Fred Thys – Media Nation

Plymouth’s town manager earns a Muzzle for giving a local news outlet the silent treatment

Plymouth, Mass. Photo (cc) 2008 by Raime.

When a community has been without a reliable source of local news for some time, government officials can become accustomed to operating without much scrutiny. And when a feisty startup arrives on the scene to report stories that had gone unreported, that can prove to be quite a shock to the powers that be.

Which is as good an explanation as any for what’s unfolding in Plymouth, Massachusetts. The venerable Old Colony Memorial had become virtually a ghost newspaper under the Gannett chain’s ownership, mainly publishing regional coverage from other Gannett papers. Then, in 2023, the Plymouth Independent, a nonprofit digital outlet, arrived on the scene.

The Independent is larger and more ambitious than many such projects; the editor and CEO is Mark Pothier, a former Globe journalist and, before that, editor of the Old Colony Memorial back when it was still covering local news. One of the Independent’s directors is Walter Robinson, a Plymouth resident who’s best known for leading the Globe’s Spotlight Team when it was exposing the clergy sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church.

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One Plymouth official who is taking particular umbrage at the increased scrutiny being brought by the Independent is the town manager, Derek Brindisi. According to a message to readers that Pothier published today, Brindisi has ordered “all appointed town officials to cease all communication with the PI.” The only exception is that town officials will be permitted to respond to public-records requests from the Independent, which, after all, they are required to do under state law.

For his unwarranted attempts to prevent the Independent from holding local government accountable, Brindisi is receiving a New England Muzzle Award. “In my decades as a journalist, Brindisi’s blanket edict is like nothing I have ever encountered,” writes Pothier, who also says:

Our job as journalists is to hold government officials accountable and to provide readers with the reliable information they need to foster a functioning democracy. In that respect, the relationship between governments and journalists is necessarily adversarial. We’re supposed to be skeptical of people in power.

Officials, paid public professionals, and Town Meeting members make decisions involving policies and spending that inevitably spark debate. They serve in the public’s interest. The Independent reports on them in the public’s interest.

Before the PI arrived, most Plymouth residents — including myself — had a hard time finding out what was going on in town. Perhaps naively, I figured officials would welcome the chance to present the town’s perspective on important issues. Some have — or did until this latest order to stop talking to us. Brindisi, however, has only reached out to express displeasure with our coverage.

Pothier goes into some detail about a couple of routine stories that upset Brindisi. One was written by Andrea Estes, a former investigative reporter for the Globe. (Estes’ career at the Globe came to a bad end for reasons that have never been adequately explained, but there is no question that she’s an experienced and accomplished journalist.) The other was written by Fred Thys, a former reporter for WBUR Radio in Boston and VTDigger, a leading investigative news outlet in Vermont.

Brindisi, for his part, childishly refers to the Independent as the “Plymouth Enquirer” and has complained about the Independent’s “distasteful reporting” and efforts to “humiliate town officials.”

This isn’t the first Muzzle to be awarded to Plymouth officials in recent months. Back in July, I gave one to select board member Kevin Canty for suggesting that an unnamed person was risking prison for recording the audio of a board meeting without informing those present. Canty was referring to Thys, who had made no effort to hide the fact that he was recording the meeting, which was also being live-streamed on YouTube.

Thys may have been in technical violation of the law, but seriously? “Canty and I later spoke about the incident,” Pothier writes. “We both agreed it could have been handled better, perhaps with a simple request that Thys announce he was recording.”

Pothier also credits Canty with working to mend the rift between Brindisi and the Independent, but that those efforts have come to naught.

Plymouth official threatens reporter for recording a public, live-streamed meeting

On a Tuesday earlier this month, Fred Thys, a reporter for the Plymouth Independent, took a seat in the front row for that evening’s select board meeting and turned on his audio recorder — openly, and in plain view. You may remember Thys from his long career at WBUR Radio. Now he’s on staff at the Independent, one of the larger and better-funded nonprofit news startups that’s popped up in recent years.

