How power communicates at the capitol

On Sunday, the 14th of December, Civil Beatʻs Deputy Ideas Editor Richard Wiens penned an article about “The Silence of The Senate” and how leadership is “not talking”.

Reading the piece, it became clear that while the article identifies the silence—something any observer of the Hawaiʻi Legislature readily recognizes—the deeper analysis of why that silence exists was largely absent.

This writer understands why.

Public exposure to the Legislature is increasingly shaped by how information is consumed rather than how it is produced. For many residents, that means summaries—a short evening news segment, a headline, or a quick online update. Media outlets, responding to audience expectations and attention patterns, operate within those limits. The result is not a failure of reporting, but a structural environment in which sustained, adversarial engagement becomes harder to sustain.

That task has become more difficult in a rapidly changing media landscape where Hawaii no longer has a large corps of reporters stationed full-time at the Capitol. Coverage is concentrated among a small number of outlets juggling multiple beats, even as public expectations for information remain high.

This creates notable coverage gaps—and it is within these gaps that the perception of silence takes hold. Let’s explain.

The traditional media relies on a stated set of practices in order to get a story. From getting quotes to exposing disagreements and policy tension, and obtaining transparent statements that expose, are key practices for journalists to get the story.

However, if one is paying very close attention to how politicians are acting these days, one can very much see that they “get” the press, and have chosen, instead, to flip the narrative from allowing the press to speak on the issues, to the politicians speaking on them, themselves.

Senator Donovan Dela Cruz, who is the Chair of the powerful Senate Ways and Means committee, has refined his control of the narrative to the point where he could probably do a TEDx talk about how politicians can control the narrative.

Senator Dela Cruz does this by communicating his positions through a regular newsletter distributed to subscribers via his website. Published roughly weekly, the updates often respond to prevailing public discussions, allowing him to address current issues while maintaining full control over the framing and content.

And if the savvy political pundit were to think this out, it makes complete sense that the conversation between the Senator and his constituents is probably the most important to him. After all, focusing on oneʻs district is literally the job.

The other benefit for the Senator to keep communication at this level is that he is in total control of the content, which is one-way and non-adversarial.

That this material often receives limited media scrutiny is not necessarily a failure of leadership, but a reflection of how accountability mechanisms have shifted. In fact, again, if the pundit thinks this out, indeed, the Senator is discussing topics that the press wants to hear about. For instance, in July, Senator Dela Cruz came out with an article entitled “Legislators of the People and For the People,” where he speaks about the topic of the time – that of conflicts of interest and drilling down into the rules as to what constitutes a conflict of interest.

While the piece was not focused on him, the fact that his office wrote it should have piqued the ears of the press, telling them that to scrutinize the Senator, one needs to read his materials and not wait for him to do a 60 Minutes type interview in which he tells you everything.

And this should be the clearest example of how the media still assumes that accountability still flows primarily through access—that politicians must submit to interviews and press conferences for scrutiny to occur.

That may have been true in an earlier era. It is no longer how power communicates.

Today’s legislative leaders are not silent. They are prolific. They publish newsletters, issue statements, highlight projects, and frame reform on their own terms. The material is there. The task now is not to wait for a return to the old rules of press-politician interaction, but to interrogate what is already being said—what is emphasized, what is omitted, and how narrative control itself shapes public understanding.

Accountability doesn’t disappear when access does. It simply requires a different kind of scrutiny.