An otherwise straightforward Government House briefing Monday about upcoming St. Thomas Carnival events and bill signing saw Gov. Albert Bryan Jr. waffle on his reasons for recently lambasting a local news outlet — the territory’s last remaining print newspaper.
“Well it’s always negative. I mean on the days when we have some of the great wins for the Virgin Islands, it’s always negative with the Daily News,” he said, responding to a question about comments he made during a ribbon-cutting ceremony last week for the opening of the Cyril E. King Airport parking garage. Bryan took that opportunity to deride the V.I. Daily News’s intent to transition into a nonprofit and called on Virgin Islanders to let the Pulitzer Prize-winning publication “die an evil and wicked death.”
“And sometimes it seems almost racist,” Bryan continued Monday, “because … it’s owned by a Caucasian who is not from here, has no investment in the community. And when you read the stories, it seems to be a mockery of we — people of African American descent on these islands — like we are a banana republic that can’t get anything right, when there’s so many things that are happening in the Virgin Islands [that are] positive.”
Bryan, who in 2019 proclaimed November to be David Hamilton Jackson Month and who in 2021 lauded the free press-advocate for feeling “the suffering of the people and through the power of the press was able to bring about social and economic change to better the lives of residents of the territory,” initially seemed to take issue with the newspaper’s reporting on the Virgin Islands government, saying Monday that the outlet published “degenerative type articles and editorials that make mockery of the government and its people.”
“I think it’s highly insulting for them now to try to be a nonprofit — and being a nonprofit competing with Little League, Women’s Coalition, My Brother’s Workshop for funds,” he said. “Newspapers — written newspapers — are a thing of the past, and I think that … businesses die, and you know, this one, unfortunately, has deteriorated from a time when it was a great newspaper under Ariel Melchior into something now that is not much more than a rag and often reports disingenuous — and a lot of times false — information from a perspective that doesn’t see anything positive happening in the Virgin Islands.”
The paper’s front page headlines Monday comprised coverage of 2025 Calypso Monarch Lucas “John Gotti” Evans, the reported suicide of Jeffrey Epstein and Prince Andrew accuser Virginia Giuffre, a wire story on the Indiana Fever’s decision to exercise the fourth-year option on Aliyah Boston, and a staff report on the CEKA parking garage opening that did not include Bryan’s incendiary comments.
He changed tack amid questioning from another local reporter and said his issue was the outlet’s previous pursuit of tax-exempt status through the V.I. Economic Development Authority, saying, “if you’re going to get a tax exemption and become a nonprofit, you should benefit the community, not be a detriment to it.”
“You can write what you want once you paying my taxes,” he said later, chuckling. “Write whatever you want.”
Faced with rising printing costs, gutted advertising revenues and the unlicensed sharing of articles, increasing numbers of new and legacy journalism outlets have turned to the nonprofit model in recent years. In its 2024 “State of Local News” project, Northwestern University — which houses the renowned Medill School of Journalism — reported that more than 3,200 print newspapers have “vanished.”
“A small number of these have successfully transitioned to digital-only operations, but this is a rare pivot, and most of the losses have been caused by closures and consolidations,” the report noted. “In the past year alone, 130 newspapers have shut down at a rate of almost two-and-a-half per week, similar to the 131 papers lost from 2022 to 2023.”
The number of daily newspapers nationwide dropped from 1,566 in 2005 to 1,033 in 2024, according to Northwestern.
The United States is generally considered a bastion of free expression. The First Amendment states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
The nonprofit, nongovernmental organization Reporters Without Borders, however, placed the United States at 55 out of 180 nations on its 2024 World Press Freedom Index. Freedom of the press violations fell significantly after President Donald Trump’s first term, the organization reported, “but major structural barriers to press freedom persist in this country, once considered a model for freedom of expression.”
Those barriers include rampant corporate consolidation of local media outlets and a concerted push by conservatives to overturn the 1964 landmark U.S. Supreme Court case New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, which requires that public officials prove “actual malice” in order to win a libel lawsuit against a news organization, reporter or any other citizen. That high standard requires petitioners to demonstrate that an outlet exhibited a reckless disregard for the truth when publishing. As recently as last week, former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin lost a retrial in her 2017 libel lawsuit against The New York Times, which published and then corrected an editorial suggesting that she had incited a deadly Arizona shooting.
Beyond criticisms of the Daily News’s tenor, Bryan did not say Monday what — if any — of the outlet’s reporting was false or inaccurate. His vexation appeared to be in response to an article reporting on the actions of a V.I. Public Finance Authority meeting last week, during which officials rubber-stamped more than half a billion dollars in funding for disaster recovery, infrastructure and other projects.
The Source asked Monday why the PFA was administering those procurements to begin with. According to its own mandate, the PFA was created “[t]o aid the Government of the Virgin Islands in the performance of its fiscal duties and the effective carrying out of its governmental responsibility of raising capital for essential public projects.”
“That’s a classic example of … the shortsightedness of some of our reporting,” Bryan said, “where you have the ingenuity of the Virgin Islands Government — namely this administration. You have a central government system that essentially has a $1.2 billion budget it’s handling. Add to that some 1,500 projects that we have to do, a thousand of them or so that have been completed already. Putting all that through the Property and Procurement system and the Justice system as well as Public Works has totally overwhelmed the system, because with all the FEMA work we have to do, we still have to do the regular work.”
Bryan touted the amount of projects funded through the PFA and dismissed the idea of funding the V.I. Property and Procurement Department at the level needed to handle large-scale procurements.
“The biggest thing we’ve ever contracted for was the Arthur Richards School, which is somewhere around $300 million,” he said. “We still have $20 billion to go. So number one, being able to pay somebody who can do that sort of evaluation — we don’t have this, we don’t have the salary scales nor the expertise in that department to do that. It’s clearly recognizing that a lot of this is above us. That’s what we talk about — capacity. We don’t have enough engineers. We can’t attract them because we don’t pay enough.”
Bryan also announced Monday that he had signed a number of bills recently approved by the 36th Legislature, including one authorizing $22 million in retroactive wage payments through funds the territory received in Jeffrey Epstein-related settlement agreements.
Editor’s Note: This reporter is a former employee of the Virgin Islands Daily News.
