By ROBERT JUMPER
One Feather Editor
I recently read a headline that reminded me of how incredibly corrupt some “news” organizations are. Yes. News companies. Corruption.
News media are supposed to be keepers of the public trust, guardians of truth, and the fourth estate of societal governance. We are to document history, recording the happenings of a community, whether that community is your town, your county, your state, your country, or the world stage.
Newspapers and the rest of the media are largely watchdogs for the community, identifying and recording the actions of government, social organizations, businesses, and even individuals.
In many communities, media outlets are privately owned. In others, there are combinations of privately owned and community-funded outlets. Community-funded news outlets receive their money through grants and private donations.
Tribal news outlets, like the One Feather, are funded primarily through the governmental budgeting process, with some support from subscription and advertising sales. The paper, in its various forms, is a product of this tribal nation.
The tribal government controls the budgetary allowance and, ultimately, the purpose of the newspaper. In fiscal year 2023 (the Tribe’s financial year runs from October to September), the One Feather operated on a budget of just over $400,000, with just over $300,000 of those funds coming from the tribal coffers. That is the amount necessary to provide the resources needed to do the coverage and to get the message out in print and electronically.
Ownership of media has its inherent challenges. Whether or not it actually happens, it is easy for the general public to suppose that an owner will tailor the reporting or suppression of reporting, to suit the interests of the owner. We used to get those allegations frequently, that the One Feather was being manipulated by the government.
The Tribe, through the Tribal Council, understood that the government should not manipulate what the media outlet reports to the public, and, through its creation of laws, wants to ensure that the people get reports without political or any other kind of bias. There have been times in the history of the paper when direct manipulation of news was a thing. There have also been times when indirect manipulation occurred. With better understanding, communication with the government, and strengthening of laws in the Cherokee Code, there haven’t been any efforts at direct media manipulation in quite some time. But the newspaper, the government, and the community must always be diligent in maintaining distance between governmental leadership and those charged with reporting of workings of government and tribal entities. That separation benefits the paper and the government. Most of all, it benefits the community in that they get a truer picture of how they are being served by those they put in office.
I would say that, for as long as we have forward-thinking tribal leadership who value the benefit of having a press free from manipulation, the tribal community may count on the information they are getting from their tribal news outlet. It is a much better position than many municipalities find themselves in.
On a U.S. national level, confidence in news outlets is staggeringly low. A Gallup poll released in October 2023 had the following bad news for journalists: 32 percent of those polled have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in media’s news reporting, while 39 percent have no confidence at all, compared to 27 percent in 2016.
The report added, “Another 29 percent of U.S. adults have ‘not very much trust. Nearly four in 10 Americans completely lack confidence in the media, which is the highest on record by one percentage point, making the current assessment of the media the grimmest in Gallup’s history.”
According to the polling organization, public confidence in media dropped below 50 percent in 2004 and hasn’t been above that mark since.
Gallup added, “Americans’ confidence in the mass media to report the news fully, fairly, and accurately is at its lowest point since 2016. This low confidence reading for the fourth estate comes at a time when trust in each of the three branches of the federal government is also low.”
Most media outlets are independent, either individually or corporately owned and operated. And in most cases, those owners are dependent on the media outlet for income and livelihood. Typically, the way an independent media outlet remains independent is revenue generation via advertising sales. Early on, news departments in these media outlets were typically small and low-budget. There was an expectation from the public that, along with their entertainment from the media, they get the news as well. However as public interest in news increased, news began to be looked at by the media management as a revenue source. Codes of ethical journalism began to be subverted to the more significant goal (in the eyes of media outlet owners) of converting space and time into profits. The generalization is that, whether perception or reality, the public is losing confidence in news reporting at least in part to biased reporting.
Add to this the misguided belief that social media provides truth in reporting. Per a Pew Research Center survey, “half of the 18- to 29-year-olds in the United States say they have some or a lot of trust in the information they get from social media sites, just under the 56 percent who say the same about information form national news organizations, but somewhat below the 62 percent who say so about information from local news organizations.”
More and more, people are depending on social media to provide the information that they use to plan their lives, to their detriment.
Local media, One Feather included, so far has the best record with the public in holding down owner and government influence on what the public sees and hears. While it is still a challenge for journalists to keep personal bias out of their reporting, most of what we, the public, see and read is accurate documentation of the ongoing historical record. As a person who reads the news regularly, I appreciate local media for attempting to holding the line on honesty and integrity in reporting. This is an especially tough environment for local, independently owned organizations as they try to balance entertaining, revenue-generating material with their duty to represent events factually.
I hope that local media continues to strive for honesty and clarity in reporting. The national media owners and the national public outlets could turn things around for themselves regarding public confidence, and maybe even up those sales, if they would return to their ethical obligations to report without bias.
