[ OUR OPINION ]

Tourism money should not
be spent on local publicity

THE ISSUE The Hawaii Visitors & Convention Bureau offered free travel to local journalists to report on the governor's trip to Japan.

KITV-4 committed a momentary ethical breach when it agreed to accept free transportation and lodging from the Hawaii Visitors & Convention Bureau to accompany Governor Lingle and her entourage on a trip to Japan to bolster tourism. The station quickly decided to pay its own way after being put to public scrutiny. HVCB and government officials have yet to admit to an even more serious breach: spending tax money intended to promote tourism to pay instead for local publicity.

Offering the free trip to KITV was approved by the governor's office and the Hawaii Tourism Authority, from which the visitors bureau receives $33.2 million in public money. Gail Ann Chew, the HVCB vice president, correctly points out that the bureau routinely offers free trips to travel writers to visit Hawaii. Those junkets help Hawaii tourism, essentially subsidizing publicity about the islands in travel magazines.

Providing tax-supported freebies to local reporters may result in favorable publicity for the governor and the visitors bureau at home, but it does nothing to bolster tourism. Unlike freebies to travel writers, subsidizing Hawaii-based journalists for news coverage aimed at Hawaii television viewers or newspaper readers is an inappropriate use of tax dollars.

Mike Rosenberg, general manager of the ABC affiliate, said he "felt there would be no conflict" for the station in accepting the freebie because it included "no quid pro quo." The station agreed to reimburse the visitors bureau for the $4,100 cost of a reporter and cameraman being included in the trip. "Our integrity is everything," said Tod Pritchard, KITV's news director.

Accepting the free trip and lodging would have violated the ethical codes of the Society of Professional Journalists and the Radio-Television News Directors Association, which forbid acceptance of gifts and call for resistance to undue influence. (The Star-Bulletin was offered the same deal by the governor's office and turned it down.) However, the breach by a budget-conscious TV station in the Honolulu market is mild when compared to the checkbook journalism practiced by conglomerate-owned national television networks.

Journalism ethicists are rightly aghast at Viacom's pitch to Pvt. Jessica Lynch for a made-for-TV movie, a Country Music Television special featuring a concert at her West Virginia home, a book deal and an interview on Viacom-owned CBS News. The gloves-off competition for interviews with the rescued prisoner of war in Iraq also is being waged by Disney's ABC, General Electric's NBC and AOL Time Warner's CNN.

---

BACK TO TOP
|

Pilot recycling plan
provides needed test

THE ISSUE Mayor Harris is proposing a pilot curbside recycling project for 10,000 Oahu homes as a first step toward an islandwide program.

THE City Council rejected Mayor Harris's islandwide recycling program this spring, but the mayor has decided to begin a pilot program for 10,000 households as early as September. The project should provide information needed to launch a curbside program across the rest of the island next year. The pilot project is preferable to a large project based on theory or experiences in other cities that may differ from Honolulu in important ways.

Harris had proposed an $8 monthly fee for a second day per week of garbage pickup for the islandwide program. The pilot project will not have a fee and will include the normal twice-a-week garbage pickup along with a recycling pickup. The recycling pickup may result in the second weekly rubbish pickup being rendered unnecessary. That is one of the effects to be learned from the project.

The mayor's original program would have cost $1.5 million, but the pilot project's cost will be only $340,000, the amount allocated by the Council for a study of the recycling issue. Suzanne Jones, the city's recycling coordinator, says information learned from the pilot project will be used next year "to propose a new curbside system that everybody's going to agree to because we'll have real data, so we can make real decisions."

Some Council members are skeptical about whether collecting garbage one day and recyclables the next day in the same trash containers will work. The pilot project should answer that question.

The city needs to reduce the environmental and financial costs of trash removal, and curbside service is the only practical way to achieve that end. Residents who want to recycle now must haul their discarded newspapers and plastic items to recycling centers.

"We're determined to institute an islandwide curbside recycling program," Harris said. "It's quite clear to us that it's the right thing to do, both environmentally and economically." The effort may require a variety of strategies to find the one that works. The pilot project is a good place to start, wherever on Oahu that might be.