By ROBERT JUMPER
Tutiyi (Snowbird) and Clyde, N.C.
The Pied Piper of Hamelin is a medieval legend about a mysterious piper who, when hired to rid the town of rats, was refused payment by the townspeople after he performed the service. In revenge, he returned and used his magical pipe to lure the town’s 130 children away, never to be seen again.
While the story’s moral is about keeping promises and the consequences of greed, there is a sub-story that we don’t often see examined, that of the influence of the Piper on the rats, the children, and the townspeople.
The Oxford Dictionary defines muckraking as “the action of searching out and publicizing scandalous information about famous people in an underhanded way,” and yellow journalism as a style of news reporting characterized by sensationalism, exaggeration, and a disregard for factual accuracy to attract readers and increase circulation.
Many of us assume that, since the media is protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution (and, in our case, Chapter 75 of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Code) that we are safe to assume that the news reported to us through traditional media outlets may be trusted. And even though this should be the case, if you look closely at most news stories, you will inevitably find bias, slant, and misrepresentation. And that is not how it is supposed to be.
Conveying the news is a sacred trust. That is why, over the course of over a decade as editor of the Cherokee One Feather, I have focused my journalistic role to be one of gatekeeping. My philosophy is simple, both in my professional and personal life. Present the facts and tell the truth. This is a great position when sharing information with the public, as media outlets are charged with doing. Truth-telling requires little memory beyond recalling the facts, while fabricating is quite labor-intensive, causing the storyteller to tell falsehood after falsehood to justify their claims to their targets, the readers. We, as journalists, have a moral responsibility to be as neutral in reporting as possible. We have a duty to parse information without injecting our personal commentary into what is presented as a factual report. Articles should present the facts and let the reader make judgments on what those facts mean. Pontification is fine in commentary, but not in news articles.
We also assume that public or private media is immune to manipulation, thus ensuring that truth-telling is more or less assured as opposed to governmentally owned and operated media. Not so. The primary reason that many news outlets are experiencing low confidence from their potential readership is the focus on chasing dollars and following the personal beliefs and causes of editors and publishers. The owners and editors of the “free press” who choose to manipulate public opinion for personal gain or furtherance of a cause they support with veiled commentary and half-truths are, in my humble opinion, the very reason the country, and sometimes our community, becomes radically divided.
It doesn’t help that journalism classes in higher education are now geared toward this perversion of journalism. “Journalism is the activity of gathering, assessing, creating, and presenting news and information to the public. Facts are pieces of information that are known or proven to be true. They are presented as having objective reality”, according to the American Psychological Association, American Press Institute, and Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Mainstream universities teach that achieving complete journalistic objectivity is impossible, but they provide a framework of standards and practices to mitigate personal and institutional biases (“The Importance of Ethics in Journalism,” May 3, 2022, St. Bonaventure University).
Add to the lack of foundational encouragement from institutions of higher learning, the celebration and endorsement of biased reporting from various press associations. Journalists and organizations that create a narrative around a particular news event, acting as experts on a subject when their only credentials are a degree in journalism, are routinely embraced and awarded accolades from press associations. When a purported journalist, intentionally or unintentionally, injects their opinion into a news article, it becomes a work of fiction, not factual news reporting.
It may be as simple as characterizing a statement of a person being interviewed. I have had a few direct encounters with local and regional media during my life, and I do my best to keep up with what they write. It is always disheartening, but never surprising, to see reporters treat investigative or “hard” news like sports commentary, where obvious bias and manipulation are things we have come to expect. Depending on what cause or political persuasion a reporter may have, it will come out in the selection of stories and the storytelling. Far worse, the gatekeepers are either asleep at the wheel or they condone and encourage this manipulation. One such recent personal encounter with a storyteller resulted in a slant that benefited the thrust of the reporter’s story, almost certainly written to titillate those who share the writer’s social-political position.
When reporters who claim to be journalists are allowed to use a media outlet as their personal bully pulpit, the profession of journalism and the community they are supposed to be serving suffer.
I am sometimes asked why One Feather doesn’t report on certain things that some other local or regional outlets are publishing. Most of the time, it is a story that has titillated or endorsed a belief that the reader already has embedded in their belief system. My typical response to our readership is that we adhere to a standard of journalistic ethics (see the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics) and that we require independent verification of the facts surrounding an event. We cannot rely on the conjecture of another media outlet.
So, we are the townspeople in the story of the Pied Piper. And the Piper could represent the media in our modern society. As the townspeople in the story were dishonest and greedy, we too sometimes tend to lean into being arrogant, childish, and entitled. We prefer to have our ears tickled. We are happy when the media tells us what we want to hear and does what we want it to do, as the townspeople were when the Piper in the story, as was the case when the Piper and his magical flute enticed all the rats in the village to follow him and drown in the river. Then, just as easily as he had dispatched the rats, the Piper lured all the children of the town away, never to be heard from again.
The most dangerous falsehood is one that is couched in truth. And that is the tangled mess we are left to unravel when our media outlets allow commentary to be mixed into news stories. I believe, unfortunately, that we are gullible or lazy to the point of just accepting whatever we read in an article, be it fact or fiction, as long as it fits our personal narrative. Many media outlets are struggling just to stay afloat. I think some lean into sensational writing to entertain and therefore secure an audience, rather than focusing on reporting the truth accurately. News becomes secondary to entertainment. I think the numbers bear me out.
“Americans’ confidence in the mass media has edged down to a new low, with just 28 percent expressing a ‘great deal’ or ‘fair amount’ of trust in newspapers, television, and radio to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly. This is down from 31 percent last year and 40 percent five years ago. Meanwhile, seven in 10 U.S. adults now say they have ‘not very much’ confidence (36 percent) or ‘none at all’ (34 percent). When Gallup began measuring trust in the news media in the 1970s, between 68 percent and 72 percent of Americans expressed confidence in reporting” (Megan Brenan, Oct. 2, 2025, Gallup).
It isn’t popular among my media colleagues to discuss this issue. Some say that it will further erode the remaining confidence in traditional media. That’s possible, but that is not my intent. We, who are writers and gatekeepers in this profession called journalism, need to get back to what we are charged to do, and that is to document history in the making. Not our skewed version of it, but the reality of it. They used to call us the “Fourth Estate”, a window into the reality of our lives and a watchdog of government. Not a manipulator of the government and citizenry, but beacons of truth.
I don’t know about you, but the numbers seem to be decidedly against the embellishment of news stories. If reporting is a tool that is focused on the generation of profit or to satisfy a particular political or special interest group we are sympathetic to, and truth-telling is secondary, then we have lost our way and are following Pied Pipers. If we are going to do that, we’d better be prepared to pay the Piper.
