A tilt toward controversy

Bruce Anderson has been described as America's "last horse-whippable editor."

By Rone Tempest
Times Staff Writer

February 28 2003

BOONVILLE, Calif. -- Even in a career championing unpopular causes, Boonville newspaper editor Bruce Anderson's recent defense of a convicted child molester is something new.

Three recent issues of the Anderson Valley Advertiser, the iconoclastic Mendocino County weekly newspaper that Anderson owns and edits, have been devoted largely to the case of a former long-haul truck driver convicted in 1995 of charges that he molested three girls, including a 10-year-old.

Anderson revisited the 8-year-old case after he was contacted from prison by the convict, a former Boonville resident, who begged him to examine the court record. The resulting articles, which included a graphic retelling of the original charges that offended some readers, are typical of Anderson's attack style.

With charac! teristic flair, he has preceded each article with a provocative quote from "Lolita," novelist Vladimir Nabokov's famously sympathetic portrayal of a professorial pederast.

A broad-shouldered, 63-year-old former Marine and Peace Corps volunteer who is as courtly in person as he is caustic in print, Anderson is a throwback to the days when the cantankerous independent newspaper editor was a fixture in rural America. Almost no one escapes his scathing pen.