By Clare Kittredge
NOTE: This classic profile of a Portsmouth newspaper publisher by a veteran journalist appeared in the Boston Globe in July 2000.—JDR
He’s opinionated. He’s impolite. Hardly an issue goes by that he doesn’t lob some barb at that “other” local paper, the Portsmouth Herald. And when he skewers the high and mighty, look out.
Meet Steve Fowle, hardened cynic, publicly declared “nose-tweaker,” independent newsman. Or, as he puts it, “one lone nut with a computer.”
In cluttered offices at home in one of the last vestiges of ungentrified Portsmouth, Fowle runs a tiny newspaper he describes as a national heirloom. It’s the New Hampshire Gazette. Fowle says it’s the nation’s oldest newspaper. And in it, he delivers caustic criticism of “the whole truth” to unmask greedy developers, perfidious politicians and befuddled journalists.
“I find the whole idea that you shouldn’t get involved in a fight you can’t win distasteful,” he said recently with a faraway grin. “We’re all going to die anyway. What difference does it make if you win or lose?”
As Fowle recounts the saga, nary a newspaper was published in New Hampshire until a distant relation of his came to Portsmouth almost 250 years ago and launched the Gazette in 1756.
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Daniel Fowle was his third cousin eight times removed. He had been jailed in Boston on suspicion of being behind a seditious pamphlet, the “Monster of Monsters,” a “very impolite” tirade against a new Massachusetts tax on rum and spirits.
Back then, the country had about a dozen other newspapers, says Fowle. When the last of those, the Maryland Gazette, folded in 1839,
The Gazette eventually fell into the hands of the Portsmouth Herald, which put it out as a weekly supplement and even absorbed it for a while, noting on the masthead that it was continuing the Gazette.
But in 1989, Fowle discovered that the Herald had let the Gazette‘s trade name registration lapse. “It was like finding a Stutz-Bearcat sitting at the curb with the keys in it,” said Fowle, referring to a vintage auto that makes aficionados drool.
In what he gleefully calls a “hostile takeover,” he registered the Gazette with the secretary of state and “liberated it from bondage.”
“I paid $40,” he said. “You want to know the funny part? It belonged to the world’s ninth-richest man.”
That man was Lord Kenneth Thomson of Fleet, then owner of the Portsmouth Herald and a vast newspaper publishing empire.
“There it was. I had reclaimed the old family newspaper after a lapse of more than 200 years,” Fowle said. “That just left me with the question of what the hell do you do with it?”
Fowle’s drive to air unreported wrongs was forged in the cauldron of the Vietnam War.
He was an Army photographer in Vietnam in the late 1960s when the Tet offensive hit. At 19, his job was taking pictures of bodies for the Army’s Ninth Medical Laboratory. “Corpses and non-combat deaths -air crashes, suicides, murders, the whole nine yards. And it felt to me like the metaphysical nucleus of that whole goddamned war,” he said.
“There I am in the morgue, a kid raised by normal New England Yankees who grew up saluting the flag and saying the Pledge of Allegiance and wondering what I’d done to be so lucky to live in this country,” he said. “And I’m in a morgue in Saigon standing with this big six-pound camera, surrounded by kids my age that have been shot up, and it just didn’t fit.”
He continued, “Because I’d enlisted and signed up to be a photographer in a conscious effort to avoid getting killed over there, I felt like every one of those guys was somehow taking my place.”
Back in the United States, Fowle felt “so alienated” that he went to the post office and filled out an alien registration form. He became a trucker, a salad dressing packer, a widget inspector. He worked as a reporter and photographer for a small weekly, The Hillsborough Messenger, “and before they fired me, I got to be editor. But I was a little too cranky.”
Dogged with post-traumatic stress disorder, Fowle buried himself in the woods. He was living in a small cabin in Hillsborough when another bombshell hit.
