PAGE 13
Z H FEß 80
WM. MICHAEL SCHUSTER, 'CAROL' (1980)
I last saw him a couple of weeks after he had been
deposed. He was leaving Oregon that day and going back home
to Norfolk, Virginia. He said his nerves were shot and he looked
frazzled and downcast as a chewed chicken wing. A woman I
knew gave him a ride to the Washington side of the Columbia
River. He gave her a dollar for my back wages, hitchhiked to
Seattle and rode a train back east. A friend from Nehalem visit
ed a few years ago and reported to me that Need had made a
success of publishing another newspaper. I suspect that if it is
successful it bears little resemblance to 'The distinctive and
unique journal of the Oregon coast," a slogan he emblazoned
on the face of every Times Eagle.
The paper did not last long after his departure. The new
publisher picked it clean and abandoned it after ruining its repu
tation. "At the end, in March 1976, the North Coast Times Eagle
was a ghost, hunted by its creditors in the streets of what once
were its own cities," John MacCormack wrote in Death of the
Screaming Eagle 'The corporeal body, a few crates of hastily
packed files and decrepit equipment lay in ignominious cold
storage in Manzanita, its final place of rest. Why the paper failed
is a question that screams with possibilities. It started wth a
suicidally inadequate financial base and quickly alienated what
little advertising existed along a poverty stricken stretch of
Highway 101. But the deeper question is whether a newspaper
that maintains an unbridled editorial voice and exploits fully its
First Amendment rights to freedom of the press, as the Times
Eagle undeniably did, can still survive in modem America with
out being as large, well exconced and unassailable as The New
York Times." (MacCormack's epitaph for the NOTE began a new
set of publishing tombstones. One Dollar Magazine in Portland
folded soon after printing it in the summer of 1976, and a maga
zine in Eugene that earned One Dollar's eulogy soon died. It
became a curse in northwest publishing to pay tribute to a fallen
press.)
The Times Eagle lay dead for three years and almost
all evidence of its former existence was burned, bulldozed, lost,
buried in libraries, forgotten in basements or, in the case of its
former staff, scattered across the country and around the world.
Its death was unmoumed by many, particularly those vtfio dealt
with it financially. Perhaps also a few public officials and others
who were treated critically in its pages were pleased by its
demise. But here and there along the coast and tucked into the
mountains were pockets of a contrary view, people who missed
the paper and wished something like it would start up again.
I revived the Times Eagle after it had lain in a crypt for
three years. I thought it had died prematurely, like a murdered
child. Its restless ghost caught up wth me on the island of Guam
and snapped me back to Oregon like an overstretched umbilical
cord. I printed the first issue of the Bom Again Bird on the tenth
anniversary of humanity's walk on the moon, July 20, 1979
I wrote in the flamboyant opening lines of the resurrect
ion manifesto of Vol. 1, No. 1:
The only corpse successfully revived in recorded history
was that of Lazarus, who was said to have lived for several
years afterward. Jesus Christ is reported to have arisen from the
dead but even the most ardent supporters of his resurrection
admit he was back on Earth only 40 days; and Jonah was still
alive when the whale spit him ashore. Countless other claims of
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resurrection or rebirth have been made, not least among them
Count Dracula and Richard Nixon. With such inspired precedent,
the North Coast Times Eagle is born again.
The Bom Again Bird was resurrected from its grave, I
wrote in its first manifesto,
...because First Amendment newspapers have become
as rare as the nation's symbol, the Bald Eagle. The independent
press has virtually disappeared into the huge corporations that
control the country and probably the world ... In this age of the
great systems devotion to any principle other than the status quo
seems quaint and naive, and faintly dangerous (but) the enor
mous pressures of population and economics threaten the way
we live The great contradictions between freedom and property
have finally reached us. ...Like everything else the role of the
press is in question. There should be no doubt The press should
have no special interest than the First Amendment. This (is)
patently impossible when the press is controlled by corporations
whose interests are often in conflict with the Constitution The
great renegade journalist A. J. Leibling once said the press was
free only to those who owned one.
Small esoteric newspapers such as the Times Eagle
(also KMUN and KBOO) defy the momentum toward megabig,
yet a significant trend in media traffic is paradoxically toward
specific, or more ominously, specialized audiences. Mainstream
ing more often seems to mean segmenting into selective user
groups that become hermetically sealed by appropriate media
The Times Eagle is a raggedy-ann example of micromedia, not
at all custom tailored, instead an off-the-rack rag that adheres to
broad principles, which as a result limits its readership.
Small impoverished newspapers such as this one dwell
in local obscurity.They are often in not particularly gentle oppos
ition to the bland or autocratic community rule and standards of
their circulation areas The fringe is most normally their habitat,
from which they operate happily however bitter their goals or
from despair their momentum. They incubate and hope to hatch
ideas or ideologies that captivate or hold them captive. Contro
versy, flirtation with original ideas or any other form of media
experimentation (aside from the purely technical) is anathema to
megamedia, which consolidates immense energy and talent to
hype the salacious, mendacious and indigestible. Commercial
media exists to make money. Micromedia is always looking for
a buck so it can publish or broadcast.
It is myopic to suggest, as megamedia consistently
claims, that only mainstream approaches to problems that criti-
NATURE PAPER
Hi it's the first day of Nature Paper] My name is
Margit and in this issue of Nature Paper you're reading
about rainforests and ways we can help them.
Rainforests are a home to many animals..,.
If you want to help save the rainforests (or other
stuff) go to the Wildlife Club and the leadei might let you
be a member! To be a member you have to go in the
spider cage. And I should tell you this, none of the spiders
are poisonous and the spider cage is big enough for one
person at a time.
Lots of people are trying to save the rainforests.
But tots of people are trying to get rid of the rainforests
too. But if you were a gecko and bulldozers were coming
your way what would you do?
Rainforests are a great place to study animals.
Can you believe people travel far and wide just to took at
tropical rainforests! Rainforests are very pretty. But they
are very rainy too. And it's a good thing too, for if it didn't
rain then what would become of the beautiful flowers?
"MARGIT BOWLER
THE NATURE PAPER
(VOL. 1, NO 1)
Six year old Margit Bowser is editor, publisher and writer
of the Nature Paper She lives in Astoria and attends Star of the
Sea School.
cally affect society should be considered. The common ground
(which is not represented by the mainstream media) is certainly
a forum at which extremes meet and seek agreement, but the
more specific audience ought not to be ignored. It is just such
esoteric publications, left or right, shrill or reasonable, which
keep the self-styled mainstream media on a somewhat honest
course and not entirely blown about by its commercial interests.
The Times Eagle, reborn from three years in a crypt,
now resurrected 17 years, lean, hungry, improvident and half
alive since breaking out of its tomb, might be considered a
forum for impractical, perhaps stoneage dreams of a less painful
future than prophesied by old grim myths, a torchbearer for an
ancient concept of personal freedom coequal vwth community
responsibility, in history only a dream but its most persistent
dream. I wrote in commemoration of the Bom Again Bird's tenth
anniversary, which was double the lifetime of its original incarn
ation:
The NCTE is a member of the Poverty Press It is one
of a few small presses obsessed with a vision unaffected by
commerce It is descended from radical newspapers that
blossomed briefly (and) its lineage threads back to the prickly
press that fostered the First Amendment, which denies govern
ment or anyone else the right to interfere with freedom of
speech. The independent advocacy press has few pretensions
toward objectivity and fewer illusions about its probability Most
small independent journals are chronically understaffed, under
funded and generally misunderstood because they seldom
reflect popular opinion. They act, often myopically and insensi
tively, as consciences and torchbearers, and most are fierce and
shrill advocates of large or esoteric causes They are usually on
hard times and fail more often than they are replaced.
Yet even in America, which worships the colossal, and
despite media merger mania, (also from the 10th birthday ode)
.... The very small can grow and relatively prosper inbetween the
cracks and shadows of the Mega-big, like fems on a forest floor.
Mouses must roar, after all, and bite at the ankles of ponderous
tyrannies if we are to keep our heads and humor Micromedia,
flamboyant, irreverent, raffish and patched, is on the march into
the 21st century
Robert Stanley Need and I publish very different news
papers, though the lineage is iccognizable He might be upset at
my evolution of his creation yet our purpose has been the same
— to exercise the First Amendment like a muscle, to push at it
and goad it, to not allowit to slip into Alzheimer's through apathy
or neglect, and to slap away the hands that wish to strangle it.
Alexis de Toqueville wrote about American journalism,
"If one wishes to know the real power of the press, one should
pay attention, not to what it says, but to the way in which it is
listened to... It only cries so loud because its audience is becom
ing deaf."
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