Honolulu Lite
There comes a time in every reporter's life when he or she, having sat through hundreds of legislative sessions or City Council meetings, looks at the elected knuckleheads making news and says, "Hey, I could do that!" Reporters running for office
is a mysterious afflictionThe smart reporters, immediately after uttering those dangerous words, hotfoot it down to the nearest watering hole and throw down cocktails until the episode of insanity has passed.
Yes, in a constitutional democracy, every citizen can run for office. Every citizen also can run in traffic on the freeway, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea.
I've never understood why someone in the news media would want to run for office. After 25 years in the news biz, I know what a pack of weasels we media types are, and I would much rather be on the side of the weasels than have them snapping at my butt.
But that's not the only reason I wouldn't run for office. I'm not a meeting guy. And modern government involves many meetings. Great heaps of meetings. Meetings staffed by the most seriously boring and brain-dead mouth breathers imaginable. I can fake interest in just about anything for a minute or two, but the thought of sitting through a marathon public hearing on what creature should be named the official state fish or some such nonsense makes me want to jab red-hot sewing needles into my eyeballs.
Nevertheless, there are news reporters with a higher pain threshold, all of them from television. People like Jon Yoshimura, Nestor Garcia and Bob Hogue have ridden their television fame or at least face recognition into public office. It turns out that others, like former Channel 2 reporter Barbara Marshall and former KGMB newscaster Jerry Drelling, are considering a run for the City Council. It's a sad thing, really, to see colleagues fall so low.
Not that they can't do the job. Of course they can do the job. Have you WATCHED the City Council lately? A monolingual Tibetan sheepherder could do the job (and NOT get indicted along the way). Marshall would be awesome on the Council. I covered courts with her years ago when her nickname was "The Sarge" because of her ability to smack judges around until they came to her way of thinking on a certain issue.
So ability is not the problem. The question is, Why would a news person subject themselves to elected office? It's certainly not for the money, unless they plan to be heavily into graft. It's not the notoriety, since they already have that from being on the nightly news. It can't be a longing to serve the public, because most TV reporters are genetically ruthless egomaniacs who would climb over their own dead mothers to get a story and further their careers. (I mean that in a good way, comrades.) So the only answer is the aforementioned episodes of insanity.
You don't see newspaper reporters running for office. There are many reasons: Most have really bad hair, their clothes don't fit right and they don't clean up well. But mostly, newspaper reporters simply are better at drowning insane ideas before they can take a breath. It takes lots of practice. Luckily, newspaper people are pros in that department.
Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com