In Praise of the AVA

A few years ago, another ETS!er wrote a column, amidst all of our bemoaning of the sorry state of commercial media in this country, praising an outlet that stands as a shining counter-example. U.S. media is not a monolith. Across the country, newsrooms include editors, writers, photographers, and artists who still believe that media is more than another investment in the corporate portfolio -- that it can challenge power structures and its audience, that it can be a force for good in the community and the world. Usually, however, that's not the mission of the media outlet itself.

And then, there's the Anderson Valley Advertiser.

It's time, once again, to trot out our praise and admiration for the AVA. The AVA is my favorite commercial news outlet in the world, bar none, and an amazing example of the impact only one person, armed with talent and a little bit of attitude, can have on his community. It began life a half-century ago, in the tiny Mendocine County, Calif. community of Boonville (pop.: 1,200), as exactly what it sounds like: the sort of small-town, Chamber-of-Commerce-driven weekly that publishes nothing more interesting than hardware specials and the winner in the local school science fair.

But in the early '80s, it was bought by Bruce Anderson -- a local resident operating a foster care home who'd had it with inept, venal local bureaucrats, and who decided to take revenge by becoming the media. And the AVA, in turn, became something extraordinary.

Every week for nearly 20 years, Bruce has put out the AVA, with his wife, Ling, handling business matters, whatever part-time staff the couple can afford, and the generous, donated help of the AVA's many admirers. In that time, they've swung elections, exonerated the wrongly accused, goaded local policy-makers, given a voice to the voiceless, and pissed off just about everyone in Mendocino County.

An ex-Marine, Anderson's politics run somewhere between left, libertarian, anarchist, and socialist, but it boils down to a deep belief in decency and common sense. Three slogans now adorn the front-page banner: "The Country Weekly That Tells It Like It Is," the French Revolution's "Peace to the cottages! War on the palaces!," and "All Happy, None Rich, None Poor." In the past, he's also run Lenin's "Be As Radical As Reality" and Pulitzer's "Newspapers should have no friends."

The word "Pulitzer" is now associated with the highest levels of achievement in American journalism, but Pulitzer's ethic has disappeared in American journalism in the last century. However, Anderson -- who also happens to be a gifted and often bitingly hilarious writer -- has embraced it fully. The county's Board of Supervisors hates him. The previous sheriff and DA--before Anderson's investigative work helped unseat them -- hated him. The "respectable" local media hates him. The Farm Bureau types hate him. The Clinton/NPR liberals hate him. Redwood Earth First! hates him, too.

I first came across the AVA in the wake of the Zapatista rebellion, when Chiapas dispatches from famed iconoclastic journalist John Ross, as well as various works from Alexander Cockburn, kept being reprinted from it. (Cockburn, who lives in the next county, still writes for the AVA -- both a weekly "National Notes" column and, with CounterPunch co-editor Jeffrey St. Clair, the same weekly "Nature and Politics" column that the duo donate to ETS!.)

But the paper turned out to be the last thing I expected: a text-heavy, 12-page broadsheet mixing global politics, local Community Service District meeting notes, and essays from ordinary people; light on the ads, a quarter of the paper devoted to readers' often insightful letters--short or long--and a full page given over to Anderson's paragraph-long notes on anything and everything. The writing was extraordinary, the margins peppered with tiny graphics, and the columns filled out with quotes from everyone from Noam Chomsky to Woody Allen to Gore Vidal to Joe Bob Briggs.

Not much has changed since, except that the tiny margin graphics are gone, victims of Anderson's grudging conversion to computer layout a couple of years ago. This season may, in fact, be one of his finest hours. As he did five years ago with a man named Bear Lincoln -- falsely charged with killing a local sheriff's deputy who was instead felled by friendly fire -- Anderson is once again in the process of tenaciously trying to free a local Native American from the grasp of the incompetent and prejudiced local justice system. This time, the man's name is Tate Laiwa, a low-life Point Arena guy convicted several years ago of a murder -- despite overwhelming evidence that his primary accuser pulled the trigger himself.

At the same time, Anderson is in high dudgeon these days over the just-concluded trial in Oakland concerning the 1991 bombing of local Earth First! activists Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney. The case has become a minor cause celebre within the national left, and the trial -- a lawsuit brought against the FBI and Oakland police by Cherney and the estate of the now-deceased Bari over their immediate and false arrest as having bombed themselves -- has so far resoundingly supported the plaintiff's complaints. But local EF! supporters' additional claims, that Bari and Cherney were not only unjustly arrested but were the targets of an assassination attempt by the FBI and/or Big Timber, has brought the pit bull-like derision of Anderson, who suspects (with good reason) that Bari's violent ex-husband, now a local recycling official, is the perp, and that local activists are cynically benefiting from Bari's victimization and subsequent death.

Right or wrong, the AVA is the sort of fearless, clearly opinionated, and strikingly individualized media outlet that has essentially disappeared from America's antiseptic newsrooms. It draws fans from outside the area -- about half the AVA's subscribers aren't local -- because people recognize, in the foibles of Mendocino County politicians, the same sorts of hijinks that could be but usually aren't reported in their own towns. It helped inspire, and continues to inspire, ETS!.

In big cities, the newspapers, radio stations, TV stations, and cable companies are all owned by big chains; in small towns, they're owned by small chains. They're interchangeable products that look the same everywhere--soulless entertainment usually devoted, in cultural as well as news content, to offending as few people as possible. Especially advertisers.

It's getting worse, of course -- more and more of our media produced by fewer and fewer corporate hands. But it's also getting better, as technology makes it possible for more and more of us to create our own media. All it takes sometimes is one person with an attitude and some determination. If every county in the U.S. had a paper with the spirit of the Anderson Valley Advertiser, we'd have a much, much better world.

The Anderson Valley Advertiser isn't on the web -- of course -- but can be e-mailed at ava@pacific.net. Subscriptions are $40 per year from 12451 Anderson Valley Way, Boonville CA 95415.