Opinion: A Tale of Two Billionaires

Wendy McCaw augured Donald Trump, and our local fight to save a free press and the rule of law is the nation's fight now

By Melinda Burns

Wendy McCaw, the billionaire former owner of the Santa Barbara News-Press, admired Donald Trump. In 2016, she was one of a small handful of newspaper publishers in the country to endorse him for President — a move that was mocked at the time by MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow on national television.

As Maddow spoke, just weeks before Trump’s shocking victory, the screen lingered on a photo that had gone around the world in the summer of 2006: In it, a group of my newsroom colleagues and I stood in front of the News-Press building with duct tape over our mouths, facing a phalanx of local, state and national reporters, protesting a gag order that McCaw had imposed on us.

No one knew it at the time, but the same, destructive brand of power dynamics that McCaw was wielding against a venerable local institution would soon become painfully familiar to Americans across the nation.

In 2000, when the New York Times sold the News-Press to McCaw, we were a respected, mid-sized paper with a professional, award-winning staff and a sophisticated and engaged readership. Profits were in the double digits.

When Trump took office for the second time, 100 days ago, the jobless rate was low and so was inflation. The economy was growing at a good clip and the stock market was soaring. A record number of jobs — more than 16 million — had been created under the outgoing presidency of Joe Biden.

Yet both of them bestowed havoc on institutions they neither understood nor seemed to care much about. McCaw demonstrated no concept of the free press as a cornerstone of democracy, while Trump has shown no regard for the Constitution. Both turned their good fortune into chaos and misery.

Here’s a look at the parallel steps they took to do it:

Mass firings.

Here in Santa Barbara, Trump’s attacks on workers, the free press and the rule of law have dredged up memories of the wreckage that McCaw left in the wake of the “News-Press Mess,” starting in 2006. That spring, she had made herself co-publisher and, in early July, five of her top editors had resigned, expressing concern that she was interfering in news reporting on behalf of friends and allies.

In the wake of the departures, we newsroom employees joined the Teamsters to protect our jobs — or so we hoped.

Yet within months, McCaw fired eight of us — or one out of four who voted for the union. I was the first to go. With the help of the Teamsters, we organized picket lines, rallies, demonstrations and a widespread community boycott of the paper. Our slogan was, “McCaw, Obey the Law!”

Instead, McCaw brought the newspaper down, committing violations of federal labor law and deploying a posse of law firms to keep the courts at bay.

The News-Press newsroom never recovered from the firings of us eight reporters in 2006 and 2007; rather, a mass exodus ensued.

The number of full-time news reporters working on the South Coast has dropped by about two-thirds since then.

Today, taxpayers wonder if America will ever recover from the loss of tens of thousands of federal workers who have been fired or placed on leave by Trump’s agents across more than 25 agencies, from the U.S. Agency for International Development and Department of Education to the National Institutes of Health and Head Start?

How many decades will it take to repair the damage done?

Defying courts.

In 2023, having exhausted her appeals of a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruling that ordered her to pay nearly $3.5 million in compensation to 50 of her former employees and the Teamsters Union, McCaw declared bankruptcy and shuttered the newspaper. (Full disclosure: I don’t stand to get a cent in those ongoing proceedings).

Today, the old News-Press headquarters, a historic landmark, stands vacant on De la Guerra Plaza. In that building, Thomas M. Storke, the News-Press owner and publisher, an influential figure known as “Mr. Santa Barbara,” won a Pulitzer Prize in 1962 for his editorials against the John Birch Society, a national hate group that had taken root in his beloved city.

Today the courts are still trying hold McCaw financially accountable for her treatment of her former employees. In 2024, a “special master” of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. recommended that McCaw be found in contempt of court and that the NLRB be allowed to pursue additional compensation. The matter is pending.

Last month, a federal bankruptcy judge said he would schedule a jury trial of Ampersand Publishing, McCaw’s newspaper business. At issue is whether the News-Press building on De la Guerra and the abandoned printing press on Kellogg Avenue in Goleta, together worth many millions, can be sold to pay more than 800 creditors.

McCaw contends that the buildings belong to her, and not Ampersand, because, in 2014, she transferred them out of the business and into two shell companies that she owns.

