All the fun a wicked god must be having with us
Local journalism must die so the "homeland" can live
Hey everyone! We all made it through another week in the jungle. I think that’s pretty great.
Before we get into it: Couple cool events coming up!
This Thursday, July 17, 6-8 p.m. a Wootenanny Comedy event to raise funds for Rob Bilotta’s campaign against District 2 Councilor Candy Mero-Carlson (booooo) at Ralph’s. Details here.
And then more Bilotta fun on Sunday: a community cleanup on Lincoln Street with the venerable IPickUpWorcesterLitterVeryWell Instagram (a must follow).
With any luck he’ll have some of his shirts, which he was kind enough to drop my way the other day. These things rock.
And then yours truly and organizer-about-town Gillian Ganesan are teaming up for the first of what will be several WORCESTER SUCKS ELECTION SQUAD BAR NIGHTS. Here’s a flyer I made based on The Shield.
A very laid back, unstructured affair. Free, save for whatever you’re indulging for libations. Think of it this way: It’s an open invitation to come down, knowing nothing about how to get involved, and leave knowing exactly what to do. And if you’re already involved, help others get where you are. We’ll have candidates, people from various campaigns, other journalists swinging by on a rolling basis. Might have some light speaking portions and open newsroom-style brainstorming sessions. I might DJ some of my stupid city council songs? We’ll see. For this first one, we’ll feel out the pace of it. The goal is to have a regular night set aside for simply getting a bunch of people in the same room who are amped up on a progressive takeover. Making new connections, sharing resources, coming up with the sort of good ideas that come out of nowhere mid-conversation after a pop or two. The most important objective, and to my mind the most radically political, is turning strangers into friends by way of a common, righteous cause. Come one, come all. Let’s party.
Ok now to business. It was a light news week, but as always there were threads worth pulling. On the docket: a new local journalism report, the city manager’s PR machine, the council meeting coming up on Tuesday, and some other stuff. First, let’s get indexed.
Weekly index
Temporary Protected Status protection for Hondurans and Nicaraguans has ended, making some 11,000 Massachusetts residents freshly deportable. Both are relatively small populations in Worcester, estimated in the low hundreds, compared to thousands in cities like Revere and New Bedford. ⩫ The Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts joined a national lawsuit to prevent the disastrous Medicaid cuts in Trump’s BBB. ⩫ About a hundred new speed bumps and raised crosswalks are set to be installed around the city, goal in mind to make walking less lethal. ⩫ Nu Kitchen announced they’re taking over BT’s failed Worcester expansion at the corner of Park and Chandler, banking on the Nashville hot chicken trend I personally find annoying. ⩫ Bowditch & Dewey, a law firm that governs the city more than city government, is set to open a new office in the “glass tower” that overlooks city hall. ⩫ Crompton Pool opened Thursday after a delay related to a faulty valve. Residents say the delay was the latest sign of a long pattern of neglect. ⩫ Brian Allen told the school committee Trump cuts could lead to a $3.5 million loss for WPS. UMass Chan Medical School is down $42 million in federal grant funding for the year. Latin American Festival organizers canceled the annual event slated for August citing “the current circumstances.” I think we know what they mean. ⩫ Mistrial declared in the ‘Cop City’ case down in Atlanta, where dozens of activists including Worcester native Ayla King face racketeering charges, a bewildering use of the legal statute. ⩫ The public library won a national award for its March Meowness social media campaign. ⩫ School Committee member Alex Guardiola remains hyper focused on the problem (citation needed) of teachers using their allotted and contractually obligated sick days. ⩫ The city released a new landing page on the website detailing a timeline of responses to the Department of Justice’s damning investigation. The timeline omits the police unions’ responses. ⩫ Date of George Street Bike Challenge announced: Sunday, July 27.
Cyber Truckin’
A quick palette cleanser: Turns out a Worcester cop is the proud owner of a matte black Cyber Truck, complete with a windshield as heavily tinted as any ICE agent’s lifted Ford Super Duty in the game right now. The kind of tint that gets you instantly pulled over if the rest of the car isn’t law enforcement-presenting. Got a tip from a reliable source that it was parked at the station the other day in a very visible parking spot with “SWAT ONLY” signs all around it. So I took a drive by and yup. Sure was.
For a few minutes my mind raced with the hilarious possibility this was a new acquisition for the department, the first thing they bought with the fiscal 26 capital spending check that came in July 1. But no, it’s the personal ride of rank-and-file officer—one who I have on good authority from multiple people as being a dickhead, on and off the clock. Personally I was shocked to hear that. Someone who drives that Cyber Truck? A dickhead?
