This Tribal News Agency Shows How to Defend a Free Press at the Grassroots

To say press freedoms in the U.S. have taken a knock during the first year of Donald Trump’s second term would be a gross understatement.

Perhaps the most glaring example is the Department of Defense’s new policy requiring journalists covering the Pentagon to sign a pledge promising not to use any information that hasn’t been explicitly authorized. But the Trump administration’s attacks on a free press have also included other tactics, like the effort to dismantle Freedom of Information Act processes across federal departments.

The administration’s explicit attempts at censorship work alongside the more insidious ways in which press freedoms are eroded, like the right-wing capture of legacy media institutions and social media platforms by ideologues and billionaires.

“To be clear, all presidents and all elected officials have always objected to their coverage,” David Loy, legal director with the First Amendment Coalition, a nonpartisan nonprofit that seeks to promote and protect press freedoms, told Truthout. “But the Trump administration has mounted unprecedented attacks on freedom of the press.”

These attacks on press freedoms don’t stop at the federal level, however; they are also being inflicted by local governments seeking to undermine already-embattled local media. In Northern California’s Shasta County, for example, the region’s registrar of voters, Clint Curtis, singled out a local media outlet for exclusion on a press release distribution list after the publication had reported on serious questions about his proposed changes to the electoral process.

It hasn’t been all bad news, with the courts remaining a vital bulwark against such attacks.

In November, Marion County in Kansas agreed to offer an apology and pay a $3 million settlement to end a lawsuit stemming from police raids on the small Marion County Record newsroom and two homes in August of 2023, including that of Record vice president and associate publisher, 98-year-old Joan Meyer, who died of a heart attack the following day. The raids were precipitated by a news tip the Record had received about the driving record of a local restaurant owner who was applying for a liquor license. The police chief alleged incorrectly that the paper had illegally accessed these records.

In October, a California district court judge sided with the Los Angeles Press Club in striking down an attempt by the Los Angeles Police Department to lessen use-of-force restrictions against journalists covering protests across the city.

Against this backdrop, the small and scrappy news outlet that serves the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma — the fourth-largest federally recognized tribal nation in the U.S. — offers a stark lesson of what happens when cherished press freedoms are lost altogether, as well as a blueprint for how to restore and protect these important civic checks and balances.

The Fight for a Free Press

Just over four years ago, Muscogee voters approved a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the nation’s free and independent press, along with a stable funding source for Mvskoke Media, a tribal news agency. It’s the first tribal nation to tweak their constitution to cement and secure an independent press in this manner.

The road to that moment was a long and rocky one, characterized by corruption in high office, a small newsroom hamstrung by government censorship, and a community forced to reckon with the potential loss of a key mechanism for holding their leaders accountable. The story is documented in the roller-coaster 2023 documentary Bad Press by filmmakers Joe Peeler and Rebecca Landsberry-Baker, the latter a member of the Muscogee Nation and a former editor of Mvskoke Media.

“Part of being a good journalism outlet is always advocating for press freedom and the First Amendment rights of our citizens,” said current Mvskoke Media Director Angel Ellis. “And now, we are in better shape to do that advocacy work and deliver the news as we should.”

The nation has been served by a monthly newspaper since 1970, The Mvskoke News, which is now housed at Mvskoke Media, an editorial and creative outlet. The nation’s journalists had already built a reputation for holding its leaders’ feet to the fire. But not everyone appreciated this public accounting, especially those in charge.

Ellis broke a major government corruption story in 2011 about the misuse of tribal gaming funds. It won her an award from the Native American Journalists Association, but Ellis’s department manager fired her for insubordination shortly after this coverage went to print.

A few years later, in 2015, the Muscogee Creek Nation passed a law codifying its free press, in the process protecting the work of the journalists Ellis had left behind. At the time, it was one of just a handful of tribal nations to have enacted such a law. Even today, only about 11 of the 574 federally recognized Native American tribes are protected by some sort of press freedom, either by a law written into their books or by a court ruling defending that nation’s independent news coverage, said Ellis.

As easily as a law can get passed, however, it can just as easily be rolled back.

In 2017, Mvskoke Media investigated the tribal council speaker, Lucian Tiger III, for sexual misconduct, in an explosive story that rattled the tribal nation. The newsroom received warnings from within the government that council members wanted to nuke the nation’s free press law to gag reporters. The following year, they did. The council voted 7-6 to repeal the law. Tiger was the decisive tie-breaker.

The vote dissolved the paper’s editorial board and gave council members the ability to edit and approve stories. Many of Mvskoke Media’s reporters — whose digital communications were suddenly open for scrutiny by government leadership — resigned, appalled at being professionally handcuffed. Ellis, who had been rehired in 2018, just before the repeal of the law, was one of the few who stayed on.

