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.
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 thatturned 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.
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.
Apologies for the unannounced two-week absence of this feature. I’ve been out of town a lot lately. Had time to crank out the occasional blog, but not to do a survey of News Content from our state. But, just when you thought it was safe… I’m baaaaaack.
Most of our honorees this week hail from the Vermont Community News Group, which includes several weeklies in Chittenden and Lamoille Counties. Its newspapers routinely punch above their own weight in creating solid content on a shoestring budget.
It can’t happen here. Oh wait, it just did. The good folk of Manchester just discovered that Donald Trump’s unconstitutional ICE crackdown is no respecter of affluence. As the Manchester Journal‘s Michael Albans and Cherise Forbes report, ICE swooped down on a notorious den of iniquity, oh wait, “a small housing development in Manchester” and arrested two unrepentant criminals, oh wait, “Jamaican mothers of school-age children who worked as Home Health aides, as their families looked on.”
Right, a small housing development in frickin’ Manchester, the front line of America’s war on brown people. You know, the thing about the ICE crackdown — well, one of many things about the ICE crackdown — is that they’re not targeting the real criminals or gang members. Those people are too hard to find. ICE is going after people with jobs and responsibilities, people who keep a schedule and have a routine, people who may not have their papers in order but who are assets to our society and our economy.
It’s no surprise that Gov. Phil Scott is turning a deaf ear and a jaundiced eye toward the Queen City, rejecting any idea that his do-nothing administration has contributed to downtown Burlington’s troubles. It’s somewhat more surprising that Democrats on City Council are effectively taking the governor’s side in the argument. Well, perhaps more ill-timed than actually surprising. Because talking like Republicans is what Council Democrats do best.
Let’s take this from the beginning. On August 13, VTDigger published an opinion piece by Burlington’s Progressive Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak, in which she slammed the Scott administration for dramatically increasing the number of unsheltered people and failing to offer Vermont’s cities any help in dealing with the ensuing humanitarian crisis.
The governor’s response, delivered at a press conference last week, was akin to then-president Gerald Ford’s response to the financial troubles of New York City in the mid-1970s, as reflected in the greatest tabloid headline ever written. LIke Ford, Scott didn’t actually say that Burlington should Drop Dead, but he did argue that the city needed to step up and address its own problems before it could expect any outside help.
Even worse were comments made by Jennifer Morrison, Scott’s commissioner of public safety and former interim police chief of Burlington. According to VTDigger’s Shawn Robinson, Morrison described the city as “terrifying” without explaining what she meant by that, and sounded like someone carrying a grudge from her brief tenure as chief:
Hey, remember December 17, when I broke the news that Lt. Gov. John Rodgers’ campaign had reported spending 31.5% more money than it had received? (His final filing for 2024 reported receiving $216,468 and spending $288,588.01.) Curious thing for a tough-minded fiscal conservative, right?
Yeah, watchdogs, hahaha. (VTDigger, which couldn’t wait to breathlessly inform us that U.S. Rep. Becca Balint’s leadership PAC received small quantities of corporate cash, which is absolutely legal, has yet to publish a goddamn word about Rodgers’ violations of the law. Vermont Public, also silent.)
That single published report about Rodgers’ faulty filings, by Seven Days’ Kevin McCallum, quoted campaign manager Rep. Casey Toof as attributing the gross discrepancy to a pair of whopper-sized bookkeeping errors. McCallum also quoted Rodgers as whining about how hard it is to comply with campaign finance law.
Oh, boo hoo hoo, Johnny, everybody else manages to do it. Why not you, or your experienced politician of a campaign manager?
But enough about the past. Let’s bring things up to date.
A pair of coincidentally-timed events have sparked a crazy idea in my mind: There is room in Vermont’s news marketplace for a scrappy upstart operation focused on state politics and government.
You know, kinda-sorta exactly what VTDigger used to be.
And if I were a younger man, I’d be tempted to create something that might be called The Blackfly or simply Skeeter: A news operation designed to get under the thin skins of our political class, to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. I leave the idea in a wicket basket on the doorstep, in hopes that someone will raise it as their own.
You probably heard about the baby race at a recent WNBA game. Yeah, the one where all the babies sat unmoving at the starting line until one of them got up and walked, allegedly for the first time ever, all the way to the finish line. It was a heartwarming moment, at least until the Internet trolls started accusing the baby’s parents of cheating.
Well, the Vermont Democratic Party’s competition for the top of the ticket reminds me of that baby race, except it’s been going on for close to a decade. We’re all staring at these babies waiting for one of them to make a move.
And now, suddenly, one of them has made a move. Unfortunately, the move was to walk off the race course.
Secretary of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas has announced she’s running for a third term, presumably against H. Brooke Paige, the world’s most elegantly dressed tomato can. (This development was apparently of interest only to WPTZ-TV. I’ve seen no other reports on her announcement. Hell, VTDigger ran a story about Copeland Hanzas today that somehow didn’t even mention her 2026 declaration.) But there are three things more important to us Vermont Political Observers than the fact that she’s running for re-election.
It was a little more than a week ago that Gov. Phil Scott held an unpublicized-until-after-the-fact meeting with EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin. The only notice anyone received of the event was a post on the governor’s Facebook page, which included a bunch of photos and a brief caption. Which is all we know about the meeting, since the press apparently got no advance notice.
But yeah, you might hope that Scott’s dignity would have at least bought him a little breathing room from the Trump administration’s savage and unconstitutional cuts in federal spending, especially where Zeldin himself is concerned.
I regret to inform you that any such hopes were completely unfounded.
The Scott-Zeldin confab was on Sunday, August 3. Well, four days later, on August 7, Zeldin delivered a swift kick in the nuts to our groveling governor: The Trump administration announced a clawback of $62.5 million in already-appropriated federal funds meant for Vermont’s Solar for All program, designed to help lower-income people access the benefits of solar power. (The cut was first reported by VTDigger, um, today.) It was part of a larger, nationwide cut in the program, but that’s one hell of a lot of money we’re not going to get, that won’t help a lot of lower-income people take advantage of the Green Revolution or build out our renewable infrastructure or reduce our dependence on out-of-state fossil fuel.
Accompanying the announcement was a cheery little video message from Zeldin himself, labeling Solar for All, a brainchlld of Vermont’s own Sen. Bernie Sanders, ” as a “grift” and a “boondoggle.”
I hate to unload on the same struggling media outlet twice in one week, in this case the formerly respected Burlington Free Press, but this is outrageous.
Notice anything funky about the byline?
Yeah, “Reporter Assisted by AI.”
It’s one of TWO articles on Tuesday’s front page attributed to Beth McDermott “assisted by AI.”
That’s two out of three stories on the front page, the third being a national story from the USA TODAY content farm.
I hadn’t noticed this before, because I can’t remember the last time I picked up a print copy of that rag. But apparently it’s been going on for a few months at least, and it’s deeply disturbing on two significant levels.
The Vermont Political Observer. 