Don't stop the presses!

For more than 40 years Pat and Tom Gish have never stopped the presses of their truth-telling Whitesburg, Kentucky newspaper, The Mountain Eagle despite threats, boycotts, and even a firebombing.

When they purchased the Mountain Eagle in 1957, the Gishes not only found local government being conducted behind closed doors, they often saw the doors slammed right in their faces. Experienced reporters who knew that the public's business should be conducted openly, they pried open the doors, exposing police corruption, fraud, misuse of public funds, safety violations and environmental threats. In their business reporting, The Mountain Eagle was one of the first newspapers in the country to write about the dangers of strip mining.

It isn't always happy news, the Gishes say, but it is news that affects their readers every day. From its perch in Eastern Kentucky, the Eagle covers a largely rural world where unemployment, poverty and illiteracy rates are high, and trust has to be earned.

"We were ... determined to give our mountain readers the facts and inform-ation needed to confront their many problems. We're still doing that," Pat Gish will tell you.

Now in their 70's, the Gishes remain committed to their community and to the cause of a free press. The Mountain Eagle's masthead once boasted the motto "It Screams." After a firebomb destroyed much of the newspaper's office in the early 1970s, they put the Eagle back on newsstands with the motto "It Still Screams."

The firebombing was ordered by a corrupt police officer after the paper reported on questionable police tactics. The Gishes believe the attack was backed by money from the coal industry, which had come under the paper's scrutiny for damaging local roads.

Pat and Tom Gish have repeatedly stood up to the power of money, whether it was advertising boycotts organized by vengeful utilities and banks, or politicians trying to buy their way onto the front page.

The Gishes lament the demise of locally-owned community newspapers in Kentucky. They say the majority are now owned by out-of-state corporations with no real stake in the issues faced by the communities they serve.

"We are convinced that knowledge is power and the more the Eagle can help inform its readers about the local and far-away developments that affect them, the more good things can happen," says Pat Gish.
 

Update: Both Pat and Tom Gish have died; their son Ben now edits the Mountain Eagle.