JUST A LITTLE BIT, JUST A LITTLE BIT

JUST A LITTLE BIT, JUST A LITTLE BIT: In addition to the inability of the local newspaper to do things like get the story right and present it in an intelligible manner, other than the intrepid “photographer” Dennis Fujimoto- who is somehow able to be in both Wainiha and Waimea at the same moment- the others are among the laziest reporters in the world.

You can’t help but notice that the dispatches from courts and police beat “reporter” Paul Curtis seem to emanate solely from hanging around the courthouse and cop shop and recording and regurgitating whatever they dump in his lap.

But this Saturday might have been a new low according to a post from attorney-blogger Charley Foster.

Though Foster’s posts have been all too infrequent since he got his law license and stopped writing about local issues, something in Curtis’ article about the Hapa Trail controversy in Saturday’s newspaper forced him to feed the beast today.

Foster writes:

I'm informed some of my blogging appeared in Saturday's Garden Island. That's kind of exciting. It would be even more so if the paper had showed me some love by way of attribution.

He then posts a section of his April 2009 post listing six bullet points culled from a lawsuit, filed by Koloa activist Ted Blake, over “a case filed back in March of 2009 over the Knudsen Trust's planned Village at Poipu development.”

And lo and behold a look at Curtis’ article shows he plagiarized Forster’s bullet points word for word without attribution.

Foster is a bit more forgiving than to call it plagiarism saying:

Hey, I'm happy for the paper to reprint anything I've written on Planet Kauai. But I'd appreciate a little nod. Something along the lines of, "According to Kauai attorney and legal blogger Charley Foster..." would be nice.

We can accept the almost monthly article about an auto accident occurring within a hundred years of the local newspaper’s offices. They apparently cover all the news that happens between McDonald’s and the “76” gas station.

But when you lift a passage the difference between attribution and plagiarism IS that the latter is done without the former, as many authors of greater stature than Curtis have found out.

AND YOU CAN QUOTE THAT

AND YOU CAN QUOTE THAT: After submitting to a shave and a bone cut (40,000 bits) to rid us of scapular-acromion and clavicular bone spurs inside our other (right) shoulder last Thursday- sans last September’s titanium-screw rotator cuff repair which, with complications, took six months to sort-of heal up, “fixing” our left shoulder)- we’ve had a lot of spare time for one of our favorite activites this past weekend... perusing the movable feast of on-line news from across the world.

On Sunday we had even more time than expected after turning to our local Kaua`i newspaper and finding, after one brief shining moment in which its content approximated a real newspaper, they’ve hit rock bottom again and begun a new era of incompetent, kissy-faced, fluff and puff, thus regaining their late-‘80’s through mid-‘00’ moniker The Garbage Island.

This is the actual list of headlines which passed for Sunday’s entire on-line local “news” section (note that the quotation marks on “news” are the kind you make in the air denoting that it’s anything but), each indicating pretty clearly the extent of the content of each:

KCC graduates offer hope, Obituaries for Sunday, May 16, 2010, Don’t let them forget it is your tax dollar (Lowell L. Kalapa’s usual drivel), Walkers show support for nonprofits, Volunteers’ aloha makes difference, Students celebrate the Earth, Kaua`i Sovereign Volunteers Award winners, Kaua`i residents graduate from University of Portland, Nutrition seminar set for Tuesday, Students help divert phone books from landfill, Free vehicle window tint inspections next week, Weekly Roadwork Index for Sunday, May 16, 2010, and Public Meetings for Sunday, May 16, 2010.

Rock bottom news can only be provided by rock bottom “writers” (again those air quotes): in this case 1) new guy Leo Azambuja, the language-challenged, rank-amateur government reporter we “mentioned” (yes again) a few weeks back, 2) Paul Curtis the oft fired and rehired “professional” (uh-huh) whose “please like me Mr. Newsmaker” reporting has been instrumental in the derivation of the Garbage Island label over the past couple for decades and 3) the always prolific Dennis Fujimoto who, though he’s been the paper’s photographer for decades so is of course the most literate among the current crop of crappy “correspondents” (of course).

But wait- on Sunday there’s a business news page, which this week, if it’s possible, was even more vapid and insipid than usual due to 4) our own Miss Malaprop, Coco Zickos who took an embrace the suck attitude toward our “flighty fluffmeister” review of her work as (here we go again) ‘Business Editor”

This week in addition to the always boring regurgitation of press releases in News & Notes for Sunday, May 16, 2010, People on the Move for Sunday, May 16, 2010, News & Events for Sunday, May 16, 2010 and People on the Move for Sunday, May 2, 2010 and another in her series of “huh?”, off-deadline-style meanderings, is a piece headlined Has Kaua`i seen the recession’s end?.

The use of a question in a news story headline and its place on the journalistic no-no list aside, Zickos’ “story” (you bet) and it’s content can be summed up in one hilarious “qualifying the previously unqualified- and doing so twice” second sentence, destined we hope to be saved by some professor for a J-school their list of howlers:

Apparently the recession is over, some economists say.

Or maybe, apparently, not.

Current Editor Nathan Eagle has a lot to answer for here although we’re not sure how much of a leash Publisher Randy Kozerski provides him. Based on his clear, decently informative although nothing-to-write-home-about, rather pedestrian coverage of the government beat- which preceded his stint as Editor- Eagle certainly knows his ass from his news-hole-in-the-ground in the journalism world.

Perhaps seeing the first enterprise reporting (and even on occasion investigative work) since the departure of legendary Editor Jean Holmes and her ace reporter Bill LeGro in 1982, made for delusional expectations on our part.

We’ve got to accept the fact that Mike Levine has gone to his reward over at Civil Beat, Now he’s busy schmoozing with paid lobbyists and candidate shills who’ve paid $20 to take turns on the soap box within the gated-community in what Larry Geller (see forth comment on article) theorizes is just an auto-renewal scam for CB (and EBay) owner Pierre Omidyar’s Pay-Pals’ test of a business model for paid, on-line-newspaper subscriptions (much like the Superferry was a model to sell the armed forced similar “littoral” boats.)

Everything old is new again... same as it ever was... but can’t anyone here play this game?

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Depending on our level of “discomfort”, frequency of follow-up with the Doc and the supply and effectiveness of these little white pills, we may or may not be, apparently some say, intermittent in posting over the next week or so.

(Pardon the interruption- try to do better next time- Nathan Eagle: go to your room).