Peter Hirschfeld, now chief of the Times Argus and Rutland Herald’s Vermont Press Bureau is a nice guy, easy to chat with, seems to be a hard worker, doesn’t seem to have an agenda when you talk with him. That’s why it’s so maddening that he seems almost to create opportunities to subtly inject right-wing engineering into his reporting. Case in point, today’s front page piece about the evolution of the much-maligned Challenges for Change. Here is the second sentence (emphasis added):
“[Challenges for Change] has been criticized by members of both parties as a disingenuous scheme to shore up budget deficits without making difficult spending decisions.”
So the public outcry against Challenges happened because it wasn’t cutting state programs enough? Seriously?
I live in Montpelier. I – and several other front pagers who live across the state from Franklin to Windham Counties – reported on the Challenges kerfuffle from our own experience and involvement. Of the roaring objections that consumed the Statehouse like a tsunami, shattering trust between many Vermonters and their elected lawmakers, I never heard one that could be characterized as objecting that it was a way to avoid cuts. I believe, as the program’s star started falling over the following days and weeks, I did read a smattering of complaints to that effect in some of the newspaper coverage, but it sounded more like right-wing rats leaving the sinking ship, quite frankly.
So it wasn’t the issue. The issue was quite the opposite. Draconian cuts were being offered out of the blue. Advocacy groups were blindsided and not allowed into the process. It was being fast-tracked in such a way to grease it through with little-to-no scrutiny and public input. Additional agenda-driven elements, such as the complete dismantling of the environmental permitting process – were included. Tempers flared, as many lobbyists and activists felt that their allies in the legislature had taken a policy baseball bat to the back of their heads when they weren’t looking to fill the budget gap in a way Governor Jim Douglas preferred. And that’s the reason you didn’t hear the kind of objections Hirschfeld suggests drove the pushback – because the GOP Governor was driving the process, and had his troops well in line.
This is the criticism and anger that derailed the Challenges freight train. There were no objections of the kind characterized by Hirschfeld to be found, early on.
But consider how – in one sentence – Hirschfeld has rewritten history, informing not simply the rest of his piece, but the ongoing understanding of the political dynamics in Vermont.
In one sentence, Hirschfeld retroactively rewrote history, re-branding the grassroots public rage that scuttled Challenges from a progressive surge, to a conservative one.
In one sentence, Hirschfeld has married the political dynamics of Vermont to the tea-party-driven political trends sweeping much of the rest of the country.
In one sentence, Hirschfeld has potentially impacted future debate over these issues by suggesting lawmakers need to be ignoring the left and placating the right.
In one sentence, Hirschfeld has attempted to shift the center of the entire political debate over the budget.
Words matter. I don’t know why Hirschfeld so often does this, but it’s gotta stop. If it’s to be “advocacy journalism,” please start labeling it as such.
the comment itself is not actually inaccurate– members of both parties have made this claim, though it’s not the reason many (or even more than a few) Democrats objected to Challenges for Change. That was a small part of my objection to it– it was a cowardly attempt to create cuts without taking responsibility for the cuts themselves, but that’s far from my major objection to Challenges and was the focus of one small piece out of a great many I wrote about it.
What does it mean to “shore up budget deficits”? Usually, I think about it as “shore up” as a synonym for support, or prop up. But, what does it mean to “prop up budget deficits”? Keep them at the same level? Or did he mean shore up the budget by stabilizing the deficits? Until we know what he meant in this first part of the sentence, we can’t know which of the possible alternate readings applies. Just poorly worded all around. I personally would have interpreted it as saying it gave political cover to the legislature by not requiring them to go on record about which spending cuts were made, and then blame the executive branch when popular programs were cut (“after all, we intended the departments to run smarter and more efficiently, not cut programs that affected Vermonters”). But then again, I was probably reading into the nonsensical statement my own bias about the program.
between the Challenges and the layoff agenda that was surrounding it, and the now present mess with the backlog of elderly abuse cases that are being exposed for cleanup by the Shumlin administration. Not that Peter was on the front lawn with a NO TO CHALLENGES sign, but Jim=jobloss was the guy driving the train…
The whole point of Challenges for Change was to enable the Legislature to cut funds from the budget while pretending that programs were being redesigned or made more efficient, instead of being slashed.
It didn’t take long for it to become brutally obvious that this wasn’t true, and agencies that provide vital services are still dealing with the fallout.