I remember back in the days when opposition to our nation's adventurism in Southeast Asia was just starting to build - way before Walter Cronkite's epiphany of that war's absurdity - that the media resorted to a cute gimmick to minimize protest. If a group of say 10,000 gathered to show its opposition, media accounts would report: "Over 1,000 war opponents yesterday."
I wasn't shocked then when The Maui News' June 21 account of the Kihei Community Association meeting about the proposed South Maui mega-malls noted that "more than 100 people attended."
Actual minimum best estimate counts conducted by KCA board members found between 220 and 250 jamming the Kihei Charter School room - certainly a far cry from The Maui News' severe undercount.
And while I congratulate the newspaper's ability to receive responses from the project's local mouthpiece, it's strange that neither he nor the company itself were willing to face the public at the KCA meeting.
M J Duberstein
Kihei
