TIMES
EAGLE
NORTH j
COAST i
VOL22NO2 50CENTS
In a dark time the eye begins to see
-Theodore Roethke
JAN&FEB 2001
ROGER HAYES
MICROMEDIA AT THE MILLENNIUM
G B Shaw to a journalist:
"Sir, your profession has as usual
destroyed your brain."
The year 2001 is the North Coast Times Eagle's
30th birthday. It has changed considerably over the past
three decades in format and style but its essential
obsession with independence and concomitant
consequence of poverty remain unchanged.
Its life is bicameral like the human brain and the
modern calendar, divided into the early era of the Old Bird
and the Born Again Bird raised from a three-year crypt with
various smaller deaths and resurrections.
The essential purpose of both incarnations of the
NCTE is to exercise the 1st Amendment like a muscle, to
push at it and goad it, to not allow it to atrophy or slip into
ethical Alzheimer’s through neglect or apathy, and to slap
away the hands that wish to strangle it.
The scatological father of the original NCTE
was Robert Stanley Need, a flamboyant, richly articulate,
socially pretentious, editorially fearless and once legendary
figure now barely remembered on the Oregon coast his
newspaper heated white hot for five remarkable years.
The 'Old Bird' lasted only five years as a conse
quence of its unconditionally controversial approach to
press freedom. For most of that time it starved slowly
(though noisily) for lack of financial substance Robert
Stanley Need acted as a Horatius holding off creditors
and philosophical enemies who strained to silence his
brand of rabblerousing populist journalism. He was a hard,
demanding editor and wrote inflammably about whatever
he considered unjust or unfair. But he finally bowed out.
exhausted and spiritually trammeled, and less than a year
after he surrendered his newspaper to a poseur who stole
bequeathed money that might have kept the paper alive
awhile longer, the 'Old Bird' went to its crypt like a
precocious child killed too early.
The NCTE was born again after three years
because, as it proclaimed in its first editorial, "1st
Amendment newspapers have become as rare as the
nation's symbol, the bald eagle. The independent press
has virtually disappeared, homogenized into huge
corporations that control the country and probably the
world ....Like everything else the role of the press is in
question. There should be no doubt. The press should
have no other special interest than the 1st Amendment
(which is) patently impossible when the press is controlled
by corporations whose interests are often in conflict with
the Constitution."
The media wields oblique influence rather than
power --- although its manipulation for propaganda is
immensely powerful. The major difference between
corporately owned mainstream media and its raffish
alternative that is usually on the edge of society and almost
always on the brink of bankruptcy, is that megamedia uses
the 1st amendment and the popular concept that news
must be reported objectively as a cloak for blatantly
partisan propaganda.
Two major institutions acted questionably this past
national election: the always questioned mass media that
did not question enough: and the U.S. Supreme Court
which sold its credibility for a longshot chance of elevating
the judicial branch of government into a blackrobed
autocracy
Virtually all of the mainstream media have
comfortably moved into the White House with George
Bush Jr. with little or no critique of the Supreme Court
decision that 'appointed' him President. Yet it is a dark
and spreading stain on the rights and powers of ordinary
citizens. Only micromedia — primarily the leftward
periodicals --- are providing any analysis of the effects and
consequences of a baldly stolen Presidential election by an
entrenched minority determined to preserve its power
against rapidly changing demographics.
Columnist Linda Ellerby wrote that the late Frank
Zappa "questioned journalists with the same fervor he
questioned politicians, and he couldn't understand why
most journalists didn't seem as passionate about the
1st Amendment as he was, or why every American
didn't realize that all censorship, especially well-intentioned
censorship, was a form of tyranny." (Zappa ridiculed Tipper
Gore's attempt to censor rock lyrics which she said
promoted deviant behavior. "I wrote a song about dental
floss," he said to a Congressional panel, "but did anyone's
teeth get cleaner?")
"Censorship is more obscene than obscenity," says
the Rev. Billy Hults, editor and publisher of the Upper Left
Edge.
Newspapers like the Times Eagle reflect the dismal
and deadening. Yet through dark funnels history is really
understood. Each era is a funhouse mirror of every other.
Wealth and power are two essential points of humanity's
triangle, creating the vastly accumulated weight of an
unstoppale lunge toward catastrophe.
These next few years promise to be vivid and
intense for unrepetentently irreverent independent media:
— 'In a dark time the eye begins to see', Theodore Rothke
wrote, which flies in the flag of every issue of the NCTE
"The day the first press is confiscated or the first
publisher of an alternative publication is branded a terror
ist and jailed for national security reasons, the mainstream
media will have to wake up," Peter B. Smith, indefatigable
editor of the wryly eccentric and stalwart Bay City Slug
('The Newspaper That Hates Progress’) has written.
"Though corporate owners of the print media might try and
ignore the event, I'm certain reporters and journalists who
work for these monstrosities of misinform-ation will sound
the alarm. Should they fail in their sacred duty the alter
native press will become the underground press, and we
will have returned to the black days before the American
Revolution....As long as the mainstream press doesn't do
its job. the alternative press will, come what may."
-MICHAEL PAUL McCUSKER