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PBS Hawaii’s locally produced Leahey & Leahey on Wednesday nights, which features an intergenerational airing of issues by the sportscasters Leahey, is proving to be sports with an often critical bite and more news than one would perhaps expect. Past the overdone faux Leahey household shtick, the father-son team are managing to hit on key issues. This week they took on the makeup of the UH Manoa search committee charged with recommending a new athletic director. Both took aim at Manoa Chancellor Virginia Hinshaw for not only appointing herself as chair of the committee, signaling that she intends to control the outcome, but also then appointing her own staff assistant to also sit on the committee.

“Isn’t that a conflict of interest,” one of the Leahey’s asked several times?

They also noted that a diverse selection committee is usually used to provide an independent perspective to the decision makers, but independence goes out the window when the decision maker takes direct control of the committee.

In any case, they made their point and even underscored it with Jim Leahey’s poetic blast at the committee and its work. It was a clear no confidence vote by these interested outside observers in Hinshaw’s handling of the matter.

Hinshaw is also co-chair of another problematic search committee looking for a new vice-chancellor for academic affairs, and that search appears to have stalled out. It was referred to as a “failed search” during discussion at the UH Faculty Senate earlier this month, although apparently Hinshaw does not share that opinion.

So Leahey & Leahey may be way ahead of the news reporters in zeroing in on problems in the new UH administration.

A press release earlier in the week reported that former MidWeek publisher Ken Berry is heading to Tennessee.

Berry will be the new Director of Target Marketing for the Chattanooga Times Free Press in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He will report to Jason Taylor another Honolulu Advertiser veteran who recently resigned as Senior Vice President of Advertising and Marketing to become the President of the Chattanooga operation, a subsidiary of the WEHCO Corporation which owns several other daily newspapers including the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

And from the Honolulu Community-Media Council:

Sheila Coronel, Director of The Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, kicks off the Honolulu Community-Media Council’s Ah Jook Ku Lecture Series Freedom of Information Luncheon with her presentation, “Endangered Watchdogs: Investigative Journalism in Troubled Times,” at the East-West Center on March 17;11:30 registration, 12:00 lunch. (Registration form)

I don’t have a whole batch of cats for this Feline Friday, so Mr. Silverman will just have to fill in. I caught him napping between Sudoku challenges, which tend to wear him out. Maybe it’s just the leap year thing. In any case, just click for a larger version.