Newsday embarked on a series of aggressive campaigns to purge `` rambunctious '' environmentalists .
For a few years starting in 1988 , under then-publisher Robert M. Johnson , Newsday embarked on a series of aggressive campaigns , to purge `` rambunctious '' environmentalists from the Suffolk Legislature , , to promote the construction of `` WillyWorld '' in Yaphank , to build a `` Business-Labor Coalition '' ( whose main players were the kind of characters Newsday had won its Pultitzers for investigating , and whose quotes about civic associations and environmental groups resembled the rhetoric of Central American death squads ) , , to build a major jetport at Calverton , to give the development lobby control of underground water supplies , and , above all , to create an Urban Development Corporation subsidiary that critics claimed amounted to a virual coup d'etat - permanently transferring important powers from elected governments to a self-selected clique of developers and their allies.
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