The dishonorable distinction award goes to Sullivan

U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, right, speaks during a press conference with President Donald Trump at the White House on Wednesday, Sept. 30, 2026. (Screenshot from official White House video)

By Rich Moniak

For Suzanne Downing, the Anchorage Daily News showed its editorial bias by not promptly covering the New York Times story about U.S. Senate candidate Mary Peltola. When they got around to it the next day, they noted the Alaska Democratic Party called it a “hit piece” intended to benefit her opponent, Sen. Dan Sullivan.

They’re both guilty of projecting their own partisan bias.

You don’t need to rely on Ad Fontes Media, Biasly, or AllSides to know the Times leans left. Or that Fox News is well to the right side of the spectrum. The problem is less about the slant of their reporting and commentary than their respective audiences who don’t balance their news and opinion diets.

Alaska Democrats aren’t pretending to be unbiased. But they shouldn’t be acting like the Times didn’t publish an unfavorable story about Sullivan two weeks earlier.

Not surprisingly, that’s nowhere to be found on The Alaska Story website run by Downing. And if the Times is really “the nation’s leading Democrat Party bullhorn,” as she claims, they would have buried the story about Peltola.

But because it had the makings of a Democratic Party scandal, she turned on her supposedly “respected journalist, editor, and commentator” hat and wrote two stories about it. 

She published a commentary by Win Gruening that mentioned it too.

He begins by blaming Democrats for the race becoming “one of the most negative campaigns in recent history,” complains about dark money ads misrepresenting Sullivan’s stock sales, and accuses Peltola of distorting her record during the two-plus years she served in Congress. He then declares “she doesn’t care about the truth or running an honorable campaign, only winning.”

The sorry truth is competitive political campaigns on both sides have been working hard to deceive voters for decades.

Which is what President Donald Trump was doing on Sullivan’s behalf at the White House on Wednesday. He invited in the news media to announce South Korea has agreed to invest $54 billion to build the 800-mile LNG pipeline across Alaska. And he credited Sullivan for bringing the project to fruition.

There is no such agreement. As South Korea’s Industry Minister explained afterwards, “the project has not been thoroughly reviewed.”

Even Downing acknowledged it’s only “a potential investment.”

Trump’s premature boasting isn’t new. And as we’ve seen with the war in Iran, it guarantees nothing. 

“I hereby fully authorize the toll free opening of the Strait of Hormuz,” he wrote in June three days before he signed the Memorandum of Understanding his administration negotiated with Iran. Within two weeks, what he hailed as a “historic breakthrough” completely fell apart. The waterway through which passage was free and safe before he started the war is still a long way from being fully open.

Sullivan isn’t interested in voters understanding the truth about the war, its impact on energy prices, or the damage it’s done to America’s reputation and our alliances. But that’s only partly because it hurts his chances of winning the election. Jonah Goldberg explained the more disturbing problem a year after he quit his lucrative Fox News gig. Remaining part of team Trump “requires you to lie about things.”

Sullivan doesn’t necessarily repeat the whoppers Trump routinely tells. On matters like the war with Iran, his silence serves as lies by omission.

What also irked me about Gruening’s commentary is how he pointed to the insulting and abusive behavior described in the Times story about Peltola to ask a question he’s never posed about Trump. “Does this sound like a candidate worthy and capable of holding elected office?”

Like his habitual lying, Trump’s venomous insults are legendary. It’s frequently aimed at the news media. On the White House web page dedicated to that purpose, he acts as if he’s the sole arbiter of the truth. Getting the full story requires doing your own research.

The website Downing publishes isn’t much better. Commentary isn’t welcome and left-leaning news media stories aren’t cited unless they’re favorable to Trump’s party.

Let me put that into a perspective relative to the Times story about Peltola. If several staffers from Sullivan’s office presented Downing with similarly unflattering complaints about him at this point in the campaign, they would have had to look elsewhere to get it published.

There’s nothing honorable about misleading voters for partisan reasons. But in this race, only Sullivan has earned the dishonorable distinction of providing cover for Trump’s gross incompetence and all his disgusting character traits.

• Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector.