By ROBERT JUMPER
One Feather Editor
We often get requests for last minute coverage. And we know that is the nature of news. It doesn’t necessarily happen on anyone’s timetable. It isn’t realistic to think that we will get a heads-up before a building fire or a car accident. Things happen and many times they happen emergently. And we know that when those emergency things happen, for the most part, any detail we receive will be from agencies. We may rush out to get a photo of a crisis in progress and may even get a little detail, but during a crisis is not typically the time officials want to chat with the media. Understandable, although I will say that when you watch or read the news, when a crisis is occurring, most agencies and governments, even those with significantly lower budgets than our tribal government, do have a person designated to provide incident information and reports via a press conference or a physical statement release.
Many times, those request for last minute coverage come from people who have planned an event for months and, as an afterthought, contact us and say “We have a ribbon cutting, dedication, guest speaker, etc., that is just starting. Can you be here in 15 minutes?” I have provided the reporting staff a good supply of “squishy” or stress relief toys for those moments. Because with only two reporters that cover all things EBCI (Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians), the reporters aren’t typically hanging out waiting for their phones to ring. They are constantly engaged in some aspect of news gathering, reporting, or documenting for the community. With the volume of material that we review, discuss, and then research to bring 24/7 coverage of the Qualla Boundary via website and social media, and a weekly print edition, it can be a little frustrating when we get the last-minute phone call for an event that has been scheduled for weeks.
There are times when we are figuratively at the office door of a newsmaker, virtually pounding on it for information on a pressing issue when they either will not answer the door or be silent on an item of community importance. One Feather has routinely run into silence on certain issues of the day. It is a loophole or glitch in the public records law that before you can start the clock on any public information request, you must have a way to get the provider to acknowledge that they have the request. And I won’t belabor the point that tribal newspapers, like the One Feather, face a very unattractive and possibly impossible option for information legally obtainable, particularly from tribal programs. The normal course of action for a media outlet is to petition the Court for information when it is not provided after a request process. That would mean the One Feather (a tribal program) would have to take the keeper of the information (a tribal program) to tribal court (also a tribal program). I have never been able to figure out who or how the tribal attorney would deal with both plaintiff and defendant being programs that his office would be bound to represent.
Wildly challenging is the tendency of tribal programs and entities to use their social media pages for official statements. Keep in mind that we have had tribal officials, both Executive and Legislative branch top officials, refer to social media as “the devil, evil, and a disease”. Yet the preferred way, and with some, exclusive way to deliver news is through social media. While there is no official Executive Branch Facebook page, the Principal Chief does have a very active page and Tribal Council sports its own page as well. Many of the largest tribal service providers, like Cherokee Indian Hospital and the Cherokee Indian Police Department, have pages on social media. And if you are familiar with public pages, there may be several moderators or administrators of a single page. One Feather has four and we only have five employees. Some of the larger entities of the tribe may have 10 or more. In addition, the page administrator may elect to allow outside agencies and partners to place content on their page, as is the case with EBCI Destination Marketing.
With the One Feather charged with verification of the information we report, trying to ensure that we may identify the source of, for example, a post on any one of the many people who use the group or official sites can be challenging. Who said it may be as important as what has been said. And keeping track of what has been said by multiple people on multiple pages is daunting as well.
But with all that said, most of the time, we have no choice but to repost information from other social media pages. For hundreds of years, that’s right, hundreds, in the public relations business, the industry standard for communicating official public information has been press releases. Documentation written for the express purpose of communicating from entity to the public. For many years at the Tribe, public information release has been severely restricted. Government, or at least some legislators and the Principal Chief at the time, did try to provide some structure to allow for public information to be more easily accessed through two measures in 2006, the “Free Press Act” and the “Public Records” ordinance. One of the issues with these two laws is that, like most laws in our Code, there is little or no “or else” language in the legislation, no “teeth”. What are the repercussions for denying or ignoring requests for information deemed “public” by the Code? Have you ever seen anyone prosecuted or even reprimanded for not providing information upon request from the tribal media, or from an individual for that matter?
Recently, there have been several incidents where the gossip got ahead of the reporting, and that is never good. One incident, in which a death occurred, spawned tale after tale about what happened. Because next to no information has been released, people continue to tout this or that theory about what actually happened. In some cases, because of an information vacuum, media outlets were publishing theory as to what happened in certain incidents based on that gossip that permeates social media. We do our best to avoid speculative chatter that doesn’t have substantiation and, in some cases, all that is available is community speculation because that is all the government has given.
One attorney once commented while the staff was having an open discussion on this issue that this gap between information keeping and information dissemination was a normal occurrence. “The government has always wanted to protect information while the press wants to release it.”
I have mentioned it before and it bears repeating, we as a community must never get to the point that we say, as one reader and community member did, “When the government wants you (the media) to know, they will tell you.”
I will use the most, or one of the most extreme examples of what can happen when we start down the road of allowing government to control the flow of information to the community. Just because it is extreme, doesn’t mean we should assume that it could never happen to us. Of course I refer to the actions of the Nazi regime in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
“When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the German constitution guaranteed freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Through decrees and laws, the Nazis abolished these civil rights and destroyed German democracy. Starting in 1934, it was illegal to criticize the Nazi government. Even telling a joke about Hitler was considered treachery. People in Nazi Germany could not say or write whatever they wanted. Examples of censorship under the Nazis included: closing down or taking over anti-Nazi newspapers; controlling what news appeared in the newspapers, on the radio, and in newsreels; banning and burning books that the Nazis categorized as un-German; controlling what soldiers wrote home during World War II.” (encyclopedia.ushmm.org)
I use this example only to drive home the point that we must not get slack nor apathetic when it comes to our civil rights. Free speech and a free press are basic civil rights that should be a part of any governing document of a free people. And yet for the Eastern Band, it is not. Nor are any of the other privileges we take for granted. Pay attention. Demand clarity and consequences for violating the Free Press Act and the Public Records ordinance. For the most part, our current government supports your right to know, even though the mechanism for you to get to know needs an overhaul. Because we have elections for our legislators every two years, we could see change for the better or worse regarding freedoms like speech and press on a regular and frequent basis. We always need to remind and support each other in these basic freedoms that affect the entire community.
