With the 2022 Osage Nation election season in full swing, the Osage News Editorial Board reviewed a complaint received alleging lack of coverage of a Primary Election candidate’s campaign activities and deemed the complaint unfounded.
The three-member Editorial Board met with News Editor Shannon Shaw Duty and staff during a Feb. 18 emergency meeting to address the complaint, which was discussed during an executive session.
At issue in the complaint is an allegation the newspaper was not covering all of one Primary Election candidate’s campaign events. The complaint comes after the Editorial Board voted to revise the newspaper’s editorial policy which previously prohibited News staff from attending and covering candidate announcement dinners and election campaign-related functions during past election years.
On Jan. 19, the Editorial Board amended the policy and procedure for covering announcement dinners, rallies and other candidate events during Osage elections. Moving forward, News staff will attend in their professional capacity and provide coverage of the events.
In January and February, Principal Chief candidates Joe Tillman, Angela Pratt and incumbent Geoffrey Standing Bear each held more than one candidate dinner/ function in various locations. The News covered one event for each of the candidates. In December, Standing Bear held an announcement dinner in Pawhuska, but the News did not attend due to the policy change not yet occurring.
As of March 1, Assistant Principal Chief candidates Joseph Thornton, Thomas Trumbly and RJ Walker have not held any similar candidate events.
The six individuals seeking Executive Branch office will be running in the April 4 primary election to determine which two candidates in each of the two office races with the highest vote counts will appear on the June 6 General Election ballot.
After the Feb. 18 executive session, the Editorial Board returned to its public meeting and its members issued statements and added no action would be taken on the complaint.
“We’re not going to take any action as a board at this point,” said Tara McLain Manthey, the board’s vice chair. “We’ve reviewed the issue and the facts of the situation and to help people with the context and understanding of what we’re coming from – We previously had an elections coverage policy that did not allow our staff or board members to attend the candidate dinners just because we want there to continue to have neutrality among our staff and board members.”
“We did realize in December (2021) that we were missing some newsworthy things happening at the dinners. After Chief Standing Bear’s dinner, we did revise that policy in January to allow news representatives to attend as a reporter and not as an individual and wanted to make sure we are covering a dinner (by) each of the candidates to help the Osage people understand who the candidates are and their platforms. And the staff have very carefully covered one of each of the dinners or events and roughly had similar (article) word counts. We feel like the coverage has been fair and even across the events.”
Manthey also said: “We understand that political season is tense for everybody and we have a lot of news to cover and a lot of things to keep an eye on for the Osage people and can’t cover every part of every election and every event and so I hope the candidates understand we can’t be attending all of the dinners, all of the whistle stops and everything like that, so we appreciate having this discussion today and I feel like the staff is doing a great job of keeping the people informed in what’s going on in the election.”
Board Chair Jerri Jean Branstetter said “the Osage News remains independent, and we are impartial and that is why we have the policy to continue to remain impartial to all candidates and throughout the campaigns.”
Board member Teresa Trumbly Lamsam added that “board members are not reporters, so they will not go to any of these (campaign) events because our purpose would not be there to report for the Osage News on behalf of the people and the Nation, so that part of the policy remains intact.” “We will just keep on doing our job in serving the Osage people,” Shaw Duty said.
