence with Mr. Young regarding the basis for his comments. (Perhaps I shouldn’t call it a lengthy correspondence, exactly: I wrote a dozen letters, to each of Young’s Alaska offices, over a two-month period before receiving a rather testy reply.) What did the congressman know that led him to conclude this was a "strong possibility"? Was he part of a top-secret meeting where the burgeoning investigation pointed immediately to bunny-huggers from Seattle? In his reply, Young noted that recent years have witnessed a rise in eco-terrorism throughout the country. That’s it. On that basis alone, our congressman judged a "strong possibility" that wacko environmentalists—whose crimes heretofore consisted largely of breaking into animal research labs and setting free hundreds of rabbits—somehow found the will to hijack four airplanes and ram three of them into icons of American economic and military might. (Gee, it doesn’t sound so crazy when I say it out loud like that!) Many Alaska news outlets entirely ignored Young’s remarks. Perhaps their idiocy was simply too much to bear. Or, more likely, the media found themselves with much, much bigger stories on their hands that Tuesday in September. And while I normally would criticize the media for failing to contextualize an official’s comments, in this case our elected representatives ably planted within their own remarks just the right dose of pompous buffoonery.
| ||
 | | |
