By Sandra S. Oshiro
Advertiser Business Editor

Few things give journalists an adrenaline rush more than the promise of major news. Such was the lure held out by the public relations people for Central Pacific Bank on Dec. 7. None of them would say what the news would be, other than it had something to do with the bank's proposed takeover of City Bank.

News-wise, Sundays are usually as dead as old poets. Smart PR folks know this and can schedule a news conference on, well, dead poets, with a high probability they'll get some kind of coverage, even on a subject that editors would usually ignore.

True to form, many of the major media in town turned out for the Central Pacific news conference. The event yielded mildly interesting news about Central Pacific's ongoing battle with City Bank, but it hardly rated as "major" news of the Page 1 kind.

Although a small example, the over-hyped news conference sheds light on the daily back-and-forth between journalists and public-relations people.

The best PR people in town, and there are a bunch of them, are truthful, informative and genuinely helpful to journalists. They understand our role is to inform the public, and within the boundaries of promoting their clients, they make sure we get accurate, timely information.

The worst among them, and that includes a few spokesmen and spokeswomen representing government agencies, are untruthful and obstructive. They stonewall reporters, lead them away from the real — usually negative — story, and otherwise establish an adversarial relationship with journalists, and indirectly, the public.

In an informal survey in our newsroom, I asked reporters and editors to give me their nominees for the most- and least-helpful PR folks in Hawai'i. I'm not going to name names, but just talk generally about the characteristics that make a PR person a dream or a dud.

There was general consensus about the worst, proving they have built their reputations over time, and less agreement on the best of the bunch.

So why should the public care if someone does or doesn't play well with the press?

For me, it comes down to this: Free flow of information is critical in a democracy. To make the best-informed decisions, we need and deserve to know how government spends our money, whether a company's practices are helping or hurting customers, employees and the community, and what the next military deployment will mean to the economy.

It is hardly beneficial if the people who control access to information act in ways that harm, distort or cut off the information stream.

In some cases, attempts at controlling the news go beyond merely spinning stories in a positive direction.

In a recent Columbia Journalism Review article, author Alicia Mundy described how public-relations pros have taken on increasingly aggressive tactics to derail investigative stories. She quotes a former TV news journalist, Kent Jarrell, who went into public relations and "crisis management" and now serves as senior vice president for litigation communications for APCO Worldwide, a major communications firm.

Jarrell said his goal is to cause journalists "legal pain." His strategy is often to get the story away from a reporter and into the hands of a media company's lawyers, forcing journalists to ask, "Is this story worth it?"

Clearly, when that happens, there's a chilling effect on journalism. And it is evidenced on a smaller but nevertheless significant scale whenever information is hard to come by.

In compiling his list, one of our reporters described his serial run-ins with a government agency spokesman. This spokesman has made getting information so difficult that sometimes, because of deadline pressures, he has succeeded in stopping stories dead in their tracks.

How that spokesman thinks he is serving the public interest escapes me, but you and I are paying his salary through our tax dollars.

We are also the poorer for having lost the benefit of potentially informative stories about an important government agency.

Another worst-of-Hawai'i winner has even complained that too many reporters are calling her, this after ordering that all media queries be funneled through her.

Again, one has to ask: Is the public being well served?

The answer is yet another thing that sets the adrenaline of journalists into overdrive.

Reach Sandra S. Oshiro at 525-8063 or soshiro@honoluluadvertiser.com.