by Hamilton E. Davis
Reading the news and committing journalism myself in this space reminds me every day of how much my profession has changed over the last three decades. In the journalism trade of the 1960s and 1970s, reporters, or editors for that matter, bore no resemblance to the media stars of today. The lead story in the New York Times the other day reported that Fox News had fired Tucker Carlson; an adjacent article elaborated on how such a cataclysm came about and what it might portend.
No need here to explain who Tucker Carlson is and why the editors of the Times might advance news of his fate ahead of lesser items, like the risks to the Ukraine spring offensive against the Russians, or the doubts of Democrats nationally about the prospects of a President Biden reelection campaign in 2024. Carlson, for God’s sake, is (was) one of the tallest totems in American culture.
At the same time, however, some characteristics of the field endure. Public figures of all kinds--politicians, government bureaucrats, business leaders, command players in all sorts of institutions—hate to be criticized, embarrassed or even mildly rebuked. In an era I now recall through a golden haze, that was just tough. Serious newspapers called them out every day, and in many communities, twice a day.
Those newspapers are gone now, and today’s news sources, local, national, international operate under a different calculus. They can just hide, it’s easy with so few watchers on the beat. They can lie, up, down and sideways, because there’s nobody checking their math. And if they can’t hide or they are uncomfortable lying, they can refuse access—just be unavailable because there is no penalty or cost to be paid for that either.
So, I feel a responsibility today to my tiny corps of brilliant readers to describe some of the issues that I face as a journalist working on healthcare reform in Vermont. What I do now is what I did as a 20-something-year-old in the early 1960s—find out as much as I can about issues I think are important to the public, and make as much sense of them as possible.
The venue in those early days was The Providence Journal and The Evening Bulletin, a single newspaper with morning and afternoon editions. The Rhode Island population is about twice that of Vermont, but everyone read the ProJo so it had enough size to aspire to the same standards as the noise, like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.
Even in those early days, I had my own views about what people might want to know, but my editors were dubious. I can still hear a tough old city editor named Al Johnson saying: “Nobody gives a damn what you think, Davis. Just give the news.”
After a time, however, the paper eased up a bit and sent me to its Washington Bureau, where my work environment changed dramatically. Rhode Island is bigger than Vermont, but not a lot bigger. Everybody seemed to know everybody, and I could wander into the mayor’s office and talk about the day’s issues whenever I felt like it. Washington was different.
I arrived in the spring of 1968, just as President Lyndon Johnson was deciding not to run for reelection, and Sens. Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy were jousting over who would get to face the Republican Richard Nixon in the November election.
In those days, Washington was a cockpit of journalistic competition. The Times and the Wash Post were still the big feet, of course, but there were large bureaus, 10 to 30 or 40 reporters, from all over the map. Papers in Philadelphia, Miami, Baltimore, Atlanta, Dallas, Portland (Ore), Seattle, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Long Island (Newsday), Minneapolis, Des Moines, Little Rock had some of their strongest players on the field every day. Not to mention Chicago, which had two or three bureaus, or the Daily News and the Wall Street Journal in New York, neither of which gave an inch to their cross-town rival. Or the Associated Press and United Press International, news agencies that seemed to cover everything that moved.
Getting the steps right in the daily dance with news sources was absolutely critical. Both journalists and their sources clearly understood what information could be used publicly, and what couldn’t.
There was on-the-record, open to all. Great for press conferences and car wrecks. But then there was background, and in back of that, deep background, and still further back, deep, deep background. Get that wrong and you were dead, headed for a shopper in somewhere like Dubuque. These gradations gave news sources all over government the cover they thought they needed to get facts to the public.
The single source that fed Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of the Post the details of the Watergate scandal that sank President Richard Nixon in 1973, for example, wasn’t identified until years later.
Fast forward to Vermont circa 2023. The UVM Health Network has been at the center of the state’s health care delivery system reform for a decade. Last December, its long-time CEO, Dr. John Brumsted retired and was replaced by Dr. Sunil Eappen, known by all as Sunny. A month or so ago, I asked to see Sunny and was granted an audience.
I met Sunny at the third floor C-suite on the Network’s facility on Shelburne Road in Burlington. Before he arrived. I chatted briefly with Anya Rader Wallack, who is the Network’s Senior Vice President for Strategic Communication; she was scheduled to be in our meeting. I mentioned to her that I was surprised that she had not been allowed to be present at an earlier meeting between Sunny and Owen Foster, the new chairperson of the Green Mountain Care Board. I knew that because I had been told about it by another source, who said that the Foster meeting had been a really “rough ride” for Sunny.
In any event, Wallack brushed the whole thing off and added that she saw no need to be in my meeting with her boss. I then met Sunny and we talked for about 25 minutes or so. We agreed at the outset that we should just chat off the record. Which we did. A short time later, I posted a mildly interesting report on Sunny’s first couple of months on the job, noting only that he had a “rough ride” with Foster.
A few days later I got a call from Wallack, who said that an “important person” had called Sunny and reamed him out verbally for describing his meeting with the important person (Obviously Foster). On that basis, Wallack said, Sunny had told his staff to refuse to talk to me at all. I was to be banished to outer darkness. Well, it would be hard to get much more trivial than that.
