The actual menace in baseball is much less robotic umpires and extra the relentless stream of sports-betting advertisements between innings. You may comply with me by the week on Bluesky, threads and X. Right here we go.
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1. STORY OF THE WEEK: In 1983, 30 years after sharing in a Pulitzer for the ProJo’s protection of an East Windfall financial institution theft, Ben Bagdikian revealed The Media Monopoly. The guide recognized how consolidating the possession of newspapers and TV stations fueled the expansion of large firms, posing a threat of much less protection of such subjects as company wrongdoing, environmental issues and labor points. In a mixed review, The Christian Science Monitor famous Bagdikian’s concern in regards to the fallout of democracy: “And not using a coherent image of the society during which we dwell and particularly of the true causes of occasions, we ‘have a tendency to stay static and bewildered, left on the mercy of whoever acts with energy.’” That echoes within the present second, given how some free speech advocates see multi-million-dollar settlements made by ABC and CBS with President Trump as “a dangerous step toward” the commander-in-chief becoming editor-in-chief. Jimmy Kimmel is again on the air, however about 70 stations owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group and Nexstar Media Group initially introduced they did not plan to air his return. (Trump was displeased with Kimmel resuming his present, stating, “I believe we’re going to check ABC out on this. Let’s see how we do.” And Sinclair has since introduced it is going to return to airing Kimmel.) Sinclair and Nexstar dominate broadcasting in Rhode Island, because the former owns WJAR-TV, Channel 10, and now operates WLNE-TV, Channel 6, whereas the latter owns WPRI-TV, Channel 12. The excellent news is that Rhode Island maintains a aggressive information panorama, with a crucial mass of reporters chasing essential public-interest tales. One examine, for what it’s value, discovered that Sinclair is more about cutting news resources than introducing bias. Sinclair’s takeover of Channel 6 nonetheless displays the continued development of consolidation, and the call for a boycott by a union representing employees there isn’t going to vary that. The larger concern could also be how the business pursuits of large media entities intersect with their enterprise earlier than the federal authorities. As former Washington Put up editor Marty Baron advised Terry Gross throughout a recent must-listen edition of NPR’s Fresh Air, “[T]hey concern that the federal authorities beneath Donald Trump won’t approve their contracts — won’t approve their mergers in the event that they alienate him, in the event that they assist anybody who’s crucial of Donald Trump.”
2. ON THE MOVE: Subsequent Wednesday, Oct. 1, is the official launch for Ocean State Media, a single model bringing collectively The Public’s Radio and Rhode Island PBS after our merger final yr. Our web site will transfer to OceanStateMedia.org. The formal launch of my new video podcast, One on One with Ian Donnis, will come the next week, that includes long-form interviews with a mixture of politicians and folks from exterior politics. It is going to air on TV, be excerpted on radio, and likewise be obtainable on YouTube. For a preview, take a look at current interviews with Helena Foulkes and David Morales.
3. PROTECTING THE VOTE: Underneath President Trump, the U.S. Justice Division is compiling a national voter roll (even when Rhode Island and another states aren’t going along with the effort). Trump has additionally proposed making a nationwide voter ID and utilizing govt energy to eradicate mail ballots and the usage of digital voting machines. These strikes have some observers anxious in regards to the impression on midterm elections subsequent yr. “I believe it’s most unlikely that the president would say the elections are canceled,” Richard Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Challenge at UCLA, lately advised NPR’s Fresh Air. “However there’s plenty of issues he may do together with his energy with the army, together with his energy over federal authorities equipment that may make it very troublesome for some folks to vote.” Rhode Island’s Ken Block is aware of quite a bit about elections. His 2024 guide, Disproven: My Unbiased Search for Voter Fraud, outlines that he didn’t discover sufficient fraud to have an effect on the end result of the 2020 election after being employed by Trump’s staff to seek for it. For his half, Block seems assured that authorized safeguards are robust sufficient to guard the vote from interference in elections subsequent yr. “The Structure says very clearly that the states are liable for the conduct of elections,” Block said during a lengthy video interview this week. “The manager energy of the president’s workplace doesn’t have that energy. It’s one factor to problem the manager order, it’s one other factor to implement it. It’s not enforceable.” In relation to delicate voter knowledge, Block stated, “The federal authorities has all of our non-public knowledge a method or one other.”
