VT Digger, are you joking?

by Rob Roper

This week the online news outlet VT Digger hosted an event in Brookfield titled, “In Facts We Trust: Local Journalism in the ‘Fake News’ Era.” They described it thus, “In an era of misinformation, how do we know the news we’re seeing is accurate? Let’s talk about it together.” Uh huh. And, yes, let’s!

Full disclosure, I did not attend the Digger event not knowing about it ahead of time, and even if I had, I had a conflict anyway. Nor have I seen or heard any accounts of what went down. The following is just my own answer to the question posed.

First of all, if you want to be taken seriously for unbiased, fact-based reporting (as opposed to being a bunch of hacks pushing an agenda driven “narrative” on behalf of partisan political interests), maybe don’t have the former Democrat Majority Leader, Speaker of the House, and gubernatorial candidate (Gaye Symington) be the president of your board of trustees. Cuz for anyone paying attention, that kind of sends up a red – or rather I should say deep blue – flag regarding serious political bias. Call me crazy.

Similarly, having Democrat Congressman now Senator Peter Welch’s former campaign PR flack as your managing editor then editor in chief (Paul Heintz) for five years doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that you’re interested in ALL the facts around particular stories. Maybe hiring a professional spin doctor to run your news division leads to the phenomenon of only select facts – the convenient ones from one particular perspective – making into stories while certain inconvenient realities land on the cutting room floor.

Hientz is gone. Good. But replacing him with the former dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism doesn’t exactly scream we’re correcting course in a more central direction. Time will tell. Hope springs eternal, but the betting odds say something else.

Also, ending public comments to your stories because readers (those pesky things) too often challenged your partisan narratives with differing perspectives and/or fact checked your reporters with, you know, facts: not a good look for an outfit claiming, “in facts we trust.” And, speaking from my own personal experience and that of several fellow conservative writers, how about you publish op-eds from a broader political spectrum instead of just hitting delete when the “wrong think” pieces land in your in-box. (Seriously, you’re not even capable of a polite “no thanks”?)

So, my general advice to readers regarding how to gauge whether or not your news source is accurate, look at the track record. If a news outlet repeatedly lied to you for four years about President Trump colluding with Russia… and hid the facts about President Biden’s mental acuity… covered up the Hunter Biden laptop story, and then untruthfully reported it as being Russian disinformation… ran with a partisan “narrative” regarding Covid 19 policies that turned out to be grossly misleading if not totally false… lied to you for years about the Wuhan lab origins of that virus… tried to sell you the notion that Kamala Harris was cool and “brat” and not just an idiot by NOT asking her tough questions during the campaign… told you that George Floyd protests were “mostly peaceful” while standing in front of flaming neighborhoods… etcetera and so on ad nauseum… yeah, they’re not a credible news source. Pay no attention to them. Ever.

Because these are just the fake news stories we can easily nail down without a doubt. If they’re willing to lie – flagrantly lie, spin, cover-up, and misreport – about all of those critical issues in order to keep and grow one political party’s power, what makes you think they’re telling you the truth about more complicated stories like, I don’t know, the Big Beautiful Bill? Or, what’s really happening in Gaza? With immigration policy? Or, here’s a big one, climate change.

And speaking of climate change reporting, that gets us back to our friends at VT Digger. For nearly five years VT Digger refused to cover in any substance or depth the polices surrounding the Global Warming Solutions Act. Digger would not ask the politicians or activists how much meeting the mandates of the law would cost or how the programs necessary to do so would work. When some tried to bring these answers to the public, Digger used its platform to attack them (thinking here of ANR secretary Julie Moore especially) rather than demand – or shall we say “dig” – for the truth about critical financial and logistical truths regarding what was being proposed.

VT Digger’s mission on that story was not to inform you or give you the facts. Quite the opposite. Their mission was to distract you from what was really happening, and to keep you uninformed. That is how they operate. But the truth did come out. The Clean Heat Standard was shown to be too complicated and cost too much. Same goes for Cap & Invest. And Clean Cars. No thanks to the reporters at Digger.

Now news consumers can look back and see who was reporting the truth, digging the facts, all along and who was not. Everyone has their biases, but track records don’t lie. Who reported the truth about Russiagate? Who reported the truth about Biden’s health? Who reported the truth about Covid? Who reported the truth, and who reported “fake news” on these and other stories and there you will find your answer as to how to judge who is more or less likely to be reporting truthfully in the present. So, great question, Digger! Not sure you’ll like the answer, though you’ll probably find a way to spin it.

Rob Roper is a freelance writer who has been involved with Vermont politics and policy for over 20 years. This article reprinted with permission from Behind the Lines: Rob Roper on Vermont Politics, robertroper.substack.com