WPRO’s John Depetro is not wrong to have questioned RI PBS’s choice of moderator for “A Lively Experiment”.

Dyana Koelsch, moderator of ”A Lively Experiment,“ which is featured Thursday at 7 p.m. and Sunday’s at Noon on PBS, admitted her role as a paid consultant to Congressman David Cicilline to WPRO’s John DePetro.

My impression of Dyana Koelsch, former WJAR television reporter, has always been that she is an honest, genuinely nice, non-scummy person. That opinion has not changed even though she is working for a candidate who possesses none of those qualities.
One item in her remarks to WPRO’s Dee DeQuattro struck me, however.

For years, Koelsch worked as an investigative reporter for WJAR-TV but now she says she is allowed to have an opinion. “I want to be able to be working for change in our state,” Koelsch told DePetro.

This time only, we’ll skip lightly over David Cicilline’s highly questionable, in some instances, borderline criminal, actions as the mayor of Providence in deliberately locking out the Internal Auditor, raiding dedicated and reserve funds to balance the budget and postponing the release of city budget numbers until he was safely past the November, 2010, election and focus on Ms. Koelsch’s stated reason for working for the Congressman’s campaign.
As a politician who 1.) is a Democrat 2.) supports ever bigger government 3.) is averse to lowering taxes or rolling back regulations and 4.) fails to see the need to use the power of his office t o strengthen our economy by making the state more business friendly, does David Cicilline really represent “change” in the heavily Democrat, thoroughly taxed and regulated, abysmally un-business-friendly state of Rhode Island?