Sometime soon, perhaps by the time you’re reading this, Elon Musk will have added Grok AI to the operating system of all Teslas. That means MechaHitler will be accompanying this Worcester officer to and from the job, providing him everything he needs to know about Ashkenazi surnames—the stuff that the woke media isn’t telling him, he’ll be reminded by an AI programmed to do so. After enough exposure, an impressionable culture warrior might find his worldview hardening around a certain ideology. Not that anyone who buys a truck like that would be an impressionable culture warrior. Not that Grok is a product of any certain ideology. No, it just regurgitates what it’s fed most often. So...
The next section is about how Zohran Mamdani is a dangerous antisemite. Ha ha. Just kidding.
Local journalism dies in the homeland
This week Muck Rack put out a landmark study on local journalism that throws into stark relief a profession that is obviously dying. At least halfway through the back nine, it seems. The headline: From 2002 to now we’ve lost 72 percent of working local journalists nationwide. A little more than two-thirds of a workforce! Over the same stretch of time that it took “the Department of Homeland Security” to go from an idea in a Senate bill to its first cavalry assault of a playground.
As local journalism diminished, the immigrants=terrorists belief flourished, animating the new department’s enforcement priorities and the new concept of “homeland” at the same time. A real chicken and egg situation right there! What came first: the disconnected communities or the scapegoat that needs a disconnected, atomized populace to stick. A decent book proposal, actually. Too much to get into today. Suffice it to say that fascistic scapegoats fall apart when people are allowed to see the genuine article up close—in, say, a puffy feature story about a church group doing a cleanup or block party or what have you. Kind of thing that fills the page on a slow day at the local daily but never in a million years makes it to Fox & Friends, where the scapegoat coincidentally is a main character making hourly appearances and the playground assault launched this week in LA’s MacArthur park is good and brave actually.
I’m reading Reign of Terror, Spencer Ackerman’s 2021 history of the war on terror. Early on he makes this quick throwaway observation I keep returning to: No one in America used the word “homeland” before 9/11. The previously gauche term was suddenly in vogue in the manic rabid wake of the attacks. The brand new agency bearing the name grew like a virus, becoming the primary vehicle for our directionless anger and need for social control. The production company for the death cult TV show in other words.
Thus, via the Department of Homeland Security, “homeland” became the last in a long historical lineage of analogous words analogously used to orient fascist movements. You can thank Democrat Joe Lieberman for that one! A fantastic example of what happens when politicians do what the pundits tell us they should: “reach across the aisle” to “get things done.” It’s in that middle ground—not on the fringes—we found ourselves repackaging some good old fashioned Blood and Soil. Freedom Blood and Freedom Soil. And with “Alligator Alcatraz” we have provided the history books a perfectly American response, as sleazy as it is stupid, to the cold and stiff and Germanic call of “Auschwitz.”
But back to the local journalism study as that’s what I came here to write about:
Less than a quarter-century ago, the United States had about 40 journalists per 100,000 residents on average. Now, the equivalent number is 8.2 Local Journalist Equivalents, about a 75% decline.
Massachusetts is ranked 11th out of the 50 states, at 12.4 local journalists per 100,000. But the figure is hugely padded by Suffolk County, which enjoys one of the highest density of local journalists in the nation, at 28 per. Worcester County nets a lowly 7. Los Angeles County, a national standout for low density and the de facto frontline of DHS’ new domestic war, sits at 3.6.
In a piece I wrote for the Columbia Journalism Review a few years ago, I dug through the archives to quantify the decline of the Telegram specifically.
The country has lost a third of its newspapers since 2005 but two-thirds of its newspaper journalists—some forty-three thousand jobs. The majority of the cuts have come from the hundreds of regional daily newspapers owned by ten large conglomerates (of which Gannett is the largest).
The Telegram, for example, had some hundred and four staffers in 2005. Today, it employs just twenty.
That’s a fifth of the size! Yet, it remains the single largest employer of local journalists in the city. Short of any huge unforeseen media plays on the horizon, the paper of record will hold onto that title for the foreseeable future—of course, until Gannett is done pecking the marrow out of the bones and closes it, something that could also happen in the foreseeable future.
It’s a grim situation with no horizon. Every now and again I become weepily grateful to all the people who’ve supported this outlet. Thank you. And while I’m hitting this note: the best time to start supporting this outlet is today today today folks!
