Category Archives: The media

One Last Go-Round for Doug Hoffer

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When you visit the official website of almost any elected officeholder, you’ll be greeted by a picture of said grandee. Or a whole bunch of pictures, because the ever-hungry ego must be placated.

But not Auditor Doug Hoffer. When you visit his homepage, you see a rotating gallery of Vermont writers who have won major awards, including Robert Frost, David Moats, Galway Kinnell, and yes, Louise Glück. I find that refreshing. Touching, really.

Hoffer’s not your typical politician. Sure, he’s got an ego and a sense of his own importance, but he has never ever expressed the slightest interest in climbing the political ladder. He’s kept his nose to the grindstone and produced a lot of great work, holding state government accountable for how it spends our tax dollars. Because as a Progressive (slash Democrat), he believes that government performs many valuable functions and has a responsibility to do them as efficiently as possible.

He isn’t as focused on self-promotion as most politicians. And I think he has suffered for it; his work has been routinely undercovered in our media and often ignored by those in the Legislative or Executive branches who ought to be taking his findings to heart. A couple of factors have worked against him: (1) Democrats and Republicans don’t like Progressives, and that’s his primary political orientation, and (2) he often challenges conventional wisdom, and nobody likes to hear that.

Now he’s on his way out, retiring at the end of his current term. He’s spending some of his last months in office encapsulating his past efforts in easily digestible form, hoping that people will pay attention. Kind of like an old rock-and-roller putting out a Greatest Hits album. Spoiler alert: It ain’t working very well. He’s getting the full lame-duck treatment. It’s a damn shame.

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Strap In, It’s Time for Another Touchdown on Planet Hank

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I hate to give this douchebag the slightest bit of publicity, because it’s what he thrives on. But “Planet Hank” Poitras is someone who needs to be taken seriously. He cannot be ignored. Because he could very well be a rising star in Republican circles. (Governor, any comment?)

Poitras is seen above in a video he posted online himself. Yep, this is his favored public presentation. The problem is, he apparently holds a position (or two) of responsibility in the Vermont Republican Party, and he’s been creating a bunch of AI-generated attack videos aimed at U.S. Rep. Becca Balint and Sen. Bernie Sanders — videos being eagerly shared by Republican Congressional candidate Mark Coester. Poitras is the kind of bare-knuckles antagonist who tends to float upwards in the turgid swamp of Donald Trump’s America.

And now he’s elevating himself to the status of Crime Victim Slash Martyr, a casualty of the widespread lawlessness he gleefully chronicles in his cheap-ass “Cops” knockoff videos.

In case you missed it, Poitras claims to have been the target of a home invasion and deadly attack. The alleged assailant is a young man who was the subject of one of Planet Hank’s breathless videos. The man has been arrested and is in custody. And so far, all we have is Poitras’ word for what happened.

If you think I’m exaggerating, remember that while the Brattleboro police officially cut off any cooperation with Poitras, he has many friends in the department — perhaps including the officer/officers who wrote up the incident. And then ponder this quote from the judge who oversaw the arraignment hearing:

There may be more to the story than is obvious from the affidavit.

So the judge smells something fishy? So do I.

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The Decline of a Once Great Radio Station Continues Apace

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Here’s a phrase that’s probably never been said before: “Soon we’ll be longing for the golden days of Guy Page.”

And here’s another: “Mary Beerworth is the sane person in this group.”

Allow me to explain. Guy Page of the conservative “news” site Vermont Daily Chronicle has announced the end of his association with WDEV Radio, where he had been holding down the 11:00 a.m. weekday slot with his call-in program “Hot Off the Press.” He is, in fact, taking his talents (such as they are) to WVMT Radio in Colchester, where he will host the 12:00 noon slot Monday through Friday.

That, in itself, wouldn’t induce me to write. What put this story over the top was the list of luminaries who will collectively occupy the timeslot forsaken by Mr. Page. All of them have made previous appearances in this space in notably dubious circumstances.

Oh man, you’d better be sitting down for this.

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The Rich Scent of Astroturf Descends Upon Our Verdant Landscape

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This, my friends, is what you get when you ask Canva’s AI illustration tool to render “Vermont landscape.” And it’s a great example of the stuff you see when you visit websites or social media feeds for conservative candidates or causes.There’s a lot of AI usage; there are also things like tech bros defending rural Vermont and sudden-onset farmers with possibly inoperative staycation programs. In short, there’s a hell of a lot of astroturf in the conservative ideosphere.

