The Owner Strikes Back in Turmoil at Newspaper
Normally genteel Santa Barbara convulsed with another round of recrimination Thursday over its daily newspaper -- with owner Wendy McCaw accusing journalists who quit her newsroom en masse of using the paper to air their biases, while one of the defectors slammed the wealthy owner as an amateurish meddler.
Much of the fighting was conducted on the front pages of the Santa Barbara News-Press and the alternative weekly the Santa Barbara Independent. Even one-time Washington political columnist Lou Cannon joined in the print-lashing of the daily newspaper's operators.
While the week-old battle raged, an eighth News-Press journalist resigned Thursday and the acting publisher said some of the city's establishment was fanning the controversy to damage an editorial page that had dared to question politicians and proposals for high-density development.
Thursday's opening salvo came with McCaw's front-page "note to readers," telling her side. In it, she accused the journalists who quit last week of failing to meet her goal of "accurate and unbiased reporting."
"When news articles became opinion pieces, reporting went unchecked and the paper was used as a personal arena to air petty infighting by the editors," McCaw wrote, "these goals were not met."
The letter, accompanied by a photo of a smiling McCaw in pearls, said that some disgruntled employees "appeared to use the News-Press for their own agendas [and] decided to leave when it was clear they no longer would be permitted to flavor the news with their personal opinions."
From the beginning of the controversy, however, many of McCaw's employees said it was the owner and her acting publisher, Travis Armstrong, who tried to censor the news. They noted that the paper killed a short story about Armstrong's sentencing for drunk driving and that management issued sharp reprimands to a reporter and three editors for publishing the address where actor Rob Lowe proposed to build a mansion.
Those incidents contributed to the resignations of Editor Jerry Roberts, five other editors and veteran columnist Barney Brantingham.
On Thursday, Brantingham announced that he would write his column for the weekly Independent. His first effort: a lengthy account of a "tragedy [that] ended with more bodies strewn around than the last act of Hamlet."
Brantingham, pictured in a Hawaiian-print shirt in front of the News-Press building, said he ended his 46 years at the paper because "front-office meddling with the news" had left its "credibility in tatters."
