When Wendy McCaw first purchased the Santa Barbara News Press in 2000, it led to the resignations and firings of reporters and staff who disputed the imposition of her political bias on the newspaper's content. The irony of the current SBNP position in support of free speech cannot be lost on those journalists fired for not aligning with McCaw's conservative political views. Attempts to unionize at the News-Press were brutally squelched and with a nod from a federal judge, the newspaper has since become a mouthpiece for its right-wing, multi-millionaire owners.
This early dispute over the lack of journalistic integrity and public accountability of the newspaper is probably why the SBNP is incapable of distinguishing between hate speech and free speech. Under the banner of the first amendment, the SBNP has instead insisted on its freedom to misrepresent an entire race and class of people in Santa Barbara by routinely depicting them as "domestic terrorists" and "thugs". Its tactic of ridiculing, dismissing, and misrepresenting black and brown culture effectively silences us in the media and erases us from relevant participation in society, a fact that cannot be lost on the owners of the SBNP.
Most recently, the SBNP has demanded the email exchanges between PODER and council member Cathy Murillo. Since the newspaper did not offer a reason for its public-records request, this is an obvious intimidation tactic meant to silence our organization for having the temerity to ask the SBNP to retract the word "illegal."
The newspaper's desire to censor PODER's right to dialog with publicly elected officials is a thinly veiled attempt to hamper our effectiveness as community organizers by limiting our speech. The fact that the SBNP would seek to censor legitimate public dialog between a Latina representative of the city and a Latino advocacy group is worrisome given the paper's open alliance with anti-immigrant hate groups like the Minutemen. The Minutemen themselves are a violent extremist group responsible for the murder of a Mexican-American family in Arizona in 2011 and a spate of shootings on the border.
We realize that many oligarchs suffer from a crippled sense of irony. The Santa Barbara News-Press has a long history of suing people it disagrees with in order to shut them up. An article published by the paper on January 27th mentions its lawsuit against Murillo's husband David Pritchett when he served on the city's Transportation and Circulation Committee in a dispute instigated by the News-Press to prevent De La Guerra plaza from being turned into a pedestrian thoroughfare. The pedestrian thoroughfare would have been disadvantageous to the newspaper's customer parking privileges in the plaza so it sued the city at a cost of thousands of dollars to taxpayers.
What is more, McCaw brought lawsuits against employees who attempted to unionize at the News-Press, as well as local businesses showing support for them by displaying signs in their storefront windows. This is in addition to countless more lawsuits she has brought against other newspapers, journalists, websites, and former employees who have had the temerity to speak out against her biased and unethical journalistic practices.
But we at PODER remain committed to speaking truth to power and refuse to be silenced by Santa Barbara News-Press owners Wendy McCaw and Arthur von Weisenberger.
For these reasons, we have issued our own public-records request for all email exchanges between SBNP, its vigilante allies among the Minutemen, and council members Frank Hotchkiss and Dale Francisco who joined anti-immigrant counter-demonstrators at De La Guerra plaza on MLK Day.
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