These groups and individuals allegedly believe that rural Vermont is a precious resource, central to our very identity, and the people who live there are the true, authentic Vermonters, not those miserable lefty masses huddled in our “urban” communities. And yet these people present themselves with an inauthentic feel that makes you wonder what the hell is going on.

With AI maybe it’s a rights issue, not wanting to pay for copyrighted photography. Or maybe it’s just too haaaaaaaaard to do a DuckDuckGo image search. Or possibly, spitballin’ here, these color-saturated simulacra reveal something about the fakeness of the message itself. Because the Golden Age of the “real Vermont” — you know, the time before the unkempt flatlander rabble of hippies and Bernie Sanders fans descended upon the Green Mountain State — never actually existed.

So, when Sen. Russ Ingalls’ The Vermont Party posts a(n AI image of a) lapel pin saying “Make Vermont Vermont Again,” what year or time period does he have in mind?

I’m guessing it’s before the construction of the interstate freeway system, the development ranked by longtime journalist Chris Graff as the most consequential in recent Vermont history*. Before the freeways came, Vermont was a sleepy backwater that was difficult to navigate, so hardly anybody bothered to try. The freeways made our state much more accessible, enabling the arrival of those damn hippies and progressive types who eventually staged a hostile takeover of Vermont’s social order. (Never forget, Romain Tenney died for your sins.)

*Census data confirms Graff’s hypothesis. Our population grew extremely slowly from 1900 to 1960. The freeways triggered three decades of double-digit growth, sending our population from 360,000 to 563,000.

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More evidence That Our Machine Overlords are Not Quite Ready to Take Over the Planet

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There’s a video clip making the rounds. It’s from an AI-generated YouTube channel offering “news” about the wonderful world of pro wrestling. The machine narrator is uncannily making its way through the AI-written copy when it comes to the acronym “WWE,” kind of a fundamental item for a wrestling channel. It doesn’t know how to pronounce “WWE,” and falls into a doom loop. At first it’s repeating “Wu-Wu-Wu-Wu-Wu-Wu” over and over again. Then the voice takes on a tone of desperation, as if it knows it’s screwing up but can’t stop. Eventually the sound devolves into a bunch of truly disturbing chokes, splutters, and noises not found in nature. It’s entertaining until it gets really uncomfortable.

I thought of this while reading a recent offering from Compass Vermont, the presumably AI-generated Substack newsletter. I don’t spend much time on Compass because it is completely unreliable. Some stuff is fine, there’s even the occasional scoop. But a lot of it reveals a conservative bias. And worse, the site offers no transparency whatsoever about who’s writing, who’s editing, or any information at all about its internal processes. No staff are identified except for Tom Davis, Compass’ “founder.” His ongoing role is not described.

I can’t say for sure Compass is an AI product, but it sure displays the hallmarks. And the item in question, “Update: Late filings reduce Vermont’s 2027 committee chair turnover from 13 to 8,” shows what happens when AI takes a pratfall into the mud and can’t get up again.

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The Reformer Steps Into an Ethical Quagmire

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There are certain words in our language that need to be replaced occasionally because of context. Think “used car” becoming “previously owned vehicle,” or “garbage man” becoming “sanitation engineer,” or “undertaker” morphing into “mortician” and then “funeral director” and probably “bereavement facilitator” next. Or the various, now-unspoken descriptors for racial and ethnic groups and people with disabilities.

And in this age of grasping for revenue in the news business, we have “advertorial” becoming “sponsored content” and now, apparently, “content revenue.”

So I gather from a recent Brattleboro Reformer story about the hiring of longtime radio personality Peter “Fish” Case as “director of content revenue” for the paper’s parent company Vermont News & Media — the outfit owned by not-at-all-fishy Belarusian currency trader Paul Belogour.

We’ll get back to the whole “content revenue” thing and how it might affect the journalism on offer at Belogour’s three papers, The Reformer, The Bennington Banner, and The Manchester Journal. But there’s a more immediate question about the ethics of Case’s hiring that goes absolutely unmentioned in The Reformer‘s story about the hire. (The piece carries no byline, which means it wasn’t written by a reporter or editor. It’s a glorified press release, is what it is. There’s a little red flag off the top.)

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House Leadership Suffered an Embarrassing Defeat Last Week, Not That Our Media Took Much Notice

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A former House speaker once told me that they never brought a bill to a floor vote unless they were certain of the outcome. Otherwise they’d put it off while they nailed down the necessary votes.

