After acquiring the historic station from the Squier family, Myers Mermel has sought to reach a broader audience with a renewed emphasis on commentary and news.
by Habib Sabet
On its face, the partnership between The Nation magazine and Myers Mermel, the new owner of WDEV-AM, is an unlikely one.
Earlier this year, Mermel, who previously served as president of the conservative Ethan Allen Institute and once ran for the U.S. Senate as a Republican, entered the fabled Vermont radio station into an exclusive deal with the progressive monthly and online publication.
Every weekday afternoon, WDEV now airs podcasts produced by The Nation, featuring left-leaning voices from the magazine like Jeet Heer, whose show “The Time of Monsters” is broadcast on the station each Monday.
“When we bought the station people were like, ‘Oh, well Mermel, he’s going to turn it into Fox News,’ right?” Mermel said. “But that’s not what Vermont is. We’re trying to serve a community.”
The deal with The Nation is one in a constellation of sweeping changes that Mermel has enacted since acquiring the station from the Squier family last year. After 88 years of ownership, the family sold WDEV and its sister stations — WCVT-FM and WLVB-FM — to Mermel, his business partner Caroline McLain and his associate, Scott Milne, another former Republican candidate.
Although the Federal Communications Commission technically only signed off on the deal this month, Mermel has been serving as the station’s main owner and operator for just over a year, he said.
Under the leadership of Ken Squier, who died in 2023, the station developed a reputation as a paragon of independent media, celebrated for its emphasis on local culture and its lineup of eclectic, and often eccentric, shows like “Music to Go to the Dump By.”
But since taking over, Mermel has begun to nudge WDEV in a new direction, trying to maintain what he called “the station’s DNA” as a community radio station while branching out in new directions.
Mermel has funded upgrades to the station’s infrastructure, including new microphones and computer systems. He has simultaneously been overhauling much of WDEV’s traditional programming, injecting more “talk” and syndicated news into its lineup, largely with the hope of courting Vermont’s younger, more politically liberal population.
“We felt it was very important to try to improve certain areas where we could, and capitalize on missed opportunities,” Mermel said.
A new lineup
In addition to the programming from The Nation, WDEV has introduced a spate of new hosts to pad out its roster of commentators.
One of the new voices on air is David Zuckerman, a progressive and the state’s former lieutenant governor. He recently began serving as the Thursday host of “Vermont Viewpoint,” WDEV’s flagship daily talk program, which features a different host each day.
Featuring discussion of a wide range of topics from food insecurity to health care, the segment is aimed at “cultivating a reasonable presentation of a perspective that maybe some folks didn’t hear that much in recent years,” Zuckerman said.
Ross Connolly, regional state director of Americans for Prosperity, a conservative libertarian advocacy group, has joined the station as another host of Vermont Viewpoint. Joseph Woodin, president and CEO of Copley Health Systems, has meanwhile begun to host “Vital Signs,” a weekly show about healthcare in Vermont.
“I imagine (Mermel) is trying to get a wide range of voices to continue what WDEV had very much been, which is a community radio station, which means having a range of voices,” Zuckerman said.
This story is provided to The Bridge via a story-sharing agreement between The Bridge and VTDigger.