In 2019, the tribal council passed another bill somewhat restoring the Mvskoke Media’s press independence. But it was far from perfect. And the newsroom’s ability to check power remained limited under a law that could once again be revoked.

In a democracy where governmental authority isn’t properly held accountable, elections are among its most corruptible parts. After the tribal attorney general called the elections later that year “fatally flawed,” the Muscogee Creek Nation Supreme Court nullified the results and called for a redo, finding the election board’s handling of ballots opened the door to tampering.

If the wheels of democracy were to spin unimpeded, an independent free press was vital. A constitutional amendment would cement it in stone. Come the elections of 2021, Muscogee citizens got their chance to weigh in.

In the lead up to the vote, the Mvskoke Media championed the amendment, with Ellis, a heavy-smoking, straight-talking force of nature, its loudest bullhorn. Part of that role required convincing community members of its necessity, some of whom believed Mvskoke Media’s journalists were just scared of losing their livelihoods.

“I didn’t argue with them. I’m like, ‘Yeah, we’re a news organization. And news organizations are run by people who do the job and people need to be paid,’” said Ellis, describing “hundreds and hundreds of hours of outreach speaking candidly one-on-one” with the community.

“We got really transparent with the public and showed them how we operated and what those funding revenue streams looked like and how they were being administered by our department. It felt risky to expose all of our funding streams and our financials,” said Ellis. “We did that so that they understood exactly how those public funds were being spent.”

Her work paid off in September 2021, when the Muscogee Creek Nation voted for the free press constitutional amendment by a whopping 76 percent. Its passage came with immediate tangible effects, for both Mvskoke Media and the Muscogee Creek Nation as a whole. Since then, “democracy has been carried out in a very cohesive and boring manner,” said Ellis.

Since the Constitutional Amendment

The constitutional amendment built a firewall between Mvskoke Media and government officials. So far, it’s held firm. “There’s nothing threatening coming down the pipeline, but we don’t want to rest on our laurels,” said Ellis.

As part of that proactive approach, Ellis has found the publication independent legal counsel. They’ve also moved the newsroom’s headquarters from one owned by the Creek Nation to an independent location in Tulsa.

“If they ever wanted to come and shut our doors, they could have,” said Ellis, about the impetus behind the location change.

Another vulnerability came from the fact the newsroom’s IT services ran through the tribe. “Are they reading our emails? Were they able to shut us down in terms of our digital electronic functions?” said Ellis, replaying some of her fears. In response, the organization has adopted its own independent IT system.

All of this has cost money, which brings up another remarkable evolution of Mvskoke Media: funding.

Although the newsroom still receives statutory funding, about 60 percent of its money now comes from merchandizing: think sweatshirts, hoodies, and t-shirts. Mvskoke Media operates two brick-and-mortar gift shops, and while it doesn’t have a commercial printing press, it has printers perfectly suited for commercial business cards, flyers, and brochures.

“In the midst of all of the upheaval we were experiencing, a lot of the citizens were really behind us and we started selling t-shirts that were culturally branded,” said Ellis, explaining the genesis of the idea. “We started out with about $10,000 worth of just t-shirts. We sold them. And everything we sold, we put right back into it. And now, we’ve grown that into over half a million dollars of revenue.”

It hasn’t all been smooth sailing. Before the free press law was repealed in 2018, the Mvskoke Media newsroom employed 12 people. “As we sit today, I only have five,” said Ellis. “I’m desperately trying to rebuild capacity. When you lose 90 years-worth of experience in a newsroom, it’s damn near impossible to replace that.”

Ellis has taken her story to newsrooms large and small around the U.S. imparting words of hard-earned wisdom. One of her pieces of advice is to embrace public criticism. For the Mvskoke Media, a frequent critique, Ellis explained, surrounds the sort of coverage the community can feel paints the tribe in a negative light.

Another is to eschew the old profit-driven funding model built around advertising. “I’ve trained some very prestigious newsrooms and my message is always this: ‘Indigenize your process and get away from the capitalism,’” said Ellis, who explained that while the Mvskoke Media still accepts advertising dollars, it’s far from a central focus of their revenue-building efforts. “Your bottom line will improve if you live in service to your community.”

“It’s always in the nature of power to resist accountability,” said Loy, offering a reminder that press freedoms need eternal vigilance. “Free speech begins at home. It’s just as vitally important that free speech and a free press be defended at the grassroots.”

Ellis, meanwhile, can now start to look back on years of frustration, fear, and no small amount of hard work with the sense of a job well done. “To see progress and to be able to provide an example of a success story for our industry that doesn’t have a ton of reasons to celebrate right now, it feels very, very good,” she said. “It’s very gratifying work.”