The real menace in baseball is less robot umpires and more the relentless stream of sports-betting ads between innings. You can follow me through the week on Bluesky, threads and X. 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 coverage of an East Providence bank robbery, Ben Bagdikian published The Media Monopoly. The book diagnosed how consolidating the ownership of newspapers and TV stations fueled the growth of giant corporations, posing a risk of less coverage of such topics as corporate wrongdoing, environmental problems and labor issues. In a mixed review, The Christian Science Monitor noted Bagdikian’s concern about the fallout of democracy: “Without a coherent picture of the society in which we live and especially of the real causes of events, we ‘tend to remain static and bewildered, left at the mercy of whoever acts with power.’” That echoes in the current moment, 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 back on the air, but about 70 stations owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group and Nexstar Media Group initially announced they did not plan to air his return. (Trump was displeased with Kimmel resuming his show, stating, “I think we’re going to test ABC out on this. Let’s see how we do.” And Sinclair has since announced it will return to airing Kimmel.) Sinclair and Nexstar dominate broadcasting in Rhode Island, since the former owns WJAR-TV, Channel 10, and now operates WLNE-TV, Channel 6, while the latter owns WPRI-TV, Channel 12. The good news is that Rhode Island maintains a competitive news landscape, with a critical mass of reporters chasing important public-interest stories. One study, for what it’s worth, found that Sinclair is more about cutting news resources than introducing bias. Sinclair’s takeover of Channel 6 nonetheless reflects the ongoing trend of consolidation, and the call for a boycott by a union representing workers there isn’t going to change that. The bigger concern may be how the commercial interests of giant media entities intersect with their business before the federal government. As former Washington Post editor Marty Baron told Terry Gross during a recent must-listen edition of NPR’s Fresh Air, “[T]hey fear that the federal government under Donald Trump will not approve their contracts — will not approve their mergers if they alienate him, if they support anyone who is critical of Donald Trump.”
2. ON THE MOVE: Next Wednesday, Oct. 1, is the official launch for Ocean State Media, a single brand bringing together The Public’s Radio and Rhode Island PBS after our merger last year. Our website will move to OceanStateMedia.org. The formal launch of my new video podcast, One on One with Ian Donnis, will come the following week, featuring long-form interviews with a mix of politicians and people from outside politics. It will air on TV, be excerpted on radio, and also be available on YouTube. For a preview, check out recent interviews with Helena Foulkes and David Morales.
3. PROTECTING THE VOTE: Under President Trump, the U.S. Justice Department is compiling a national voter roll (even if Rhode Island and some other states aren’t going along with the effort). Trump has also proposed creating a national voter ID and using executive power to eliminate mail ballots and the use of electronic voting machines. These moves have some observers anxious about the impact on midterm elections next year. “I think it’s very unlikely that the president would say the elections are canceled,” Richard Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA, recently told NPR’s Fresh Air. “But there’s lots of things he could do with his power with the military, with his power over federal government machinery that can make it very difficult for some people to vote.” Rhode Island’s Ken Block knows a lot about elections. His 2024 book, Disproven: My Unbiased Search for Voter Fraud, outlines that he didn’t find enough fraud to affect the outcome of the 2020 election after being hired by Trump’s team to search for it. For his part, Block appears confident that legal safeguards are strong enough to protect the vote from interference in elections next year. “The Constitution says very clearly that the states are responsible for the conduct of elections,” Block said during a lengthy video interview this week. “The executive power of the president’s office does not have that power. It’s one thing to issue the executive order, it’s another thing to enforce it. It’s not enforceable.” When it comes to sensitive voter data, Block said, “The federal government has all of our private data one way or another.”
4. NEW BREEZE: A court ruling this week made possible the resumption of work on Revolution Wind, the wind turbine project off the Rhode Island coast that is projected to provide electricity for 350,000 homes in the Ocean State and Connecticut. Gov. Dan McKee was among those hailing the news (which followed a lawsuit by the company operating the project and a separate lawsuit brought by the AGs of RI and CT). In a statement, he said, “Halting a fully permitted project that is already 80% complete harms Rhode Island families, businesses, and workers. I am encouraged by this ruling that will put people back to work. I remain optimistic that the courts will continue to recognize the legitimacy and importance of this project to our jobs and our energy future. Increasing our energy supply options is essential to lowering long-term costs. That’s why my administration continues to support an all-of-the-above energy strategy that includes offshore wind, nuclear power, natural gas, and hydropower. This approach diversifies our energy portfolio and keeps our energy system reliable.”