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Come on down!
But that’s not why I’m taking the time to sketch this out. There’s a second part to this story.
At the same time, conveniently, that local journalism has rushed down a precipitous decline, the public relations apparatus of local governments and police departments has experienced exponential growth. It’s true everywhere but it’s glaringly obvious here in Worcester.
The other day I scrolled past this post...
...and realized I straight up do not know who this man is, have never met him or talked to him in my eight or so years covering this city, and have no idea what he does. Worcester has a marketing director?
So I did what any normal sane person would do: went to the Fiscal 2026 operating budget, scrolled down to the city manager’s office section, and looked at the org chart.
Batista has eight staffers doing public relations: a director, a content strategist, a communications specialist, a communications coordinator, a staff writer, a media and public relations administrator (not director, that’s different), and two web support specialists (despite our having a whole IT department?). Cutting the IT guys in exile, there are six flaks in an office of 15 overall positions. There are fewer than six journalists covering city hall in a manner even approximating a full time beat.
More flaks than reporters! The devil’s ratio.
For reference, I pulled the same org chart for 2016 and man it’s a little startling to look at them side-by-side...
Just five staffers spread over the three main divisions of labor. There’s no further breakdown. One we can safely assume is a receptionist. Another doing government affairs. Who knows. Generously, we’ll say two of them were probably public relations types of some kind. This was around when I started reporting here. And there was only one guy dealing with the press full time (hi, John!). He did fine on his own. No complaints. And there were more reporters to deal with then!
The explosive growth of city hall public relations meets the worsening demise of local journalism. You’re looking at a situation where the fourth estate can’t functionally do what it’s supposed to, even if it wanted to (which, oftentimes... debatable, but I digress), while the manager is using public funds to build the apparatus for a marketing machine disguised as local media. A city newsroom with more resources than any actual newsroom in the city and much more incentive to massage the truth for the sake of the brand.
Such power in his hands a city manager could begin to entertain the idea that he can completely dictate the public conversation, and maybe even get a little pissy when he can’t. He might do things like prevent the Human Rights Commission from releasing any statements, prevent it from attaching supporting documents to its agenda, fire the Human Rights Commissioners who disagreed with this and other clampdowns... Might do something like that. Might make it so reporters cannot talk to anyone in city hall without going through his press office for permission and input. Might make it widely known that there are consequences for city hall staffers who break this rule, to the point that I can really only have off-the-record conversations with folks. Many of them are afraid to even provide information on background.
So back to that Facebook post. Computer, zoom out.
John Keough is one of those less-than-eight reporters covering city hall. He says Moore—this guy whose job I totally understand and knew about—“really believes that they only put out accurate information and that they are challenging things that are inaccurate.” So I listened for myself and... wow. Yep. Moore here:
...then you just have to from our own channels put out the accurate information and just keep pushing that because you can't, you know, reach out and correct everybody who's posting on Twitter or Facebook, so that goes back to building that brand right? So if we're able to establish ourselves as a go-to source of information that people can go to...
On and on like that. In this little snippet two things are clear: They see their role as building up an in-house media channel that competes with local media, and that brand management is the orienting principle of that new machine. Goes back to building that brand, right?
Buried between the lines is a strange, vaguely-stated conflation of “difference of opinion”—healthy, we’re told, in democratic societies—with “misinformation.” Negative opinions are inaccurate and thus warrant correction. They correct it by loudly offering a different opinion. The image-obsessed rationale of a brand manager brought into the arena of local government, given more resources than any single newsroom in the city, courtesy the taxpayer, which the brand manager uses to challenge public pressure with a self-serving claim of “accuracy.”
To bring it all back to the chicken-and-egg question I opened with, Batista’s in-house media team played an integral role post-Eureka Street, advancing a narrative that exonerated ICE as much as it did WPD. The WPD did not assist ICE, they said, despite it being obvious that they did. They advanced the idea of a riotous crowd in need of containment, a prelude to the justification used to send the military into LA. They said WPD acted professionally as the whole world watched WPD throw a little girl on the ground and cuff her for the crime of being upset that her mom was disappearing before her eyes in an unmarked SUV with an unknown destination. If I were to say right now that WPD did not in fact act professionally, I’d be engaging in “misinformation” as defined by Batista’s new media apparatus. They may take some action to correct it.
