KTOO’s hard-hitting and unbiased reporting reminds us that despite the obvious wealth, beauty and superficial happiness seen everyday in Juneau, crisis after crisis afflicts the city behind the scenes. We investigate this apparent paradox.
A tourist visiting Juneau for the first time would never recognize the many crises afoot in the city. “Sure we have a vibrant and prosperous downtown on the outside,” said Earl Juggins, Managing Senior Assistant Director of Crisis Intervention from the Office of Crisis Creation and Management in the City and Borough of Juneau’s Department of Public Relation’s Office. Juggins continued, “sure, the glacier is nice enough and Douglas can look kind of quaint at the right time of day, but unless you’re out there really looking for them, you could live your entire life in Juneau without noticing all the crises in town. KTOO is really doing the heavy lifting when it comes to pointing them out,” Juggins concluded.
Indeed, KTOO recently stepped up for its listeners and readers to report on the remarkable fact that Juneau somehow manages to simultaneously suffer from both a hunger crisis and a labor shortage crisis. “If you’d asked me six months ago, I’d have told you that there was no way on Earth it could make sense for a small city to have both a labor shortage and a hunger crisis at the same time. I mean, you’d think that hungry people would start working in the middle of a labor shortage once they got hungry enough, but I guess not. Once I started reading the news at KTOO.com, it really opened my eyes,” said John Travers, a local electrician. “I started seeing things a lot differently. Just the other day I had to step over three hungry-looking people sleeping under the “Help Wanted” sign outside the Home Depot,” he related, before pausing to consider a bit further, “but they also could have been passed out, come to think of if, because they did smell a lot like beer. Either way, they looked sort of hungry to me.”
Another Juneau resident readily concurred. “When you’re out there playing with your family, or partying downtown with your buddies, it’s hard to remember all the crises you can’t see on your own,” Sarah Bottoms, a local cannabis retailer, agreed. “We owe a lot to KTOO for reminding us not to be too happy about where we live, just based on our own experiences,” Bottoms noted, before admitting that she has also has her own personal interest in KTOO’s crisis identification effort. “Too much free happiness hurts my bottom line,” she said with a smile, lighting up a nice fat joint filled with premium grade ganja. “Aside from approaching blindness and maybe incurable, insufferable pain, nothing puts the cash in my register faster than a bunch of depressed customers looking to self-medicate, and nine out ten of my customers are listening to KTOO when they walk in the door.”
Unfortunately, not everyone is as rational as Travers or Bottoms. “I don’t see any real problems,” said Paul Valdis, a loud-mouthed, balding, overfed white man who identified himself a local lawyer and who made his hateful, right-leaning ideology implicitly obvious at the beginning of our discussion. “This place is incredibly beautiful and it’s obviously a wealthy town full of generally happy people. I’ve been to Detroit. I’ve been to Mexico. I’ve been to Anacostia in Washington DC. I’m familiar with what a real crisis looks like and I’m just not seeing one around here anywhere,” he scoffed in a arrogant and dismissive manner that plainly displayed not only his filthy white privilege, but also his complete and utter ignorance of the myriad crises surrounding him.
Discounting Valdis’ uninformed blithering, we contacted KTOO to get background for this story, but we were referred first to Alaska Public Media and then to National Public Radio. An NPR spokesman, Delicious Dumplings (zhe, zhey, zheurs), wrote by email that KTOO is fulfilling NPR’s mission of fomenting fear and divisiveness in order to persuade NPR listeners and readers to support government intrusion and intervention into all manner of family and social arenas. The letter we received noted that “a content population will not need or want government intrusion, while a fearful population will not only expect the government to solve their problems, but they will actually demand it. This distinction is core to our reporting methods,” the letter concluded.
Struggling to find a human being to actually speak with us, after leaving a series of voicemails and sending several dozen emails, we were finally put into contact with Chavie Hardheep, Media Relations Assistant Managing Supervisor for NPR’s Office of Self-Justification, who eventually spoke to us by means of Whatsapp from a noisy pub in London, where she and several dozen other NPR office staffers were attending a United Nations conference devoted to limiting business travel as a means of avoiding cost and pollution. She told us that while, as a government-funded media outlet, NPR is technically supposed to be non-partisan and despite its reasonable and unquestionably admirable refusal to place journalistic fairness and balance on a even keel with its self-imposed crucial mission to advance progressive social issues, nobody actually believes that NPR is non-partisan today. “After all these years, nobody really expects us to cover both sides of political or social stories anymore, but we do really have to still watch what we’re saying, sometimes, especially in election years,” Hardheep said . “Everybody knows we’re actually a left-leaning government mouthpiece, and that’s OK these days, as long as we avoid using the word “Democrat,” she explained. “Of course, the reality is that we live by Rahm Emmanuel’s mantra, ‘Never let a serious crisis go to waste!’ I’ll leave it to you to look up what party he’s in. And I have to say that KTOO is doing some real great work in identifying and putting crises to good use,” she concluded abruptly in order to return to her dart game.
The record certainly bears out Hardheep’s assessment. A simple search of KTOO’s website confirms the station’s diligence in reporting on the dozens of mostly imperceptible crises afflicting Juneau. A complete list would fill pages, but some of these crises include:
- The COVID crisis.
- A domestic violence crisis.
- An energy crisis.
- A fiscal crisis.
- An opioid crisis.
- An affordable housing crisis.
- A daycare crisis.
- A homelessness crisis.
- A health crisis.
- A mental health crisis.
- A food stamp crisis.
- A transportation crisis.
- A climate crisis.
- A foster care crisis.
- A teaching crisis.
- A public safety crisis.
- A mortgage crisis.
- A veterinary crisis.
- A behavioral health crisis.
- A MMIP crisis. (whatever that is)
- A state payroll crisis.
- A confidence crisis
- A crabbing crisis.
- A gun violence crisis.
- A plastic waste crisis.
- A declining species crisis.
- A sexual harassment crisis.
- A hospital funding crisis.
While this list is hardly exhaustive, it serves well to illustrate KTOO’s important mission to prevent Juneau’s unwitting population from falling into a false sense of complacency and contentment by relying solely on their own observations or their own unguided opinions. Without KTOO point out the unseen crises facing Juneau, very few people would ever recognize, much less care about, many of these crises. KTOO’s listeners and readers are certainly well-served by this important coverage.