Sharp-eyed readers came up with a couple of good points.
On Aug 18, NYT editorial writer Lawrence Downes (local boy) wrote about our subdued statehood observance and said:
“A Honolulu newspaper columnist, David Shapiro, lamented all the ambivalence….”
But when that editorial was reprinted in the S-B (on Friday), the “David Shapiro” had disappeared!!!!!
Yup. The column as printed by the Star-Bulletin dropped Shapiro’s name and was left with the general reference to “a Honolulu newspaper columnist”. Dave is a former popular managing editor of Star-Bulletin who now writes a regular column and blogs for Gannett’s Honolulu Advertiser.
It seems to me that editing the syndicated copy in order to Flush Dave down the memory hole like that is just plain petty.
Another reader suggested an obvious winner in the “Stupid Quote of the Day” race:
Here’s what City Transportation Director Wayne Yoshioka was quoted as saying after the Fed Gov’t released an email showing the City to be $500 underwater on the transit project:
This is not a public document. It is an internal draft,” Yoshioka said. “The only reason why it was released is because there was a Freedom of Information Act request to the FTA and they had no choice (but) to release it.
What??
Let’s unpack Yoshioka’s statement.
He says, “This is not a public document.” Apparently that’s the city’s working viewpoint. Standard procedure. Not public.
But in light of a FOIA request to the Federal Transit Authority, “they had no choice”. Meaning that, by law, it was in fact a public document. If it had been an “internal draft”, then FTA would not have had a copy. It would have been internal to the city transportation department. Or does the city have a new definition of “internal”?
It’s another reminder that city and state officials need a lot of education in the law as it applies to government records. Or, to be less generous, they need to get whacked politically or with some legal sanctions when they routinely claim a right to secrecy without a firm legal basis.
This brief experiment with allowing you to leave comments without registering first has been a success. I’ve had to remove a handful of spam comments, and edited one sentence from a comment that unnecessarily made a personal attack on another commenter’s character. Apart from that, it has drawn more comments which have raised serious issues and perspectives. I’m pleased by it and will let the open comments continue.
Yesterday started out nice but by the end of our walk the weather was quite threatening. This morning it’s a bit windier, and there have been on-and-off periods of rain overnight. It’s too dark to evaluate the morning’s cloud cover and threat of rain.
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Ah, Mufi: the lawlessness of Frank Fasi without the roguish charm.
Since the rail project is 1/2 billion in the hole maybe it is time to think about less expensive designs such as the one supported by the AIA: flexible light rail.
It could be cheaper and better too!
“It’s another reminder that city and state officials need a lot of education in the law as it applies to government records.”
Au contraire- they are so well educated that they have found all the soft spots to abuse to their secret little hearts’ content. And until citizens set up a well funded organization focusing on legal challenges to bureaucratic sunshine and UIPA abuses WE will be the ones getting an education.
I see no harm in giving state and local officials the benefit of the doubt in situations like this. Either way, withholding the document was an incorrect move. If I assume it was a lack of understanding of the law, the officials are allowed to save face. Perhaps they will indeed learn from it. No harm in trying. Name calling and assuming the worst isn’t a good long-term strategy, in my view at least.
I think the city should be more transparent too, but I’m a little confused. Withholding the document and a lack of understanding of the law? Well, did anyone actually request the document and not receive it? I haven’t seen that reported anywhere.
It’s pretty clear that what the guy meant is that this internal draft was not a document that would be routinely circulated publicly. I haven’t seen anything indicating that it would be. How was the law misunderstood?
It’s pretty pathetic that the Advertiser allows Cliff Slater’s loud little anti-rail group to lead it around by the nose , then completely fails to examine what’s driving them. That, by far, has been the Advertiser’s biggest failure since it began this rail sensationalism binge more than a year ago. And it has been a total failure, a major disservice to this community. I’ve never seen a newspaper apply scarce resources so incompetently over so long a time.
Here are the players the Slater group discloses. Check out the businesses listed on the right:
http://honolulutraffic.com/whoweare.htm
Is this who should be the main force influencing the coverage by the state’s largest newspaper of the city’s biggest public transportation project?
The people who run the Advertiser have made complete fools of themselves with most of the rail coverage.
The self-serving headline the other day, “City blasted for rail report,” was a classic example. The only blasting I saw was from Charles Djou, who will blast anything to get his name in the paper. The Advertiser seemed pretty desperate for validation of what really amounts to a journalism fiasco.
Here’s a good headline: “Advertiser blasted for rail reporting.”
I know several people who canceled their subscriptions earlier this year in disgust, and I’m about ready to join them. It’s really sad watching that paper become such an obnoxious rag.
TV wasn’t much better, except for channel 9, which was reasonably balanced. Channel 2 actually reported that the rail report was released by “a community group.” Not even rail opponents, just a “community group,” like it was the Rotary Club or something.
And then there are the stupid little cheap shots, like this one that appeared in Friday’s story:
“The FTA yesterday did not return messages seeking to verify the existence of a more recent financial report from the city. ”
Yet the day before, the Advertiser had posted on its Website a PDF file of a letter from the FTA, under this description: “July 30 letter from the FTA to rail opponent Cliff Slater stating that the agency has an updated version of the city’s financial plan, which was given to FTA Administrator Peter Rogoff by Honolulu Mayor Mufi Hannemann on June 16.” They posted the same file, with the same description, on their website today (Sunday). But let’s not allow a documented to fact get in the way of another little cheap shot.
By the way, the last two stories have stopped admitting that the report was supplied to the Advertiser by rail opponents. They just say that it was released through FOIA, as if the Advertiser had requested it and interpreted its contents without any assistance from the most mangy dog in this fight. Open up that memory hole if it makes your story look better.
The Advertiser is not a credible newspaper. Period.