The Lone Star Iconoclast: the little newspaper that could

 

Endorsing candidates was nothing out of the ordinary for the editorial board of Crawford's Texas Iconoclast. Over the last four years in publication, the Iconoclast has gone on record with endorsements for candidates at all levels of public service.

The publication's recent endorsement of presidential candidate John Kerry in President George Bush's backyard, however, generated an initial wave of local response that was hateful, followed by a local and national affirmation of overwhelming support. The editorial, in fact, changed the Iconoclast's profile from purveyor of the news to becoming the news itself.

The Iconoclast's editor W. Leon Smith says he wakes these days with the sensation that he's snapped out of a weird dream, only to realize that this particular exercise of the First Amendment -- despite years of service to the Crawford community and nearby Clifton where he serves as Mayor and publishes the Clifton Record with his father -- has brought him the ire and ill wishes of once faithful readers.

“In the past when someone didn't agree with an endorsement, we might get a couple of letters to the editor or very occasionally a cancellation for a subscription,” Smith said. “I never thought I'd have someone calling to say, ‘Come get your papers' or that I would hear that citizens were pressuring businesses not to advertise with us. This was more extreme. We were surprised at the reaction, but we knew we had done the right thing,” he continued.

Smith said that the initial local calls were angry. “They were slamming the receiver down and cussing. They were threatening,” he said.

The callers appeared not to have regard for the freedom of the press or an understanding that the mission of a newspaper is to inform and to engage its readers in exchanges that move them to think and act. Nor did the callers seem to understand the newspaper's ideal in defining its flag the Iconoclast -- “an exposer of icons, icon-buster, fighter for truth, justice, and the American Way .”

The Iconoclast's endorsement of Kerry took on a momentum of its own as the national and international media picked up the story. “Before we printed our editorial, we had newsstand sales of 920 issues. What we lost in cancellations has been replaced by new subscriptions from coast to coast. The second day after the editorial was printed, there were just as many calls but they were telling us to hang in there,” Smith recalled.

“Our endorsement of President Bush at the Clifton Record four years ago just followed the trend in Texas to vote Republican. I did, too, but I've changed my mind. Back then he said he was a uniter and not a divider. He had done a good job that way as Governor of Texas. That is not the case now,” Smith said.

“About three months ago we got serious about the endorsements we would be making. The editorial staff -- me, Don Fisher, and Nate Diebenow -- knew it would be hard to endorse Bush as we re-evaluated his last three-and-a-half years in office,” Smith continued. Both Diebenow and Fisher are associate editors at the Iconoclast. Fisher, a professor of journalism at McLennan County Junior College in Waco , has a minority stake in the Iconoclast's ownership.

“Just after 9-11 we looked to the President as our leader, a uniter. We had the support of other nations. Like many Americans, we supported the move into Iraq because we believed the President had proof of weapons of mass destruction, that he had done due diligence,” Smith said.

“Don had concerns about the President's actions just after 9-11. He wanted to know why the President did not take a leadership role in initiatives to make Americans less dependent on foreign oil. Don felt the country would have followed the President's lead and made sacrifices to reduce energy consumption. Instead, the President told the country to go shop, to act like nothing had hurt us or displaced us,” he continued. “I agreed with Don, but I also felt we needed to be supportive. We let it slide. The BBC interviewed me at the time of the invasion of Iraq , and I told them that the President was highly intelligent and that he knew what he was doing. When there were no weapons of mass destruction, I felt we had been had,” Smith recalled.

“As we began to formulate our endorsement, we also looked at the trivializations in the campaign, the half-truths, the unfair stuff. We wanted instead to focus on issues, especially those that will have a lasting effect on our lives -- social security and stem cell research, tax cuts for businesses that sent American jobs overseas, the deficit, the reduction in benefits for veterans, billions of dollars in government contracts without competitive bids. I would want to fix social security, not privatize it, which considering the ramifications of privatization, could send the entire economy into a tailspin,” he continued thoughtfully.

“We felt strongly about stem cell research, which could have such an impact on the quality of life because you could cure diseases. This would also have a positive impact on the economy,” he said.

