Posted on: Wednesday, November 10, 2004

VOLCANIC ASH
Hawai'i's news media missed the marks

By David Shapiro

For Hawai'i's news media, the 2004 election was about horse-race polls that stumbled out of the gate yet again and the story we didn't tell.

Hawai'i newspaper polls showed President Bush with a slight edge over John Kerry, and Duke Bainum whipping Mufi Hannemann for Honolulu mayor — by 8 percent in The Advertiser's poll and 17 percent in the Star-Bulletin's.

Kerry carried Hawai'i by a comfortable 8.7 points, and Hannemann snuck past Bainum, continuing a long history of embarrassing misses by local media polls.

We can talk about high voter turnout and late swings, but there was no way Bainum had a 17-point lead weeks after he did only 6 points better than Hannemann in the primary election.

And no chance Bush would carry Hawai'i when Kerry was solidly holding states that voted for Al Gore in 2000.

Polling has always been tricky in Hawai'i because of high numbers of "undecided" voters who mistrust telephone solicitors. Now cell phone users and caller ID screeners are leaving the grid, further skewing polling demographics.

In the Star-Bulletin mayoral poll, factoring in the margin of error and allocating the undecided one way or the other could have made it anywhere from 70-30 Bainum to 53-47 Hannemann.

How was this information possibly meaningful to readers?

The Advertiser's presidential poll, similar to the Star-Bulletin's, could have run anywhere from 61-39 Bush to 59-41 Kerry with the same variables.

How could this reasonably form a basis for declaring the race deadlocked?

But declare we did, and we reveled in the national attention our polls received when they suddenly made Hawai'i a "battleground" state, with visits from Dick Cheney and Gore and $250,000 pumped into presidential TV ads.

Newspaper claims that readers demand horse-race polls don't stand up to examination.

When I was managing editor of the Star-Bulletin, I discontinued horse-race polls for three elections and didn't receive a single reader complaint. If I discontinued a moldy comic strip, I'd get angry calls for a month.

The story we didn't cover was a late Internet attack on Bainum's wife, Jennifer, that many considered a cheap smear. It was likely a swing issue in a race separated by 1,355 votes.

The Jennifer Bainum attack originated on a Republican-oriented Web site with ties to state Sen. Sam Slom. Perhaps not coincidentally, it appeared a day after Slom took out a large newspaper ad endorsing Hannemann.

News media investigated the report, about an old dispute between Jennifer Bainum and the family of an elderly man she once cared for, and found the one-sided allegations not newsworthy by our standards of fairness.

But we chose not to share our findings with our readers and viewers to avoid drawing more attention to accusations we didn't believe credible.

Unfortunately, whether we covered the story or not, it was spreading to tens of thousands of baffled voters via Internet mailing lists. They were hungry for reliable guidance on what to make of the buzz.

By not sharing what we knew, however noble our motives, we left them to vote on rumor and innuendo.

Traditional news media need to adjust our thinking in the Internet age. Dubious political information circulating widely online needs our scrutiny just as much as misleading campaign mailings and TV ads.

If we leave the stories everybody is talking about to the Internet and office water coolers while we focus on polls that confuse more than enlighten, ultimately we render ourselves irrelevant.

David Shapiro, a veteran Hawai'i journalist, can be reached by e-mail at dave@volcanicash.net.