It’s in black and white, and they’re red all over : Owner of Wild West News specializes in fighting words. His paper is popular and loathed, and he loves it.

His home has been shot at and his mailbox has been stuffed with scorpions by scornful neighbors. He has been sued for libel and physically assaulted.

And Friday, while delivering the weekly newspaper that has made him the most reviled man in eastern Arizona, Chuck Rosa saw a lot of obscene gestures waved from the windows of passing cars.

As owner, editor and premier writer for the Wild West News, Rosa believes he is on a divine mission to “tell the truth” about the 8,303 people who live in and around this isolated White Mountains community of vast, terraced canyons formed by open-pit copper mines.

“I’ve got supernatural protection--ain’t no plane gonna crash with me in it, and nobody’s gonna shoot me until I’m done doing what I was called to do,” said Rosa, 52, a stocky man with a shock of gray hair who often wears a bulletproof vest over his shirt. “Lois Lane said on the ‘Superman’ show last month, ‘My job is to disseminate the news, not ponder the consequences.’ I believe that too.”

In his newspaper and in conversations with anyone who will listen, Rosa lodges a constant stream of charges about local people and institutions, all vigorously denied. Among the hotly disputed allegations: that prisoners have had sex with courthouse secretaries in the courthouse; that ambulance drivers may be selling drugs and sex out of their vehicles on city time, and that a small fire at the home of the head of the Clifton Chamber of Commerce may have been connected to a “dope” operation.

Recent articles also asked readers to guess, for a $5 prize, “which top police department official in (nearby) Morenci is strongly opposed to drug testing because it might catch him full of cocaine?” and, “Which business in Graham County is suspected of being a whorehouse?”

Rosa says he gets his “scoops” from seven perpetually running police scanners in the living room of the home he rents from Phelps Dodge Mining Co. He says some “news tidbits,” however, are supplied by people who pay him to print damning allegations about unfaithful lovers and mean bosses.

The Wild West News is wildly popular among those who get a kick out of reading about their neighbors’ alleged mishaps. But other townsfolk are fed up with articles they say are so riddled with factual errors and unsubstantiated rumors that they seem to stretch constitutional rights to freedom of speech to the limits.

Some even have stopped identifying themselves in emergency calls to the police for fear that Rosa is listening on his scanners and may publicize erroneous accounts of their plight.

“Each Monday I get complaints from people who want me to do something about him,” said Greenlee County Attorney Dennis Lusk. “I have to tell them to file a lawsuit against him. Trouble is, when they finally get their judgment, that judgment and a quarter will buy them a cup of coffee.”

Rosa, who filed for bankruptcy after losing a libel lawsuit in 1991, has virtually no attachable assets. He says he only earns a few hundred dollars a month from the newspaper. His most valuable possessions include the secondhand police scanners, a donated computer, a Polaroid camera he bought at a rummage sale for $5 and a houseful of worn-out furniture.

Walter Mares, executive director of the Chamber of Commerce, recently took matters into his own hands. “I beat the side of (Rosa’s) head,” he said. Rosa responded by printing an article about the fistfight, accompanied by a photograph of his scratched face.

“They can’t stop me,” Rosa said. The Wild West News, which started five years ago as a one-page sheet that was handed out free, is now an eight-page, 35-cent newspaper boasting a weekly circulation of 5,850. Rosa says he expanded circulation territory to include neighboring communities.

A satisfied customer is Carolyn Dyer, a waitress at the Morenci Motel. “I buy the Wild West News for a treat, and man, it tickles me pink.”

Daniel Barr, a media attorney in Phoenix who has provided Rosa with legal advice, also has “a soft spot in my heart for him.”

“In some ways, Chuck’s newspaper is a lot like the newspapers . . . in Philadelphia and Boston in 1776, which also included grammatical errors, outrageous statements and personal attacks,” Barr said. But those were the foundations of the nation’s free press.

Rosa, who, with the help of his wife, Jane, gathers up his newspapers every night to protect them from being stolen or set afire, could not agree more.

“There’s a need for people to know what’s going on around here. And I tell everything I know.”