A soapbox for the masses

By Rick Swart

The South County Spotlight, Mar 12, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (21 Reader comments)

Rick Swart / Spotlight illustration

Bill Eagle and his Web site, the St. Helens Update, have spent the past eight years chronicling the foibles of local government through anonymous comments posted by readers. Eagle defends the practice, saying it is a tradition that goes back to the birth of the United States.

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Politicians hate it.

Rabble-rousers love it.

People in the middle don’t know quite what to make of Bill Eagle’s Web site, the St. Helens Update.

Google describes The Update as “a parable of local government foibles.”

Eagle himself compares it to an underground newspaper.

No matter what you think of it, there’s one point upon which just about everybody agrees – if you’re interested in salacious gossip, stinging sarcasm, and unfettered political commentary, you’ll find it on The Update (www.sthelensupdate.com).

“There’s nothing more extraordinary than what people have to say,” said Eagle, who started The Update eight years ago as a vehicle to get himself elected to the St. Helens City Council.

It didn’t work. Eagle didn’t get elected, but through his Web site he has helped shape local issues by giving ordinary citizens a soapbox from which they can pontificate anonymously from the comfort of their own home. Eagle was hip to Web logs – or blogs, which are now the rage – long before Web logs were cool.

It’s all about free speech, according to Eagle, 68, who has been skewered by local politicians and threatened with lawsuits for letting people say almost anything about “public people.” He can only think of a couple of times when he pulled a comment because it crossed the line into defamation of character. What bothers him more than threats, he said, are politicians who complain about his Web site but don’t bother to offer an opposing view.

“A public person is judged differently than a private individual,” said Eagle, who cites New York Times vs. Sullivan, the Supreme Court’s landmark free speech case, as legal justification for the freewheeling comments on his site. It is, he says, an American tradition that goes back to Benjamin Franklin and Poor Richard’s Almanac, and Alexander Hamilton and the federalist papers: “This is what America is all about – the right of people to speak their mind without fear of retribution.”

In fact, giving people the opportunity to speak without fear of retribution was the genesis of The Update. Eagle decided to allow people to post comments anonymously back in 2000 at the request of St. Helens city employees who approached him and said they had some things they wanted to say about the operation of city government but were afraid they’d be fired or blackballed if they spoke up.

A former government employee himself who was for 38 years constrained by laws against political activism, Eagle sympathized with those city employees. So it was that anonymous comments on The Update were born.

At first, comments were posted in the form of questions to “Professor Evil,” who offered frequently cynical, sarcastic and satirical explanations for the goings on of local government. Eventually, Professor Evil left and was replaced by “the Shoeshine Boy.”

Pen names, and distinct writing styles, became a staple of the Web site. Eagle claims he doesn’t know the real identities of the contributors, although he did know that “Timber Truck Tom,” a former Update regular, was a professional writer from Portland who enjoyed posing as a log truck driver who offered folksy observations about everyday life in St. Helens. He’s also got an inkling that someone who writes under the pseudo name “Victor” is a friend “because he usually has something clever to say and ends up by insulting me.”

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