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My children thought it was amusing that their mother fought fascism from her MaeWestside Tumblr blog but so I did. Post after post, investigation after investigation, I wielded my keyboard like a weapon of dooshbaggery destruction. I pressed send on my first anti-Trump post on September 17, 2016, at 3:02 pm, and the rest is rock ‘n’ roll history.
It’s emotional for me to scan the headlines I crafted as MaeWestside, just as I’m certain it will be in some future realm when I look back on the work of Bette Dangerous. That my sites take their titles from women who wrote their own narratives in a time of profound patriarchy is no accident.
Mae West wrote her own scripts, her own starring plays, she wrote most of My Little Chickadee and when she was told she couldn’t bring her man of color home to her apartment in Hollywood, she bought the fucking building and changed the rules.
Bette fought her entire career, the first star to sue her oppressors — Warner Bros. — and she won in losing — getting better scripts and treated with dignity. Her tombstone reads: “She did it the hard way.”
I can relate.
How much easier my life would have been if I just stayed on Rupert’s plantation.
But I’m not here for easy. And even having walked out on broadcast news tens years ago, my soul is still in recovery.
In 2016, when I realized I was a woman with investigative reporting experience unshackled by a corruption, away I galloped.
I’m here for us to win this thing — to defeat fascism so our children, and grandchildren can deal with the structural reforms so needed to form a more perfect union.
As I mentally prepare for our meeting tomorrow with Wake UP Sonoma, I plucked out a post I wrote for MaeWestside on September 24, 2016, at 6:31 pm. I had been writing in a fever to try to turn people away from MAGA and get people to see that their media was failing them and that if we all just worked a little bit harder, we could defeat the knuckledragging pageant guy.
It’s a tribute to the men who taught me to be a real journalist, because back then, it was a man’s world. Grammatical note: We now have better words for sex workers, but the report I’m relaying occurred in the 1980s and tells a far bigger story.
“HOOKER DUMPED AT SEASHORE,” and Other Lessons from the Fourth Estate, by heidi siegmund cuda, aka maewestside
My first week as a cub reporter for the Pulitzer Prize-winning weekly, the Point Reyes Light, and a corpse shows up. Having devoured the Nancy Drew catalog as a young Catholic-school bookworm, I liked a good mystery.
In this case, a lady of the night had ended up on the wrong side of luck, and it was all very film noir.
The newspaper’s owner, David V. Mitchell, decided the headline would read: “HOOKER’S BODY DUMPED IN SEASHORE.”
This was the middle ‘80s, and it may as well have been the middle ages.
A shitstorm ensued where everyone in the various townships weighed in with their verbal pitchforks, which usually came in the form of letters to the editor or in person. Leading the charge was a former lady of the night herself, who continually got into regular shouting matches with Mitchell.
I remember one particularly salty afternoon, where he defended his headline from his second floor balcony office. I could hear his balls clank as he walked across the floor to stand at the edge looking down at his critic.
Some dialogue ensued with the machine gun rat-a-tat of a precode Cagney gangsta flick, and I remember thinking to myself, “There’s a man with some gaddamn balls.” He stood his ground, whether you agreed with his choice of verbiage or not. It was his newspaper and due to its compact size, he always emphasized an economy of words. The word “Prostitute” didn’t fit the font size.
My father, who owned a print shop in North Beach, saw another issue. Due to fiscal restraints, the newspaper’s masthead was old and crusty, muddy and clumsy. One weekend that summer, my father went into his San Francisco shop, and created a crisp masthead for the Point Reyes Light.
Well, suddenly, this cub reporter, who was actually a summer intern, got elevated to the second floor sidekick desk, and boy did I have a swell time. I was in J school at UC Berkeley, and it was the first time I had hands-on reporting experience.
I remember the first time Mitchell edited my copy. He saw all the “Mr.’s” and “Mrs.’s” I’d included to sound very proper. With a red ink pen, he deleted them all and said, “We’re not the New York Times yet.”
I couldn’t tell the difference. That summer, I rooted out cults, exposed silent springs, and a cover story I penned on feral pigs got picked up by Newsweek. Along with sharpening my writing and reporting skills, I learned how to lay out the paper, and I even had my own delivery route.
I’d drive my little yellow Opal from Inverness, where I was paying $25 a week to live in an artist’s loft which I shared with banana slugs. I’d cruise through the scenic seaside towns of Point Reyes, Bolinas and Stinson Beach, where people would be milling in front the Post Office waiting for the newspaper.
I’ll never forget that. Every week, the Light’s readers would line up to get their hands on the paper, certain a letter they’d written would be published or a follow up story printed about the mystery woman. It was the only paper of its size that had foreign correspondents reporting from revolutionary countries, and the first to give an 11-year-old Latina a column.
I met locals that summer who roasted roadkill on spits at Drake’s Beach, and I got lost in fog and wound up amid a posse of cows. I hid in bushes to follow a leader of a cult around, and I even won a tennis tournament.
By the time the internship ended, I had the main tool I needed to get a job: clippings with my byline. And Mitchell, who I’d nicknamed Iron Balls Dave, gave me $50 and a pizza party.
I would go on to a career where I would be mentored by legends in the industry, both in print and in television, and I am damn grateful to have worked in journalism before the death of a thousand cuts resulted in buzz fed brains and zombie anchors.
Typically, its leaders are no longer fearless iconoclasts of the Fourth Estate, but of a bean counter variety spawned in the front office.
There are so few in media who stand any ground about anything, because the ground is now made of quick$and.
GIVING UP THE GHOST
I just got back from Guerneville, Ca, a funky art community in north Sonoma County. While admiring the flora and fauna on Goat Rock beach, just minutes from where Hitchcock filmed “The Birds,” I stumbled across a corpse. As it later turned out, the man was running from an alleged dark past, and apparently he offed himself before the past caught up. It was all so film noir, so out of the past.
Even though I left corporate news three years ago, I still morphed into cub reporter. Documenting, taking video, and alerting all local stations that a man had given up the ghost.
It was in between sweeps and management was on vacation, so no one cared. No one, except a small local daily paper, bothered to report the story.
I thought about the David V. Mitchell’s of the world, and how 30 years earlier a newsman took a story of a seaside body and ran with it, causing a shitstorm but reporting the facts…. all the while, standing his ground, and teaching a cub reporter a thing or two about journalism.
#freepress 💕✒️
(Above, Goat Rock Beach)
******
Heidi Siegmund Cuda is a former Los Angeles Times columnist and investigative producer for Fox 11 News. She has authored multiple rap and punk books, and is currently writing screenplays, among them: a zombie satire of corporate local TV news.
Originally published September 24, 2016–hsc.
Sigh.
What else is there to say. Please join us tomorrow for Wake UP Sonoma, as we help a small blue community fight for its very life.
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More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter/producer, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.