5. RI IN DC: Here’s some of what is happening with the state’s congressional delegation.
***With a potential federal government shutdown looming after Sept. 30, U.S. Sen. Jack Reed criticized President Trump’s decision to cancel talks with Democratic congressional leaders. In a statement Thursday, Reed said in part, “Democrats have a plan for health care and the budget; Trump and the Republicans clearly don’t or they’d be at the table right now rather than threatening people’s livelihoods and their health care. In the days ahead, I expect Donald Trump to spend a lot of [time] avoiding the truth and trying to blame everyone but himself. But that doesn’t change the facts or fix the health care mess he created. Senate Republicans have already admitted that President Trump is the holdup and all they need to resolve this issue is a greenlight from the White House to negotiate a bipartisan solution.”
***U.S. Reps. Seth Magaziner and Gabe Amo (a former Pell Grant recipient) called on the House Appropriations Committee to maintain the name of Pell Grants — the federal education grant for students with financial need named for the late former U.S. Sen. Claiborne Pell of Newport — and to steer clear of renaming them as “Trump Grants.” In a letter, they wrote, “In stark contrast to Senator Pell’s steadfast commitment to education, President Donald Trump’s record includes efforts to bypass Congress to unlawfully dismantle the Department of Education, freeze federal education and research funding at institutions, pressure schools to roll back key initiatives, including those focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
***Responding to President Trump’s description to the UN General Assembly of climate change as “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse objected to what he called a sham proceeding by the EPA: “[C]limate denial fraud has metastasized inside government, with an arm of the operation operating within the halls of government, allowing fossil fuel interests to capture and exert official government agency power.”
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 during a Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce event in Warwick this week. Moderator Laurie White didn’t ask Powell about this and he probably would have steered clear of the controversy anyway. Powell did indirectly wink at it while rebutting charges of partisanship on the Fed. “Many people don’t believe us, because — they [say,] ‘Aw, c’mon, you’re really political,’” he said. “But [the] truth is, mostly people who are calling us political, it’s just a cheap shot. And also we don’t engage. Our argument is doing our jobs. We don’t get into back and forth with external people. We just do our jobs — we keep our heads down and do our jobs, that’s what we do.” In other key takeaways, Powell said he expected a limited effect from Trump’s tariff program and he said it’s too soon to assess the economic impact of artificial intelligence, although he said tech innovation usually leads to greater economic growth.
7. RI’S ECONOMY: As a businessman who twice ran for governor, Ken Block doesn’t mince words in outlining his view of what is limiting economic growth in the state. “The biggest challenge we have by far is the General Assembly,” Block said during our extended interview this week. “Every year there are bills that are put forward that could seriously not only disadvantage Rhode Island, Rhode Island businesses, but potentially cost them a fortune. We have a business-unfriendly General Assembly.” While speakers tend to put the brakes on “doing the most harm,” Block said, he also points to how the state budget grew by billions of dollars since during the Covid epidemic (thanks largely to an influx of federal dollars). “We haven’t dropped our budget since Covid has gone. And everyone’s wondering how we can keep paying for it. We can’t. And as long as we don’t make some changes, we’re starving and looking for places where we can tax entities and people for other things. And generally speaking, uh, our General Assembly spends like drunken sailors on leave. And that’s a problem for us because we don’t have unlimited pockets.”
8. POLITICS & WOMEN: Women candidates tend to win when they run for elective office in Rhode Island. It’s also true that GOP women such as Arlene Violet, Susan Farmer, Nancy Mayer and Claudine Schneider helped spearhead victories for the Rhode Island GOP when it sometimes held statewide offices back in the ’70s ‘80s and ‘90s. That’s why it’s worth noting how the number of GOP women in the General Assembly has doubled — albeit just from two to four — since 2013.
