Is Plain Speaker a Tad Too Plain? : Media: People say they moved to tiny Jacumba to escape the evils of city life. So when their scrappy little paper published an obscenity, they rebelled.

At the Hitching Post Cafe, not far from this San Diego County hamlet, they recently came close to an old-fashioned book burning.

But it wasn’t banished books, rather newspapers that counter-dwellers tossed into a potbellied stove that thaws the mean winter winds swooping from the Cleveland National Forest.

With hoots and hollers of protest, they stoked the flames with copies of the November issue of Plain Speaker, a free monthly paper that has become the voice of news and often-oddball views, from El Cajon to the Arizona border.

Over the years, the scrappy newspaper has irked, titillated and humored readers across this jagged sprawl of mountain peaks and high desert plains 200 miles southeast of Los Angeles, where old California Route 80 pierces the clouds as it winds its way across the Tecate Divide.

This time, though, the Plain Speaker had gone too far. And locals were fit to be tied, ready in fact to round up a posse to pound morality’s warpath.

Cyrus (Moondog) Nygerski had struck again.

It wasn’t the liberal-minded columnist’s wise-acre slam on President Bush, America’s involvement in Vietnam or World War II veterans that made stomachs here churn.

It was his vulgar language.

Especially the “mother” word that’s among those seven profanities George Carlin once proclaimed would never be uttered on American television, much less printed in the conservative backwoods.

“They’re filth, plain filth,” Hitching Post owner Floretta Sorantos says of the 20 copies of the paper delivered each month. “We burned every last one of them Plain Speakers. And I’ll tell you another thing, we don’t ever want them dropped off at our restaurant again.”

Locals--a self-described collection of conservative ranchers and farmers--are no less riled at the writer.

“These newspaper people are a bunch of Yahoos who apparently don’t have the intelligence to express themselves in decent language,” said one man. “You can get a chimpanzee at the zoo to write better than this. We deserve better.”

Sorantos and her coffee-guzzling customers weren’t the only ones piqued by the column, which ran in the 18,000-circulation paper’s November edition. Within days of publication, the Plain Speaker’s tiny, unheated newsroom behind a realty office in downtown Jacumba received calls from a dozen enraged readers who canceled their subscriptions.

At least half a dozen irate advertisers also pulled their ads. Even the woman contracted to sell Plain Speaker advertising quit in a huff, saying that kind of offensive language had no place in a paper read by all ages.

“I had a responsibility to my advertisers,” said Cathy Beecroft, who lives in nearby Brawley. “I represent people who are more hometown, more country. And they don’t want to see that kind of obscenity in their local paper. This isn’t San Diego or Los Angeles. This is God’s country.”

That one really makes Henry Garfield laugh.

The great-great-grandson of President James Garfield is associate editor at the Plain Speaker and writes an occasional column under the Moondog pseudonym. The controversy, he says, is proof that many readers “are still living in the 19th Century.

“It’s humorous but not surprising that there would be this reaction. You know, they also burned Beatles records in the 1960s when John Lennon said the group was more popular than Jesus. Well, old Moondog just has this obnoxious streak. He likes to rabble-rouse, to tweak people in print.

“I guess we should have included a flag on the cover. That way, they would have had a real dilemma. I mean, these rednecks wouldn’t burn the flag now, would they?”

Media experts say the battle lines involve a newspaper’s right to publish, an advertiser’s right to support the cause and the subscriber’s often-whimsical prerogative to read, throw away or set fire to the local paper. Advertisers and subscribers alike say they quit the Plain Speaker to send a message that they, too, have a say about what the paper prints.

“Everybody’s exercising his rights here,” says Ted Frederickson, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Kansas, where he teaches courses on media law, ethics and newspaper reporting. “This seems to me a classic confrontation between the news purpose and the advertising purpose of a newspaper. But such a confrontation is more sharply defined in a smaller area such as this because the stakes are higher.

“Even a few angry advertisers or readers can have a significant economic effect on a paper, perhaps causing them to lend a more attentive ear to what’s being said.”

Indeed, publishers of the Plain Speaker say the rift could eventually cost the paper a quarter of its $40,000 annual advertising income. The Plain Speaker is run on a shoestring budget.

