It’s the Discoverers’ Day non-holiday here in Hawaii, Columbus Day in most other parts of the country, for what it’s worth.
Listening to the KHON-2 news last evening made me cringe more than usual.
Maybe I was just in a less-than-optimum mood, but I found some of the writing quite jarring.
Here are a couple of examples from a story on proposed curbs on commercial fishing.
“The U.S. has offered a counterproposal to keep the longline quota where its at for Hawaii.”
Where its at?
Why not simply say that the U.S. counterproposal would leave the quota unchanged?
Then another:
“The reduction could potentially make ahi and sashimi prices more expensive.”
Hmmmm. I don’t even know how expensive prices are now. What do you pay for a price? The sentence could have said ahi and sashimi prices could rise, or that ahi and sashimi could be more expensive.
“Prices more expensive” just doesn’t do it.
Am I being too picky?
Meanwhile, the Star-Advertiser has quietly started daily delivery to our house in Kaaawa, although we only paid for the Wed-Fri-Sat-Sun “Weekend Plus” subscription.
I had heard others mention the same thing.
Perhaps the cost of record keeping outweighs the cost of daily delivery, or maybe this just boosts daily circulation numbers. Who knows?
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“. . . started daily delivery to our house . . .” We had daily delivery of one of the papers to our house a few years ago and found out it was part of their marketing — temporary unannounced samples.
The TV news websites are even worse!
You are not being too picky.
Expecting newswriters/newscasters to know the basics of the language they’re using isn’t “too picky.”
They were probably “communications majors” in college. Whatever that is.
Your comments are on the mark. News writing on Hawaii TV has declined for years. No one teaches and I doubt anyone edits. And if there is editing, then it’s done by someone who who’s either lazy or knows less than the writer.
While I’m picking, pronunciation of Hawaiian names has also fallen to an embarrassment. How many different ways have you heard “Kapiolani” pronounced?
Or “Kalanianaole”?
…or “Hanalulu”?
Darn. Someone needed to edit that 🙁
Read: Bob Basso. Yes, this outdated TV newswiter’s social direction engineering is completely silly. But here we are in 2013 – all agreed? – and if you if you follow such illogic from such pulpits it almost amounts to this nitwit Republican and former KHON-TV newspresenter from not long ago, Bob Basso – oh, these guys: all over the place, when the times deteriorate and the cheap verbiage amps up to some predictable point to this ridiculousness in the annals of the former Honolulu – so don’t even try to understand the true sense of ahi prices or sashimi prices, or paying these ramped up apartment prices, or factoring in your kids’ education- (or prices in general!) – guys – it overall must just be the locked-up medieval mind set of this lot that has something to do with these pervasive ditsy senseless Hawaii Republicans and – in the words of Bob Basso the KHON -TV performer of yore, and whomever else of this ilk that gets into the boardrooms and such: Thomas Paine (good guy, deliberating the 18th century, but so silly now, clearly due for an update, to say the least) So ignore Rupublicans, ignore junk mail contributions like this, and ignore KHON-TV!
“So ignore …..contributions like this…” Gladly. It seems that this was generated by one of those random word or phrase generators.
……..ramble much?……..
I have a question, but would like to start with one of many, many possible examples I’ve come across in the local news,
Title and some content from the first page of yesterday’s (10/13/13) Star Advertiser money section:
“Isle Economy’s Growth Slowing”
“Local card transactions have increased, but at a lower rate than previous years, , a First Hawaiian Bank study finds”
“The Hawaii economy keeps growing, but not as fast as it did coming out of the Great Recession.”
“In a sign that the state continues moving in the right direction, local businesses saw credit and debit card transactions increase 5.9 percent in the third quarter from the year-earlier period, according to First Hawaiian Bank’s quarterly business activity report due out today.”
“But the pace of growth is slowing . . .”
“”A prolonged government shutdown could slow the growth even further, according to Jack Suyderhoud, a First Hawaiian Bank adviser . . .”
The quoted material above is about change in rate of growth. One quote takes note of the fact that movement continues to be in the “right direction.”
Later, the article goes on to quote the same First Hawaiian Bank adviser:
“Given the size of the increase of the last few years, we’re all expecting a deceleration,’ he said. ‘We’re not expecting a decline. It just means the speed of the advance is slowing down a little bit.”
Above, the quoted material differentiates between a
“deceleration” and a “decline.”
My question: Why is it that news articles on the economy, and tourism, and population trends, and many other subjects, usually seem to strive to treat reductions in growth rate or “decelerations” as separate and different from “declines” that amount to changes in “direction,” while news articles on rail’s effects on traffic congestion usually treat the two concepts as if the difference between them was immaterial?
Why does everything have to do with rail?
THANK YOU for that comment, Forest.
Beyond the grammatical and typographical errors with which the paper is rife, I find the frequent lack of correlation between headlines and actual story content to be irritating, or at least confounding.
Editors at the Advertiser, and later the S-A, gave me their “reasons” for having an editor, rather than the reporter, write the headlines but the explanation have never justified the gulf that frequently exists between the two or the all too frequent outright contradiction. The reporters I talk to complain about it all the time but have no control.
False advertising, I call it.
Umm, try stay move!
After my 46 yrs as editor and writer, I found accurate headlines challenging. But today the relationship between the story and headline is more challenging than ever. Disconnect is the word I consider most accurate.
Remember the “key word” principle by which they hope to get plenty of page clicks. Enticing headlines that are only marginally representative of the contents.
Thanks to you, I just read the KHON report on possible cuts to the longline quota. And, apart from the ghastly writing, there are some real problems in the fact that the reporter quotes only people very closely tied to the industry.
In point of fact, the quota of 3,763 metric tons (I’m relying on memory, so this may be off a few hundred tons) is meaningless. For the last two years, the longline industry has been allowed to continue fishing even after the quota is reached by ascribing the excess part of its catch to American Samoa, which enjoys no limit on bigeye (it is regarded under the international — not U.S. — commission as a territory that is developing its fishing industry). This excess has amounted to hundreds of tons — although the exact amount is not easy to find out.
So no crocodile tears from me for the commercial longliners. Even when the rest of the member countries to the WCPFC were told to cut their catches by 30 percent in 2008, the Hawaii longliners escaped with just a 10 percent cut.
Altogether, the story on KHON is distressing — and not just for reasons of the cringeworthy language.
You’re not being too picky. This is what we get when the news media cares more about their bottom line than doing a good job. They continue to cut jobs, hours and anything else to increase profits. A couple of years ago a young reporter wanted an interview about civil rights. I ended up holding a class on simple social studies as she had no background in local history or anything else to do with civil rights. BTW I never saw an article about anything we talked about and I responded to every question she asked. Auwe! Guess I was talking to the wind.
The writing ability of the staff at KHON is no doubt on a par with the integrity of the news operation of the station’s parent corporation.