This March, however, the NLRB issued a new complaint against Ampersand, seeking to prove that McCaw’s property-holding companies, and McCaw as an individual, are responsible for compensating her former employees. The current amount she owes, the agency said, is $3.6 million, plus interest and minus withholding taxes.

McCaw’s trail of evasiveness and litigation may seem familiar.

Recall that in the run-up to the 2024 election, Trump was convicted on 33 felony counts for falsifying business documents to cover up his affair with a porn star during the 2016 election — but avoided fines and jail time.

And that three other federal and state indictments against Trump were dropped, or are on hold.

They were the allegations of four counts of conspiracy, dropped last year, regarding the Jan. 6, 2020 insurrection at the Capitol; 40 counts, dropped last year, for “retaining” classified national defense documents at the Trump mansion in Mar-A-Lago; and eight counts of racketeering, presently on hold, involving the phone call in which Trump pressed Georgia’s Secretary of State to “find 11,780 votes.”

In each case, Trump, like McCaw, used every delaying tactic available to a litigant who has few, if any, financial limitations on how much he or she can spend on lawyers.

Now, in his most shocking move, Trump is defying an order issued by the U.S. Supreme Court to “facilitate” the return to the U.S. of Kilmar Abrego García, a Salvadoran immigrant with protected status who was mistakenly deported to a supermax prison in El Salvador in March.

In the case of more than 250 Venezuelan immigrants who were deported to the Salvadoran prison without due process, a federal judge has threatened to hold Trump administration officials in criminal contempt of court, citing their “willful disregard” for his order to return the deportees to the U.S.

Union busting.

McCaw never signed a contract with her newsroom, instead delaying proceedings with countless frivolous appeals and stalling contract negotiations while bargaining in bad faith.

In addition, the courts found, McCaw violated federal labor law for 11 years, from 2007 to 2018, by hiring freelancers to replace her newsroom employees; laying off a columnist and firing a sports writer; depriving newsroom employeesof their merit pay in retaliation for joining the Teamsters; and doubling the cost of health care to her employees — all without negotiating in good faith with the union.

Trump’s anti-union agenda has included firing 50,000 federal workers and ending collective bargaining rights for the hundreds of thousands remaining in the federal sector. He has lowered the minimum wage for federal contractors. He has fired a Democrat on the NLRB board, so there is no quorum to decide cases.

Two weeks ago, NPR reported that, according to a whistleblower in the IT department at the NLRB, Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency may have taken sensitive data from the agency regarding union leadership, ongoing legal cases and corporate secrets. An NLRB spokesman denied that the agency had granted DOGE access to its systems.

And, recalling the kind of gag order that led us to seal our mouths with duct tape as a protest symbol, ProPublica reported last week that a top official in the Department of Labor has told all staff members that they could face criminal charges if they speak to journalists, former employees or others about department business.

Press attacks.

In late 2006, McCaw filed a libel lawsuit against Susan Paterno, the Chapman University professor who wrote “Santa Barbara Smackdown,” an article critical of McCaw that appeared in the American Journalism Review. McCaw lost, but the Review had to pay Paterno’s lawyer’s fees.

Also in 2006, McCaw sued the Santa Barbara Independent for allegedly infringing upon the News-Press copyright by posting a link to a leaked story about the five editors who had resigned in protest. The story had been killed by the News-Press, and the Independent promptly took down the link; but the lawsuit was not settled until 2008. Neither party recovered lawyers’ fees.

In 2012, McCaw prevailed in the District of Columbia Court of Appeals against the eight of us reporters whom she had fired following our union vote in 2006. We were seeking reinstatement and back pay. But in a sign of things to come, a panel of Republican appointees sided with McCaw’s argument that we had interfered with her First Amendment rights by organizing a boycott of the paper.

In recent months, Trump has similarly weaponized the First Amendment, suing ABC for defamation and extracting a $16 million settlement in a case that many lawyers believe the network could have easily won. Trump has also sued CBS’s “60 Minutes” for $10 billion over what he views as an unfairly edited interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, his challenger for the presidency. And he sued the Des Moines Register for publishing unfavorable poll data in the run-up to the 2024 election, a lawsuit that was later dismissed.

Trump and his allies would like to overturn New York Times v Sullivan, the landmark 1964 Supreme Court case that gives reporters and anybody else who tries to hold public figures accountable some breathing room against libel suits. The court ruled that honest mistakes cannot be construed as defamation — a significant protection of press freedom and freedom of speech.