Some version of this media machine exists in just about every city in America I imagine. It’s expensive! Eight positions is a lot of money. And it’s paid for by property taxes, parking tickets, excise bills, and all the rest.
But public funding for actual journalism is, we’re told again and again and again, a slippery slope to the “state-owned media” of the evil communist countries in our collective imagination. The evildoer nations where there’s no free press! As opposed to here where the press is definitely free and exceptional and holds power to account rather than actively facilitating it out of naked self interest. And there’s no careerist bargains made with the truth in exchange for getting or keeping one of the rare nice media jobs that pay well.
So instead we have public funding for The Buzz, a Youtube show in which Eric Batista answers softball questions from his main press officer while they both pretend to drink coffee. That decision was arrived at with no democratic input, by agents of the state. It is media. Do I need to spell this out...
Meanwhile the vaunted free market destroys local journalism every day on purpose and a few harried local reporters hold onto meager, tenuous careers. Dangled in front of them always is the promise of a fat pay raise if they switch teams. Swap out the truth for the brand. Many do so! To the point local journalism starts to look more like a city hall farm team. But in this economy you can’t blame ‘em. Myself, I’d rather do anything else. Deliver the mail, maybe. Hopefully that decision day never comes but being realistic it’ll likely come sooner rather than later. Until then I promise you, dear reader, that with the precious time you’ve afforded me here to pursue the truth, I will never not once spare a second’s concern for the brand.
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When the cavalry eventually shows up on our playgrounds (that $175 billion in the BBB gotta go somewhere) and the cops do less than nothing about it, we’ll have at least eight people working overtime to negotiate the impact of the optics on the city’s brand. And that’s not even counting the police-side PR machine. We’ll have to save that for another time. For now, just take a look at this Masslive story published yesterday: "Raised by undocumented loved ones, Worcester officer seeks to rebuild public trust"
A first ballot copaganda hall of famer right there.
Frustrating, man. What I do in these emails you read used to feed families and send kids to college. Columnists were prized assets of any self-respecting local paper and they were paid well. Now I beg you every week for my right to have what amounts to a gig economy job. Worst part is I’m rightfully proud of the position I’m in. It’s an objectively difficult feat to crowdfund a job as a local columnist, a job you could mortgage a house on back before the DHS existed.
Bergman & Kalkounis’ anti-public petition
The city has a new system for managing its agendas. It’s got some real frustrating downsides: The agenda search function is, at least for the moment, limited to 2021-present. The hosting service requires a login to search and there’s no information at all about how one goes about acquiring login credentials. The municipal calendar—by and away the best feature of the website since it was added back around 2018—is gone and not coming back. That sucks.
Upside: The agendas themselves are cleaner and the HTML versions let you download PDFs of supporting material with one click. This used to be an arduous dozen-click procedure in some cases. Trying to do it on a phone especially had one feeling like a chimpanzee. So my assessment: mostly bad but a little good. Definitely gotta be on their case to make it suck less as they continue to transition over.
Quick look at Tuesday’s meeting: It’s long long long. Too many items to give any item due attention. Here’s the HTML version of the agenda.
—Top concern: They’re trying to restrict who can file public petitions using an incredibly shaky legal argument. By they I mean Moe Bergman and Donna Colorio, with an assist from new City Solicitor Alexandra Kalkounis. The main item is 13c. A legal argument that the city could stop allowing residents to file petitions:
Nothing in the charter, or the general laws, requires a process to allow resident petitions to be placed on the council agenda.
The council will vote on whether to advance it to Moe Bergman’s subcommittee, where it already has the two votes it needs to be sent back to the general body.
—There’s a Mill Street report from city staff (8h) that the cranks will not be happy about:
After 18 months of monitoring, data indicate that there is improved safety on Mill Street. There have been fewer crashes since the implementation of flexposts in the summer of 2024, lower speeds, and improved accommodation for vulnerable road users. While more monitoring is needed to see if the trends hold, what we’re seeing is encouraging.
Good news! Wonder if Jose Rivera is still going to campaign on it being a disaster?
—There are a bunch of electioneering-style orders. Most glaringly so is the tax break for slumlords I went over in my last post on here (11f).
Update to the saga: On The Talk of The Commonwealth last week Joe Petty defended this idea... by saying it won’t work.
“The only way you're going to get out of this is build, you know, keep on building units here in the city of Worcester,” Petty said, adding it’s “the only way you're going to bring the rents down and that's going to take us several years.” The term several doing more heavy lifting in that quote than Taliban soldiers in a freshly abandoned presidential palace.
