Honolulu’s Mayor Frank Fasi died before Twitter was invented and he never went as far as calling journalists “the enemy of the people,” but for decades he was the state’s most vociferous press critic.
So when I read how President Donald Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, has started to selectively ban reporters and media outlets from his press briefings, it was familiar.
Fasi was Honolulu’s longest-serving mayor and easily the most significant. He and the Honolulu newspapers saw each other as combatants in a daily news war.
When I covered City Hall for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin in the 1970s, I was barred from Fasi’s news conferences, and city officials were even ordered not to answer my questions.
I was not the first Star-Bulletin reporter who made the list. In 1969 reporter Toni Withington was barred by the newly-elected mayor. When the newspaper turned to the Associated Press for reports on City Hall, Fasi barred the national news service. It got so crazed that Fasi refused to talk to AP while giving a news conference while on a junket in India.
The Star-Bulletin and I sued in federal court and won a preliminary injunction. For a while, Judge Sam King’s decision was the only legal guidance supporting journalists’ right to attend a news conference given by a public official.
Fasi and the newspapers kept on scraping. Fasi tried to get the Star-Bulletin and The Honolulu Advertiser, which maintained a federal and state-sanctioned joint operating agreement, put under the control of the Public Utilities Commission. And when it looked like the Star-Bulletin was going to fold, Fasi held a news conference in the paper’s parking lot to say, “Good.”
Helen Geracimos Chapin wrote in “Shaping History: The Role of Newspapers in Hawaii,” that Fasi had more column inches written about him than any other person in the history of the state — and while the book was published in 1996, it is not likely that anyone will ever surpass his inch-count record. Fasi was just good copy.
In much the same way, Trump’s record of press bullying and name-calling is also good copy.
How many readers wake up wanting to know whom Trump vilified overnight?
But unlike mayors in the middle of the Pacific wrestling the local press, when the president of the United States gives legitimacy to censorship and vilifying the news media, the press isn’t brutalized, democracy is.
William McRaven, the retired four-star admiral and Navy SEAL who oversaw the special operation that killed Osama bin Laden, is calling Trump’s media attack “the greatest threat to democracy.”
“We must challenge this statement and this sentiment that the news media is the enemy of the American people,” McRaven said in a speech on the University of Texas Austin campus.
Republican U.S. Sen. John McCain added that attacks like those by Trump are “how dictators get started.”
Reporting and journalism is about facts and telling the truth quickly and cleanly. As that continues, Trump’s purposely misleading statements will be seen as part of his own war with reality.
As Fasi’s former press secretary Jim Loomis said in Chapin’s book, “You can destroy someone in the media by only telling the truth.”
Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays. Reach him at 808onpolitics@gmail.com.
