If you lived in Santa Barbara 20 years ago, you know the story of how the Santa Barbara News-Press, a Pulitzer-Prize winning paper, was brought down by a billionaire owner after a years-long battle with her newsroom.
You may recall the resignations of most of the top editors, the newsroom’s vote to join the Teamsters union, the firings and the labor trials.
Maybe you’re one of the thousands of readers who cancelled their subscriptions in support of us journalists and never went back.
But most of all, you may remember the events of July 14, 2006, when we newsroom employees walked single-file out of the News-Press building and into De la Guerra Plaza, dressed in black.
We didn’t realize how soon many of us would be barred from the building forever. And we certainly didn’t know that what was happening to us would be happening all across the national media, two decades in the future.
The week before our protest, six editors had resigned, alleging that Wendy McCaw, the News-Press owner and co-publisher, was meddling in news reporting. In effect, they said, she had torn down the invisible “wall” between news and opinion that any self-respecting news organization would observe. (McCaw, in an opinion piece later that same month, wrote “Violations of our paper’s policies and standards are what brought on this conflict.”)
Those of us left in the newsroom felt as if our world had been turned upside down. Would we — would the paper — survive McCaw’s interference? Her managers had circulated a new “Business Conduct” memo, barring us from speaking to other media outlets. We called it a gag order.
That’s how, on that July 14 — 20 years ago — we journalists found ourselves facing a phalanx of reporters, and behind them, an enormous crowd. We had called a press conference, and it was clear that the word had gotten around.
It was strange to be in front of the press and not with the press, but we were determined to take a stand. And we already had a powerful ally.
Just days before, we had met with an organizer from the Teamsters union and signed cards to call a union election.
I was the designated speaker. From the lineup, I took a deep breath, stepped forward to the mic, and thanked the other media members for coming. Then I said, in effect: “We would like to tell you about what is happening at the News-Press but we have been ordered not to speak to the media.”
At that signal, my colleagues and I each took out a few inches of gray duct tape and placed it across our mouths. Our protest was muzzled. The photos of us — so prescient, in retrospect — went around the world.
People in the crowd still remember where they were standing at noon that day.
But what I recall most clearly today is not those news photographs. It’s the people of Santa Barbara who were standing just beyond the cameras.
As we stood in formation, many of them came forward to walk along our line and shake hands with each of us. Some were fighting back tears, and so were we.
In that moment, we knew that the community would be on our side in the battle for the soul of the paper.
That’s how the “News-Press Mess,” a.k.a. the “News-Press Meltdown,” began. It shook Santa Barbara psychologically in the way that the earthquake of 1925 had shaken it physically.
In my mind’s eye, I still see us journalists standing like sentinels in that line, frozen in time.
The “unsatisfactory” newsroom
The News-Press had had some illustrious owners. T.M. Storke, who built the headquarters on De la Guerra Plaza, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1962 for his editorials attacking the John Birch Society, then a semi-secret national right-wing group that had taken root here.
Storke vowed to print the news “without fear or favor of friend or foe,” and he ran that slogan on the News-Press masthead.
Later, the New York Times owned the paper. They told us we were “the jewel in the crown” of their chain of smaller papers. I started at the News-Press on the same day the Times did, in fall 1985.
Then, in 2000, the Times fatefully sold the News-Press to McCaw. A Times report described her as “one of the wealthiest, if not best known, women in America.”
There’s a tradition in responsible media ownership: The owner and publisher (sometimes the same person) run the business and control the opinion, or editorial, pages; and news editors run the news coverage.
But to quote from the records of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), McCaw soon came to view the newsroom’s work as “unsatisfactory” and, over the years, “took an ever more active role in expressing her views and dissatisfaction with news articles.”
At the same time, the newsroom was winning state, regional and national awards. Tensions were further heightened in May 2006, when the opinion editor, who was closely aligned with McCaw, was arrested for drunk driving.
The record shows that McCaw “limited coverage” of his arrest and sentencing; after an initial story, McCaw “instructed” that a follow-up article on his sentencing hearing not be published. In newsroom parlance, we would say she “killed the story.”
In June, the newsroom covered a story involving actor Rob Lowe, a friend of McCaw’s who was proposing to build a mansion on a vacant lot in Montecito. Prior to the story’s publication, Lowe had called the opinion editor to ask that the address of the lot not be published because he had safety concerns about his young children; the opinion editor emailed a newsroom editor about those concerns.
