Fiction Meets "Fact" In New ABC TV Show About Alaska's Serious Rural Problems
"Alaska Daily" Kicks Off With Story About Missing Indigenous Women The last time a big city woman from "Back East" tum...
"Alaska Daily" Kicks Off With Story About Missing Indigenous Women
The last time a big city woman from "Back East" tumbled into the hallways of the Anchorage Daily News, she almost brought the paper down for good.
Alice Rogoff, wife of a prominent American billionaire, David Rubenstein, came to Alaska, bought the Alaska Dispatch website in 2008, and then bought the Anchorage Daily News in 2014, blending the two media sources together.
Three years later, she drove the Daily News (then called The Dispatch) to bankruptcy in a highly publicized debacle. The paper was rescued by the Binkley family of Fairbanks.
This upcoming Thursday, October 6th, another East Coast woman (this one fictitious) will crash her way into a fictitious Anchorage newspaper called The Alaska Daily.
The new show is about Alaska, journalism and women. In the trailers to the TV show, the actress Hilary Swank plays a "disgraced" journalist who comes to Anchorage and faces one of the most well-known and terrible issues that rural Alaskans deal with today: a never-ending stream of missing, endangered and murdered indigenous women.
Alaska has the largest number of missing persons in America. Although indigenous people make up about 19% of the population, almost 50% of reported rape victims in the state are Native. Many Native women have gone missing or been murdered; so many, in fact, that other women make artwork to commemorate their fallen comrades' lives.
Alaska's huge size and sparse population makes it especially unsafe. Rural Native communities often have little in the way of law enforcement available to them, due to the enormous distances between villages. Recently, the Anchorage Daily News won its third Pulitzer by reporting on the problems of rape, violence, and the deficiencies of police care in Alaska's rural villages.
The award-winning ADN series on the topic, "Lawless," was written by ADN journalist Kyle Hopkins. He and Ryan Binkley of the Daily News helped produce the new TV show.
But, in a Daily News story about the show on Saturday, October 1st, the ADN described "Alaska Daily" as fiction.
The Copper River Country Journal wrote about "Lawless" when the Pulitzer winning series came out.
The Journal also listed various Alaska officials who have tried unsuccessfully over the years to stop domestic violence in Alaska.
