Thursday, June 19, 2008

$s for Emergency Foreign Language Broadcasts

Checking in with the Governor’s PR office can turn up something useful now and then, such as yesterday’s press release that she’s released money to local foreign language radio stations to aid communications during emergencies.

Radio stations KZOO and KNDI each is receiving $100,000 “to assist with the implementation of recommendations issued by the Governor’s Comprehensive Communications Review Committee (GCCRC) convened by Governor Lingle following the October 15, 2006 Kiholo Bay earthquakes.”

In case the GCCRC is new to you, here’s how the release describes the committee:

“Members of the Comprehensive Communications Review Committee included more than 100 government officials from state, county and federal agencies; owners, general managers and publishers from print, broadcast, radio and Internet media statewide; representatives from telecommunications providers; and editors and reporters who were ‘on the ground’ gathering information and reporting on the day of the earthquake.”

At the risk of seeming a tad churlish, we’ll point out one again – as we did when the committee was formed and repeatedly since then – that that the CCRC included nearly everyone but members of the public, the people who were ill-served by emergency communications and communicators after the earthquakes. It was a major oversight that never sank in with the CCRC’s leadership.

We continue to make the point that public should have been included on the CCRC, because the next time an after-action committee is formed to see what could be done to better serve Hawaii residents, the people should be included in the process.

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