Thursday, March 20, 2014
Censorship
The Chico News & Review has refused to print From the Edge twice in two months. Do you think they’re trying to tell me something?
The first time an editor rejected my work was in late ’97. Minnesota Law & Politics had recently published a piece about cops, but when I submitted an article about parent’s rights the editor decided it was way more than the lawyerly community could stand. The magazine has since gone out of business.
I started writing From the Edge in 1998, and when we moved to California I’d phone them in to KFAI radio. My producer refused to broadcast one because I had absent-mindedly used one of the words the Federal Communications Commission bans. My bad.
A while back whoever was my editor then—I’m on my eighth—refused to print a column I’d written about clemency for Roman Polanski. The editor said the whole staff agreed with him.
A couple of months ago I wrote a piece about my recent experiences with mental illness and the way mentally ill people are treated in Butte County, one in particular. That time CNR staff decided that what I’d written might get the paper sued, and they refused to print it. Fine. Wussy, but fine.
This last refusal takes the cake. I wrote about the Sid Lewis mess, based entirely on published accounts on web sites of the Chico Enterprise-Record and KRCR television, and I referenced nothing that wasn’t available around the world. I didn’t think privacy would be an issue, and it wasn’t.
I’m usually way behind the news cycle, but Lewis had only recently been arrested for masturbating in front of a 17-year-old girl, and I had something to say about both him and the girl. I didn’t know anything about Lewis’s arrest last year on charges of assault with a firearm and corporal injury to a spouse until I read about it in the CNR. I was feeling pretty pleased with myself for being up to date when actually I wasn’t so much current as too soon. Unbeknownst to me, there’s apparently a limit on these things.
Here’s what my editor said, in part, “It’s a brand new case and there is way too little information available to be putting out opinions in the paper as to what's going on with either Sid or especially the girl who made the allegation.”
I’m not a reporter, and I feel no obligation to be fair or balanced. I never thought anybody would expect me to toe the CNR’s editorial line in any way out here on the edge, because I haven’t and I don’t. I guess that’s the problem.
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Sorry to hear you're leaving the CN&R, Tony, let alone under such crummy circumstances. Have had the growing sense that the paper has been steadily going downhill ever since Robert Speer departed as Editor, especially since the current editor seems to be using the editorial space as a personal soapbox for her private life and opinions. So not surprising that the pettiness and narcissism has extended into other areas of the paper as well. Although ironically it comes at a time when the Chico Enterprise Record, which has usually been such a reactionary rag, now seems to be exhibiting a bit more "balance" for a change.
ReplyDeleteSounds like you've always been a "survivor", and BTW, I wouldn't be surprised if you even have a book (or two) in 'ya!
Best Wishes, -M.
So. It was the sex. That done you in.
ReplyDeleteThis is a surprise? In the country that devoted 18 straight months to ceaseless fulminations about a blowjob? When even the president of the United States can be impeached and put on trial because a woman willingly wrapped her lips around his member, you tread on dangerous ground indeed when you freely comment on a local (alleged) penis-plucker, and she for whom he made his masturbatory music.
This country was founded by Puritans, and they still infest the dern place. Their watchword the memorable line from the movie Zardoz: "the gun is good; the penis is evil."
Were the editors afeared that you might somehow be seen as "smearing" lascivious Sid and/or the pale frail wildwood flower? Wonder what they thought of the February 24 column by Synthesis editor Amy Olson, who recounted a tale from her wayward youth, when, while drunk, she successfully eluded an attempt by Lewis to ease her into his bed. Though she averred she could not speak to the truth of any current charges, she observed that "over the years I saw him behave in pretty awful ways toward his girlfriend; once he was even physical against her in front of everyone"; she damned Lewis as "a dick from the very beginning," writing him off as "basically a rude person who got by on being impressive." Sheesh.
Years ago I heard you interviewed on KZFR, I think maybe by David G., and you said you didn't often receive much feedback. I thought, as I was listening, "I need to write the guy and tell him how much I appreciate his work." But of course I never did. Even when the thought reoccurred, as it did frequently, when I would be struck anew by the power of your fresh, naked, composed prose. And neither did hundreds of other people, who always someday meant to get around to telling you how much they valued you. But never did.
Know that you are the best and bravest writer ever employed by that paper. And I would know. Because I have been reading the damn thing from the beginning. I in fact was one of those who moved the paper from campus to community. Though I understand Robert Speer would command all credit for that, these days. The always highly, though unintentionally, amusing Mr. Speer. Whose latest irony is to apply to Robert Stone the word that best describes Robert Speer: "mediocre."
That word has never applied to you. And it never shall.
And that, in the end, is why you are no longer there.