On Thursday, the Office of Hawaiian Affairs board will decide whether to spend $172,500 for due diligence. The question is whether to buy a television station. Sources close to the deal point to KITV-KIKU: the local ABC affiliate plus a smaller station with Japanese and Filipino programming.
Both stations are owned by Allen Media Group. The company is quietly offloading more than a dozen stations to pay down debt. Allen bought KITV in 2020 for $30 million. It added KIKU a couple of years later for an undisclosed price.
OHA has its rationale on the record: jobs, portfolio diversification, and more sway over Native Hawaiian storytelling and public messaging.
Twenty years ago, the OHA board considered a similar move. They turned it down without spending a dollar. In 2006, OHA trustees rejected a proposal to buy KGMB. They even voted not to fund due diligence. At the time, critics raised the obvious concern. A state agency would control a local news outlet.
There is, to be fair, a Hawaiian precedent OHA could cite. In the mid-1840s, King Kamehameha III bought a press. It belonged to a struggling weekly called the Polynesian. The paper had recently been made the Official Journal of the Hawaiian Government.
An American transplant named James Jackson Jarves had founded the paper. Under his watch, it had been bleeding money. Royal ownership steadied it. The Polynesian published the laws, the criminal codes, and the legal notices. News, editorials, and the occasional puff piece appeared alongside. It remained the Kingdom’s voice until 1861.
But the Polynesian lived in a world without radio, television, or internet. Only a handful of papers competed. Most subscribers had nowhere else to turn for shipping schedules and government notices.
Today, the Star-Advertiser keeps its readers in part for similar reasons. It is the paper of record where legal notices must run. Many subscribers buy it for the Longs ad. But print newspapers are dying.
Over-the-air television has also been losing audience for decades. It bleeds viewers to cable, to streaming, and the rest of the internet. Allen isn’t selling KITV because the station is thriving.
What’s striking about the Polynesian under royal ownership is not what it printed. It is how it justified the arrangement. In 1845, the journal published that “the government of a nation as a whole, from its commanding position and centering within it the local knowledge to be derived from all its constituent parts, is most likely to arrive at a correct conclusion of what is for the general welfare.” A government, it went on, was the “head and lungs and arms of the body politic, by which it thinks, speaks and acts.”
It is a tidy metaphor. It was also, in 1845, already five years out of date.
The Kingdom’s first constitution, issued in 1840, opens by citing Acts 17. “God hath made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on the earth.” It declares that all laws of the islands shall be in consistency with the general spirit of God’s law.
The Kingdom did not locate the source of correct conclusions in its own commanding position. It located the source elsewhere. It put the work of government under that higher rule.
ThePolynesian’s account of authority did not match the Kingdom’s constitution. But the official journal pushed it anyway. That is the temptation of state-owned media. A government’s press tends to puff up the government.
OHA wants to buy a mouthpiece from the wrong century. It is making a case it cannot quite say out loud. The case: public messaging, properly controlled, can build a nation. It cannot.
Even the Polynesian, with the throne behind it, was one voice among many. KITV in 2026 will be one voice in a roar.
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Author Sterling Higa can be reached at hello@sterlinghiga.com.