Barely into his new term, Trump has restricted access to the White House press pool by the Associated Press and other wire services. And he intimidated the White House Correspondents Association. A comedian critical of Trump was dropped from the correspondents’ annual dinner last weekend, after the White House objected to the plans to include her.

In addition, Trump is poised to slash $1 billion in federal funding for PBS and NPR, America’s largest public broadcasters on television and radio, respectively. He tried to dismantle the Voice of America, the international news service that has been funded by the U.S. government for the past 80 years: a federal judge has halted that effort.

In 2022, Trump sued the Pulitzer Prize Board for libel after the board made a statement reaffirming its past awards for stories about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. This March, a Florida judge denied the board’s request to pause the case during Trump’s term in office.

Vengeance.

In late 2006, McCaw filed a breach of contract lawsuit against Jerry Roberts, the former News-Press executive editor (and future Newsmakers co-founder) who had resigned because of McCaw’s interference in the newsroom.

McCaw lost her claim. The state arbitrator in the case found that Ampersand had “pursued its objectives in this proceeding in a scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners, go-for-broke fashion … to punish Roberts for Ampersand’s public drubbing …”

Noting that McCaw had increased her complaint against Roberts from $500,000 to $25 million, the arbitrator further stated: “I infer from the evidence before me that Mrs. McCaw is capable of great vindictiveness and appears to relish the opportunity to wield her considerable wealth and power in furtherance of what she believes to be a righteous cause.”

McCaw didn’t stop there. In 2007, she smeared Roberts on the front page of the News-Press with a story headlined, “News-Press seeks exam of computer used by ex-editor Roberts containing child porn.” There was no byline, and Roberts had not been contacted for comment. The News-Press had purchased the computer in question used, and others at the paper had worked on it before Roberts.

He vigorously pushed back on McCaw’s insinuation. Roberts voluntarily took (and passed) a lie detector exam to prove he had no connection to the images, and his lawyers demanded a retraction, which resulted in the paper running a front-page “clarification” claiming they intended “no such accusation” and acknowledging they had no idea how the images made it onto a computer owned by their company. No charges ever were filed about the illegal images.

During his first 100 days, Trump has waged a widespread campaign of retribution by suing, issuing executive orders, firing people from government jobs, canceling security details and publicly threatening the individuals and institutions he views as enemies. He’s effectively extorted large law firms to provide him with services and change their internal policies — or face loss of business — and Ivy League universities, threatening to withhold federal funding and cancel tax-exempt status.

In one executive order, which stands out because it was aimed at an individual, Trump recently called on the U.S. Attorney General to investigate Chris Krebs, former head of the national Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, for denying that the 2020 election, which Trump lost to Biden, was “rigged and stolen” — in effect, for telling the truth.

Similarly, Trump has ordered the U.S. Justice Department to investigate Miles Taylor, a former Homeland Security official, alleging that Taylor disclosed “sensitive information” in a book that he wrote, criticizing Trump’s first term.

What you can do.

McCaw has used the courts for nearly 20 years, but she has lost badly in the court of public opinion. Her readers boycotted the News-Press by the tens of thousands and never went back. It was a remarkable display of solidarity with us journalists.

Now, it’s more important than ever to support local news by generously donating to the media outlets you depend on. I’m grateful that Newsmakers has been posting my stories for more than eight years.

Also — out of the blue — a non-profit called Newswell, which works nationally to support local journalism, has acquired the rights to the News-Press name and archive and is preparing to re-launch my old newspaper online. It’s a bold move in the face of a national trend in the opposite direction. By some estimates, nearly 3,000 American newspapers have been shut down since 2005.

We live today in a country in which half the citizenry is not tuned in to media sources that are telling them the truth. Trump, a media mogul himself, uses Truth Social, his social media platform, to spew out lies and propaganda to millions of followers.

All strongmen try to seize control of the free press so that they can control the people. No democracy can survive without a free and independent media.

We must hold the line.

Melinda Burns, a former News-Press senior writer, has 40 years of experience covering immigration, water, science and the environment. For the past eight years, as a community service, she has been offering her reports to multiple publications in Santa Barbara County, at the same time, for free.

Image: On Oct. 2016, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow reported the Santa Barbara News-Press had become the first newspaper to endorse Donald Trump in his first race (MSNBC).