To Stand on Principle Might Require a Superhero

Did you read the accounts over the weekend of the veteran newspaper columnist in Santa Barbara who, along with several top editors, quit in protest over alleged meddling by the owner? And that some News-Press staff members “cried and others hurled obscenities” at the new publisher as he escorted a departing editor from newsroom?

Pretty stirring stuff, and I tried to imagine what it would take for me to walk out over a principle.

Couldn’t think of a darn thing. As I’ve mentioned in past columns, my rent is atrocious.

Still, the notion of quitting in protest is one that appeals to journalists, because we pride ourselves in representing truth, justice and the American way (remember, Superman chose newspapering), and how can you represent those qualities adequately if you let The Man walk all over you?

For the moment, then, the rebels in Santa Barbara have become journalist folk heroes, not unlike our peers who have gone to jail instead of relinquishing principles. In a way, the Santa Barbara gang is even more impressive: when you go to jail, you still get paid.

Most of the mutineers in Santa Barbara were editors, but I naturally relate more to Barney Brantingham, described as a veteran columnist. I don’t know him, but when I read that he writes five columns a week, it made me wonder why he hadn’t resigned long ago.

I’ve quit two newspaper jobs in my life, neither time in a snit or over principle. The closest I’ve come to showing an ounce of employee courage came 20 years ago in Denver, where I got into an argument with my boss in front of the newsroom. He had wrongly -- I was pretty sure -- accused me of being an idiot and laid into me.

Normally, I would have whimpered like a kitten, but I decided to take him on, and we went at it like a couple of alley cats.

At one point, he dropped this on me: “Why don’t you make both of us happy and quit?”

In retrospect, a good line. But wanting him to remain miserable, I refused. Oddly enough, I remember being totally calm during the verbal slugfest that went on for several minutes. Only when back at my desk did I start shaking like a flimsy cot in an earthquake.

Funny how you remember episodes like that. Moments later, another editor sent me a computer message that said, “I’ve worked everywhere from coal mines to pizza parlors, and I’ve never heard a boss talk to an employee like that.”

I took that as a badge of honor, but I was a veteran at handling abuse. Years earlier at my first newspaper, the editor sent me home for not wearing a tie to the office. That might sound harsh, but to be fair to him, he didn’t specify patterned or solid.

That story, now some 35 years old, is fresh in my mind because last month a bunch of us from that newspaper had a reunion.

My former colleagues love to bring up the story, and they still laugh at the memory of it. I told them -- in all seriousness -- that if that editor showed up at the reunion and told me to go get a tie, I’d probably do it all over again.

Such is the power that editors hold over us. Which makes it all the more amazing, and laudable, that the News-Press people defied upper management and took a hike.

On the other hand, if you have to quit in the middle of summer, there are few better places to do it than Santa Barbara.

I wonder if News-Press readers appreciate the convictions of the paper’s editors and veteran columnist or just think they’re nuts. But tell the truth: Don’t you love the part about employees hurling obscenities at the publisher?

I bet you don’t do that at your office.

As for my faithful readers, fear not. I don’t have anywhere near the requisite courage to quit, over a principle or otherwise.

I’m not going anywhere.

Which, come to think of it, is just what my boss keeps telling me.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.