Newspapers report news that matters to their readers
The call came into Teton County’s dispatch center at 5:56 a.m. on a snowy Friday: Immigrations and Customs Enforcement would be operating in the valley, seeking to collect 17 undocumented immigrants.
Video shot from inside a window on an upper floor of the Latitude 43 apartments showed a man wearing a vest marked POLICE/ICE talking to a person over the door of a sedan. The 8-second video and a grainy photograph of a Chevy SUV blocking the complex’s driveway quickly circulated on social media.
By the time the News&Guide published an article online at 11:50 a.m. that day, Feb. 7, the ICE agents already had nearly six hours to attempt to execute 17 warrants.
Political news outlets questioned our motives. Within four days, talking heads on a national cable news network were calling us traitors and accusing us of trying to thwart ICE’s operations. Why did we write the article and publish it to our website? What steps went into the decision?
Let’s set the record straight: In short, we run a newspaper, and newspapers report the news.
Unsubstantiated rumors had swirled for weeks about immigration officials operating in Jackson Hole, but Feb. 7 was the first time that ICE’s presence had been confirmed here since President Trump’s mass deportation agenda began in mid-January.
Our community deserves accurate information and insight into the operations of its government. The presence of immigration enforcement in the county was news.
What was important to me that morning was that we had as thorough an article as possible before publishing it online. We didn’t want to panic anyone, and we didn’t want to put officers in danger, but we wanted to get the news online in a timely manner so that residents would know what happened.
A News&Guide reporter got the first tip about the ICE operation at about 8:30 a.m. that day, and she called to check in with the Teton County sheriff. He confirmed that he had been alerted to the operation that morning. He voiced concern for the safety of ICE agents if we were to race online with a report.
The reporter texted and called two editors to discuss strategy before contacting people who were posting the short video on social media. Editors decided more reporting was needed.
One editor and a photographer headed to Latitude 43 apartments, arriving around 9:30 a.m. They spent an hour looking for residents to interview, but no one who spoke with News&Guide staff said they’d seen anything unusual that morning.
Another reporter emailed ICE for comment. The first reporter checked in with Jackson’s police chief and the sheriff again. Editors conferred about the best plan for publication. At around 11 a.m., Managing Editor Billy Arnold began editing the first draft of the article.
At 11:50 a.m., that article appeared at JHNewsAndGuide.com and was sent out via email and cellphone push to readers. It was posted on our home page with a blue “developing” label, not a red “breaking” one.
By this time, the video had been shared on social media by several different entities.
That morning, the most pressing question was what type of warrants were involved. Were they criminal or administrative? Criminal warrants are signed by a judge and require people to open the door, or give ICE permission to forcibly enter a residence. Administrative warrants are issued by ICE and don’t allow that intrusion, according to immigration advocates and former ICE officials.
ICE still has not answered that question.
A reporter from the Cowboy State Daily, a partisan online news website launched by Foster Friess and owned by billionaire B. Wayne Hughes, emailed us three days later with questions that made their angle apparent.
Sure enough, when the article appeared, it included an interview with a Trump campaign advisor who accused us of activism masquerading as journalism. That seems like the Cowboy State Daily’s modus operandi, not ours.
Our newsroom adheres to the Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics. Its tenets are simple: Seek the truth and report it. Minimize harm. Act independently. Be accountable and transparent.
Ordinarily we don’t want our newspaper to become the story. But these are not ordinary times, when partisan websites attack carefully reasoned news decisions.
It’s our responsibility to correct errors fully and promptly. But what about when the mistakes or malicious mischaracterizations aren’t in our pages? Then it’s more complex, hence this explainer.
Bullying and intimidating the legitimate working press is a political strategy aimed at reducing trust in news.
As Wyoming’s elder statesman Sen. Alan Simpson has often said, “An attack unanswered is an attack believed.”
Don’t agree with how we handled an article? We welcome letters to the editor, signed with your name and hometown. But anonymous hate-filled phone calls and emails are a waste of everyone’s time (see “act independently / resist influence,” above).