“As our ideas came together -- , mine, Don's, and Nate's,” Smith said, “We took the approach that in filling the office of the President of the United States , we are not appointing a king or an emperor. We are hiring someone to do our work. We want a candidate who can have a work ethic and will not mislead us, who will be alert to things and will keep us safe. We don't have that in President Bush. If you held the highest office in the nation, don't you think you'd put in all the hours necessary and that you'd effectively manage your staff to give you the best information so you could make good choices?” Smith asked.

Who better than his neighbors in Crawford would know how much time the President spends away from the White House and at his ranch? The Iconoclast editorial sums up this issue succinctly: “We should expect that a President would vacation less, if at all, and instead tend to the business of running the country, especially if he is, as he likes to boast, a ‘wartime president.' America is in service 365 days a year. We don't need a part-time President who does not show up for duty as Commander-In-Chief until he is forced to, and who is in a constant state of blameless denial when things don't get done.”

“The President is not in the real world sometimes. Look at the economy, how jobs are being exported, how tons of contracts are going out for Halliburton that should be going out to bid. It's one thing after another,” Smith said.

“In some regards,” Smith reflected of the Iconoclast 's unwilling catapult into the spotlight, “This has been a lesson in the power of the printed word. This was just an editorial in our paper. It was us doing what we've always done. As we finished the piece, I had thoughts that I wished John Kerry might read it and would know he had support in Texas. After it was published, an elderly gentleman from the VFW told me he was glad we had written the editorial. He said, ‘Kerry needs to know that people in Texas like him,'” Smith continued.

“It's an honor that millions have read our editorial. It's very gratifying. The word ‘courage' has been attributed to us, but I think rather than that, it is very important that newspapers do what they feel they should do and not worry too much about the consequences. I've talked to so many other journalists about this. There is the chance you could be cutting your own throat. It makes my head spin, but it was the right thing to do,” he said.

 

 

ICONOCLAST2

A few Saturdays ago as I unloaded tools from my truck into the barn I heard a story on Air America that riveted my attention from beginning to end. It was the account of the Lone Star Iconoclast , the little newspaper in Crawford, Texas that days earlier had endorsed Senator John Kerry instead of the homeboy incumbent George W. Bush. The story caught on my heart as I heard how the Lone Star Iconoclast in an avalanche of phone calls protesting Kerry's endorsement suddenly faced the lost revenues of cancelled ads and cancelled subscriptions, something LareDOS experienced when it first began to run stories in 1995 about the fondness of LISD's oligarchy for extravagant purchases that had little to do with education. (‘Member the new constellation in the heavens over Laredo, the Double Dipper?)

Even before I read the Iconoclast's well-written, well-executed endorsing editorial (reprinted here in its entirety) or took a look at the publication's professional presentation in broadsheet, I felt immense admiration for the stand the Iconoclast took in so Republican a bastion of the religious right.

The Iconoclast's editorial breathed a life of its own when the New York Times ran a story about the political climate in Crawford, the editorial, and its repercussions. Other newspapers followed suit. The editorial has been reprinted across the country and is posted on numerous websites. Editor W. Leon Smith, one of the three writers of the editorial, has been interviewed by American news and radio networks as well as the BBC, PBS, and the European and Japanese press. He estimates that he was interviewed over a hundred times regarding the editorial.

The lost revenues and subscriptions have been in part replaced with subscriptions purchased by strangers far from Crawford, Texas, about 400 of them, and so many visits to the Iconoclast's web page that it crashed.

I'd long heard the legend of the Iconoclast of a hundred years ago, the paper established by William Cowper Brann in Waco, a paper that told its readers, “The Iconoclast makes war upon no religion of whatsoever name or origin that has fostered virtue or added aught to the happiness of the human race. It is simply an independent American journal, exercising its constitutional prerogative to say what seemeth unto it best, without asking any man's permission.”

On the publication's web site, Smith tells present day readers of the Iconoclast: “There is more than one way to skin a cat. Actually, there are hundreds. The new Iconoclast will challenge status-quo monopolies of thought and illuminate new perspectives that were there all along but which denizens have been too blinded to see.”

In the story below, Smith, a seasoned journalist whose relationship with printer's ink dates to the days of hot lead Linotype, recounts the unexpected wild ride his weekly newspaper experienced as it became the news, not only in the town of Crawford but in the larger arena of national and worldwide public opinion.

 

María Eugenia Guerra