Something remarkable is happening in an unlikely place: The
people of Santa Barbara are standing up for a free press.
How is that possible? Everyone knows Southern Californians can’t
be bothered to read when there are waves to be ridden and tans to
be nurtured.
Something remarkable is happening in an unlikely place: The people of Santa Barbara are standing up for a free press.
How is that possible? Everyone knows Southern Californians can’t be bothered to read when there are waves to be ridden and tans to be nurtured.
You may have read the story: After Santa Barbara News-Press owner Wendy McCaw and her co-publisher and fiance Arthur von Wiesenberger killed or altered several stories – one of which was about a drunk driving conviction of opinion page editor Travis Armstrong – nine members of the editorial staff, including respected editor Jerry Roberts, resigned in protest.
McCaw’s response, issued from her yacht in Greece, was to appoint Armstrong editor.
But to almost everyone’s surprise, the public was outraged. Hundreds of demonstrators turned out to support the staff, and to condemn Armstrong and McCaw for doctoring the news pages.
And I thought no one cared.
For years polling organizations have been telling us that the press ranks somewhere barely north of politicians and south of dog catchers in the public’s esteem.
Last year the Annenberg Public Policy Center reported that almost half of Americans believe the press is “often inaccurate” in its reporting. About same time the Knight Foundation surveyed 112,000 students and found that 36 percent believed the government should be able to approve what papers print – as if that would make either the government or the press more credible.
Faced with such distrust – and confronted by unprecedented competition – circulation numbers, and along with them readership, have been falling steadily.
Yet hundreds show up to support a free press. In Santa Barbara.
I grew up 25 miles away in Ventura, Santa Barbara’s poor beach town cousin. Like many, I have fretted that the prevailing wisdom might be right, that the public had soured on what we do. What was bad nationally, I figured, had to be worse in California.
But the News-Press conflict has brought into relief conflicting assumptions – about Californians, and about the press.
On the one hand, we have the clueless Wendy McCaw, who got her millions in a divorce settlement. As she sunned herself in Greece, her lawyers were threatening to sue former employees for speaking up about their experience at the paper. They also threatened the local weekly paper, the Santa Barbara Independent, with a lawsuit for publishing a story about a demonstration in front of the paper the News-Press had killed.
Evidently Armstrong and von Wiesenberger, a food writer, have no quarrel with these obvious slaps at free speech by their own newspaper.
As McCaw plays to type, confirming all the worst stereotypes of ditzy Californians who, under the influence of inline skating and SPF 30, long ago forgot whatever they may have learned about the First Amendment in their civics classes, a countervailing force has risen.
McCaw’s ignorance of the importance of news reporting’s independence from the editorial page stands in stark contrast to the grasp of that principle by the crowds packing De La Guerra Plaza – in the sunshine, under the swaying palm trees – next to the News-Press office in support of the reporters, both inside the building and out.
Americans weren’t supposed to care about – or worse, understand – journalism and how it really works. But it turns out they do.
Andrew Kohut, executive director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, says that while trust of the national press is low, attachment to the local newspaper is strong.
“What the polls show is that local news is the news that the public is most connected to,” he told the LA Times.
But does that mean local ownership is a good idea? With the recent breakup of Knight Ridder, that has become the new ownership paradigm: that it will ensure the kind of news people want and at the same time relieve the corporate pressure for ever higher profit margins.
But the issue is more complicated than that. Owners of newspapers, be they local or national, are only stewards of a public trust, which they abuse at their peril. The real owners are in the public square – be it Lexington Green or De La Guerra Plaza – and their rallying to the cause of a free and reliable local press is a watershed moment.
And it is happening in the most unlikely of places: Santa Barbara.