4. NEW BREEZE: A court docket ruling this week made attainable the resumption of labor on Revolution Wind, the wind turbine challenge off the Rhode Island coast that’s projected to offer electrical energy for 350,000 houses within the Ocean State and Connecticut. Gov. Dan McKee was amongst these hailing the information (which adopted a lawsuit by the corporate working the challenge and a separate lawsuit brought by the AGs of RI and CT). In a press release, he stated, “Halting a completely permitted challenge that’s already 80% full harms Rhode Island households, companies, and employees. I’m inspired by this ruling that can put folks again to work. I stay optimistic that the courts will proceed to acknowledge the legitimacy and significance of this challenge to our jobs and our power future. Growing our power provide choices is crucial to decreasing long-term prices. That’s why my administration continues to assist an all-of-the-above power technique that features offshore wind, nuclear energy, pure fuel, and hydropower. This strategy diversifies our power portfolio and retains our power system dependable.”
5. RI IN DC: Right here’s some of what’s taking place with the state’s congressional delegation.
***With a possible federal authorities shutdown looming after Sept. 30, U.S. Sen. Jack Reed criticized President Trump’s choice to cancel talks with Democratic congressional leaders. In a press release Thursday, Reed stated partly, “Democrats have a plan for well being care and the funds; Trump and the Republicans clearly don’t or they’d be on the desk proper now fairly than threatening folks’s livelihoods and their well being care. Within the days forward, I anticipate Donald Trump to spend so much of [time] avoiding the reality and making an attempt guilty everybody however himself. However that doesn’t change the info or repair the well being care mess he created. Senate Republicans have already admitted that President Trump is the holdup and all they should resolve this problem is a greenlight from the White Home to barter a bipartisan answer.”
***U.S. Reps. Seth Magaziner and Gabe Amo (a former Pell Grant recipient) referred to as on the Home Appropriations Committee to keep up the title of Pell Grants — the federal schooling grant for college kids with monetary want named for the late former U.S. Sen. Claiborne Pell of Newport — and to keep away from renaming them as “Trump Grants.” In a letter, they wrote, “In stark distinction to Senator Pell’s steadfast dedication to schooling, President Donald Trump’s document consists of efforts to bypass Congress to unlawfully dismantle the Division of Schooling, freeze federal schooling and analysis funding at establishments, stress faculties to roll again key initiatives, together with these centered on range, fairness, and inclusion.”
***Responding to President Trump’s description to the UN Common Meeting of local weather change as “the best con job ever perpetrated on the world,” U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse objected to what he referred to as a sham proceeding by the EPA: “[C]limate denial fraud has metastasized inside authorities, with an arm of the operation working throughout the halls of presidency, permitting fossil gasoline pursuits to seize and exert official authorities company energy.”
6. CLUB FED: The president’s effort to remake the Federal Reserve hovered like an invisible 800-pound gorilla when Fed Chairman Jerome Powell spoke throughout a Higher Windfall Chamber of Commerce occasion in Warwick this week. Moderator Laurie White didn’t ask Powell about this and he in all probability would have steered away from the controversy anyway. Powell did not directly wink at it whereas rebutting fees of partisanship on the Fed. “Many individuals don’t consider us, as a result of — they [say,] ‘Aw, c’mon, you’re actually political,’” he stated. “However [the] reality is, largely people who find themselves calling us political, it’s only a low-cost shot. And likewise we don’t interact. Our argument is doing our jobs. We don’t get into forwards and backwards with exterior folks. We simply do our jobs — we hold our heads down and do our jobs, that’s what we do.” In different key takeaways, Powell stated he anticipated a restricted impact from Trump’s tariff program and he stated it’s too quickly to evaluate the financial impression of synthetic intelligence, though he stated tech innovation often results in better financial progress.
7. RI’S ECONOMY: As a businessman who twice ran for governor, Ken Block doesn’t mince phrases in outlining his view of what’s limiting financial progress within the state. “The largest problem now we have by far is the Common Meeting,” Block stated during our extended interview this week. “Yearly there are payments which are put ahead that might severely not solely drawback Rhode Island, Rhode Island companies, however probably value them a fortune. We’ve a business-unfriendly Common Meeting.” Whereas audio system are inclined to put the brakes on “doing probably the most hurt,” Block stated, he additionally factors to how the state funds grew by billions of {dollars} since through the Covid epidemic (thanks largely to an inflow of federal {dollars}). “We haven’t dropped our funds since Covid has gone. And everybody’s questioning how we will hold paying for it. We will’t. And so long as we don’t make some modifications, we’re ravenous and in search of locations the place we will tax entities and folks for different issues. And usually talking, uh, our Common Meeting spends like drunken sailors on depart. And that’s an issue for us as a result of we don’t have limitless pockets.”
8. POLITICS & WOMEN: Girls candidates are inclined to win after they run for elective workplace in Rhode Island. It’s additionally true that GOP ladies corresponding to Arlene Violet, Susan Farmer, Nancy Mayer and Claudine Schneider helped spearhead victories for the Rhode Island GOP when it typically held statewide places of work again within the ’70s ‘80s and ‘90s. That’s why it’s value noting how the variety of GOP ladies within the Common Meeting has doubled — albeit simply from two to 4 — since 2013.
