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October 10, 1997
By JASON CHERVOKAS & TOM WATSON
New-Media Pamphleteers Revisit
The Roots of the First AmendmentebToday looks very familiar. The blue flag with the globe. The colorful section headers: red for sports, green for money, yellow for weather. Even the headlines seem eerily familiar: "Death of a Princess," "War in Sudan," and a special report on the economy.
It's only when you look at little more closely that the differences between the USA Today national news site and WebToday become more apparent. Look at the links -- to conspiracy theories, conservative Web sites and Bible sources. WebToday's design is a USA Today knock-off, and it uses copyrighted graphics and editorial content to boot, but its news is a different variety entirely. It refers repeatedly to the R.I.M. -- short for Reality Impaired Media, and purports to set the record straight.
WebToday, above, is a copy of USA Today in appearance only. Gerald McGlothlin, WebToday's editor, said that the nature of the Net allows for a freer flow of ideas. He said that most traditional news publications "have an anti-Christian bias" and that he considers himself both a journalist and an activist, adding the "most journalists are" activists, "but they don't admit it."
WebToday is far from unique. All over the Web there are "news" sites springing up, some national but many local in nature. These sites provide local gadflies, government critics and people sympathetic to their causes an alternative outlet. Taken together, they paint a picture of a previously marginalized community of Americans. While some take an adversarial stance to the mainstream press, others aim to tell stories that are merely overlooked -- often community news of an extremely local nature.
Up in Lewis County, Wash., a man named Sherwood (S.C.) Schantz publishes the Community News on the Web, part anti-government rant, part local media watchdog. It's a lively site with a conservative bent that blasts certain local government officials while praising others. And there are several sections labeled "news."
For instance, click on "Unreported or under reported Local Happenings" and you'll find one local resident's very public opinion on a rape case. After quoting unnamed "sources," it ends with this warning: "The People are getting feed [sic] up with the government, their public servants, making war with them."
Or you can click on Schantz's version of a story that involved him, a septic system, and a three-hour armed stand-off with authorities that led to his arrest. The first-person story rambles, but as Web writing goes, it's pretty intense stuff: "This is what scared me, not the dying, I accepted that when I got out of the truck. It was the blind obedience to orders of these young cops. They never said this is stupid, or I'm not going to kill someone over a septic system."
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But Schantz's site goes well beyond his personal experiences; it is a touchstone for other disaffected people in that corner of Washington, many of whom have contributed columns or "news reports." Schantz is not a journalist in the generally accepted use of the word, but he is providing a forum for opinion in what some would say is in the best tradition of the First Amendment.
Like the rest of the Bill of Rights, the First Amendment was drafted during an age of vitriolic pamphleteering that bore little resemblance to what would eventually become the profession of journalism. When Thomas Jefferson referred to the free press, he was talking about printed partisan diatribes -- stuff that would be referred to in the digital age as controversial content.
Schantz, for one, is an unabashed media critic who spends a great deal of his Web space picking apart the stories of professional journalists, including the local newspaper, The Lewis County Chronicle.
"The local paper does a good job at most things," Shantz allowed in an interview, "but like most organizations, they tend to take the word of the county officials over the average person or tend to give less credence to a person who disagrees with the official view of things. I will admit they probably have good reason for this practice, but why don't they do some real investigations to find out if maybe there is something wrong out there."
He continued: "I believe if something is wrong and we ignore it, it will fester until it is soon uncontrollable. It's like preventive medicine -- a little at the start can cure, but if left untreated soon will be fatal. We have an unrest in this country of which most people are unaware, or think it is just a bunch of nut cases. Some are, but not most. These people have genuine grievances; otherwise they would not fight so hard to correct these wrongs. People with a deep belief do not stop."
The Chronicle's former editor, Sarah Jenkins, a target of some of the anti-press criticism in The Community News, is no fan of the Web site.
"In general, I don't like seeing opinion presented as fact," says Jenkins, who is now editor of The Yakima Herald-Republic. "Nor do I care for the nature of the intensely personal attacks this group seems to prefer."
Even so, she defends Schantz's role in the public discourse.
"As a journalist, I also believe that readers, citizens, computer-users have a right to all the information they can find, and that they are intelligent enough to make their own judgments about the quality of the information they receive," she said. "That applies just as much to Web sites as it does to printed newspapers."
Not all newspaper editors are as sanguine. Barry Locher is managing editor of The State Journal-Register, a newspaper published in Springfield, Ill., the state capital, and owned by the Copley chain. He took umbrage at an item in the current edition of Community News, when Schantz reached beyond Washington State to compare anti-government coverage in WebToday to the Journal-Register's reports about a stand-off between a 51-year-old widow in Roby, Ill., and police officers seeking to enforce a court order. As part of its coverage, Community News ran a Journal-Register story in its entirety.
"It certainly bothers us, especially when these extremists can take an objective, legitimate news story and carve it into whatever form suits their conspiracy-theory-du-jour approach," Locher said. "It is certainly a violation of copyright as well as a violation of ethics. But then, I doubt very much if any of these Web publishers struggle a great deal with questions of journalistic ethics on a regular basis."
Not surprisingly, the battle lines between the arch-conservative, anti-government groups and the traditional news media form easily. Less troubling on the surface to most journalists would be publications like the Community Media Workshop in Chicago, a site that aims to tell the stories that the mainstream media miss -- and to sell those stories to journalists in the process.
“Do I believe in what I am doing, and is it right? Yes. Am I a journalist? No.” S.C. Shantz,
Community News on the Web
With the motto "Everyone Complains About the News -- We're Doing Something About It," the CMW unabashedly pushes "good news" stories from Chicago community groups, publishing a news tips newsletter with stories on successful job-training programs and the like. The site even maintains a large contact list of area journalists, complete with e-mail links. That the site has so far been a disappointment -- something that founder Hank De Zutter, a journalist himself, attributes to a lack of Net-savvy journalists in Chicago -- is almost beside the point.For Chicago community groups, and for others who publish community news on the Web outside the normal journalistic ken, there is a perceived vacuum -- and the publishing ethos of the Net allows them to fill it without worrying about profits and costs. Millions of people can now get at least some of what they perceive to be "news" from amateur publishers who do nothing to sheath the axes they have to grind.
As S.C. Shantz said when asked whether he considers himself a journalist or a partisan: "As to being a partisan, that would depend on in what form it is meant. If you mean, Do I believe in what I am doing, and is it right? Yes. Am I a journalist? No. Have I joined the ranks of journalists? If I have to be able to spell that word to get in, I would flunk an entrance exam."
Of course, in the world of news on the Web, Schantz -- and thousands of self-publishers like him -- pass that entrance exam every day.
DIGITAL NATION is published weekly, on Fridays. Click here for a list of links to other columns in the series.
Related Sites
Following are links to the external Web sites mentioned in this article. These sites are not part of The New York Times on the Web, and The Times has no control over their content or availability. When you have finished visiting any of these sites, you will be able to return to this page by clicking on your Web browser's "Back" button or icon until this page reappears.
- WebToday
- USA Today
- Lewis County Community News
- Lewis County Chronicle
- State Journal-Register
- Community Media Workshop
Jason Chervokas & Tom Watson at nation@nytimes.com welcome your comments and suggestions.
