there have come to be so many monopolies and chains. I can’t think of many places with less in common than Alaska and California, but McClatchy owns half the papers in CA and the Anchorage Daily News, the dominant paper in Alaska. Now, everybody in Alaska knows that the ADN is a leftwing rag from California, but still, they read the thing in the morning and other more sane papers around the State pick up ADN stories as does the AP.

Morris Communications’ flagship paper is the Augusta (GA) Chronicle, the oldest continuously published paper in the US, but Morris also owns the Juneau Empire and a couple other Alaska papers as well as some radio stations. As long as the old man was still in charge of the company, the Morris editors and publishers were usually sane and the Empire was a reasonable and even somewhat conservative voice in Alaska. Under the son and in and out of bankruptcy, Morris really needs some adult supervision and the Empire has turned hard left. It is also so poor now that mostly it just reprints AP and ADN stories. The only thing that sells it is habit, the Police Blotter, Juneau’s society pages, and the Classifieds.

One thing I find particularly galling now that most papers have gone online and have comments sections for each article is the fact that the lefties dominate the comments. First, they’re obviously more into commenting on news stories than conservative, most of whom have jobs, are, but the really galling thing is most papers use a “Report Abuse” function that after some number, and usually its pretty low, of abuse reports, a comment is taken down automatically. A conservative CANNOT comment on a Juneau Empire article or editorial; the comment won’t last five minutes. The lefties and greenies just get on their phone tree and all of them “Report Abuse” and the conservative opinion just disappears. So much for freedom of speech.