PASS FORK, DALZELL CREEK -- Out here all alone on a snowmachine below Rainy Pass just north of the Alaska Range, there is plenty of space, time and space-time to think about how different this world of old Alaska is from the world inhabited by most people reading this. And how, about one thing, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was presciently right: There are too many people in the American media today making things up.

The odd part is that it doesn't have so much to do with the left-leaning nature of news organizations as it does with their ruthless capitalism. Gathering the news is costly, and many of the businesses selling news today just don't want to spend the money required to do the job right. They'd rather fake things. I know.

I faked the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race for the past several years. I'd sit in an office at the Anchorage newspaper, take what I could get from a reporter in the field, scour other news services for more, check the weather report, roll in everything I knew from being on the ground on the Iditarod Trail in the past and write daily Iditarod race reports. I like to think I did it well. I sometimes ran into friends and acquaintances at the supermarket who were surprised to see me. "I thought your were out on the trail," they would say, and I'd just smile.

You can get away with this sort of bastardized newsgathering if you get out there now and then, but you can't get away with it forever. Day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year, the world changes too much in too many subtle ways. You begin to miss things if you spend your time sitting in an office far removed.

The willows grow up to hide the tripods that used to mark the trail up Pass Creek. Moose go into decline, and the trail is no longer pocked with moose holes threatening to injure dogs. The trail out of Puntilla Lake gets shifted from the east side of a ridge to the west side. The once-cleared trail down the Pass Fork grows up. Things change all over the place.

"A desk," observed British writer John Le Carre, "is a dangerous place from which to view the world." The author of "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy," Le Carre was a man who knew a thing about information gathering. His real name was David John Moore Cornwall, and he was a former member of British intelligence. Reporting is a bit like intelligence; a good reporter takes bits and pieces of information and from them tries to construct an accurate representation of events as they happened.

The better the information, the more accurate the story. That's why reporters used to put boots on the ground. Now they are all too content or, more accurately, their bosses are all too content to let reporters sit in offices and spend their time on the telephone or computer repackaging information from this spokeswoman or that spokesman or maybe just from some computer somewhere cranking out electronic messages on its own. Who knows? So much happens in the virtual world these days it's hard to keep track of what is real and what is not.

In the virtual world live a bunch of bloggers who operate without rules and a few old-fashioned journalists who operate by rules that have become almost a parody of themselves. In many cases, the only important "fact" these days is that someone in officialdom said something even if they're only blathering on about "death panels."

Whether what is said makes any sense or reflects the reality of the situation is largely irrelevant. What matters is "Well, that's what she said," or "That's what he said," or "That's what they said." Thus, when a bunch of snowmachiners heads out from Moose Pass on the Kenai Peninsula only to get caught in an avalanche 13 miles to the northeast, the whole incident is moved to somewhere "near the Spencer Glacier" because that is the location cited by the Anchorage-centric officialdom that rushes to the scene from the North side of the Kenai.

Never you mind that you can't even see Spencer Glacier from where the avalanche took place, or that Spencer Glacier has nothing whatsoever to do with the avalanche. It doesn't matter because "that's what they said."