It’s wrong, of course, to assert that increasing for-profit production via incentives is the only solution available. But it’s wrong in a way that makes the developers happy. So that’s why every official in Massachusetts nominally concerned with the housing crisis keeps repeating it, from Healey to Augustus on down. It tacitly affirms that the government has no power over the market but the power to reduce its own power. A curious argument! One Zohran Mamdani specifically refutes, and to world historical success if you’ll remember.
Kate Toomey, chairwoman of public safety, has an order on the agenda that appears to weigh the interests of the business community over and above the public and its safety (11a). She’s asking for “a report concerning the economic impact property owners may feel should the city adopt [the state law that] mandates the installation of automatic fire sprinkler systems in residential buildings with four or more dwelling units.”
In case you were worried Toomey understood “public safety” as anything other than a euphemism for her chosen family, “the police.”
Lots of other stuff. Definitely worth a scan. You’ll notice there are about 100 public petitions on this agenda where the idea of blocking public petitions is significantly advanced.
The boomerang of enzymes
On Saturday I got food poisoning from a glass of milk. It was so severe I ceased functioning for all of Sunday and Monday, reduced to sleeping, moaning, going to the bathroom. Couldn’t even think. For reasons that would bore I’m sure it was the milk, and I was content to chalk it up to a freak accident. Until a friend pointed out on Tuesday morning that the FDA has quietly given up testing milk. I looked into it and yep actually they did do that. Under the austerity of DOGE and RFK Jr. culture war cuts, the FDA suspended its quality control program for fluid milk and other dairy products on April 21 “due to reduced capacity in its food safety and nutrition division,” per a Reuters article from the time:
The FDA this month also suspended existing and developing programs that ensured accurate testing for bird flu in milk and cheese and pathogens like the parasite Cyclospora in other food products.
Classic government overreach, this making sure people don’t die from dairy products. Waste, abuse, corruption, and fraud.
It’s not just milk. On Tuesday the New York Times Magazine put up a big splashy feature headlined “Inside the Collapse of the F.D.A.” which, having just been victimized by the trend, I read with interest. The agency is doing about as well as I was on Sunday. Rendered useless by some preventable pathogen. In April, NYT Magazine writes, “Kennedy made his first in-person visit to agency headquarters. In a speech broadcast from a private room to a large hall where the agency’s staff had gathered, he doubled down on the sentiments expressed in his October post. The Deep State was real, he said. And the F.D.A. was a mere industry ‘sock puppet.’” Thousands had already been fired. The kicker quote of the piece is the ousted FDA commissioner claiming the agency is “finished.” It won’t be coming back. Milk is free to ruin you from now on.
Anyway after that, I opened a story about X The Everything App’s antisemitically malfunctioning AI chatbot in Zeteo. And had to sit for a minute with this line:
By late Tuesday, Grok was calling itself “MechaHitler.”
Just marvel at it. Think about all the fun a wicked god must be having with us.
Odds and ends
That’s all for this week folks! One more subscriber request for the road.
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Few more things: Assumption College is goated I guess. (We can have goat lawnmowers but no chickens?)
The Pulse rocks, lol. They put a picture of Nicks, a bar that isn’t even there anymore, in the Vincent’s section of their ‘best Worcester bars’ feature recently.
In a lovely little profile of Donker Farm from the Telegram there’s a hall of fame Colin Novick quote.
The evidence of the moose is there, said Colin Novick with the Greater Worcester Land Trust, adding "the more you look for the animal, the less likely you are to see it," but the "reservoir lands are pretty good for moose."
Describing the animal as a "stealth moose," Novick said it rarely ventures over the line from Holden to Worcester, but it does happen every so often. The bears on the other hand are frequent visitors.
The “stealth moose.” A Tom Clancey children’s book in the making I think.
I saw the Grateful Dead cover band Dark Star Orchestra up in Maine Friday night with my dad and my uncles. (I am the progeny of hippies and will defend the Dead to my last dying breath as the most important, transformative American rock band post-1960.) They played an eclectic mix, including the late-period “So Many Roads,” a song I didn’t know going in but now know goes extremely hard.
Ok til next time!
I'm glad you are feeling better. Food poisoning is serious. I wonder what it will take for those non essential employees to be made essential again. The Telegram will die when their older readers stop subscribing. I used to read Clive McFarland and Dianne Williamson's columns now there is nothing worth reading.