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“In 1986, the federal government announced it was going to take fuel rods from commercial nuclear power plants and bury them under my house,” he deadpanned. “It was as if they’d dropped an emotional neutron bomb on the community. What could be worse, we’re going to shoot your firstborn?”
A “phalanx of government robots” descended on the small town with rosy descriptions of their plans. Rebellion brewed. And he didn’t trust the papers to tell it straight.
BONUS: Publisher Fowle meets publisher Robert Foster (scroll down)
“I saw a white-haired Granny stand up and wag her index finger at these Washington bureaucrats and say, ‘You better watch out, I keep a shotgun behind my do-aah,” he said. “But the available media could not contain the full truth of that story.”
The New Hampshire Home Defender was born. The small rebel monthly was replete with “intemperate observations” about the waste dump, “minus the saccharin platitudes” of the establishment media.
“I managed to get out three issues before the federal government struck their tents and snuck away in the night,” he said. “I like to think I helped. It was great fun. Everyone in town was suffering terribly, but I was having the time of my life because the federal government showed up in my backyard and dared me to mess with them.”
Not long after, he stumbled upon the Gazette.
“This is a case of being presented with a national heirloom, the stewardship of the nation’s oldest newspaper, and being forced to find a way to carry it on without resources, and trying to build a medium that can contain the whole truth,” he said.
Lord Thomson, the Gazette‘s former owner, came in for lampooning. “Be Glad You’re Not the Ninth Richest Human on Earth,” thundered a headline.
So did his “award-winning local daily.”
“The Portsmouth Herald: Local Paper? Or Lo-Cal Paper?” another headline hollered.
The attacks didn’t let up when Thomson ceded the Herald to the Ottaway chain in late 1997. (Fowle claims some of the credit.) “What am I going to do?” he asked. “They keep publishing the damn thing.”
The Herald takes it in stride. “Basically, public critique of your work is part of the fun of putting out a daily community newspaper,” Herald managing editor Jane Murphy said with a sporting chuckle. Nor does Fowle spare other papers (the Globe included). He also regularly barbecues lawyers, developers and politicians.
“Plan to Put Suburb in Swamp Hits New Snag,” howled one headline. “Yet Another Stealth Monstrosity,” shouted another.
“The national and local economy are organized so that those who are merely filthy rich can become obscenely rich, and all they have to do is hire a lawyer and put up an eyesore that will distort the fabric of the community for centuries,” Fowle complained.
In his self-proclaimed role as “public eye,” Fowle cranks out 3,000 issues “fortnightly” (every two weeks), with the help of cartoonist Mike Dater. Engraved on the nameplate of his ancestor’s “ancient ramshackle sheet” are the fox and crow from Aesop’s Fables, meaning “citizen beware.” Merging 18th- and 21st-century technology, Fowle courts fresh input and an Internet following.
Still, he is the “ink-stained wretch” in the driver’s seat.
“Forget horse racing, newspapering is the sport of kings,” he wrote a while ago. “Real, independent newspapering, that is. Slaving away like a nag tied to a treadmill on some chain-owned paper in a dry, boring inland town is my idea of hell on earth.”
To save money, Fowle recently retreated from his Market Square headquarters to his house. Here, a carved sign trumpets: “NIL DESPERANDUM” (Don’t despair). With a little help from his VA disability check and local ads, the paper survives on a shoestring. But he won’t take an ad from The Gap.
As he sees it, the journalistic niche he occupies is wide open.
“We’re awash with media. And yet we seem somehow to know less and less,” he said with a laugh. “O.J. Simpson, Monica Lewinsky. What’s the point? Meanwhile, stuff we desperately need to know is not suppressed, it’s ignored.”
“The entire political structure of the country today is bought. And the citizens have no alternative except to perceive it through the bent prism of the advertising-addicted media … And that’s why people are lapping up the Gazette like a hungry cat goes after cream.”
© Clare Kittredge, all rights reserved. This article originally appeared in The Boston Globe. Reprinted with permission of the author.
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