‘Sometimes a cigar is just cigar’

It was the end of our anonymity that summer day in 2008 when presidential candidate John McCain announced he’d selected Sarah Palin to run as vice president with him on the Republican ticket.

Before that time, only people in Alaska knew of the existence of Wasilla or the Mat-Su Borough. We suspect those days are gone forever.

Regardless of where we live in the world, it doesn’t take much nowadays to send a story, photo or video circling the globe at the speed of light. Though if the news comes from Wasilla, you can bet that when other media outlets report the story, it will mention us as Sarah Palin’s hometown.

Now, local education spats that in the pre-2008 era would have ended with the principal and local school board are reported as news by media outlets across Alaska, the U.S. and even internationally — “Sarah Palin’s high school bans Bohemian Rhapsody,” or more recently, “Sarah Palin’s high school bans sculpture.”

Regardless of how many newspapers stories like these may sell, mostly they tend to reflect poorly on us as a community when they are reported and reprinted by other media outlets around the world.

Newspapers and magazines internationally have contacted us seeking permission to reprint the story and photos of “Warrior Within,” Wasilla High’s controversial new sculpture that some claim resembles female genitalia. This seems key, since each editor and news outlet that has reprinted the image could be accused of printing “soft porn,” according to our reader comments anyway.

It’s worth knowing that when we printed the “Warrior Within” image, no one called to complain of its vulgarity. In fact, not one person has contacted us to question our decision to print the image in multiple editions of the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman.

Yet we are certain if we had printed a photo or an accurate illustration of female reproductive parts, our readers would have written and called to voice complaints and cancel their subscriptions.

And we are equally certain that had we printed such an image our parent company, Wick Communications, would have responded swiftly with concerns, and that people on our staff would have been fired. But nothing like that happened.

We did receive lots of reader comments and a couple of letters to the editor about the sculpture, but no one questioned our decision to print an image of this sculpture that some of our neighbors are describing as pornography.

People should also know that multiple copies of the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman are delivered to every school in the district, and not one teacher, staff or parent contacted us with concerns that the image we printed was inappropriate.

We hope this story provides our community an opportunity to reflect on the care we take as a community with our collective reputation. Knowing that every hiccup that originates in Wasilla carries the potential to be national and international news, we hope the lesson here is obvious.