AFTER DEADLINE

By Jim Kelly

The pace of the political season accelerated dramatically when Jeremy Harris withdrew from the race for governor. In the three days after the Honolulu mayor's announcement, we ran more than a dozen stories, analysis pieces, columns and editorials about the decision and what it means for the Democratic Party.

Because most of the stories focused on the party's turmoil and the damage caused by Harris' withdrawal, we didn't receive any calls from Republicans complaining about excessive coverage of the Democrats.

But I thought it would be a good time to talk about how we try to ensure that coverage of candidates and parties is fair, balanced and accurate.

Right off, it's important to know that fair coverage doesn't mean equal coverage. If we simply ran stories about the various candidates of identical length with identical photos on identical pages, we'd be stenographers, not journalists. We know you're overloaded with a lot of information competing for your attention, and that you expect us to prioritize and summarize the news, to sort through the staggering heft of speeches, press releases, position statements, campaign appearances, photo ops, political ads and daily news events to determine what's significant, what's new and how it affects you.

But equal treatment is certainly one of the elements of fairness. Let me give you an example of how this plays out in coverage decisions.

We determined early on that when the candidates filed papers to get on the ballot, we would write brief stories and run them inside the Hawai'i section, because "filing papers" is largely a photo opportunity that rarely yields real news. Most of these candidates announced their candidacies months ago, and this simply makes it official. So far, we've run brief stories about Republican Linda Lingle and Democrat Ed Case filing papers, and we played both of them the same way.

I heard from several readers who were angry we didn't cover Lingle's fund-raiser last week; they argued that it was newsworthy that so many people turned out.

But for the same reason we don't do much with candidate filings, we're not hot on covering fund-raisers, rallies, sign-waving and endorsement announcements. We're more interested in covering forums where voters can ask questions, or events where there is unscripted interaction between candidates and average folks, not partisans who pay $100 a plate to hear speeches.

Rather than covering media events, we'd prefer to have our reporters examining the candidates' backgrounds, comparing what they say to what they do, writing about their specific ideas for fixing Hawai'i, getting answers to your questions.

Again, fairness dictates that we wouldn't give lavish coverage to one candidate's fund-raiser and ignore the others. We didn't cover Lingle's bash, just as we passed on covering a recent fund-raiser for Mazie Hirono.

But that isn't to say we would never cover a fund-raiser. We already know how broad Lingle's financial support is. But with three Democrats competing in the gubernatorial primary, we may indeed cover a candidate's fund-raiser as a news event, not to simply play back the candidate's speech but to figure out who is supporting him or her.

One of the big political stories of the summer on the Democratic side will be to see who is winning the race for money, and our reporters will likely use fund-raisers as one measure. (In 1998, when Lingle was running her first statewide race, we covered several of her fund-raisers to get a sense of her support, but we skipped most of Gov. Ben Cayetano's events because we knew who would be there.)

These are events to which we apply our news judgment, not political bias. We also use that judgment in determining which candidates to cover.

Some candidates, especially those who face an uphill primary struggle or are affiliated with a third party, argue that their exclusion from regular political coverage is depriving voters of important information.

Jonathan Adler, a perennial candidate in state and local races who is running this year as a gubernatorial candidate of the Natural Law Party, calls me regularly to make sure he's included in our coverage.

Adler's name will not be absent from our coverage. But at the same time, it's not our role to pretend that he's in the same league with a Linda Lingle.

In deciding whom to cover, we look at candidates' backgrounds (Have they actually done anything?) and whether they are actively campaigning, raising money and talking about issues, not simply churning out e-mails and faxes.

We also consider what our polls tell us about name recognition and relative strength. For example, a Hawai'i Poll we published today shows us that John Carroll is far behind Lingle in the Republican primary race. Those numbers will certainly inform the coverage we devote to the candidates. Again, this is news judgment, not bias.

As the campaign continues, I'll likely be writing about other aspects of political coverage, and I invite your questions and comments. It's important that you know that our role is not to nudge or shove you in the direction of a particular candidate or party, but to ensure than you go into the voting booth prepared with as much relevant information as we can assemble about each candidate.

• On another sensitive topic, we owe a big apology to crossword puzzlers who found themselves stymied last Sunday, not by a brain-teasing clue or two but by a list of clues that didn't match the puzzle grid.

The mistake happened when a page designer didn't match up the clues and the grid when she laid out the page. We ran the correct puzzle on Page E3 Tuesday.

Jim Kelly is executive editor of The Honolulu Advertiser.