Last Wednesday, Speaker Jill Krowinski fell afoul of that maxim. Or ignored it, or didn’t care.

The full House was considering Act 181 dismemberment reform, which turned out to be a lengthy floor debate with plenty of amendments. And something happened that only rarely happens: the minority Republicans won a couple of votes. They actually had an impact on the process.

“In all of my 18 years, I can’t remember that happening,” Republican Rep. Mark Higley told the Vermont Daily Chronicle — the only media outlet to report on Wednesday’s events as a noteworthy, standalone story. Which is a depressing statement on the health of our media ecosystem, but we’ll get to that later.

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VTDigger Makes a Good Hire, I Think

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This truly is the Golden Age of cheeseball graphics, isn’t it? Although this one is perilously close to the line between “crafted by a top-shelf management consultant” and “xkcd cartoon.”

Anyway, to the matter at hand: the Vermont Journalism Trust hiring Brendan Kinney as its new CEO. Let’s stipulate off the top that I don’t know Kinney, have never met him, and have spoken to no one about him. This is me standing outside the forest, unencumbered and/or disempowered by inside information.

It seems like a great move in many important ways. But I do have some caveats, and some thoughs on how the announcement was covered.

Judging solely by resumé, Kinney has a lot going for him. He’s been a top executive at Vermont Public for a long time — before and after the merger of Vermont Public TV and Vermont Public Radio. (Not everyone survived that transition.) He was in charge of development, a.k.a. fundraising, for one of the most successful nonprofit organizations in Vermont. He knows the landscape and the audience as well as anyone, he knows what works and what doesn’t in terms of audience engagement in these parts.

And public media is the model for the nascent world of nonprofit journalism. For decades, public media have been raising enough money to build strong, vibrant enterprises. The new wave of nonprofit outlets is playing catchup, and could do far worse than emulate the development successes of public media

So, Kinney’s a home run, right?

Possibly. But I do have questions.

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For Local News Day, I Dream of a Bottom-Up News Ecosystem

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Oh, looky here, we’ve got another billionaire with a plan to “save America’s newspapers.” Have we learned nothing from Jeff Bezos?

I mean, maybe Florida-based 73-year-old David Hoffmann is the real deal who will do what Bezos and Alden Capital and whatever Gannett brands its processed news-ish product these days have failed to deliver: A viable, profitable model for relevant journalism. But seriously, how many eggs am I willing to put in the billionaire savior basket? Especially since Hoffmann is a micromanager who daily pores over the 140 papers he’s invested in with a red felt-tip pen, thinks that the Associated Press leans “sometimes a little to the left,” and believes that ultra-local “boosterism” and “pivoting toward paywalls” are the keys to making money in the news business.

Oh, also, this is his “home.”

Just a regular guy. Puts on his pants one leg at a time. With the help of a valet, I’m sure.

But I digress, bigly. I’m here to spin a fantasy in honor of April 9, “Local News Day,” a “national day of action connecting communities with trusted local news.” (Maybe I’ll see you at the LND event at the Kellogg-Hubbard Library?)

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Here’s One Guy Who’s Glad Vermont Has No Ethical Guardrails for Local Officeholders

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Seems to be a bit of a kerfuffle down Chester way. It goes back a couple weeks, but it hasn’t been noted beyond local press accounts.

At its March 18 meeting, the Chester select board was doing a bit of routine annual business: designating newspapers of record, where official notices are to be published. And boy, did board chair Lee Gustafson try to pull off an unconstitutional power play. His behavior ought to warrant an ethics investigation except that, well, the underfunded, understaffed state Ethics Commission has washed its hands of local ethical issues due to a lack of resources. So he’s probably off the hook.

The select board ultimately voted to continue with two papers of record: The Chester Telegraph and The Vermont Journal. But Gustafson used his position of authority to try to kneecap The Telegraph’s journalistic independence. If he’d had his way, The Telegraph would have been cut out.

The Telegraph is a proud independent local paper that often punches above its weight. The Vermont Journal, generally speaking, is not much of a paper. It describes itself as an “upbeat” publication and most of its content is more fluff than substance. (Its “News” section consists largely of repurposed press releases.) However, it did itself proud in reporting on Gustafson’s attempted bullying of The Telegraph. The Journal’s was the most complete account, since The Telegraph took a very restrained approach for some understandable reasons.

But let’s get back to what happened, viewable on the select board’s YouTube channel.

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