Star-Bulletin reporter Craig Gima has a good story this morning concerning possible ethics violations by the Lingle administration in seeking Sugar Bowl tickets for certain insiders.
First, although the story is about violations of the state’s ethics law, it doesn’t cite or quote from the statute. This leaves readers with only a vague sense of what the standard is that was violated. The story quotes Ethics Commission director Dan Mollway.
“There’s a question of fairness,” Mollway said, speaking in general terms. “If you’re basically using your official position to get special access to tickets that a member of the public wouldn’t, we would see that as a violation (of state ethics laws).”
It wouldn’t have taken any more space to quote the statute and provide a cite to Section 89-13 HRS.
No legislator or employee shall use or attempt to use the legislator’s or
employee’s official position to secure or grant unwarranted privileges, exemptions, advantages,
contracts, or treatment, for oneself or others
The second thing that bothered me is that this is a story based on use of the state’s public records law and involved a request for emails, but the story never describes the documents or the history of the request. What emails were requested? Was the request directed to the university or the Lingle administration? Were all requested records finally obtained?
And why no quotes from the emails that appear what was relied to point fingers at specific people? That’s also a puzzling omission.
I suppose what I’m saying is that the story spells out the immediate issue quite well but falls well short on using it as a platform for educating the public on how the system works and or is supposed to work. With just a few specifics, it could demonstrate to readers how they could obtain investigate similar situations. But that opportunity was lost.
How do you make civilian casualties in a war zone disappear? I’ve noticed this consistently in news stories in which the Defense Department apparently applies the “suspected insurgent” label to all those killed my U.S. military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. A Google search for the term turns up a long list of examples.
I was reminded that this technique is not new to our current wars. Yesterday I was looking at an article on the photographs of Philip Jones Griffiths in a copy of Aperture Magazine. On photo is titled simply “Civilian Victim, Vietnam, 1967”. The caption reads:
This woman was tagged, probably by a sympathetic corpsman, with the designation VNC (Vietnamese civilian). This was unusual. Wounded civilians were normally tagged VCS (Vietcong suspect) and all dead peasants were posthumously elevated to the rank of VCC (Vietcong confirmed).
Unfortunately, it seems that most news reports simply repeat the label assigned to the dead and wounded without challenge, except in those cases where others raise the allegation of civilian victims. Then and now.
And so it goes.
We took a drive yesterday out to the new Kamaaina Metals store in Pearl City (those photos will have to follow in another day or so). But we also stopped in at the VCA animal hospital around the corner where we were greeted by these five miniature schnauzer puppies. They were getting their last shots before being delivered today to Petland in Kahala where they will be up for sale and adoption. They were attracting a lot of attention there in the waiting room. They’ll probably go fast.
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I agree that the SB story was a tad squishy. How did they ferret out the fact that these people asked for tickets? I’m also not sure how the ethics code is applied in each and every case.
Take Tsutsui, example. He’s a season ticket holder and, say, he’s friends with Gene Awakuni. He calls Gene and says, “Hey, do you know how this ticket thing works?”
How different is that from Joe Blow who knows Gene calling and asking the same question?
On the other hand, if Tsutsui called and asked Gene to see what he could do to jump the line and get some choice tickets, that would be an entirely different matter.
But the story is so vague, it errs on the side of giving the impression that something wrong was done without the facts to prove it.
Speaking of open records, did you see the item in today’s HA’s business section?
Written by an AP reporter, it starts off like this:
“Laws in all but a handful of states give the public access to government e-mail. But what if that e-mail was intentionally deleted or routinely purged? In Hawai’i, Gov. Linda Lingle’s office allowed e-mails of her top aide who became the victim of a blackmailer to be purged. ”
It goes on to include this gem:
“The Associated Press requested calendars and e-mails from Awana’s government e-mail account in February to determine whether they could provide evidence of misconduct on state trips to the Philippines in 2005 and 2006. But the governor’s office said the e-mail had been routinely purged.”
Are Hawai`i govt emails really purged? Do they really go away forever? Why aren’t state agencies required to maintain a master archive even if local machines or servers don’t do so?
wlsc, there is no law that states e-mails must be kept for a certain length of time. Similarly, with routine correspondence or notes or telephone logs.
I would think official minutes of commission or board meetings and the like are kept forever in the state archives along with legislative testimonies, etc.
I would think when a new administration comes in, computers are wiped clean and correspondence files are dumped.