The Boston Sunday Globe of August 21 carried a Page 3 City & Region article on Dorchester's Tom Finneran that is Exhibit A on how a newspaper can subtly (or maybe mindlessly) turn one thing into another so that the subject of the story can reasonably cry foul.

On a Saturday the 20th, we gather, the reporter was given a Patriot Ledger story to follow up, a story that needed looking into on the face of it. By all appearances, he made the right phone calls. He reported that Finneran as speaker told the state ethics Commission about this arrangement with his wife's co-owned "business" and he also reported that the Office of Campaign and Finance said the spending "appears" to be legal and he quoted Brad Balzer of that office as saying the spending was legal under state law and that his office would probably rule that the spending was permissible.

The Globe story talked about the women's "company," the drop headline about their "store." From neighborhood experience, we know that Donna Finneran's and Patti Brett's "business" was basically an in-home operation in which they created personalized gift baskets of candies, cookies, nuts, dried flowers, etc. to be sent by relatives and friends to people at home with an illness or an anniversary and like that. Donna and Patti were classmates who got their UMass degrees as adults back five years or so.

So what do the Globe editors do with all of this? They promote the story on the front of the City & Region section with an opaque presentation that leads the casual reader to say, "Oh, they got him again," and then they headline the Page 3 story "Finneran's spending on gifts questioned" and "Campaign cash used at wife's store."

Who is questioning this? Not the state agencies responsible for oversight of such matters, not the attorney general. No, it is Pamela Wilmot, the Common Scold from Common Cause who is quoted as calling the matter "alarming" and who is said to be "troubled and disturbed" by the story. Wilmot says there are "legal questions and they should be looked at." I guess because the Office of Campaign and Political Finance and Brad Balzer have not digested the huge importance of all this - my God, they absolve the former speaker of any illegality in using campaign funds to purchase gift baskets for constituents and others from his wife's living-room operation -ºthey have their heads up their rear ends. When these same folks nail a pol's head to the wall, Wilmot sees them as white-hat types.

Ms. Wilmot gets her ups in every Globe story of this sort, which, given her position, is usually appropriate, though she invariably comes off as a shrieking harridan. But here is a case where regardless of what the state agencies had to say, Wilmot as "prosecutor" is given the space and the headline display to call for Finneran's public flogging for what she sees as "disturbing and alarming" malfeasance.

It takes no stretch of the imagination to know that the Globe would not deem fitting for publication a story headlined "Finneran campaign-funds spending on wife's gift baskets called okay."

Goo-goos like Ms. Wilmot have done a lot of good in this town since the Curley days, but they also have spread, via the public press, a lot of permanent goo on public figures that never should have left the jar.