So, now I have Sunny telling me I’ve broken the rules. I didn’t break the rules. I published only what another source told me. Sunny described his meeting with Foster in detail, which was fascinating, and BTW, I am sure he never would have brought it up if he thought it would be published. I never used that information in my post. The fact that Foster was angry about the “rough ride” phrasing was Foster and Sunny’s problem, not mine. Sunny, a child of the new era, might not have known the rules himself, but Wallack should have.
The reality, however, is that neither Sunny, nor Wallack, nor anyone else in the high command of the UVM Network has the faintest idea what the rules actually are, or rather, were. They don’t know how journalists function, or they pretend not to so they can blame a reporter for their missteps in the face of information that embarrasses them.
Sunny and Wallack aren’t the only ones who function like that: the whole policy and political world operates in very much the same manner.
A personal piece of evidence for that: Not only have I been banished by the UVM Health Network, I have also been banished by the Green Mountain Care Board, which is the other side of the same coin. I have at times over the past decade been critical of the Board’s performance, but that never had any effect on my ability to engage with the members. Kevin Mullin, the chair of the Board from 2017 until last fall, was noteworthy in that regard. Sometimes I thought he was right on the issue, some times I thought he was wrong. Irrespective of the issue, however, Mullin stood up to inquiries from me, or from anybody else.
Call him on his phone, he answered it—himself. Ask him your question, you got an answer. He never hid. If you wanted to argue some point or other, knock yourself out. He never bailed out because he had a “meeting.”
A couple of months into the regime of Owen Foster, the new chair, I had occasion to go to Montpelier, so I stopped at the GMCB offices on State Street. I was admitted by the administrative assistant, Kristen LaJeunesse. She invited me in and told me that she had been on the job for just three weeks. She seemed very nice. I said I would like to talk to Mr. Foster. She asked me to wait.
A few minutes later, she returned and said that Mr. Foster, as well as the other Board members, were too busy. “I should also tell you,” Kristen said, “that the Board members will be too busy to talk to you in the future, also.” I thanked her and took my leave.
As I drove away, I thought, Wow, back to the Washington of 50 years ago. During my tenure there, President Nixon hated the press and did everything he could to make their lives miserable, but reporters went to work every day, and the Republic survived.
So, what happens when a reporter gets banished, by the Green Mountain Care Board, the UVM Health Network, a specific legislator or office holder, President Nixon, or anyone else?
Well, in an important sense nothing, if you’re a professional—you just keep gathering all the information you can, and assessing it as best you can. In the case of the health care reform project in Vermont, the vineyard I’ve been tending for the last decade, there is a cornucopia of data and information, so much it is often overwhelming.
In just the last several months, I have written a couple of dozen what used to be considered obvious front page stories.
The 11 non-UVM hospitals in the state are costing the public from 30 to 50 percent more per capita than the UVM Network hospitals in Burlington, Berlin and Middlebury. The quality in the non-UVM hospital system is abysmal. The state has 154 more beds than it needs, a huge financial drain on the state. Hospitals in Newport, Springfield, and Randolph, and St. Albans are doing complex surgeries in far too few numbers to meet national safety standards…
These are just some of the highlights in the hundreds of pages of consultant reports sleeping in the Green Mountain Care Board archives, available to all. The members of the Green Mountain Care Board know all about that data because they are the ones who ordered it assembled. Yet they never mention it in their regulatory deliberations…
Still, even if you are persona non-grata, you can listen in on the Board Meetings, and you can still make a comment as a member of the public. You can do the same at Governor Scott’s press conferences. You can attend legislative committee hearings. And there is always the possibility that a player on the field will ignore the stigmata of ex-communication because he or she thinks the public needs to understand a policy issue.
Finally, there is an ironic consequence to shutting off a member of the press. Reporters have to work harder in a hostile environment than in an amicable one, and it is easier in those cases to dredge up negative information than positive. If a reporter is both competent and conscientious, he or she will give a news subject a chance to comment on the issue at hand. Sometimes, the news subject has a compelling reason for acting a certain way or knows something the reporter has missed, and that information can change the tone of the story.
Getting and assessing the story, in short, is harder, but still eminently doable. President Nixon found that out the hard way.
It was a couple of kids at the Wash Post, Woodward and Bernstein, who used the Watergate issue as a way out of covering the comings and goings in Prince George’s County, Md.
There are some enduring lessons, I think, from that era for our current debased policy and political life. One is that the press, or anyone else who is concerned about any policy issue, can expect to get all sorts of difficulties from institutions, politicians, bureaucrats, and just random yahoos who will defend their policy territory tenaciously. Not all of them, of course, and not even most—but still, a lot.
And don’t forget that people can change. Good things can happen as well as bad.
As I have written in this space, the early performance of Owen Foster as the new chair of the Green Mountain Care Board struck me as appallingly bad. He bullied OneCare Vermont, and he seemed determined to do what he could grind every nickel out of the UVM Network, the cost and quality leader of the whole system.
Yet, in a recent round table discussion on those issues, one of the witnesses argued, in effect, that the way to help UVMMC would be to cut its budget by more.”
The other Board members just sat there.
But Foster leaned right in. “How is that possible?” he demanded to know, sounding incredulous. It was just a moment in time. But I thought, okay, that sounded different. Maybe Foster will begin to get a grip on the whole reform conundrum.
That would be a good thing.