‘It's not a rail thing; it's a procurement thing.’

Once again, the Advertiser buries another essential fact in a story that involves the Honolulu rail project.

The paper's last example of a grossly buried lead required reading 650 words to find it. Today, the number is 970 before the nine words headlined above show up in the story's last paragraph.

Page one view-with-alarm stories may feel like muckraking for some staffers inside the newspaper, but they really amount to “Puffy Shirt Journalism.” The most recent example involved several days of puffed-up stories, editorials and columns in the paper about the Runway Protection Zone issue at Honolulu International Airport – an issue that was quickly resolved.

Stay tuned for a similar resolution of this one.