Vermont
Can you survive on a diet of Froot Loops?
No? Then how can you get by with the journalistic equivalent -- the Burlington Free Press?
I appeared on the local television station CCTV, run by the Center for Media and Democracy in Burlington, Vermont. I got into a little verbal interchange with local reporter (and Free Press & Gannett lifer) Candy Page, in which she chose to take offense at my analogizing the Free Press to Cheez-Wizor Froot Loops. The exchange happens about half-way through the program. See it here.
The local "independent weekly" (whose staff political reporter, Ken Picard, was on the program with myself and Ms. Page) features a little blog by its online editor, Kathy Resmer, in which she rushes to Page's defense. Unfortunately, in so doing, she takes both my and Page's comments out of context, making it sound as though I attacked Page. I didn't. We were talking about the media, and particularly the Free Press, which I likened to processed food products. Page took it upon herself to ask me directly if I was calling her work of 30 years "Froot Loops". I told her that I wasn't talking about her work specifically. She stayed offended. I thought it made great TV.
Even Froot Loops has some nutrional quality. Cheez-Wiz, too. They even taste good sometimes. But do you really want to eat them?
