I felt bad for the folks at the Honolulu Advertiser after another blooper appeared in an article featured in today’s newspaper.
The front page of the Local/Business section is filled with a story about an ethics complaint stemming from Pine’s 2018 run for Honolulu mayor.
The obvious problem is that she ran for mayor in the 2020 election, and the position of Honolulu mayor wasn’t on the ballot in 2018. Pine filed to run for mayor on June 1, 2020.
A 9:40 am update quietly corrected the error in the Star-Advertiser’s online edition.
I would have expected someone along the way to catch the error earlier, but that didn’t happen.
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Their copy editing has never been very good, but lately it’s been pathetic. Maybe it’s because they canned all their copy editors when the pandemic started. Some of the writing is downright awful.
And that’s a pretty long story and prominent placement for a mere allegation of that nature.
“Pay peanuts and you get monkeys”.
Why would anyone try to get a FT job at the S-A when they know the career path is bleak?
That’s a pretty minor error when you consider how badly the top front page story is mangled.
The first sentence is a hot mess of a whopper:
“Three Honolulu police officers who opened fire on a 16-year-old crime spree suspect and his crew after he ignored their orders to surrender and led them on a daredevil chase at rush hour are free of criminal charges after an Oahu District Court judge dismissed the argument that the trio committed murder and attempted murder.”
In addition to being ridiculously long and unwieldy, that sentence contains multiple errors.
Two officers opened fire specifically on the driver, and one fired at the front passenger. The trio did not fire on a “crime spree suspect and his crew.” It has been reported that a total of six were in the car, and all were suspects in the crime spree, but police did not open fire on all of them, and no individual officer fired at more than one of them.
A judge found the evidence presented against the three officers did not establish probable cause to proceed to trial. That doesn’t necessarily mean the three are “free of criminal charges,” since prosecutors could again present the case to a grand jury, though that seems unlikely.
And it’s not exactly true that the judge “dismissed the argument that the trio committed murder and attempted murder.“
Only one of the three was charged with murder, and he was not charged with attempted murder, so lumping all the charges together and assigning them to “the trio” is quite misleading. And the judge dismissed the charges, not the argument.
There’s plenty of other dumb stuff in that story, like the jargony statement that “an Oahu grand jury did not return a true bill against the men….” Why not just say a grand jury declined to indict the officers?
The story also claims the officers fired into the car “while it lurched over the sidewalk, through a fence and into a canal.” Actually, they fired before all that.
It goes on and on. No wonder so many people have been so confused about this case. All the SA stories have been messy like this.
Even one of those large, backlit entry displays at Van Gogh exhibition had such an error. Not many have time for detail these days. The StarA is so hip-deep in the national narrative as to not be any benefit to local community…IMHO
I feel even worse for the folks at the Star-Advertiser.