“I thought I’d come back here just for a little while,” he said. But he found those plans upended when his father’s health began declining in the late 1970s. His father came home from World War II, became a reporter at the Monitor-News and eventually bought the newspaper with a partner.Īnfinson grew up planning on a journalism career somewhere beyond small-town Minnesota. His grandfather, a poetry-loving plumber and child of Norwegian immigrants, came to Benson as a child. Still, Anfinson sometimes is surprised to find himself in Benson.įamily is a powerful force here, and this town is knitted together in ways that few Americans understand anymore. A contemplative man who casually quotes Voltaire, he loves newspapers deeply, and mourns the hundreds of small-town papers that have gone under in recent years. Wednesday afternoons, after he gets that week’s edition ready for printing the next morning, often count as his weekend.Īnfinson is 67 but looks at least a decade younger. His white Jeep is often spattered with mud from the county’s dirt roads.
He’s there for school concerts, community fund-raisers, elections and livestock judging at the county fair. But just to follow local politics.Īnfinson does cover Swift County intensely - the city council, the county commissioners, the school board and nearly every other gathering of consequence. He grudgingly subscribes to the Monitor-News, which has a circulation of roughly 2,000.
“Trash gets thrown at you so many times and eventually you just give up.” Anfinson’s editorials on farm subsidies and politics leave him fuming. “I just can’t stomach it anymore,” said Saunders, whose family settled on part of his sprawling farm more than a century ago, and who speaks almost lovingly about the rich brown soil. “In rural Minnesota we still have a work ethic, and I’ll call them Christian values, and that’s not reflected in our local newspaper,” said Al Saunders, a farmer and friend of Wolter’s who graduated from Benson High School a couple years after Anfinson. Seated with a reporter, he starts talking as if Anfinson is there. Wolter’s frustration boils over during a late breakfast in a town cafe. He’s also certain that information “will never make it into the newspaper.” He hasn’t seen the death certificates and hasn’t contacted health authorities, but he’s sure the vaccine deaths occurred: “I just know that I’m doing their funerals.” He also suspects Democrats are using the coronavirus pandemic as a political tool, doubts President Joe Biden was legitimately elected and is certain that COVID-19 vaccines kill people. His neighbor, Jason Wolter, is a thoughtful, broad-shouldered Lutheran pastor who reads widely and measures his words carefully. “There are no alternative facts,” Anfinson says. Nowhere in the Monitor-News, for example, will you find reports that local people are dying because they’ve been inoculated. But in an America of competing visions, some here say he has taken sides. While his editorials lean left, he works hard to report the news straight. Sometimes, he grudgingly worries about his safety. He deals with the occasional veiled threat. Lots of people disagree with his politics. He’s not the most popular man in the county. He wrote that story on clinics struggling with COVID-19. Most weeks, he writes every story on the paper’s front page. In one house is Reed Anfinson, publisher, editor, photographer and reporter for the Monitor-News.
It has seeped into the American fabric, all the way to Benson’s 12th Street, where two neighbors - each in his own well-kept, century-old home - can live in different worlds. It’s another measure of how, in an America increasingly split by warring visions of itself, division doesn’t just play out on cable television, or in mayhem at the U.S. And some will go further: People, they’ll tell you, are being killed by COVID-19 vaccinations. The vaccine is untested, they say, dangerous. But ask around Benson, stroll its three-block business district, and some would tell a different story: The Swift County Monitor-News, the tiny newspaper that’s reported the news here since 1886, is not telling the truth.
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