Tag Archives: gnat-tv

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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News You Should View: Pre-Summer Slump

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Not gonna lie, it’s a bit of a thin crop from our ever-diminishing media fields. Maybe it was the runup to the first big holiday weekend of the season? Maybe it was the amount of MSM attention lavished — rightly — on the education reform debate in Montpelier? Whatever the reason, I had less than usual to choose from. Still, there’s definitely stuff worth consuming. Also, apologies for posting this a bit late; I was out of town for nine days, and I’m still in catch-up mode.

Just like the good old days. We’ll start with the comprehensive coverage given to the education reform issue. It was front and center in the Statehouse, and our major outlets delivered solid, blow-by-blow reporting. If you followed my personal Big Three (VTDigger, Vermont Public, Seven Days), you got a very good sense of what was going on. It was like we were suddenly transported back to the year 2010, when multiple outlets competed for the big stories.

My only complaint: As a whole, the coverage didn’t much question the fundamental assumption of the debate: that the rising cost of public education is the result of shrinking student population and Balkanized governance. Not addressed, or not enough anyway: the fact that Our Betters are failing to address the real cost drivers in the system: (1) the skyrocketing cost of health insurance, (2) the slow-motion crisis sparked by the state withdrawing its traditional support for school infrastructure almost 20 years ago, and (3) social services for schoolchildren being paid for by schools instead of the Agency of Human Services. Our Betters aren’t trying to solve the problems with the cost of public education; they’re just shifting the burden onto the schools.

A new podcast from the Democratic mainstream. Former state senator Andy Julow and Chittenden County Democratic Committee chair Joanna Grossman have teamed up on a podcast whose title they may come to regret: “There’s No ‘A’ in Creemee.” Cutesy, kind of an inside joke, doesn’t roll off the tongue. But hey, whoever thought “Amazon” was a good name for an online bookstore? Well, Jeff Bezos did.

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News You Should View: Trump-Free Edition

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Well hey now, got us a bumper crop of content worth your time without mentioning the big ol’ manbaby in the White House. Yes, It Can Happen! And we’ll begin with not one, but two stories from VTDigger. It’s hard to imagine where we’d be without Digger, what with the decimation of the rest of our news media. So let’s celebrate the things Digger does well and encourage them to do more.

Official misconduct in the Fern Feather case. I mentioned this in an earlier post, but I want to shine a spotlight on Peter D’Auria’s deep dive into the prosecution of Seth Brunell for the murder of Fern Feather — a prosecution that ended with a defendant-friendly plea bargain triggered by police misconduct. D’Auria’s story chronicles all the ways in which this case was mishandled by police and prosecutors. You come away from it feeling mad as hell, and wondering if Feather’s gender identity played any role in how authorities screwed this thing up six ways from Sunday.

Exiting prison is a “bureaucratic morass.” In an example of the routine Statehouse coverage that no other media outlet provides, Digger’s Ethan Weinstein reported on a role-playing simulation of the process of exiting prison and re-entering society. The system “forces individuals to jump through hoops that many of us in this room would struggle through,” said none other than Corrections Commissioner Nicholas Deml, the person in charge of administering the system. I saw no other reports on this simulation which, in a just world, ought to trigger a thorough overhaul of a system that surely must contribute to high recidivism rates. Probably could also apply to social service programs designed without any input from those who have to jump through an obstacle course’s worth of officially-designed hoops to receive the help they need. “Lived experience,” anyone?

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Stealth Republicans: Pin That Extremist to the Wall

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We can end the competition for Best Moment in a Political Debate in 2022. We already have a winner!

The honorees are state Reps. Kathleen James and Seth Bongartz of Manchester, whose star turn came in an October 12 candidates’ debate on Vermont’s best community access TV service, gnat-tv. The forum featured the three candidates in the two-seat Bennington-4 district. Pictured from right to left (in the photographic sense only): James, Bongartz, gnat-tv moderator Andrew McKeever, and Republican candidate Joe Gervais, seen here desperately wishing he was somewhere else.

Gervais is a Covid denialist, vaccine truther, and 2020 election conspiratorialist among other things. Oh, and he sees the hand of God in random cloud formations.

Throughout the debate, he did his best to conceal his extreme views behind the usual façade of run-of-the-mill Republicanism. But near the end (just before the 49-minute mark in the one-hour program), James calmly rolled out a devastating attack.

When you and I met for the first time on primary night, outside the Arlington polls, you told me you believed that Trump had won the 2020 election and that basically it had been stolen by massive national voter fraud, and that was disturbing to me… And I’ve gotten a call from a constituent who said that you told her that you were at the Capitol on January 6th, the day of the insurrection. And you’re campaigning on honesty and transparency, and I want to know if you were in Washington DC at our nation’s capital on the day that a violent mob attacked it

Ouch!

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