Back in 2021, global currency trader Paul Belogour purchased three long-established Vermont newspapers: The Manchester Journal, The Bennington Banner, and The Brattleboro Reformer. It was part of a Brattleboro-area property buying spree by the mullet-haired skillionaire. At the time I noted that it could be a very good thing to be owned a rich guy who could prop up the struggling papers — or a very bad thing because rich-guy owners (See Also: Bezos, Jeff) can be inconsistent stewards with no concept of journalistic ethics. And Belougour’s homeland, Belarus, was dubbed by Reporters Without Borders “the most dangerous country in Europe for media personnel.” That’s saying something, since Putin’s Russia is right next door.

For the most part, things have seemed… okay at the three papers. The paper has published the occasional op-ed or letter from Belogour, mainly parroting Putin’s worldview on European affairs and alleged corruption in Ukraine. But he hasn’t meddled too much in the newsroom as far as I can tell.

Until now.

The above LinkedIn profile lists Alexander Belogour as a “correspondent” for the papers’ corporation, Vermont News & Media. Yes, he’s the owner’s son. And he is a devout Catholic who seems to be part of a national movement toward Catholicism among MAGA men, up to and including Trumpian red-ragger Steve Bannon and Vice President J.D. Vance. Young Belogour is a student at Franciscan University of Steubenville (Ohio), founded in 1946 to cash in on the postwar education boom fueled by the GI Bill (as were many other upstart institutions). Franciscan U was characterized in a 1998 National Catholic Reporter piece as “a sleepy regional college” transformed into an epicenter of conservative Charismatic Catholicism in the late 90s. Enrollment has more than doubled since then.

(The NCR also noted how Franciscan U has infected the culture of the entire city, which should serve as a warning to Poultney, former home of Green Mountain College and possible future home of a university run by a Florida-based evangelist.)

Well, Young Belogour has been spending his summer away from campus as a very busy reporter for his dad’s newspapers. To put it kindly, that’s a mixed blessing. And a troubling portent.

His byline has been featured in The Reformer 18 times since late May, with many stories republished in the other two papers. Mostly they are standard fare: police blotter stuff, a high school graduation, a new housing development, Whitingham’s Old Home Week. But some of his pieces reveal an unapologetically right-wing view that you’d expect from the Vermont Daily Chronicle, not a respected mainstream newspaper.

From what I’ve been told, Young Belogour aspires to be a reporter. Which would make him the heir apparent to his dad’s media empire, including the three biggest news outlets south of Rutland. That’s a scary prospect for those who rely on their community papers for sound journalism.

Y.B.’s ascension coincides with the departure of longtime Reformer editor/reporter Bob Audette, who doffed his fedora in late May. The timing is inauspicious for the future direction of the Belogour media mini-empire.

Y.B. made a brief appearance in this space as the co-author of an uncritical piece about an alleged attack on local rabble-rouser “Planet Hank” Poitras. The story repeated Poitras’ account of the incident without any real attempt at balance.

Some of Y.B.’s other stories are even more overt in their bias.

He’s published a pair of breathless pieces about Branches Family Resource Center, an anti-abortion “counseling center” that conceals its true intent behind vague language of concern while doing everything it can to keep pregnant women from having abortions. Y.B. casts founder/executive director Jean Marie Davis as a heroic rescuer of troubled women who aspires to create “a national chain of safe houses for women to escape sex trafficking.” Davis implies that abortion providers conspire with sex traffickers and pimps “to exploit vulnerable women” and force them to abort pregnancies. It’s a popular talking point among the MAGA crowd, and it’s complete bullshit.

But The Reformer, under the byline of the owner’s son, published it — twice! — as the unchallenged truth. Leaving aside the obvious bias of the two pieces, why publish profiles of the same outfit two times in quick succession when your newsroom is seriously resource-starved?

And then there’s Y.B.’s fawning profile of Daniel Banyai, the former operator of a militia training ground in Pawlet who was convicted and served jail time for flouting local zoning and permitting laws. He wasn’t specifically charged with terrorizing his neighbors, but that’s certainly what he did.

In simple journalistic terms, there’s no excuse whatsoever for The Reformer to publish a piece about a guy who lives in Rutland County. It’s just not a local story.

If you squint real hard, you could talk yourself into this being local for The Journal, since Pawlet isn’t that far from Manchester. But I doubt The Journal spends much time covering Rutland County, normally the purview of The Rutland Herald.

Setting aside the quite reasonable questions about why this story even exists, the content is even more troubling. It’s a complete whitewash of Banyai, presented here as a victim of “zoning terrorism” who was deeply wronged by vengeful town officials. Dutiful stenographer Y.B. tells us that Banyai, having served his sentence for committing actual crimes that turned Pawlet upside down for years, will now turn his attention to “vindicating himself, taking up lawsuits against various media companies, the town of Pawlet, [town Constable Thomas] Covino and those he said ‘slandered and defamed him.’”

On the advice of his attorney, Banyai refused to disclose any information about upcoming litigation. Anyone in the media community been served yet? Don’t know. There’s been no coverage besides Young Belogour’s worshipful account of Banyai’s Christlike transformation into a champion of the oppressed. Lives of the saints, indeed.

Presumably one of those “media companies” in Banyai’s thankfully metaphorical crosshairs is VTDigger, which regularly covered l’affaire Slate Ridge. In an unfortunate case of bad timing, Digger has just announced a partnership with the Belogour outlets plus the Killington-based Mountain Times. The deal was lauded by newly-installed Digger CEO Brendan Kinney as “a win-win for Vermont journalism and the readers who rely on us for high quality, relevant news.”

It’s one of a series of Digger partnerships with local newsrooms around the state, which largely consists of recycling content to fill the news hole sharing stories across platforms to, ahem, better inform readers about what’s happening across the state.

I may have more to say about these partnerships in a separate post but for now we’ll just note that the timing of this announcement couldn’t be worse, when Young Belogour is spreading his right-wing ideology all over his dad’s three papers. I don’t call any of that “high quality, relevant news.” Will Digger take a closer look at the company it just got into bed with? Or can we look forward to an upcoming Digger partnership with the Vermont Daily Chronicle?