9. LIFE SCIENCES: On the floor, the work of five inaugural members for Rhode Island’s new life science incubator sounds precisely just like the sort of forward-looking innovation the state has searched for years. XM Therapeutics, for instance, touts its growth of “novel therapies to restore the extracellular matrix.” P53 Therapeutics targets “genome guardian p53-loss or mutation in most cancers with small molecules that use p73 or built-in stress response.” You get the concept. However tales about Raleigh-Durham challenging Boston’s biotech dominance and Boston’s biotech winter increase the query of whether or not Rhode Island has missed the second. Home Speaker Joe Shekarchi, who helped champion the transfer towards life sciences, argues that decrease prices and new services within the Ocean State protect a gap for progress. “This can be a nice alternative for us to do in Rhode Island what Massachusetts did, which is to take Hasbro from Rhode Island,” Shekachi advised me. “Let’s take some biotech corporations from Boston to Rhode Island, together with Organogenesis, which simply relocated from Massachusetts to Rhode Island about three months in the past. I hope it’s one in all many and I hope it presents alternatives. We’re the brand new child on the block.”
10. AG WATCH: With 2026 across the nook, extra candidates are elevating their campaigns. Keith Hoffmann, previously the coverage chief for Legal professional Common Peter Neronha, plans to formally launch his Democratic AG run at midday Tuesday, Sept. 30, on the pedestrian bridge in Windfall. One other Democratic AG hopeful, state Rep. Jason Knight (D-Barrington), is ready to make his announcement at 6 pm Oct. 6 at The Guild in Warren. Lastly, state Rep. Robert Craven (D-North Kingstown), chair of the Home Judiciary Committee, has stated he expects to unveil his run later in October.
11. SUICIDE PREVENTION: Samiritans South Coast, based mostly in Fall River, helps to fill the hole after the Trump administration ended funding for the nationwide Suicide and Disaster Lifeline’s specialised service for LGBTQ+ youth. My colleague Paul C. Kelly Campos has the story.
12. RIGHT TO REPAIR: It didn’t entice a variety of discover when the Common Meeting handed close to the top of session in June a invoice defending folks’s proper to restore their very own wheelchairs and different mobility aids. The invoice was sponsored by Sen. Mark McKenney (D-Warwick) and state Rep. Grace Diaz (D-Windfall), who referred to as it a win for shoppers. What was much more attention-grabbing was how former U.S. Rep. Jim Langevin supplied written testimony in assist of the measure: “As I’ve dug into this problem, I’ve come to study of the super complexity and forms constructed into the system and the necessity for reform of this damaged course of to permit repairs on advanced energy wheelchairs to occur extra shortly.” That was a change from how Langevin, the primary quadriplegic particular person to serve within the U.S. Home of Representatives, testified against a similar measure in Connecticut in 2024. The Nutmeg State now has such a regulation, though critics say it lacks teeth.
13. APEX PREDATOR: When Amazon needs to construct a brand new distribution middle, native officers typically welcome the move, seeing it as a win for jobs and financial growth. However the way in which during which the enormous retailer made it troublesome to cancel a membership in Prime by so-called “darkish patterns” affords a special view. As NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly reports, a criticism by the Federal Commerce Fee “describes a four-page, six-click, 15-option journey to cancel and claims that Amazon had a code title for this course of – the Iliad Move. Lorrie Cranor, a professor at Carnegie Mellon College and director of its CyLab Safety and Privateness Institute, says that code title is revealing. English majors could bear in mind ‘The Iliad’ is in regards to the epic 10-year siege of Troy.” Amazon has agreed to pay $2.5 billion to settle the difficulty.
14. KICKER: Police face a troublesome job, partly since they generally see folks at their worst. A high-ranking officer in an area division in Massachusetts as soon as complained to me years in the past that cops must be a mixture of psychologist, mother or father, disciplinarian, psychological well being counselor, and so forth. Now, by a partnership with Gateway Healthcare and Neighborhood Well being Plan of Rhode Island, Central Falls is embedding a full-time behavioral well being clinician when police reply. In a press release, Mayor Maria Rivera stated, “Our officers have typically responded to conditions — with EMS assist — that basically require a psychological well being skilled’s experience. Because of this partnership, our neighborhood will get each: the protection of our officers and the care of a clinician, working aspect by aspect. We need to guarantee our neighbors and neighborhood members who’re experiencing psychological well being crises get the assistance and assist they want.”
15. KICKER II: Hope springs everlasting, even when guarded by doubt in some corners of Pink Sox Nation. Sure, I drafted for Recreation 4 of the Massive Dance in my ticket group, though the Sox’ inconsistent play leaves very unclear their final vacation spot within the post-season.
