Posted on: Sunday, January 26, 2003

EDITORIAL
Lingle's new beginning best built on facts

We in the newspaper business know all too well the perils of making claims without backing them up with hard facts. Once a gaffe is discovered, your credibility plummets, feathers are ruffled, and it takes time to prove you're worthy of the public's trust.

So we'd like to gently suggest that Gov. Linda Lingle and her administration carefully check the facts before making certain claims to the public. In the bloom of a "new beginning," the Lingle administration cannot afford to lose plausibility.

A case in point, of course, is Lingle's claim in her State of the State address that the Hawai'i Supreme Court had ruled in favor of a worker's compensation for the stress an employee suffered after being fired for stealing. The worker had in fact been fired for insubordination.

Granted, Lingle apologized to Chief Justice Ronald Moon and promptly corrected the error in a press release. But false claims can linger in the court of public opinion.

Also raising eyebrows in the State of the State address was Lingle's allegation that there's a virtual epidemic of public school teachers sending their children to private schools. Lingle said that "the teachers and the administrators themselves reportedly send their own children to private schools at a rate dramatically higher than that of the general public."

We don't know if this is true because no survey has been conducted. Sure, Hawai'i has among the highest rates of parents sending their children to private school in the nation, but that doesn't mean a disproportionate number of those parents are public school teachers and officials.

In the absence of hard data, it's probably best to keep such speculations out of important public speeches. There are enough urban legends circulating in Hawai'i without adding more to the mix.