Monthly Archives: September 2025

Overdue News You Should View

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This feature, which was once published with plausible reliability once a week, continues to break its own schedule with distressing regularity. No excuses, not even a promise to get back to weekly status, I’ll just press forward and do the best I can.

Not to say there’s been a shortage of quality content worth your attention. Our local outlets (and a pair of podcasts) are still hard at work — despite the bad news about the Brandon Reporter and a setback for the Hinesburg Record, which merits a post of its own. Meanwhile, let’s get to the top-shelf offerings, shall we?

If you’re homeless, do you really deserve to own stuff? The usually big-hearted town of Brattleboro has been removing encampments of the unhoused on the ever-popular principle of “If you can’t see poverty, it doesn’t exist.” And in the process, as The Commons’ C.B. Hall reports, there are signs of a cavalier attitude toward the belongings of The Removed. Larry Barrows, survivor of three strokes, lost everything he had via official town action, including prescription medications and “My kid’s Bible, my kid’s photos. It’s devastating.”

Town Health Officer Charles Keir III, depicted in this story as a real piece of work, insisted that during the removals, “I don’t remember seeing any personal belongings that we deemed as salvageable.” He must have an interesting definition of “personal belongings” because he acknowledged that tents are not considered personal property. “We destroy them,” he told Hall. “They go to the landfill.” Well, isn’t that special.

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Turns Out That — Shocker, I know — Charity Clark Is a… POLITICIAN

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I’ve been slow to the party regarding Compass Vermont, a not-so-new entry into our sadly depleted media ecosystem. I welcome its participation, because we can use all the help we can get on the journalism front. I hope it succeeds, although I have some serious reservations about its real merit.

Which brings me to its latest “scoop” and what it reveals about the limitations of Compass’ approach and the broad hints of serious ideological bent.

Compass’ big reveal? Attorney General Charity Clark sometimes exaggerates her accomplishments.

OH NO.

I clutch my pearls. I reach for the smelling salts. I search for the Captain Renault screenshot. I am shocked — shocked — to learn that a politician is acting like a politician.

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Russ Ingalls Can Do What He Wants With His Radio Stations, But He Doesn’t Have to Be an Asshole About It

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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.

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News You Will No Longer Be Able to View

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We interrupt our somewhat-regularly-scheduled feature, News You Should View, to bring you some sad tidings on the local journalism front. As related in the above headline, the nonprofit Brandon Reporter has announced it will cease publication in early October. Ironically, its self-proclaimed last gasp will take place the day before the University of Vermont’s Center for Community News begins its first national conference on university-led efforts to foster and support local journalism.

A bit too late for The Reporter, as it turns out. Although really, the conference is aimed at a much higher level and, even if The Reporter still existed on October 2, would have had little relevance to the struggles of a small, local journalistic nonprofit. But more on that in a moment.

As described in Steven Jupiter’s story, The Reporter had been owned by The Addison Independent, but in 2022 it was sold (or given, it’s unclear) to a group of Brandon residents determined to reinvent The Reporter as a nonprofit. They did their level best, but have now decided to call a halt. Jupiter and his colleagues are painfully aware that, absent a local newspaper, the Brandon area will become a news desert — a place where there is effectively no real coverage of local events. So they’ve thrown a bit of a Hail Mary, hoping that The Reporter might continue in some form.

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