VT Media Watch: Totten’s Sloppy Welch Kiss

Shay Totten of Seven Days has been known to document the shady revolving door that goes from political job to journalism job (and vice versa) in our small town known as Vermont. I guess he should know about the phenomena from experience since he has, after all, gone from journalist to employee of former Auditor Liz Ready and then back to journalism. Dizzying, I know.

Totten appears to be keeping the revolving door between covering politicians and working for them well-greased if you consider his recent sloppy kiss of an article that he wrote about Vermont’s lone congressman, Peter Welch (“The Man of The House.”).

The headline should give you a hint about how far over Totten bent to supply Welch with nothing but accolades and applause lines. But the article is worse if, like me, you find yourself hoping that Totten and Seven Days would deliver on their “alternative media” tagline. No such luck here.

In his two-page feature, Totten waxes poetically about Welch’s great accomplishments with regards to the health care debate and his (cue laugh track) anti-war stance. But when Totten isn’t serving up his own chapped-lips for more Welch kisses, he serves up one quote after another from Welch’s friends and colleagues who (guess what?) have nothing but praise for Welch’s “skill, temperament, experience, and interpersonal skills.”

Please, get a room.

Quoting all this praise isn’t a bad thing in and of itself. It only becomes a glaring problem when you realize by the end of his article that Totten hasn’t quoted one, single person who has anything critical to say of Welch and/or his record. Not from the right. Not from the left. No one.

But let’s step back and look once again at the issues Totten-via-Welch are declaring to be Welch’s great successes.

First up: health care. How is it that Welch can be “succeeding” in the health care debate when it’s so obvious that real health care reform (read: single-payer and even the so-called public option) is off the table? Smells like a failure to me.

And how about the wars? Totten gushes about how Welch “was a vocal critic of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan when he ran, and won, in 2006.” But then Totten refuses to report how Welch has voted repeatedly since being elected to fund BOTH wars.

Laughingly, Totten lets Welch off the hook by serving up his old and tired claim that he supports “timelines” for withdrawal of troops when he votes to appropriate more money for the wars. But how’s that strategy working out for him? Well, in 2007, Welch insisted that his vote for more Iraq war money at the time would lead to an end to the war by September 2008. Yes, September 2008.

But Totten doesn’t bother to trot out these kinds of facts or take a minute or two to contact someone who could provide him with an alternative view. Instead, Totten declares Welch victorious with his war stance – never mind the facts.

Worse, Totten lets Welch spit this line out without any opposing view: “The major thing in electing Barack Obama was to bring our troops home.”

Who amongst the sane – let alone the “alternative media” – believes that Obama is trying to “bring the troops home”? None that I know of. In fact, nearly two thousand Vermont National Guard troops are about to be deployed for Obama’s wars in the next couple of months, a deployment that is the largest in the state’s history. Moreover, there’s talk of a troop surge in Afghanistan and hemming and hawing amongst the Obama Defense Department about meeting the absurdly slow (and largely mythical) troop withdrawals from Iraq.

So how is it that Welch is succeeding here? Because, once again, it sure smells like failure to me.

Totten’s article on Welch should be considered “exhibit A” on how members of Congress can continue to be popular while the Congress itself is detested by the populace. It’s because members of the local media – alternative or otherwise – serve up nonsense about “their” congressman succeeding despite the obvious facts to the contrary.

If Congress is so clearly bungling health care and the wars, how can Welch be succeeding? When Welch delivers on his campaign pledges to provide single-payer health care and END the wars, then we’ll trot out the “success” word. But, for now, Welch is little more than a political loser.

Tottten won’t say that – not if he wants that revolving door to keep spinning in his favor. Too bad.