Keeping the Lid On

Legions more expected today, the day of woe

By Curt Sanburn
Honolulu Weekly
As printed in the Honolulu Weekly

Wednesday, January 27, 1993

On the night of Jan. 17, a lot of tired but inspired people in Honolulu sat down in front of their television sets to watch the national news and – hopefully – see themselves participating in a historic moment: the Hawaiian call for justice on the 100th anniversary of the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy. But there was nothing. Though this had been the biggest political gathering of Native Hawaiians in a century, though it marked a clear turning point in the struggle for Hawaiian rights and though the local media had been all over the event like a rash, there wasn’t a word on national TV.

One reason for that: events elsewhere during the weekend of Jan. 15 to 17 (U.S. missiles exploding in Baghdad, Bill Clinton’s pre-Inaugural posturing at the Lincoln Memorial, a train crash in Indiana) had, from a national news director’s point of view, overshadowed the 10,000 peaceful Hawaiians gathered at Iolani Palace. But it may have been more than just world events that conspired to deny Hawaiians space to march across the nation’s TV screens.

On Friday of the observance weekend, I ran into public relations executive and former TV news anchor Barbara Tanabe on the palace grounds. (One of Hawaii’s best-connected media experts, Tanabe represents such clients as Outrigger Hotels, PRI, developer Jack Myers, and, last but not least, the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, which is spending $130,000 for her firm’s services.)

At that point, with the flap over Gov. Waihee’s order to lower the stars and stripes in full swing, the town had been buzzing with talk of serious national attention. I asked Tanabe if she knew of any attempts to contact CNN or the networks. “No,” she said, adding, “we didn’t want to make this a commercial event.”

The next day, Bill Paty, Waihee’s longtime advisor and the influential director of the state Department of Land and Natural Resources, said he didn’t know of any national TV coverage of the flag flap, and he hoped there wouldn’t be any.

“We don’t want to detract from the event itself,” he said.

(As it turned out, CNN did a minute-long piece on the flag issue. It was to be the only story on the observance to air nationally. The national print media did a bit better: Writers in attendance included columnist Lou Cannon from the Washington Post and reporters from the Sacramento Bee, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Examiner and Knight-Ridder News Service. The New York Times ran a three-inch AP wire story on page 18 of its Jan. 15 issue.)

So here’s the biggest, most solemn and most potentially news-making event in Hawaii’s recent history – and two top insiders of business and government were saying up front that it would be unseemly to let the nation know about it?

One leader who doesn’t share their shyness about the story is Kekuni Blaisdell, coordinator of Ka Pakaukau, a coalition of 12 sovereignty groups. “The events of that week,” Blaisdell said, “were the most powerful statement the kanaka maoli [Native Hawaiians] have made since the events of 1893 to 1898 [the period between the overthrow and annexation]. But we’re not going to get anywhere until we take our appeal beyond Hawaii’s shores. We must have U.S. attention – global attention! We have to get on CNN. It’s essential.”

So had anyone in an official capacity contacted the national media?

“No, we didn’t. We weren’t holding this event for the media,” said Ellen Blomquist, OHA’s public information officer, in an uncanny echo of Tanabe and Paty’s line.

Blomquist suggested I talk to head of publicity for the Onipa’a Centennial Committee: Wendy Hee, sister-in-law of OHA Chairman Clayton Hee. (OHA was parent agency for the Onipa’a committee, a group of high-profile volunteers – among them state Sen. Eloise Tungpalan, Mufi Hannemann, Palani Vaughan, etc. – set up to organize the entire observance.)

“The committee did not do anything to draw national attention to the event,” Hee said. “Our attitude was to accommodate [the national press] if they appeared, but it was not a high priority.”

“We didn’t do anything,” said Mark Segami, Hee’s predecessor as the publicity committee’s chair. “Our strategy was to give out information to those who demonstrated an interest.” Clearly Onipa’a’s publicity strategy was a passive one. I asked Segami, a professional communicator who came to the committee from the Governor’s Office of International Relations, then run by Hannemann, if there had been any concern about media attention in early meetings. “Sure,” he said, “there was concern in the visitor industry that it might give people a reason not to come to Hawaii.”

As it turns out, the only attempts to contact national news medial came from grassroots groups like Ka Lahui Hawai’i, the largest and most organized of the pro-sovereignty activist groups, which faxed out about 25 press advisories in October.

Ka Lahui’s leader, Mililani Trask, said she had understood that the Onipa’a committee would oversee the event’s press relations, and she assumed the national media would be contacted by the professionals on the press committee. Trask was shocked to learn that nothing had been done.

“It’s becoming pretty clear to me that [the state] conspired not to notify the media,” Trask said. “They didn’t want to publicize their own negligence. State policy tries to paint Hawaii as a multi-ethnic paradise, twisting the truth to suit the needs of the Hawaii Visitors Bureau. Our whole culture is grossly commercialized for the visitor industry and this kind of intentional inaction, this black-out is part of it.”

George Ostercamp, a news producer with the CBS bureau in San Francisco, confirms Ka Lahui’s publicity work and the official, state-supported agencies’ lack thereof. “We didn’t receive any advance notice from any official sources,” Ostercamp says. “We did receive a fax from Mililani Trask and one from Lela Hubbard [a well-known local activist]. But unfortunately, there was a log-jam of events that day. To get on the air, the story needed greater urgency and better prepping.”

So, if there had been no American bombs in Baghdad that Sunday, would we have seen ourselves on TV, introduced by Tom Brokaw’s emphatic sympathy, marching up Mililani Street, watching the awa ceremony and listening to the fiery speeches? Probably not even, since it appears that at some early point a group of powerful state employees – the same people who were bending over backwards to make the state seem sympathetic to Native Hawaiian goals –had decided that our observance of the overthrow should not be seen across the nation.