Maui News Opinion Page Actions Raise Questions

Last month, County Councilmember Kelly King sent a “Council’s 3 Minutes” column to the Maui News opinion page. The “3 Minutes” column regularly rotates among councilmembers and is generally used to highlight issues of interest to the particular member.

King’s column, “Mayor’s Veto Sends Mixed Message,” reflected her disappointment in Maui Mayor Michael Victorino’s decision to veto Bill 60, the so-called “hotel moratorium bill” introduced by King (that died Friday after a council vote failed to override the veto).

King, by her recollection, has submitted about a dozen of these columns during her two terms on the council. However, she said what happened next was a first.

“I received a call from Maui News managing editor Colleen Uechi questioning a couple points I made in my viewpoint, one about the mayor’s Lahaina injection well case decisions [In a paragraph, King suggested that Victorino relies on Corporation Counsel for policy decisions rather than legal opinion]. Colleen demanded an explanation as to why I included it. She told me that the mayor would be allowed to respond, and–if he did–that they would not publish any more comments from me about it in the paper.”

“I thought it was very disturbing coming from a news editor,” King said. “It made me wonder if she called the mayor’s office to question the contents of his columns.”

King said she asked Uechi, “What gives you the right to question my viewpoint? It’s my opinion.”

King made no changes, and the column ran July 27^th as she wrote it.

Altered Letter

Around the same time, community activist Christopher Fishkin also was doing some head-scratching. He initially sent a letter criticizing the mayor’s Lahaina injection well decisions to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, which published it on July 21st.

Fishkin’s letter was brief. It read: “Just how many times can Mayor Victorino and his Corporation Counsel, Moana Lutey, lose the same injection well water case, funded by county taxpayer money, while falsely claiming “environmental stewardship”?

The County Council, led by Council member Kelly Takaya King, had previously voted to settle the case to the benefit of the county, but Victorino and Lutey rebuffed the will of the people.

When will it end? When will we have a mayor with clean mana who is pono?”

On July 24, the Maui News also printed Fishkin’s letter, but with an omission. His final statement, “When will we have a mayor with clean mana who is pono?” had been removed.

When Maui County agreed to purchase the Maui News building earlier this year, part of the deal allowed the paper’s staff to remain in the building, rent-free, for two years. Fishkin worried that “the new landlord/tenant arrangement could affect the paper’s coverage of the mayor. And when they deleted that final sentence of my letter, I felt they were showing partiality to the mayor,” he said in an interview.

What’s going on? I disagree with King and Fishkin’s assessments that the mayor gets favorable coverage, while dissenting viewpoints do not. I think the mayor gets pounded plenty in the Maui News. However, Uechi’s phone call and the peculiar letter editing raise questions about newsroom involvement in opinion pages, as well as the paper’s overall policy about outside submissions.

I’ve been cautioned to lay off the Maui News, given its ongoing strangulation by stingy parent company Ogden Newspapers, Inc. of West Virginia, which is in the process of finalizing the sale of its building to the county. In the meantime, things are bad. Crammed into a small outbuilding next to the printing presses, the tiny, overworked staff can barely keep up with Maui’s copious news, especially in these days of COVID, overtourism, and the ongoing tug-of-war between Mayor Michael Victorino and a highly active County Council. My newspaper arrives by mail these days, because the paper can’t find a carrier to deliver it in Paia (and other areas, I hear). But despite these deteriorating conditions, shouldn’t the Maui News still strive to maintain proper journalism practices?

Or have the rules changed?

Opinion/News barriers come down

In the good old days, when newspapers were fat, well-staffed, and functional, a so-called “Chinese wall” existed between newsrooms and opinion pages. The term refers to an ethical barrier that blocks the exchange of information between departments in a company.

The publisher was free to write editorials and run outside submissions about anything he or she wished, and letters to the editor were handled by an opinion page staffer. The newsroom concentrated on news and steered clear of the opinion section.