The published story included the address. As an NLRB judge later wrote, “It was standard practice at the News-Press to publish the exact location of a controversial project.”
Angry that the story had included the address, McCaw promptly reprimanded several staffers.
Soon, editors and others began resigning in protest.
On July 13, in the wake of the resignations, we asked company management to welcome our editors back and honor our demands for what we thought were basic news ethics. It didn’t happen. So the protest began.
But the resignations and the duct tape protest were about much more than a few stories and memos.
The News-Press was generally viewed as a trusted source of local news and a fair arbiter of civic debate. If status or friendship could censor news coverage, we feared, that trust would evaporate.
McCaw, in our view, had broken Storke’s promise of fairness. The way we saw it, the future of a democratic institution was at stake.
We the “fireds”
None of us could have predicted the scope or duration of the News-Press Mess.
On that July day 20 years ago, with our editors gone and our careers in jeopardy, the question before each of us was, “Should I quit or should I stay?”
At 58, I decided to stay. I was a senior writer at the paper, but I had no illusions that seniority or the awards and grants I had won would protect me. I was sure I would be fired, and I wanted to go down fighting. That meant that I, an Ivy League graduate with a degree in English literature, would soon be proud to call myself a Teamster.
Without the union, there would have been no organized opposition.
In the long hot summer of 2006, with the Teamsters’ help, we mounted picket lines and rallies in the plaza. At one of these protests, Rob Kuznia, a fired education reporter who later went on to win a Pulitzer Prize, memorably played a solemn “Taps” for the News-Press on his trumpet.
That September, the newsroom voted overwhelmingly to join the Teamsters. When McCaw contested the vote, we initiated a community-wide boycott of the paper. (McCaw remained steadfast in opposing the union. As an editorial published at the time stated, “The News-Press is standing firm against allowing outside union organizers to influence news coverage or interject bias into reporting.”)
One month after the union vote, I was the first to be fired. By early February, 2007, McCaw had fired seven more reporters.
Meanwhile, thousands of people were cancelling their News-Press subscriptions in our support, ignoring the full-page ads against the Teamsters that McCaw was running. In the newsroom, an exodus was underway.
After 21 years at the News-Press, I had to decide whether to get another job in journalism somewhere else. Once, I had covered stories of strawberry pickers in Santa Maria who were fired after staging sit-down strikes. Now, I was in a similar fix.
I got a job offer from a regional paper that wanted me to write three stories a day, and I turned it down. Instead, I cobbled together some funds by renting out my apartment. With Dawn Hobbs, a fired cops and courts reporter, I spent the next two years working on the boycott campaign and trying to obtain a union contract for the newsroom at the so-called “bargaining table.”
In those early days, we the “fireds” — and the Teamsters themselves — believed there was a good chance we would win our case against McCaw for reinstatement and back pay.
People asked us, “Why would you want to go back there?” But for me, it was a matter of strategy. Maybe if some or all of us went back, I thought, McCaw would sell the paper.
So, every Saturday, we would stand at the entrances to the Farmers Market in Santa Barbara, asking people to sign cards cancelling their News-Press subscriptions. Many would eagerly demand, “Give me that card!”
We picketed car dealerships, McCaw’s biggest advertisers. We got “McCaw, Obey the Law” posters printed and put them up around town. Some businesses put them up in their windows until they received “cease and desist” letters from McCaw’s attorneys; at one hair salon, the owner simply moved the poster to the ceiling so his customers would see it while they were getting their hair washed.
Teamster power
If a calamity had to befall us, we couldn’t have asked for a finer group of people to try to set things right.
The union flew Dawn and me to conventions in Las Vegas and Tampa, where we gave speeches about our fight at the News-Press. We made our pitch to men who worked in warehouses and printing plants, total strangers. Without hesitation, they dipped into the savings of their locals to help us out.
At one of those conventions, Dawn and I found ourselves onstage in Las Vegas with Jim Hoffa, the Teamsters president (and son of the famous Jimmy). We watched a mass of organizers as they marched into the auditorium, fists raised, chanting, “Every minute/every hour/organize/for Teamster power!”
From the leadership to the rank-and-file, the Teamsters were unwavering in their commitment to our cause.
