A local businessperson walked into the Ely Echo offices on Wednesday and was clearly exasperated.
“The (Minnesota mainstream media outlet) has done more damage to Ely than any fire will ever do,” he said.
The businessperson was referring to a report just a couple hours earlier, posted online and widely shared on social media, that the U.S. Forest Service had extended the closure of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness until Oct. 1.
The only problem? The report was not accurate, not even close.
In real time, as Forest Service officials were indeed talking about the possibility that portions of the wilderness would open - and perhaps within days - some of the state’s largest media outlets were saying that a good chunk of the Ely area would be closed to visitors into the fall.
We at the Echo took notice and quickly contacted the media outlet; indeed, there was some backtracking, and soon a retraction of the inaccurate report. But the damage, sadly, had already been done.
It came on top of better than a week of publicity, barely any of it good, that all but declared Ely off-limits to visitors.
One might get the idea, whether they were tuning into the television news in Duluth or the Twin Cities, looking online to catch the reports of the state’s major media outlets, or just perusing Facebook, that Ely was in the midst of the apocalypse.
It seemed almost as if it was some combination of fear, paranoia and Covid 2.0, where “safety” trumped all and that daring to say anything - even that Ely was indeed still open for business - was nothing sort of blasphemy.
The misguided media reports were hardly limited to Wednesday afternoon’s snafu.
Last week, not long after the BWCAW was closed and the fires started to spread, a prominent Duluth media mogul proclaimed - again with no basis in fact - that Ely itself was about to be evacuated and that the fires were on the town’s doorstep.
Mind you, Ely was not then, nor has it ever been over the course of the last week, even in the “Ready” zone when it comes to the “Ready, Set, Go” evacuation status.
It got us thinking of the sage wisdom of the Echo’s own, the late Jackpine Bob Cary, who often joked when there was a media frenzy “Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.”
The frenzy continued this week, and on Tuesday night there was a television report, again completely inaccurate and misleading, that power to Ely area residences would be turned off as a result of the fire.
A headline worthy of the old National Enquirer probably got some clicks, and one had to read a few paragraphs into the story to find out that the report referred to some properties that had already been evacuated for more than a week - not properties in town or those in potential evacuation zones.
There’s no doubt the wildfires make for a fascinating story and we’re not surprised the media has taken the area by storm, covering every angle.
But far too often in the last two weeks, the reports have taken on a sensationalist, negative tone, making it sound as if Ely was akin to a war zone and a place that no visitor could safely navigate.
A day after the mayor and two U.S. Senators declared Ely “open for business,” the Blueberry/Art Festival was canceled and the community took yet another hit.
But indeed, the air did clear, some rain arrived and significant progress has been made in containing the fires.
Ely is open for business, but it may take a public relations campaign - one that would cost far more than whatever lodging tax funds are available - to combat the panic- driven messages sent out by far too many.
The takeaway from this month in Ely may not be the fires and the genuinely heroic response of so many, but instead the efforts needed to convince those who have been scared away to come back.
Indeed, as the businessperson aptly noted in our offices, the inaccurate portrayals and needless fear-mongering may have done more damage than the fires themselves.
