When state Sen. Russ Ingalls, a conservative Republican, bought a bunch of Northeast Kingdom radio stations earlier this year, he indulged in some high-toned blather about emphasizing local information and keeping politics out of the product.

Well, now we know how that turned out.

As VTDigger’s Shaun Robinson reports, Ingalls has raised some ire among liberal listeners by getting rid of newscasts from major network broadcasters and the Associated Press and replacing them with, you guessed it, Fox News.

And that’s the way our capitalist media system works, isn’t it? He who pays the piper calls the tune. Ingalls is well within his rights to air whatever kind of newscasts he wants. (Thanks, it must be said, to Ronald Reagan’s deep-sixing of the Fairness Doctrine, which required broadcasters to fairly represent all points of view from the birth of electronic media until its repeal in 1987.)

Actually, when I first scanned the headline, I thought he’d replaced the stations’ entire programming with far-right conservative talk. He hasn’t. He’s decided to air Fox News in the brief window devoted to news at the top of each hour. Which usually amounts to no more than a couple minutes of news along with plenty of advertisements.

Point being, if you depend on commercial radio newscasts to keep you informed, it’s kind of like making Lunchables the foundation of your diet.

So I don’t have much of a beef with Ingalls’ decision. I do have trouble, and plenty of it, with his comments about the situation. Which reveal him to be a tunnel-visioned ideologue with no patience for criticism of himself, the country, or its current (you should pardon the expression) leadership. Not to mention his open contempt for constituents who disagree with him.

Ingalls told Digger that he abandoned his commitment to avoid injecting politics into his stations — well, he didn’t put it that way, but — after hearing from listeners who wanted him to “do something about the news,” which they saw as overly negative toward the manbaby in the White House. Ingalls said he chose Fox News for its more “positive” outlook on the country.

“Just because CBS, ABC, NBC and AP hate Trump doesn’t mean that the rest of America does. I mean, he’s our president,” Ingalls said. “I was tired of the negativity that was coming from all those other news sources. That’s not what my stations are about. That’s not what Russ Ingalls is about. It’s not … how I run my businesses. I like cohesiveness. I like people getting along and being together.”

The only people who think the mainstream media “hate Trump” are the true believers of the far right, whose numbers clearly include Ingalls. He was “tired of the negativity” so he used the power of his purse to silence the messages that made him uncomfortable.

As for that thing about “I like people getting along and being together,” well, bullshit. He likes people getting along the way Trump likes people getting along — by agreeing with him in every respect. If you don’t agree with Ingalls that “this country is doing very, very well,” then he has no time or patience for you and he doesn’t want to hear any bad news about the country or its chief executive.

Ingalls is part of a conservative cohort in the Statehouse whose growth can be laid at the feet of Gov. Phil Scott. He collaborated with a bunch of conservative candidates last year, and he gave them cover for their far-right views by giving them a simple, anti-tax platform to run on.

It can also be laid at the feet of Vermont Democrats. By their years-long failure to mount effective challenges to Scott, they’ve allowed him to set the agenda and they’ve botched opportunities to hammer away at his Teflon coat. Scott may profess to disagree with the ultraconservatives in his own party, but he clearly takes full advantage of their support in Montpelier. I suspect that’s one big reason that he’s remained largely silent about Trump’s numerous excesses. He can’t afford to alienate the most powerful wing of his own party and risk losing the support of House and Senate Republicans.

I seem to have strayed from the point of this essay. Which is, as I said in the title, Ingalls can do what he wants with his properties. But as a public servant answerable to all the voters in his district, even the liberals, he shouldn’t belittle those who disagree with him. And his blinkered view of the world is a dangerous thing for the future of democracy.