Off The Beat: Senate Committee Roundtable Off The Record?
The said “all are welcome,” but apparently news reporters don’t make the cut.
As part of the 10th Annual Native Hawaiian Convention that’s running this week at the Hawaii Convention Center, staff from the congressional Senate Committee on Indian Affairs on Monday hosted a so-called roundtable listening session. The topic — accessing capital in “native communities.” Sen. Daniel Akaka is chairman of this committee.
Civil Beat last week called the convention’s organizer, the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement, to register for the roundtable. We were told on Friday that the session was a members-only event and that someone would call us back to confirm if we could attend.
No one called us back, so we simply showed up.
Here’s how the agenda describes the roundtable: “Senate Committee on Indian Affairs Roundtable Listening Session — The Senate Committee on Indian Affairs is hosting a roundtable listening session to hear from Native and Tribal leaders on the topic of ‘Accessing Capital in Native Communities.’ All are welcome, this is a no cost convening hosted by the SCIA Chairman Daniel K. Akaka and SCIA Staff Director Loretta Tuell.”
The meeting room was filled with close to 50 people. About a dozen people were seated around a long rectangle table in the center of the room.
One of the first things Tuell announced was that the conversation will be off the record, explaining that the session is intended to encourage dialogue.
She then says: “If there are any members of the press in the audience — and we’ll find you out when we go around and do introductions — if you want to get a quote about something that is said, you can talk to any of these people out in the hallway.”
How is it that a congressional committee can host a roundtable with federal agencies represented at the table and have it be off the record? And why wouldn’t Native Hawaiian organizations want the public to understand the financial challenges their community faces?
Some of the bigwigs at the table included representatives of the following agencies and national organizations:
- of the U.S. Department of the Treasury
- of the U.S. Small Business Association
- of the U.S. Department of the Interior
And this isn’t the first time a reporter has been un-welcomed. At a previous convention, one reporter had his recording equipment confiscated.
