WCAX’s catch phrase was once “Vermont’s Own News station” but no more. In May 2017 the station became part of Gray Television, a large corporation based in Atlanta, GA, with 144 local TV stations covering 10.4% of U.S. households. Layoffs hit the WCAX newsroom about a year later.
Although not considered to be as openly right-wing as Sinclair Broadcasting — which stipulates all outlets must carry conservative political content — Gray TV may be “Foxifying” WCAX a bit.
This fall, just in time for the 2020 presidential race, Gray-owned stations will begin airing Full Court Press, a Sunday public-affairs program featuring FoxNews veteran Greta Van Susteren. On theHill.com Gray TV Chairman and CEO Hilton Hatchet Howell, Jr., characterized Full Court Press this way: “Our goal is to provide critical information without bias to allow viewers to form their own opinions and reach their own decisions by exploring all sides of a complex issue.”
For those not familiar with her, Van Susteren spent 14years as a prime-time FoxNews host — replaced by Tucker Carlson in 2016.Then in 2017 she was on MSNBC but was dropped after six months.
At Fox, Van Susteren once wondered if the government was wasting our tax dollars at NASA because of the long delay getting satellite images from Pluto back to Earth.
More recently Media Matters reported something more problematic : With one terrible tweet, Greta Van Susteren helped fuel a conspiracy theory that made its way to the president, who repeated it within hours
On Twitter, former Fox News and MSNBC host Greta Van Susteren tweeted that the “FBI obviously tipped off CNN,” adding that “even if you don’t like Stone, it is curious why Mueller’s office tipped off CNN.”
Nearly three hours later, Van Susteren conceded that she might be wrong about CNN acting on a tip. Even so, the original tweet, which had accumulated thousands of retweets, remained up and continued to be shared. The new tweet, correcting her mistake, had just 95 retweets at the time of this writing. [The Mueller investigation later vigorously denied the claim in a court filing]
The 2016 presidential primary and general election brought in upwards of $100 million on political ads in broadcast and cable television in New England markets. And now Full Court Press here in Vermont with a little bit of FoxNews is going to get a share this fall for Gray Television. 
Van Susteren told The LA Times: […] she expects Gray’s geographical reach to help in booking presidential candidates to appear on the program.
“Politics begins in local markets,” Van Susteren said. “I am now the local media. I’m going to reach their voters.”
Gives a whole new spin to the late columnist Peter Freyne’s moniker for WCAX: he always called it WGOP; only now, of course he might call it WFOX, or WGRAY.