Another high point of our struggle was the 2008 premiere of the documentary “Citizen McCaw,” by a group of talented filmmakers from the region. The giant auditorium at the Arlington Theater was packed. The title was a play on “Citizen Kane,” the 1941 movie that fictionalized the life of William Randolph Hearst, the media tycoon who built an empire on yellow journalism.
At the end of the documentary, a group of us former News-Pressers walked onto the stage and took a bow. We received a long standing ovation.
Offscreen, though, as the court battles dragged on, we were getting a bitter education in the loopholes of federal labor law and the ways in which an employer with deep pockets can delay and derail justice.
We the “fireds” won our case against McCaw in 201l, only to lose it on appeal a year later. Three appeals court judges found that the ruling in our favor had violated McCaw’s First Amendment right to run her paper as she pleased.
Our colleagues fared better. The NLRB issued a 2017 judgment against McCaw. But the feds are still trying to enforce the decision.
McCaw has been ordered to pay $3.6 million, plus interest, to the Teamsters and nearly 50 former newsroom employees in recompense for what the board has called violations of labor law, including bad-faith bargaining, denying raises to union supporters and firing a sportswriter who had participated in contract negotiations.
The NLRB found that McCaw’s agents had engaged in “aggravated” misconduct and “willful defiance” at the bargaining table. After 2017, they were found to be in contempt of court for continuing to bargain in bad faith.
The eight of us who were fired earlier and lost a separate case are not eligible for any significant reparations — I get nothing.
McCaw hired law firm after law firm as her newsroom dwindled. She never signed a union contract. In 2023, she put the paper into bankruptcy and turned off the lights.
This June 4, the NLRB concluded that in addition to several of her companies, McCaw personally was liable for the money she owes the Teamsters and some of my former colleagues.
Déja vu, 20 years later
Our silent protest in De la Guerra Plaza was an early sign of trouble ahead. The story of a billionaire owner vs. a principled newsroom has become the story of our times.
In 2016, McCaw, a libertarian, was one of the first publishers in the country to endorse Trump for President. Rachel Maddow, the MSNBC host, talked about it on her show, next to a photo of our duct tape protest.
In 2013, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, bought the Washington Post. This February, the Post fired 30 percent of the staff and narrowed the views on the opinion pages to a defense of personal liberties and free markets.
Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner of a network of biotech companies, bought the Los Angeles Times in 2018. In 2024, he killed the paper’s longstanding tradition of endorsing a presidential candidate. The editorials editor resigned in protest, and soon the entire editorial board departed, part of a larger newsroom exodus.
Recently, I thought about the News-Press Mess as I watched an interview with Scott Pelley, a longtime correspondent for CBS News.
Last year, Paramount Global, the owner of CBS, merged with Skydance Media, which was owned by David Ellison, the son of tech billionaire Larry Ellison.
The new network ownership put a longtime opinion writer in charge of CBS News.
After top “60 Minutes” staffers were fired, Pelley confronted one of the new bosses at a staff meeting; the next day, he, too, was fired. In a video interview with the New York Times, Pelley said he was most heartbroken about his colleagues, one of whom, after 30 years on the job, had been told to get out of her office by 5 p.m.
Fighting back tears, Pelley asked, “What company in the world treats their precious people that way?”
“You can’t have democracy without journalism,” Pelley said, finally. “It can’t be done.””
Back to the future
I found my way back to local journalism in 2012, but I discovered the piece rates for freelancing were very low. By 2017, I was sending my stories simultaneously to all local media except the News-Press for free.
For eight years I continued to work as a volunteer reporter; at least, I figured, I had more readers.
Today, thanks to philanthropy, you’re reading this in the News-Press, alive again after it was bought out of bankruptcy court and placed under the guidance of a journalism nonprofit. I look at the new News-Press with its growing newsroom and I think I can hear Storke cheering it on.
The fine old News-Press building, a historic landmark, sits vacant on De la Guerra Plaza today. But we will never forget how the community rallied around us. It was a stunning display of solidarity against what we viewed as an abuse of power, and that’s the only thing that’s saving America now.
On this anniversary of the News-Press Mess, I am remembering the people who lined up in De la Guerra Plaza to shake our hands, 20 years ago. Thank you. You were true believers.
Melinda Burns is an investigative reporter with more than 40 years of experience covering immigration, water, science and the environment. She was a senior writer at the News-Press during a 21-year career at the paper, ending in 2006.
