Honolulu Lite
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Reports of our death are (still) premature. A year later, the war goes on. Not our country's war against terrorism, which is only 7 months old, but the newspaper war, the battle between the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and the Honolulu Advertiser. For the Gannett-owned 'Tiser, it's a battle to wipe out any daily newspaper competition, to smoosh out the Star-Bulletin like a cigarette. For the Star-Bulletin, it's a battle just to survive. Our paper’s hard to kill,
despite Gannett’s effortsA year after Canadian publisher David Black bought the Bulletin, along with MidWeek, we're still alive. That's pretty amazing, considering Gannett is doing everything it can to kill us. Yep. There's no doubt about it. Gannett, the most powerful newspaper company in the country, wants the Star-Bulletin dead, defunct, extinct, departed, done and gone.
Not that every individual at the Advertiser wants the Star-Bulletin dead. My wife works at the 'Tiser in advertising, and I'm pretty sure she doesn't want to see me lose my job. I've got a lot of friends there, too, who I know have a lot of aloha for the Star-Bulletin.
But the corporation, the Advertiser, and its owner, Gannett, dream of the day when the Bulletin is just news dust in the wind. And they are doing everything they can to try to get there.
Why? Because despite the public perception of newspapers as being somewhat benevolent organizations dedicated to sticking up for the rights of the downtrodden, championing the concept of fair play and being warriors for the First Amendment, newspapers are businesses. Gannett is what you would call "Big Business." Or even "Huge Business." And while Big Business might talk a good line about supporting free enterprise and capitalism, the last thing behemoths like Gannett want is competition. Gannett has a history of squishing its competition like bugs. When it tried to shut down the Star-Bulletin a few years ago and pay its owner off with $26 million, it assumed this bug was dead.
We may have been on our back, legs up in the air, but we were still kicking. After Black bought the Star-Bulletin, Gannett continued to try to help us into an early grave, launching a fierce circulation and advertising war against us.
One is tempted to use the word "hypocrisy" to describe the contrast between the Advertiser's warm and fuzzy, socially conscious liberal editorial persona with its savage, wipe-out-the-competition-at-any-cost business side. Just about everyone agrees that a community is best served by at least two editorial voices. The Advertiser believed that when it entered the joint operating agreement decades ago to save itself from dying. Now that the JOA is over, Gannett pines for the day when it is the sole daily editorial voice in Hawaii, and, more important, the sole collector of newspaper advertising and subscription fees. Because, make no mistake about it, Gannett's war against the Star-Bulletin isn't about ideas and news coverage, it's about money. There's only so much advertising money out there, and Gannett wants it.
If this were just two businesses fighting for control of the widget market, that might be understandable. But at a time when the United States is pushing places like China and North Korea to allow freedom of the press, Gannett's scorched-earth policy for its rivals seems unnecessarily brutal.
Perhaps the Advertiser should explain to its readers why, when it comes to other countries, the more newspapers -- the more editorial voices -- the better for a free, open society, but when it comes to Hawaii, it is best to have only one daily newspaper. I'll help them out. I'll start off the editorial for them:
Dear Advertiser readers,
It is important for you and Hawaii in general that the Advertiser do everything in its power to destroy the Star-Bulletin because ...
I'll let them finish it. In the meantime, thanks to the support of a growing army of readers and a feisty cadre of newspaper employees fighting the good fight, the Star-Bulletin is still standing and ready for another year.
Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com