9. LIFE SCIENCES: On the surface, the work of five inaugural members for Rhode Island’s new life science incubator sounds exactly like the kind of forward-looking innovation the state has sought for years. XM Therapeutics, for example, touts its development of “novel therapies to repair the extracellular matrix.” P53 Therapeutics targets “genome guardian p53-loss or mutation in cancer with small molecules that use p73 or integrated stress response.” You get the idea. But stories about Raleigh-Durham challenging Boston’s biotech dominance and Boston’s biotech winter raise the question of whether Rhode Island has missed the moment. House Speaker Joe Shekarchi, who helped champion the move toward life sciences, argues that lower costs and new facilities in the Ocean State preserve an opening for growth. “This is a great opportunity for us to do in Rhode Island what Massachusetts did, which is to take Hasbro from Rhode Island,” Shekachi told me. “Let’s take some biotech companies from Boston to Rhode Island, including Organogenesis, which just relocated from Massachusetts to Rhode Island about three months ago. I hope it’s one of many and I hope it presents opportunities. We’re the new kid on the block.”
10. AG WATCH: With 2026 around the corner, more candidates are elevating their campaigns. Keith Hoffmann, formerly the policy chief for Attorney General Peter Neronha, plans to formally launch his Democratic AG run at noon Tuesday, Sept. 30, at the pedestrian bridge in Providence. Another Democratic AG hopeful, state Rep. Jason Knight (D-Barrington), is set to make his announcement at 6 pm Oct. 6 at The Guild in Warren. Finally, state Rep. Robert Craven (D-North Kingstown), chair of the House Judiciary Committee, has said he expects to unveil his run later in October.
11. SUICIDE PREVENTION: Samiritans South Coast, based in Fall River, is helping to fill the gap after the Trump administration ended funding for the nationwide Suicide and Crisis Lifeline’s specialized service for LGBTQ+ youth. My colleague Paul C. Kelly Campos has the story.
12. RIGHT TO REPAIR: It didn’t attract a lot of notice when the General Assembly passed near the end of session in June a bill protecting people’s right to repair their own wheelchairs and other mobility aids. The bill was sponsored by Sen. Mark McKenney (D-Warwick) and state Rep. Grace Diaz (D-Providence), who called it a win for consumers. What was even more interesting was how former U.S. Rep. Jim Langevin offered written testimony in support of the measure: “As I have dug into this issue, I have come to learn of the tremendous complexity and bureaucracy built into the system and the need for reform of this broken process to allow repairs on complex power wheelchairs to happen more quickly.” That was a switch from how Langevin, the first quadriplegic person to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives, testified against a similar measure in Connecticut in 2024. The Nutmeg State now has such a law, although critics say it lacks teeth.
13. APEX PREDATOR: When Amazon wants to build a new distribution center, local officials typically welcome the move, seeing it as a win for jobs and economic development. But the way in which the giant retailer made it difficult to cancel a membership in Prime through so-called “dark patterns” offers a different view. As NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly reports, a complaint by the Federal Trade Commission “describes a four-page, six-click, 15-option journey to cancel and claims that Amazon had a code name for this process – the Iliad Flow. Lorrie Cranor, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and director of its CyLab Security and Privacy Institute, says that code name is revealing. English majors may remember ‘The Iliad’ is about the epic 10-year siege of Troy.” Amazon has agreed to pay $2.5 billion to settle the issue.
14. KICKER: Police face a difficult job, in part since they commonly see people at their worst. A high-ranking officer in a local department in Massachusetts once complained to me years ago that cops have to be a combination of psychologist, parent, disciplinarian, mental health counselor, and so on. Now, through a partnership with Gateway Healthcare and Neighborhood Health Plan of Rhode Island, Central Falls is embedding a full-time behavioral health clinician when police respond. In a statement, Mayor Maria Rivera said, “Our officers have often responded to situations — with EMS support — that really require a mental health professional’s expertise. Thanks to this partnership, our community will get both: the safety of our officers and the care of a clinician, working side by side. We want to ensure our neighbors and community members who are experiencing mental health crises get the help and support they need.”
15. KICKER II: Hope springs eternal, even if guarded by doubt in some corners of Red Sox Nation. Yes, I drafted for Game 4 of the Big Dance in my ticket group, even though the Sox’ inconsistent play leaves very unclear their ultimate destination in the post-season.
