Purveyors of slime

I imagine that most readers of John Day’s column in the July 2 Bangor Daily News did not also read The Boston Globe the same day. Had they done so, they would have found the curious piece of information that Globe columnist Thomas Oliphant indirectly called Day an assistant purveyor of “slime” who lacks both journalistic standards and ethics.

The judgment is based on Oliphant’s evaluation of the recent charges Gary Aldrich leveled at the White House in general and President and Mrs. Clinton in particular. These charges have already received so much publicity that it is hardly necessary to repeat them.

John Day takes the position that the Clintons are full of “self-pity” and are “whining” when they object to Aldrich and his charges. Day indicates that, in his mind, the hanging of a White House Christmas stocking full of coal for Newt Gingrich is adequate to indicate that tree was also hung with sex objects and drug paraphernalia.

Without any relevant facts, Day goes out of his way to try and justify and support what Oliphant pictures as an unjustified and unsubstantiated “PR slime campaign” aimed at making book royalties for Aldrich, manipulating the public and destroying or discrediting the Clintons.

Anyone can read both columns and decide whether or not Day was helping pedal “slime.” Perhaps the more relevant point raised by Aldrich is that “If Gary Aldrich walked into a newsroom even today, and told his White House tales, cursory checking would reveal absence of corroboration, the presence of second to fourth hand sourcing and thick overlay of malice. As a news source, he would be unacceptable. Today, however, all he has to do is put exactly the same slime between two hard covers and it is called `news’.”

Oliphant details the growing public and media awareness of Aldrich’s lack of credibility and he then makes the telling point that, “In the absence of judgment, journalism becomes a transmission belt, the servant of manipulators instead of the public.” The readers of the Bangor Daily News deserve better than that from their newspaper. Charles O’Leary President Maine AFL-CIO Bangor