Alaska is in the throes of a busy election year, and as part of Alaska Public Media’s campaign coverage, we’ve got a voter guide on our website. It’s a joint effort with three other major Alaska news organizations: the Anchorage Daily News, Alaska Beacon and KTOO.
The newsrooms have collaborated like this for several elections now. But an odd thing happened this time: U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan and Congressman Nick Begich did not participate, along with three of the top Republican gubernatorial candidates.
Alaska Public Media Washington Correspondent Liz Ruskin discussed possible reasons in her newsletter, Alaska at-Large, and with Alaska News Nightly host Casey Grove
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Casey Grove: Liz, Why did you want to write about this?
Liz Ruskin: I guess because it seemed unusual. I mean, in a sense this happens all the time. Sen. Sullivan and Congressman Begich decline to answer a lot of my questions. But this time, it wasn’t just me asking, or just Alaska Public Media. It was the news outlets that employ a majority of Alaska’s journalists. And this isn’t just a case of “Boo-hoo they won’t talk to us.” This is a long-standing Republican trend nationwide: Republicans often don’t talk to traditional news reporters. It’s a strategy.
CG: Yeah, so, why is that?
LR: I put the question to James Brooks, Alaska Beacon political reporter and friend of the show. He says that often Republican candidates don’t talk to us because they don’t have to.
James Brooks: “If you're a Republican candidate and you're running in a red state, as Alaska is, you don't necessarily have to talk to independent voters, to the mainstream, to people who are not affiliated with your party in order to win. That doesn't always work out, but it can work out.”
LR: Brooks says Republican candidates are less likely to fill out published questionnaires and less likely to participate in big public events, because if they want to talk to their base voters, they have other options. There are Republican bloggers and podcast hosts. They’ve got social media channels, and political influencers who will amplify their message. There’s less risk involved there.
CG: How do you mean risk? Political risk?
LR: Yes. We are asking candidates to stake a position on controversial topics, like aid to Israel and Ukraine and impeachment, gun violence.
Let me back up to say that we — all four news outlets working on this — invited our audiences to submit questions, and we edited them. I think it made for more pointed questions.
One that we included asked: Did any actions by the Trump administration raise legal or constitutional concerns for you? And if so, which ones? Another was: knowing what you know now, should the Senate have convicted Trump after his 2021impeachment?
If a reporter in the halls of Congress is asking a Trump question like that, Sen. Sullivan is not going to stop to answer it. But our audience asked a lot of questions along those lines so we included a few.
A Republican operative I talked to complained that we were asking gotcha questions. And yes, we were trying to pin the candidates down on specific issues. And those responses might be played in a negative campaign ad, even years later.
CG: I can see that. So then why did so many other candidates answer, and why have they in the past?
LR: I called one candidate who said, basically, you have to lay out your positions if you want people to vote for you. That was independent candidate for Congress Bill Hill, taking a traditional view. He’s trying to reach a broad audience.
If you’re reaching to the right, I think candidates often see more risk than reward.
Also, both Sen. Sullivan and Congressman Begich are running big-dollar campaigns. Maybe they’d rather their campaign ads speak for them rather than talk about issues they don’t want to focus on.
CG: Liz, I assume you asked the campaigns why they didn’t respond?
LR: Oh definitely. This may shock you, but they didn’t provide a response to say why they didn’t respond.
CG: How does this fit in with the national picture?
I called an expert in media habits and partisanship — Michael Lipka at Pew Research Center. What he said basically backed up our friend James Brooks. He said it used to be that candidates needed traditional news outlets to reach a broad audience. But he said there's a partisan gap in media habits. He said Republicans distrust news organizations at much higher rates than Democrats and trust FOX News far more than they trust any other national news outlet. Democrats, he said, spread their trust around to a greater number of national outlets, and they trust national news more. Trust is higher – and the partisan gap is less pronounced — when it comes to attitudes about local news, but Lipka said there’s a significant gap and it’s growing.
CG: Interesting. Well, as we said before, we have that voter guide on our website – that’s at alaskapublic.org/elections – which is also the home of all of our election coverage, plus a series of interviews with many of the candidates for governor. And Liz, folks can sign up for your newsletter, Alaska At-Large, at alaskapublic.org/newsletters.
