Tom Gish (January 28, 1926 – November 21, 2008) was an American newspaper reporter and editor, best known for his work as the owner and co-editor of The Mountain Eagle weekly newspaper alongside his wife, Pat Gish, in Whitesburg, the county seat of Letcher County, Kentucky, where his paper was the first in the eastern part of the state to challenge the damage caused to the environment resulting from strip mining.
[1] For a period of time, the newspaper's reporters were banned from attending school board and fiscal court meetings.
[1] An August 1974 firebombing destroyed $17,000 worth of the newspaper's equipment, doing only light structural damage to its facility, yet the local police department placed a condemnation order on the building.
Pat and Tom were also profiled in Studs Terkel's 1983 book "American Dreams: Lost and Found" concerning their work as publishers of a small-town newspaper.
Tom Gish received the Zenger Award from the University of Arizona in 1974 (between Katharine Graham of the Washington Post (1973) and Seymour Hersh of the New York Times (1975)).