Wendy P. McCaw
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Wendy P. McCaw is the multi-millionaire owner of the Santa Barbara News-Press. She is also known as an animal rights activist. McCaw has been the center of controversy since July 2006 over her management decisions involving the News-Press, an award-winning paper and one of the oldest daily publications in California.
Born Wendy Petrak around 1951, she met Craig McCaw, the son of a wealthy Seattle media owner, at Stanford University where they both majored in History. They married in 1974. The couples' tumultuous divorce in the mid-1990s gained McCaw her fortune.[1][2][3]
[edit] Controversy
On July 6, 2006, six editors and a senior columnist collectively resigned from the newspaper currently owned by McCaw, The Santa Barbara News-Press. The group publicly cited an increasing imposition of McCaw and her hired managers' personal opinions onto the process of reporting and publishing the news. The six resigning employees were Editor Jerry Roberts, a veteran journalist who once worked at the San Francisco Chronicle, Managing Editor George Foulsham, Deputy Managing Editor Don Murphy, Metro Editor Jane Hulse, Business Editor Michael Todd, Sports Editor Gerry Spratt, and widely respected and read community columnist Barney Brantingham, who had worked at the News-Press for 46 years. As of September 25, the number of reporters and editors who had left the paper had grown to 23.
"What we have as a paper to sell to people is our credibility," Don Murphy told the Associated Press following his resignation from his post as deputy managing editor. "On one hand you have someone writing editorials and on the other hand editing news stories. There is an inherent conflict." Tensions had been brewing between the newsroom and executive suite since April, when Publisher Joe Cole retired, erasing what had been an effective buffer between the owner and the newsroom. McCaw named herself and longtime fiancé, restaurant critic and bottled water connoisseur Arthur von Wiesenberger, as co-publishers. Conflicts began to mount when editors chose to write an article about Travis Armstrong, who was arrested for driving drunk the wrong way down a one-way street. A second article on his sentencing was killed, editors said. In another incident, Mrs. McCaw delivered reprimands to three editors and a reporter after actor Rob Lowe's address was published in the paper in regards to a public housing board meeting.
The final straw, many editors complained, was in early July when Armstrong was named acting publisher and was given the authority to edit news stories while also serving as editor of the opinion pages. As scores of readers promptly canceled their subscriptions, the company countered that it was divergent interests that led the editors and columnist to resign.
Over Thanksgiving weekend, the News-Press erected - without permits or approval - chain-link fencing with shade cloth around its parking lots on Anacapa Street. Paul Casey, Community Development Director for the City of Santa Barbara, wrote a letter to the News-Press informing them that the fence was illegally installed and must be removed immediately or fines could be assessed for each day the fence remains in place. On December 1, 2006, the fence around the auxiliary parking lot was removed and on Dec. 2, the fence around the parking lot adjacent to the News-Press building was removed. (Craig Smith's blog, Dec. 1 and 2 2006; www.craigsmithsblog.com)
[edit] Animal Rights
Mrs. McCaw and her former husband, cellular phone pioneer Craig McCaw, gave millions in donations in the 1990s to help return Keiko, the orca star of "Free Willy," to the wild.
In her editorials in the News-Press, Mrs. McCaw is a staunch defender of animal rights, arguing against whaling operations and a federally funded hunt to kill feral pigs on the Santa Barbara Channel Islands. Her defense of animals while also opposing an ordinance to increase the minimum wage for city workers has led to some criticism. Soon after her purchase of the paper, an editorial called for an end to the Thanksgiving tradition of eating turkey, because of the suffering of the "unwilling participants."
