The key to obtaining Nadas' release was the national media attention which, on top of a large Internet appeal, resulted in a critical mass of pressure that forced the Jackson County Commissioners to back down. Without national attention, saving Nadas would have been impossible.
National attention was first focused on this story in November, 1997 when the National Enquirer ran its first piece about Nadas. Thousands of letters to Governor Kitzhaber of Oregon resulted. Click Here to see this original article. However, The National Enquirer piece by itself was not sufficient. The appeal was belittled by officials as one orchestrated by a tabloid.
The National Enquirer then ran a second piece, directing readers to contact the Jackson County Commissioners, who now received thousands of letters. However, the ball did not really get rolling until Hard Copy picked up the story in January. Filming in Medford, Hard Copy urged viewers to take action, resulted in an unprecedented number of people writing and calling officials. Hard Copy got such an excellent response that they did three individual stories forcing regular mainstream media to pick up the story. The Los Angeles Times did an excellent piece on the situation, and Nadas became a national news story.
It has been difficult to interest the local mainstream media in following what happened to Nadas and what the story really means. This occurred for a couple of reasons. In January 1997, The Oregonian, Oregon's daily newspaper, gave excellent coverage to a similar case in Deschutes County, Oregon, in a series of articles written by Gordon Gregory. There, two dogs had escaped from an owner's yard in a rural area and were discovered across the street at a sheep ranch. The death sentence made front page news and was picked up by the national wire services. Photographs of the two dogs, a golden retriever and a beagle puppy, were widely distributed and people from across the county responded with letters and faxes to officials to spare the dogs. The Deschutes County Commissioners relented and passed an ordinance permitting a "second chance" for dogs caught chasing livestock. The ordinance was effective retroactively thus sparing the dogs.
Although Nadas had already been impounded for 4 months by this time, there was no such media attention for his case. The Oregonian bureau chief covering Jackson County did not have the same interest in this kind of story that Gordon Gregory had. In addition, the Oregonian did not want to run "another dog story" so similar to the one it had just run. Media attention was further hampered by Jackson County's refusal to permit anyone to visit Nadas. With no "photo op", the television stations were not interested in the story. With lack of support of local media, no national concerns then picked up the story.
In the meantime, a loose coalition of individuals familar with the situation continued to try to interest various national news entities in the story. In a rather bizarre chain of events, Inside Edition was poised to do a story about Nadas last summer, however abruptly backed out at the last minute. Evidently someone in Jackson County started spreading malicious lies about Sean Roach, calling him a drug addict, drug dealer and a dog abuser in order to keep the media from doing the story. Their tactic was effective. Rather than investigate whether these were true or not (and they weren't), Inside Edition pulled out rather than risk any fallout from such a story.
On November 11th, the story got its first national exposure in the National Enquirer, which made an appeal to its readers to contact Governor Kitzhaber urging him to intervene to free Nadas. As a result, thousands of faxes and letters from around the world were sent to the governor's office.
National exposure through radio syndication also occurred. SJS Entertainment Radio Network, with affiliates across the county, picked up the story in mid-November. We were contacted by two affiliates in Florida for example, and asked to briefly tell the story on the air.
However, for some reason, the deeper issues of this story were largely ignored by the local media. There was no focus on how Nadas was taken while on his owner's property, without a warrant, and how that was an example of government officials acting in violation of the law. There has been little discussion of the legal definitions of "chasing" as specified in the livestock laws. There has been no investigation of why Jackson County officials were so intent on destroying this dog, and where they got their money from. In short, there was an absence of true investigative journalism. The only local coverage seemed to occur when something like the National Enquirer article was released or the Hard Copy stories aired. Rather than digging a little to report on the details of the story, all that was usually stated was that the Enquirer (or whomever) had appealed for Nadas' life and that the governor said he couldn't do anything about it. End of story.
In late December, The Medford Mail Tribune printed an editorial critical of the handling of the situation by the commissioners. Evidently this provoked such a strong negative response by those who sided with the commissioners that the newspaper felt it had to "even the score" by publishing its own quasi-investigative piece on January 9th. This turned out to be Alberto Enriquez's libelous article smearing dog owner Sean Roach. Enriquez was apparently fed information by county government officials who had succeeded in whipping up a frenzied neighborhood antipathy directed at Mr. Roach, who as it turned out, had lived in the only rental property in a neighborhood of owner occupied homes. The existance of the rental had evidently been the source of some sore tension by residents. By attempting to paint Mr. Roach as a troublemaker and misanthrope, officials hoped to draw attention away from their determination to kill the dog, hoping instead for sympathy for dealing harshly with the owner. Indeed, up until the week before Nadas was freed, the commissioners continued to pass out copies of this article to anyone requesting background information on the Nadas situation.
Here is where, in a big way, the media failed. The Medford paper went unchallenged in its depiction of Sean Roach. Other papers, particularly The Oregonian, were not of a mind to investigate the story. And the national media was not yet following the day to day issues. As a result, a key example of a media campaign to vilify a private citizen at the behest of government officials was not exposed for what it was.
Additional examples of the media's failure to recognize and report inconsistencies in the statements made by government officials abounds. True investigative journalism requires the keeping of records of previous statements in order to catch officials that might be distorting events. As an example, in order to gain public sympathy, on several occasions the commissioners claimed that this or that person was "threatening them". This was duly reported by both the newspapers and the local television stations. However, when asked for proof of threatening letters, the proof could never be produced. Why didn't the media call them on it? Short attention spans on the part of reporters has resulted in the loss of the real stories in all of this.