Larry Geller on Disappeared News highlights an AP article which says what Save Kahului Harbor knew from the beginning – The Superferry wasn’t economically viable and was bleeding money — in default to the State as early as 2008.
Today’s Star-Advertiser buried the AP story Superferry was in trouble early in its run (7/21/2010) as best it could. It ran on page B3, although in fairness it was pretty prominent once you got there. There was no teaser pointing to the story.
Try and find it on their web page. It’s there, down in the fine print.
The thrust of the AP story is that the Superferry was unable to fully pay the required fees to the state starting in July, 2008, and that the Lingle administration was aware of the company’s economic difficulties.
The “disappeared” news is that our media could have figured this out sooner. Bloggers ran through the simple calculations needed to demonstrate that the ferry company was almost certainly losing money. Hawaii Superferry had enough money to pay for web ads that appeared on newspaper sites, though.
Read the whole article at Disappeared News
More details here.