Frank Fasi Fights Fiercely

To his detractors, he is "Facile" Frank Fasi, an arrogant gutfighter who shoots from the lip and to hell with the consequences. To his supporters, he is Mayor Fasi of Honolulu, a dedicated public servant battling an impacted Establishment. These days, Frank Fasi, 49, is easier to talk about than read about: since last July, the mayor has barred all interviews between his administration and the reporters from Hawaii's largest newspaper, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.

The feud began in the fall of 1968, when Fasi, a onetime junk dealer and perennial political campaigner, was making his fourth attempt to win the mayoralty. Both newspapers, the morning Advertiser (circ. 72,000) and the evening Star-Bulletin (circ. 123,000), endorsed his opponent. In one issue, the Bulletin ran a photographic view of Honolulu's memorial to the battleship Arizona, marred by junked automobiles on property incorrectly identified as leased to Fasi. The candidate seethed. He seethed again when the paper enjoined its readers to "Wake Up Hawaii--Vote Republican" beneath a full-page advertisement for Democrat Fasi.

Banned Reporters. The feisty mainlander (born in Connecticut) won the election by 16,000 votes. By March, after the Bulletin criticized several Fasi proposals, the mayor went on TV to denounce the paper and urge his constituents to read the Advertiser, "if you want the straight reporting." In June, the mayor barred a Bulletin reporter, whom he considered hostile, from his office. A month later, after a Bulletin series implied collusion between Fasi and a contractor who had won city permission to advertise on the envelopes of civic-center tickets, Fasi banned all Bulletin reporters from all administration offices.

The Advertiser sided with the Bulletin, saying that the ban "interferes with the public's right to know." The American Civil Liberties Union and the American Society of Newspaper Editors, among others, objected on the same grounds. Unfazed, Fasi departed on a worldwide good-will tour, refusing interviews to Associated Press reporters along the way, because the Bulletin subscribes to that wire service. "I was elected to represent all of the people in the community," says Fasi, "not just the chairman of the board or the editor of the Star-Bulletin."

With the ban still in effect last week, Honolulu's Democrat-controlled city council unanimously adopted a resolution "strongly reaffirming its deep faith in the freedom of the press and the free flow of information," and deploring "any restrictions, especially from government." Unless the mayor rescinds the ban. the feud will probably be resolved in the courts this spring. In the meantime, the newspaper and the mayor continue, as State Senator David McClung puts it, "to peck away at each other like a pair of outraged myna birds. Neither is doing the job that should or could be done for our people." All the same, the mayor's popularity appears to be rebounding. A telephone poll by local TV station KGMB indicated that only 1 out of 4 citizens approved of Fasi's actions in October. In a similar poll last week, however, approval of the mayor had climbed to 37%.

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