Did you get the announcement that the Burlington Free-Press had become a wholly owned subsidiary of the Lake Champlain Regional Chamber of Commerce?

Hmmm, It seems we all missed it. But how else explain the 1,400-word platform the Freep provided for Chamber President Tom Torti in Monday’s business section?

Followed by a half page outlining the Chamber’s wish list for the 2009 Legislature and another half-page for two other businessmen to make their own suggestions.

All without a word of assessment or the slightest hint that some of these proposals might be controversial, not to mention inconsistent.

Well, it is the Business section. But in a newspaper, as opposed to a propaganda sheet, that means a section devoted to covering the news of business, not an opportunity to provide a megaphone for businesspeople to pronounce their preferences as though they were princes of one church or another.

Especially when their preferences are as sweeping as President Torti’s. He wants nothing less than the reorganization of  state government in which the Departments of Labor and Economic Development would be eliminated, but then somehow merged, along the way picking up the adult education responsibilities now in the Education Department.

He also wants the state government to do less because “government has grown larger than we can really afford.” Except, of course, where he wants it to do more, such as investing in electric transmission infrastructure. And he wants taxes lowered, especially on the richest one percent of the people.

And just what is wrong with any of that? Perhaps nothing. Torti’s opinions are as legit as anyone else’s. But like anyone else’s, they should be put into some perspective, and would be were they being reported in an actual newspaper, not what appears to be the Chamber’s newsletter.

It isn’t that business’s point of view shouldn’t be in the paper. But it should be there with context, in this case an indication that much of what Torti proposed is not likely to happen, and a reminder that his is, after all, a special interest, to be treated with the same skepticism as any other special interest.

Were this journalism rather than  promotion, the story would have quoted someone-perhaps one of the leaders of the Legislature,  saying, ‘Gee, maybe we’re not going to do all of that. Or any of it.”

Were it good journalism, it would have sought out someone on the other side of the political spectrum. A trade union official. A somewhat liberal economist. (Come to think of it, a centrist economist would do). A representative of consumers. A health care advocate. Anyone who might present a contrary case.

Failing to do this might be acceptable if the Free Press also had, say, a weekly labor Section, or a pull-out devoted to education, or the arts (which its Thursday entertainment guide is not), or police officers and firefighters. Then each interest group could be handed a similar megaphone to present its prejudices. But business is the only identifiable constituency that gets its own section every day.

Because he has committed actual journalism in the past, reporter Dan McLean may well know all this. He did find one semi-independent sources, David Mace, the spokesman for the Agency of Commerce and Community Development, who said…well, not much of anything, really. Aside from that, he simply let Torti run on, not even pointing out the glaring inconsistency (less state spending except where it’s good for the corporate world), raising the question of whether he was ordered not to challenge the interview subject.

Acceptable perhaps in a feature-style personal profile. But that’s not what this was. This was politics.

Likely to backfire anyway, thanks to Torti’s public relations gaffe about the onerous tax burden of the top one percent. The tax structure, Torti said, gives these folks “A reason to leave” the state.

It isn’t that people who earn $348,000 a year (the national figure in 2007) should be under-appreciated and over-taxed. It’s just that the assertion that they are abandoning Vermont because of its marginal income tax rate is too silly for words, a fact that should have been noted in the story (though of course not expressed quite that baldly).

Vermont has been right next to New Hampshire for roughly 250 years, and for the last 30 of them Vermont has had a relatively progressive income tax while New Hampshire has none at all. If rich Vermonters wanted to leave the state because of its taxes, they wouldn’t have very far to go.

No doubt a few have gone. But the number of rich people in Vermont keeps going up. Maybe that’s because they keep getting richer. A study a little more than a year ago found, in fact, that “Vermont’s wealthiest households have seen their incomes grow faster than anywhere else in New England,” as reported in the Free Press by…Dan McLean.

Very well reported, too. But that was back in October of 2007, when the Free Press was still trying to be a newspaper, arguably worth the 50 cents it then charged. Now it barely tries and charges 75 cents. Why pay it?

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