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On Politics Richard Borreca |
Last Tuesday, did you know
who your governor was?
Six days ago you did not know who was governor of Hawaii.If you called Governor Lingle's office, as did Associated Press reporter Bruce Dunford, and asked if the governor was in town, you would have been told that Lingle was "around here, working on several things."
That was a lie.
Lingle was flying to Iraq, and as soon as she had crossed the state boundaries Lt. Gov. James "Duke" Aiona automatically became acting governor.
Since then Lingle has defended this act of duplicity by saying that security restrictions were so stringent that no word of the trip she made to Iraq with five other governors could leak.
When asked why Lingle spokesmen didn't simply say she was out of town and leave it at that, Russell Pang, chief of media relations, said that would have led to more questions.
"We played out a number of scenarios -- we figured any way it would lead to more questions and more questions," Pang said.
The blatant deception was compounded because Lingle's office had released a media advisory on Monday stating that on Tuesday she would be at a wreath-laying ceremony at the USS Arizona Memorial.
Both of Honolulu's daily newspapers have criticized the lies. But, interestingly, the administration was not yet finished with its ruse.
On Tuesday afternoon it e-mailed pictures of Lingle in Iraq, but the photos had been retouched. The logo on the governor's blue sweater had been purposely deleted.
Pang acknowledged that his office thought the logo was too commercial, so they blocked it out. When it was pointed out that the governor from Minnesota was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with SPAM in big letters, Pang allowed that "it was kind of cute, but we didn't want her (Lingle) wearing it."
Any photojournalist knows he has crossed the line if he removes or destroys the visual content of a picture. You must not add to, erase or digitally edit a picture without carefully stating that the picture is not an accurate representation. If a photographer makes changes without adding a disclaimer, the only decision left is whether the photographer is going to be suspended or fired for fiddling with a news photo.
Since the prevarication, Lingle has said the news media are "blowing this out of proportion."
But Aly Colon of the Poynter Institute, a respected journalism think tank, explains that if the press unknowingly passes on lies told by the government, both institutions will suffer.
"The public depends on the press to let it know what government is doing. If it repeats as truth a government lie, in the future the public may question whether the press knows what is going on and whether government officials are telling them the truth," Colon said.
Earlier, Helen Varner, dean of communications at Hawaii Pacific University, said there is no place in public relations for purposely telling a lie.
Nationally, the public is increasingly questioning President Bush's truthfulness, according to a Washington Post poll, with more than half of the people thinking Bush lied about evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
The Lingle fabrication doesn't rise to that level, but the question for the press is not the importance of the lie, but whether we are to believe there won't be another.
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Richard Borreca writes on politics every Sunday in the Star-Bulletin. He can be reached at 525-8630 or by e-mail at rborreca@starbulletin.com.