Suddenly a member of the board interrupted the proceedings. As recounted by Independent editor and CEO Mark Pothier, that member, Kevin Canty, proceeded to inform those on hand that state law was being violated because an audio recording was being made without any advance notice being given. Although Canty did not call out Thys by name, Pothier wrote that Canty’s words appeared to be directed at the reporter as he told those in attendance:

There is a wiretapping statute that prohibits the discreet recording of even a public meeting by a private individual or member of the media that is punishable by up to five years in state prison, or two and a half years in jail. So if you are making any recording without making those in the room aware of that, I would encourage you to reconsider that particular stance.

Now, Canty was not 100% wrong, though he was more wrong than right, and his warning was certainly at odds with the interests of governmental transparency. Thus he has richly earned a New England Muzzle Award for attempting to interfere with a journalist who was simply trying to do his job.

Let’s count up the absurdities.

The proceedings were already being live-streamed on YouTube by the local public access operation and would be posted for posterity within a few days of the meeting.
Canty immediately reached for the state wiretapping law, which was sometimes used to stop citizen activists from recording police officers while performing their duties — but which, as Pothier observes, a federal appeals court ruled was a violation of the First Amendment.
If it bothered Canty so much, why he didn’t just take Thys aside at a break in the meeting and ask him to announce that he was recording at future meetings?

Justin Silverman, executive director of the New England First Amendment Coalition, told the Independent that “you have a meeting that’s being live streamed and recorded. Certainly, there’s no expectation of privacy here. One really needs to question what the intent was to make that threat of jail time. Was it to intimidate the journalist?”

But Canty, a lawyer, did have a thin reed to grasp onto. Under state law, anyone who plans to make an audio recording of an interview or a gathering needs to inform those present. At one time we all thought that the explicit permission of the party or parties being recorded was necessary, but that was clarified by the state’s Supreme Judicial Court in 2021. Still, you do have to say something.

When I asked Silverman about that, he replied by email that Thys should have notified the chair, although he was within his rights to record whether the chair liked it or not. “That said, I’m not aware of any penalty, if there is one, for not making the announcement,” Silverman said. “I’m also skeptical about whether this requirement would even apply in cases where the meeting is already being recorded by the town and live-streamed.”

Two other points of note.

First, when Canty made his public announcement, he said he was speaking on behalf of the town manager, Derek Brindisi, but Brindisi later suggested that Canty was exaggerating. Brindisi told Pothier that he let a couple of the select board members know that someone was recording and suggested they make an announcement. “So it was nothing other than that … You have to speak to Kevin about why he chose the words that he chose,” Brindisi said.

Canty, for his part, said his remarks were not grounded in any animus toward Thys or the Independent. “It’s just my general practice as a rule as a criminal defense attorney to discourage people from committing felonies,” he said.

Second, Thys said he’s been recording public meetings for years without making an announcement, and he had never run into trouble before. As it turns out, the meeting was covering was unusually fraught — the select board was removing a founding member of the Community Preservation Committee who had chaired it since it was established in 2002. If you can’t stand the heat, etc.

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The Plymouth Independent, a nonprofit stocked with Boston Globe veterans, goes live

The Plymouth Independent, a high-profile nonprofit news project, has made its long-awaited debut. The site right now is leading with a story by former Boston Globe reporter Andrea Estes on the town’s affordable housing crisis.

Estes is just one of several Globe folks involved in the site: the editor, Mark Pothier, was a high-ranking editor at the Globe, and Globe veteran Walter Robinson is listed as an adviser to the board. Estes is one of two staff reporters; the other is Fred Thys, formerly of WBUR Radio and VTDigger.

Notably, the Independent has a social media presence on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, but not on X/Twitter. I’m sure we’re going to see more and more of that. It’s also one of two nonprofit news sites to launch in Eastern Massachusetts this month, along with The Belmont Voice.

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