The Ragged Edge Publisher’s Hard Work Is Her Reward!

Profile: Michelle Baker

Michelle Baker’s Reward! newspaper swerves from “From the Outrageous to the Mundane!” Her life has swerved the just opposite.

Three years ago, she was a corporate consultant selling telephone systems in California.

Today, she’s a Coeur d’Alene tabloid publisher revealing how to form militia cells and how the Oklahoma City bombing was a government plot.

Her Fourth Street office became a clearinghouse for conspiracy theories and a meeting hall for the Concerned Citizens of Idaho, a patriot group. Last summer, she accompanied news crews to Ruby Ridge to ensure they got the story straight.

Until the Reward! she’d never heard of Randy Weaver.

“I had no concept of politics,” said Baker, 45. “I was a Republican and all my friends were Democrats.”

Raised in rural Ohio, Baker moved west with her parents at 16. While classmates at San Francisco’s Lincoln High dropped out to do acid, she dropped out to apply at the phone company, wearing a suit and white gloves. She ratcheted up from the art department to consulting. She adopted Sufism, an Islamic mystical religion.

But California was never home. In 1992, her parents died. When her last sales contract ended and friends in Coeur d’Alene called, the divorced Baker kissed her 15-year-old daughter goodbye.

Living at Twin Lakes, she read, wrote poetry, drew pictures and drained her savings. “It was blissful. I figured I’d get a job when the money ran out.”

Not in North Idaho. Finally in April, she took work at the Reward!. Founded by Clint Michael Cord of Athol, it banked on free classifieds and outrageous content to win readers. Baker was to head advertising and marketing and offer customers her own training seminars (The Color Workshop, Gracious Retail).

She soon learned the Reward! was borrowing office space, three months behind on the phone bill and $9,000 in debt. Cord left. Baker stayed. It was a job.

It became more. Documents on the New World Order and government control flowed in. Baker wrote, edited, illustrated and carried 10,000 copies of the newspaper into convenience stores.

She attended parties where that “nice older man” was Aryan Nations leader Richard Butler. She reprinted former Ku Klux Klan leader Louis Beam’s essay on “Leaderless Resistance. She never worried about inciting violence through her paper.

“I don’t think a few stories here and there are really going to trigger someone,” she says. “I was just trying to balance the lack of information out there.”

Baker says she would print any viewpoint.

“People assume I’m on a patriot agenda but I’m not.” She even lampoons the movement a bit, editorializing on new M&Ms being United Nations blue.

Still, she can’t dismiss what she sees in documents “from places you can’t believe.” Too many documents not to believe in globalization, mind control and a shadow government.

Too many not to reveal.

Even as it costs her. By October, Baker was living on donations, mostly through patriot leader Eva Vail. She closed her office, moved into a mobile home and took a telemarketing job in Spokane. The latest REWARD! sits unprinted.

But Baker vows to continue - and add music reviews.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo