Battle of the Bias

News-Press reporter Anna Davison seems an incongruous candidate for the poster child for self-indulgent journalistic bias. On the witness stand, Davison comes across as soft-spoken, precise, and a little hesitant. Equally striking is the alleged smoking gun that got Davison fired for bias: an eight-inch piece about sidewalk repairs taking place on lower State Street earlier this year. But on January 25-10 days after the article was published on the front page of the Santa Barbara News-Press-Davison was fired for bias.

Davison insists her real offense was supporting the union drive that lead to last fall’s 33-to-6 vote by newsroom employees to affiliate with the Teamsters. Davison wore Teamster t-shirts to work every Friday-though she took them off when out on assignment-and photographs of Davison attending prop-union rallies showed up in many of the news articles chronicling the News-Press‘s ongoing meltdown. As for allegations of bias, Davison testified that none of her editors ever complained to her about it either in person or in writing. Nor was the issue was never mentioned, she said, in any of the five annual performance evaluations written up by her immediate supervisors.

And if Davison was so biased, she wants to know why her superiors at the News-Press rewarded her with bonuses from 2003 to 2005. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), it turns out, agreed with Davison. And because it’s a violation of federal labor law to fire workers for engaging in lawful union activities, the NLRB dispatched two of its attorneys-Brian Gee and Steven Wyllie-to Santa Barbara to prosecute the News-Press.