Imagine Democrats fund-raising for Pat Buchanan and fighting to get him on the presidential ballot in Maine. Also imagine the Maine Republican Party challenging the Democrats in order to keep Buchanan off the ballot.

If this strange event were for real, the Sun Journal would run front-page headlines accusing the shameful Republicans of thwarting the democratic process and short-circuiting the electorate’s right for choice.

Yet on Aug. 24, the Sun Journal buried an article well within its pages: “Activists seek to block Nader.” Four paragraphs into the article, the Sun Journal finally reveals that former Democratic House Speaker Michael Saxl is behind the effort along with other Democrats. Conversely, on Aug. 12, the Sun Journal ran this headline, “GOP operative trying to get Nader added to N.H. ballot.” The first sentence describes “a Republican operative.”

What the Democrats are doing is sleazy and unethical while the Republicans are openly playing Nader as a flexure tool to siphon off far left votes that otherwise would go to Sen. Kerry. The Republicans offer little pretense as to their end game and the Sun Journal’s reporting seems very much at ease in telling it the way it is.

The point seems to be that when the Democrats do something that is highly un-American, offensive and contemptuous, the Sun Journal downplays their activities, and even homogenizes the party into indistinct “political activists” while also relegating the article off of the front pages. Filtering political news is never the mark of a good news organization.

Bertrand Dugal, Durham