Suit Filed by Ironworkers Union Claims Newspaper, Nassco Conspired to Kill Ad
For a week last January, San Diego was at ground zero of American sports, that megaton explosion of hype and publicity known as the Super Bowl. Thousands of people descended on the city. But these weren’t ordinary tourists.
No, these were VIPs: the well-connected and wealthy from the corporate ranks, reporters from the nation’s largest newspapers and magazines, and high-profile television folks. Just the kind of people the city, hosting its largest event ever, hoped would be impressed and shower the town with favorable publicity. Such is the power of Super Bowl-only exposure.
Jumping at that same opportunity were officials at Local 627 of the San Diego ironworkers union. The union was in the midst of a bitter contract dispute with National Steel & Shipbuilding Co., a large local employer, and it wanted to tell its side of the story. So it bought a newspaper advertisement in the San Diego Union.
On Jan. 28, the labor union paid the newspaper $4,506.48 for a half-page ad to run in the sports section on game day three days later. The hard-hitting ad was headlined “NASSCO: The Story Behind the Headlines. The Nassco yard is a death trap for workers.” It detailed the labor union’s criticism of safety practices at the shipyard, where six workers had been killed in a crane accident the previous July.
The ad never ran.
Three weeks ago, the labor union filed a civil-conspiracy and breach-of-contract lawsuit against the San Diego Union; its afternoon sister paper, the Tribune, and the shipyard. The suit alleges, among other things, that officials at the newspaper and Nassco conspired to kill the ad.
“We felt they were in bed with the company, frankly,” said Manny Ruiz, business agent for Shopmen’s Local 627 of the International Assn. of Bridge, Structural and Ornamental Iron Workers. “We wanted maximum exposure . . . but they (newspaper and shipyard) didn’t want anything they thought would make the city look bad.”
“They never explained to us why the ad didn’t run after we paid for it,” said Victor Van Bourg, the San Francisco attorney who filed the suit on the union’s behalf. “They simply said it was their right.”
Gerry Wilson, the newspaper’s director of marketing, emphatically denied the union’s allegations and said that, because the ad was “slightly inflammatory,” he asked the paper’s legal staff to look at it. The lawyers approved the advertisement the following Monday or Tuesday, but by then the Super Bowl was over.
The labor union later ran the ad in the Feb. 14 editions of The Times and called attention to the fact that the San Diego Union had refused to publish it on Super Bowl Sunday.
“We were willing to run it” after the legal staff’s approval, said Wilson. “I don’t know what was the big deal with the Super Bowl. The game wasn’t an issue with me at all. . . . I don’t know who the Nassco man is.”
One important Nassco man would be Fred Hallett, the company’s vice president of finance.
“I don’t know why we’re named in the suit,” Hallett said. “This is strictly a between the U-T (Union-Tribune) and the union. We’ve never had any dialogue (with) the paper before or after the ad.”
Wilson said that, despite the fanfare surrounding the Super Bowl, the newspaper published only about 10,000 extra copies of its Sunday edition, which normally has a circulation of about 400,000 copies. “So we’re only talking . . . 2% or 2 1/2% more papers,” he said.
The Super Bowl, however, provided an advertising bonanza for local newspapers, and nowhere was that more evident than at the Union and Tribune. Aside from the extensive editorial coverage about the game and its ancillary events, both papers published 105-page Super Bowl tabloid advertising supplements three days before the game.
The San Diego Union also had a more direct link to the game. Its editor-in-chief, Herb Klein, served as head of the media subcommittee of the San Diego Super Bowl Task Force, the group of local government and community leaders responsible for preparing the city for the game.
Accepted on One Condition
Ruiz says that the ad was taken to the newspaper Jan. 28 and that it and the labor union’s check were accepted, with one condition: Because of its content, the ad had to receive editorial approval. A newspaper advertising representative later contacted the union and said the only problem was that the ad needed a line at the bottom, clearly stating that it had been paid for by the ironworkers union and giving its address and phone number. “That was fine with us,” Ruiz said.
“The ad was brought over to our office, and we went over it for typos. The person told us, ‘The next time you see it, it will be in the newspaper.’ ”
But, late Friday afternoon, Ruiz was contacted at his home and told that the ad now had to receive legal approval. He said he knew then that it was doomed.
“I just felt they did it on purpose,” he said. “ . . . It’s our feeling that everyone was coming to ‘America’s Finest City,’ and, all of a sudden, it was a day of reckoning . . . and they didn’t want to do it.”
Marketing Director Wilson said a different set of factors was at play at the newspaper. It is true, he said, that lower-level advertising representatives had approved the ad. But, because of its controversial nature, Wilson said, it was “red-flagged” for his attention, a practice he said is common at most newspapers.
He saw the ad for the first time that Friday afternoon, the day after it was submitted, and decided it needed legal review. The legal staff was busy, he said, and wasn’t able to get to it until early the following week.
“I think what’s happened here is a situation where people have probably never run an ad in their life and don’t realize we have to check out these things all the time,” Wilson said.
As for the allegations of conspiracy, Van Bourg declined to go beyond the general assertions made in the lawsuit.
“We’ve alleged it, but I’m not going to give it out (specific details). There’s going to be a court hearing for that,” said the attorney, explaining that he expects to rely in part on the discovery phase of the trial to ferret out information about conversations between the newspaper and the shipyard.
“We wouldn’t have made the allegation if we didn’t have information,” he said.
The lawsuit, filed May 24 in Superior Court, seeks unspecified damages. But the suit says that monetary damages alone will not be sufficient. Because the exposure surrounding the Super Bowl can’t be duplicated, the labor union wants the newspaper to publish the ad, at no extra cost to the union, several times.
