When you have a few minutes, don’t miss Civil Beat’s Sunday feature, “The Sunshine Blog,” which takes aim at a proposed bill (SB 1618) that would create a state agency to regulate the press, and presumably penalize reporters or news outlets that are said to have strayed from the journalistic straight and narrow.
Their proposed state-run Journalistic Ethics Commission would investigate complaints against journalists — perhaps even from legislators — and would have the power to punish news outlets or individual journalists if the commission found they had violated its code of ethics.
The offending journalists could face unspecified fines and “suspension or revocation of state media privileges, including press credentials for government-sponsored events.”
The bill leaves the development of a code of ethics and implementing rules to the proposed Journalistic Ethics Commission, to then be applied by a separate “journalistic ethics review board.”
The bill does not provide an appropriation to find this unwieldy operation.
The bill magnanimously provides that “independent journalists and bloggers with a readership of fewer than 10,000 per month shall be exempt from this chapter.” But even my small, one-person blog enjoyed 12,000+ visitors in the past 30 days, meaning only the smallest blogs will avoid dealing with the proposed ethics police.
Of course, there’s one fundamental flaw. The bill provides that the code of ethics shall “comply with” (whatever that means) the code of ethics adopted by the Society of Professional Journalists, although it also provides for “additional standards adopted by the commission….”
And here’s how SPJ describes its ethics code.
The SPJ Code of Ethics is a statement of abiding principles…. It is not a set of rules, rather a guide that encourages all who engage in journalism to take responsibility for the information they provide, regardless of medium. The code should be read as a whole; individual principles should not be taken out of context. It is not, nor can it be under the First Amendment, legally enforceable.
Again, for emphasis. According to SJP, its code of ethics “is not, nor can it be under the First Amendment, legally enforceable.”
One can only imagine what the sponsors of the bill envision it doing. Sponsors include names that would not occur to me as defenders of a free press, including the lead proponent, Senator Donna Mercado Kim.
Another couple of sponsors, Senators Donovan Dela Cruz and Glenn Wakai, are best known for their behind-the-scenes bullying of state agencies and their employees, while doing their best to keep their strong-arm antics out of public view.
Interestingly, today’s Sunshine Blog also reports that the Senate leadership has closed off the press box on the side of the Senate Chamber, which has traditionally been a spot where reporters could observe the proceedings and converse with members of the Senate.
The sudden closing off reporters traditional access to the senate press box eliminates any confidence that the goal of the proposed “Journalistic Ethics Commission” has anything at all to do with transparency and the public interest.
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I am completely flabbergasted that these elected officials continue to introduce these non-sense bills. We have so many other issues within our state and they put out crap like this. Anyone who has to deal with the DCCA knows the current wait time for a normal application to be reviewed, and they should not be wasting time reviewing this type of application when they are unable to review and issue Realtor, Guard Employee, Nurses license applications in a timely manner.
Please everyone, stop voting for these officials..
To me, it shows their arrogance and flippant attitude towards the public. Always remember, we are nothing more than second class citizens to a lot of “them.” I remember a former legislator allegedly referred to us as “rubbish people.” When you understand this and accept it, the actions of those in power make sense. There is a logic to their actions.
What happened to ethics, transparency and public trust? Confounding.
Something is seriously wrong. This cannot be allowed to take hold. If the media gets it wrong sometimes, that’s OK. If they intentionally misbehave sometimes, that’s OK too. More than any other state, Hawaii needs unfettered journalists because so many of us are just trying to survive and don’t pay attention like we should. We need journalists that freely speak out otherwise we would never know what is going on.
These people don’t understand the U.S. Constitution. Sounds like a sneaky way to hide corruption. And this state has a lot of it.
Hawaii already has one foot in the hole of Socialism, which is one step away from Communism.
Wanting to have privately owned hotels provide housing for California wildfire victims? What’s the next step? Forcing private citizens to do the same? Redistribution of wealth is at the very heart of Socialism.
Notice how if you let those in power get an inch that they take a mile?
Totally agree!
It might be more immediately productive for these senators to back a makeover of the legislature’s ethics committees into robust vehicles for transparency and accountability.
“Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.” Matthew 7:5, KJV