Disappeared News

by Larry Geller

During a political campaign it is not unknown for some news outlets to embrace one party or the other, or that a reporter or columnist will faun on a particular candidate or blast another relentlessly. Journalism has never been free of that.

Astute readers catch this right away, and for many of us, questioning the motives of the news outlet seems both natural and critical to maintaining basic standards. After all, we pay for our newspaper subscriptions. We are the customers, or should be. Fairness should be the basis of unbiased news coverage.

I am beginning to wonder what the connection is between the Star-Advertiser, its reporter Dan Nakaso, and Rep. Tom Brower. I won’t hazard a guess, but guess what, Nakaso didn’t miss mentioning the attack on Brower, carefully identified as  (D, Waikiki-Ala Moana-Kakaako) , in another story that Brower had no part in.

Governor David Ige’s Leadership Team met yesterday. There were significant announcements. You can read about it in the newspaper or (better) on Civil Beat, which is not paywalled. It’s not “disappeared news” so I won’t repeat the story here, but you can watch the entire news conference in the YouTube player below if you wish.

In Nakaso’s article for the Star-Advertiser, he not only mentions the attack on Brower for the nth time, but describes exactly what Brower was doing that day, which has not yet been established.

Again, Brower did not appear in the news conference video. Dropping his name so many times is no crime, but does make me, as a reader, wonder what might be going on between this reporter and this politician that the guy gets so much free publicity.

And I realized just now that every time I mention this, I’m also mentioning Brower. In the future, maybe I should say “the B-word” or something.

I have no doubt that the B-word will be used again and again in Nakaso’s articles.

Here’s the news conference video:

Permalink posted by Larry @ 8/28/2015 06:19:00 PM