The current turbulent media climate has changed those policies significantly, said Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at the Poynter Institute, the respected journalism research and education nonprofit in St. Petersburg, Florida.

“At some large papers the editorial and opinion pages are separate,” Edmonds said in an interview, adding that one is the Tampa Bay Times, which Poynter owns. However, at news organizations where the opinion pages and their staffs have shrunk or disappeared, Edmonds acknowledged that the lines have blurred, and often a newsroom editor ends up involved in the process. However, he added, “it’s good to practice transparency about this point. I do see [opinion pages] that attempt to clarify that through a statement that runs either every day or periodically.”

J. Keith Moyer [who, full disclosure, used to be publisher at my former paper, the Minneapolis Star Tribune] currently serves as both editor and publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Despite that dual position, Moyer said in an interview, he keeps the departments separate. While he remains involved with opinion pages, he stays away from the newsroom. “I do give them feedback when they’ve done something really well—or really stupid—but my feedback is always post-publication.”

Moyer found Uechi’s call to King odd. “We might call if we don’t understand something, or if it needs to be re-worded grammatically, but we don’t call them up and grill them about content.”

And as for the editing of Fishkin’s letter, Moyer’s initial reaction was “Well, they can do anything they want. But it sounds like the publisher or editor was sort of covering for the mayor.” Moyer said whoever made the changes to Fishkin’s letter “shouldn’t have done that. I would have just not run the letter if I had a problem with that statement.”

I reached out to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser opinion page editor (yes, they still have one), who did not return several messages. The Star-Advertiser does offer posted guidelines for sending letters to the editor, stating that it does “reserve the right to edit letters for clarity and length,” adding “personal attacks will not be published.”  The Maui News states that writers may submit no more than two letters per month, that letters may run no longer than 250 words, and, vaguely, that submitted letters will be subject to “editing.”

Clearly, the Star-Advertiser did not regard Fishkin’s “pono” sentence as a personal attack.

To find out why the sentence was removed from Fishkin’s letter, I contacted Uechi and publisher Chris Minford about King’s column and Fishkin’s letter. Both are relatively new to their positions. Minford served as the paper’s circulation manager for 20 years before being named publisher last fall. Uechi joined The Maui News staff as a reporter in 2015; she was named managing editor in November.

Minford’s response was short, “Please have Kelly King and Mr. Fishkin contact us directly.”

Well, I’m not your employee, Chris, but I did pass along the message. King and Fishkin spoke separately to Minford last week and reported back to me on their conversations.

King said Minford told her initially that “we believe in responsible journalism, and we want to check all the facts.”

King said she responded that Uechi’s call “wasn’t a fact check. She was questioning my opinion and not the facts.” Minford told her that Uechi was on vacation and that he would “definitely look into it” when she returned.

King remains unsatisfied. “He never said whether or not that was their policy or appropriate to question people’s opinions.”

Fishkin reported that his conversation with publisher Minford was “extensive, constructive and meaningful.” Fishkin said Minford told him that “he intends to meet with Colleen to discuss the editing/removal of the sentence in my letter” when she returned to the office.

Speaking of the office, both Edmonds and Moyer expressed some concern that the Maui News remains located in a building under purchase by Maui County, an organization the paper covers daily.

“They shouldn’t be renting from a government body, even if they’re not paying anything—in fact, that’s even worse,” said Moyer. “There’s got to be another place. It sounds like an ethical breach, to say the least.”

Edmonds wasn’t as vehement as Moyer. “There are a lot of papers that have sold their buildings and then lease back the office space,” he said, mentioning the New York Times as an example.

But was the New York Times renting space from New York City government?

Edmonds paused. “Um, no.”

A paper’s opinion pages have been described as a miniature town square, where a community’s thoughts can be shared without the filter imposed by news reporting.  If Maui News management wants to preserve the integrity of those pages, transparency is in order when it comes to explaining to the public how it handles those submissions.