I don’t take kindly to the Hawaiian Electric advertisement that’s been playing the past week or so, formatted as a news interview with HECO executive Robbie Alm. Alm is being interviewed by former news anchor Jade Moon, now a Hawaiian Electric spokesperson, and the ad has been running during evening news broadcasts. It probably also runs at other times, but we watch the news and that’s when we’ve seen it.
Viewers are also referred to the the company’s web site where the full interview is available.
In the brief excerpt being broadcast, Alm defends record high electric bills as simply the product of global competition for fuel in the wake of the Japan earthquake and tsunami, which has resulted in a turn away from nuclear power plants in Japan and elsewhere. He follows this with a plea for quick approval of the company’s renewable energy projects, while viewers might not know that many of those initiatives have been collapsing under the weight of their own internal problems.
To the casual viewer, the interview could easily be understood to be legitimate news content from the news team rather than a carefully controlled advertising message. You had to be watching pretty carefully to see any mention that the interview was prepared and packaged by Hawaiian Electric and not by your favorite news source. It seems to me that both the station and the company have responsibility to make the distinction between news and advertising clear to viewers.
Of course, it’s just part of a growing problem of public relations and advertising blending into news, or is it the other way around?
In any case, I’m unhappy to see Hawaii’s regulated energy monopoly using this technique. I wonder–is this kind of advertising paid with shareholders’ money or ratepayers money?
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There is an association in the popular imagination between a kind of tropical island culture and a pristine natural environment.
Perhaps from this imaginative association, an assumption develops that people in Hawaii are environmentalists.
This might be not so true.
Perhaps Hawaii’s general culture might be better understood as a small-town culture that is rather macho, materialistic and pro-development (with a kind of economic development that spurns education).
Hawaii’s small town culture really might not be that different from that found in small towns and suburbs in the US midwest or Texas or Australia, etc.
This would explain why football comes before the fate of nearly extinct birds on Kauai.
http://www.disappearednews.com/2012/04/current-incarnation-of-light-pollution.html
It seems that Kauai is a really nasty place for the birds, but a great place for football.
http://www.burdr.com/2010/10/birds-and-kauai-football/
One thing we need to understand to make sense of Hawaii is that there is a difference between materialism and a sense of distinctiveness.
The conservative columnist David Brooks famously wrote a piece in the Atlantic in 2001 entitled “One Nation, Slightly Divisible” comparing the cultures of the more urban “blue states” like California and New York with that of more rural “red states” in the “heartland”.
He memorably wrote that the ethos in a city like Los Angeles or New York City is narcissistic and can be summarized as “I’m special! Look at me!” In contrast, in a more humble and community-oriented place like the small town midwest, the ethos can be summarized “I’m normal. Please do not look at me.”
It is often said that Hawaii is the “ultimate blue state” because of the strength of its labor unions and the monopoly on power of the Democratic Party.
The anti-individualistic ethos of the local labor unions and the local Democratic Party, however, is that of a red state, and perhaps in the extreme.
And that’s okay. But let’s remember that this small-town ethos is purely materialistic.
There was a scene in the TV show “Mad Men” where Peggy Olsen went on a date with a businessman from a small town. He insulted her weight problem and New York City. She responded by saying “Those people – in Manhattan – they are better than us. Because they want things they haven’t seen.”
Small town life is almost completely materialistic, and revolves around the creature comforts enjoyed with friends and family, physical gratification and the desire for security.
Now, we hear complaints from places like Lanai and Molokai that “We are not materialistic like Oahu!” Well, that is sort of true. The outer islands are just as materialistic as Oahu — that is, they are completely materialistic — but the outer islands are not acquisitive in their materialism, or display oriented.
In contrast, life in the big city is based on displaying the signs of one’s great accomplishments, and in that sense is less materialistic. That is, it is egotistical, but also idealistic. People like Bill Gates will give all their money away to charities like universities and the arts or to cure disease. In a small town, such idealism is considered eccentric, and life revolves around concrete stuff and actual people you know. Small town people might join the military, but even that is done out of peer pressure and a conservative ethos (not an idealistic will to change the world).
Here’s an example of an idealistic urban ethos. The best thing for the environment is not buying a hybrid electric car. In fact, one of the best things would be to not own a car (better yet, avoid any transportation except walking or biking), or to keep an old car for as long as possible, because it takes energy to build new cars. (This was why the “Cash for Clunkers” program was not really an environmentally sound project; some of the cars turned in were not even “clunkers”. The success of that program was psychological, in giving a depressed population the illusion that action was being taken as the world fell apart.)
Then why do certain Americans buy hybrid electric cars? For example, the Germans resist building them because they consider electric cars to be environmentally fraudulent greenwashing.
The kind of people who buy a Prius do so because they want to project a certain kind of image as a superior, enlightened citizen to their peers.
On Oahu, these kind of people live in Kailua and vote Republican. In any other place in the US, they would be yuppy liberals who write big checks for Obama. Central to their identity is finding every way they can to give the middle-finger to what they see as the uneducated, right-wing, pro-land development, anti-education troglodytes who dominate the Democratic Party in Hawaii.
Generally speaking, those people in Kailua are correct.
The problem is that they are hypocrites.
They enjoy a certain material suburban lifestyle and they don’t want others to enjoy that as well. If they were sincere, then they would push to retrofit suburbs like Kailua into walkable communities and to scale down all forms of commuting.
So until Hawaii’s environmentalist Republicans in Kailua walk the walk — literally, walk rather than commute — and bring an end to their hypocrisy, the frauds and anti-environmentalists who dominate Hawaii’s Democratic Party will pave over all of Hawaii and destroy the economy.
How can we seriously promote walkability in Hawaii, and dramatically downsize all forms of commuting?
I’m late to the party on this one, Ian — more than a decade late, having found the post while searching for HECO’s infamous TV spot boosting geothermal energy that we shot next to Halemaumau Crater in the early 1980s. Speaking of decades, 11/23/2022 will be the 40th anniversary of Hurricane Iwa, after which some called me the “Prince of Darkness” as HECO’s primary spokesman in the dark hours after the storm….. But back to your post: OF COURSE the “news conference” spot was unethical! Had the spot been proposed while I was running HECO’s corporate communications (I resigned in 1989), I would have dismissed the concept immediately and would have won the argument; CEO Dudley Pratt and I got on well. Dare I say it: Things went downhill after I left. ? However, I do take responsibility for approving the concept for the crater TV spot. Well-known Molokai doctor and Hawaiian activist Emmet Aluli once told me the spot was the incentive for Native Hawaiians to begin their successful campaign to block large-scale geothermal energy development on the Big Island. He said plunging a giant male electric plug into the ground to symbolize drawing power from the volcano was like stabbing Madame Pele in the heart…. Ah, the many things we can’t see when we’re too full of ourselves….like both TV spots. Best to you from Idaho!