BELLOWS FALLS — I read, with some surprise, Randy Holhut's piece on Tom Salmon, “Learning Experience,” in the Feb. 9 Commons. In the piece, Holhut writes, “Even though he was a prominent state official, Salmon sought no special treatment.”
This strikes me as a questionable statement. Tom Salmon isn't a bad guy, but he is a political animal. My guess is that Holhut, whom I know to be an excellent reporter, was probably under a deadline and, in essence, rewriting a press release.
Salmon is, naturally enough for an ambitious politician setting himself up to challenge Bernie Sanders for his Senate seat in 2012, trying to make lemonade out of lemons.
“Salmon wants fellow DUI offenders to open up about how it affected their lives” was the subhead. Fair enough. But it is disingenuous for a newspaper to report as fact that Salmon sought “no special treatment.”
According to a piece in the Nov. 1, 2010, edition of Seven Days about the police video of Salmon's DUI, “In the seconds before Trooper Brandon Doll administered the roadside breathalyzer test, Salmon asked, 'You know I'm the state auditor, right? I'm like the state treasurer, governor and lieutenant governor,' said Salmon....After placing Salmon in the car, the trooper turned to a Montpelier police officer and said, 'He says he works for the state or the governor or something - he threw that card out a few too many million times.'”
I'd say it would be fairer to say, “After initially letting troopers know how important he was, Salmon stopped, seeing as how that wasn't getting him anywhere.”
Or, better yet, not say anything about special treatment at all.
I'm sure you guys work under the gun - too much to report, too little time. But what you write is going to get used in political campaigns. And now, on the record, The Commons has said that Mr. Salmon didn't request any special treatment. Well, maybe, kinda, sorta. But he hinted at it. Better not to make a blanket statement than to simplify a situation with considerably more nuance than that.
I'd urge you to think ahead as to how one's words may be used in the future.