By Anne Harpham

Readers contacted us last week to express their dismay over our failure to report on Al Gore's Monday speech in San Francisco criticizing President Bush's policy on Iraq.

The speech was not only unusually harsh but was a departure from the low-profile stance of the former vice president since the 2000 election. Additionally, Gore chose a prominent platform to make his speech, which was aired to a national radio audience.

Gore and our readers "deserve better from your paper," Lance Robinson said in a letter we published Thursday. Others questioned whether the exclusion of the Gore speech was a deliberate effort to censor opposition to the president's aggressive stance toward Iraq.

Robinson was right — we should have done better. Here's what happened: Coverage of his speech was included in a roundup of Iraq news Monday night, and editors had assigned the story onto a page, giving it fairly prominent play. Late that night, however, close to deadline, the computer system we use to lay out and edit stories seized up and a number of stories were lost, including the Iraq roundup. When our computers came back up, there was a significant new development in the Iraq story with Britain's dossier reporting that Iraq had military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons. That became the lead story for Page One, but by then, editors had run out of time to reconstruct all the elements in the original roundup, including the Gore speech.

A story on Page A8 Wednesday mentioned the Gore speech, but it was far down in the story and may have been missed by some readers. And, of course, it did not give the detail that would have been in the Tuesday story. Given the impact of the Gore speech and its political implications both for the next presidential election and the continuing debate over this nation's Iraq policy, we probably should have done more in Wednesday's paper to cover some of the ground we were unable to report Tuesday.

Last week, the syndicated column by Lou Boyd contained an item that reader Gus Hannemann found offensive.

In the item, Boyd said Samoans like nothing better than to sit around at their leisure and argue the finer points of Christianity. The item went on to say that other islanders call Samoans "the Irish of the Pacific."

Do I think Boyd meant to be derogatory? No, I don't. But as anyone who reads Boyd knows, some of his items are just plain silly, and I thought this one was especially pointless.

There are several levels at which different people might find things in that Boyd item to make them flinch.

And in Hawai'i, there are nuances we understand that may not resonate elsewhere. I don't think Boyd meant to portray Samoans as people who just sit around and argue about Christianity as opposed to living their faith, or to perpetuate stereotypes about any people, whether Samoan or Irish.

In a similar vein, some readers objected to a word used in a the first paragraph of a story on Page B1 Monday about a Hawai'i family celebrating its ancestors' arrival here.

The paragraph referred to the ship Peru docking in Honolulu with a "cargo" of Japanese immigrants. I know that the writer and every editor who read the story before it was printed did not intend to denigrate the immigrants aboard that ship. Some readers saw it differently, pointing out, rightly, that cargo refers to commodities, not people.

Senior Editor Anne Harpham is The Advertiser's readers representative. Reach her at 525-8033 or aharpham@honoluluadvertiser.com.