May 24, 2010
Statement from the Office of Media Relations
Oneida Nation / Oneida Nation Enterprises

The Observer Dispatch’s May 22 article about the Oneida Indian Nation’s across-the-board 3% pay increase for its workforce (“Nation’s New Approach: Raises for Everyone”), which injected more than $2.7 million into the local community, somehow took a “good news” event for our local economy and manipulated it into story that highlights the sorry state of leadership in our region and undermines the credibility of this newspaper.
Rather than applauding wage increase as an investment into our economy, Assemblyman David Townsend used the article to attack the Nation’s motives in paying more money to its employees. He wrongly surmised that the pay increase was in response to a negative article that appeared the previous day in the Observer Dispatch about the Nation, suggesting that the Nation was paying $2.7 million in increased wages to offset a single negative newspaper article. He had no facts whatsoever to support this claim. If the Nation gave pay increases every time an unfair or negative article appeared in the Observer-Dispatch, the Nation would be broke.
If the Observer Dispatch had bothered to contact the Nation for a fact check before reporting Assemblyman’s Townsend’s accusations, the reporter would have learned that the May 21 pay raise announcement date had been set more than a week earlier. That should have ended the story right there.
The Observer Dispatch’s failure to contact the Nation to for a basic fact check, and instead blindly reporting Assemblyman Townsend’s demonstrably baseless accusation, undermines the integrity of both Townsend and this newspaper. It is unfortunate that the Observer-Dispatch continues to contrive controversies about the Nation, presumably as a selfish way to attract attention to sell more newspapers.
Shame on Assemblyman Townsend for starting false rumors. And, shame on the Observer-Dispatch for allowing him to use the newspaper as his tool to do so.
Our community deserves better representation than Assemblyman Townsend has provided, and fairer reporting than the Observer Dispatch has chosen to publish.