The paper’s officials, however, remain unbowed.

Associate publisher Robert Mitchell stands behind the column. If anything, he might have used even stronger language because, as he says, “if you want to get people’s attention, you’ve got to hit them over the head.

“The way I see it, every issue of the Plain Speaker should offend somebody. And if it doesn’t, then we’re not doing our job--a theory that comes from the world of complacency in which we dwell. It just doesn’t offend us if our advertisers cancel. They have that right and more power to them. That’s what America is all about.

“Just as we have a right to print, they have a right not to endorse us by withdrawing their economic support. We may think they’re idiots, but we’ll defend to the death their right to do it.”

The Plain Speaker is no stranger to controversy.

Mitchell himself recently wrote a column about the unhealthy temptations in Congress, reasoning that after four years in Washington, even Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary could return as pimp and prostitute.

“The Holy Rollers hit the roof over that one,” he says. “A grocery store in Julian and a pharmacy in Jamul boycotted us. We still haven’t got papers back into those places.”

And when the Plain Speaker excerpted a Newsweek article that referred to the nearby Salton Sea as the most-polluted body of water in America, local advertisers balked.

But the paper didn’t flinch. More recently it has reported on issues such as a trash dump being considered for a local Indian reservation and racial tensions between townsfolk and migrant workers in nearby Alpine.

“The hallmark of the Plain Speaker has always been that we don’t care about your political posture or religious convictions,” Mitchell says. “If you’re out there, you’re fair game. And if some segment of the readership doesn’t like it, well, then, that’s just too damned bad.”

Dave Dailey didn’t like it. After advertising in the Plain Speaker since its inception five years ago, the owner of a local hardware store wrote a letter in late November to cancel his account. He was angry over the obscene language and the fact that editors had placed a column containing religious criticism next to his ad, which included the Christian fish symbol.

The paper, says Dailey, is simply a messenger of perverse modern times in which children succumb to sex, drugs and foulmouthed language.

But not in rural America, he stresses. That’s why people moved there in the first place--to escape such city problems.

“We’re trying to make a point that as readers and advertisers we have some influence at this paper, that we have a say,” Dailey says. “Advertising is the way they make their money and we provide that money. So we have control.

“But we don’t want to tell them what to print, maybe just how to print it.”

Former Plain Speaker advertising agent and delivery person Beecroft agrees.

She recalls her surprise and anger the Thursday night she picked up 3,000 copies of the November issue for delivery. The previous month, Garfield had used another offensive word in a column about baseball. But this time was even worse.

As she drove her delivery route, Beecroft became angrier and angrier. When she finished, she drove home to Brawley, picked up the telephone and resigned. Finally, she fired off a letter of complaint to Garfield.

“People want the Plain Speaker to be just that--plain-speaking and controversial at times,” she now says, “but never obscene.”

Garfield responded with his own letter explaining his perceived obligation as a writer and artist to push what he calls the often-narrow parameters of community standards.

“It’s the duty of artists to continually slam the boundaries of what is acceptable,” he says. “Advertisers won’t like it because this attitude makes some people uncomfortable. But a creative society can’t live without it.”

Kansas professor Frederickson wonders whether anyone is well-served by the controversy. Both he and Ben H. Bagdikian, a journalist and former dean of the graduate school of journalism at UC Berkeley, applaud the paper for taking a stand, but say it’s never wise for a newspaper to gratuitously offend readers.

“I think this will provide a healthy shaping of standards in that community,” Bagdikian says. “Only a few years ago, the word damn wasn’t allowed in most papers. Now that’s changed, things have loosened up a bit. Whatever happens, the words a newspaper uses reflect the changes occurring in private language.”

And Garfield has a suggestion for Plain Speaker readers or anyone else offended by what they read in their local paper:

“For God sakes, write a letter to the editor. It’s a forum for you, too. And an opposing point of view is always welcome--even if you do believe that Moondog should be lined up against the wall and shot.”

The War Over Words

A plain-speaking monthly newspaper has riled up the community of Jacumba (Pop. 600) in southeastern San Diego County.