Document ID: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-caDC-11-01348/USCOURTS-caDC-11-01348-0/pdf.json

Parties Involved:
Ampersand Publishing, LLC
Respondent
National Labor Relations Board
Petitioner

Document Text:

United States Court of Appeals 

FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT

Argued November 8, 2012 Decided December 18, 2012 

No. 11-1284 

AMPERSAND PUBLISHING, LLC, DOING BUSINESS AS SANTA 

BARBARA NEWS-PRESS, 

PETITIONER

v. 

NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD, 

RESPONDENT

GRAPHICS COMMUNICATIONS CONFERENCE OF THE 

INTERNATIONAL BROTHERHOOD OF TEAMSTERS, 

INTERVENOR

Consolidated with 11-1348 

On Petition for Review and Cross-Application for 

Enforcement of an Order of the National Labor Relations 

Board 

L. Michael Zinser argued the cause for petitioner. With 

him on the briefs were Glenn E. Plosa, Carter G. Phillips, and 

Paul J. Zidlicky. 

USCA Case #11-1348 Document #1410688 Filed: 12/18/2012 Page 1 of 14
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Kira Dellinger Vol, Attorney, National Labor Relations 

Board, argued the cause for respondent. With her on the brief 

were John H. Ferguson, Associate General Counsel, Linda 

Dreeben, Deputy Associate General Counsel, and Julie 

Broido, Supervisory Attorney. 

Ira L. Gottlieb argued the cause and filed the brief for 

intervenor. With him on the brief was James B. Coppess. 

Before: SENTELLE, Chief Judge, HENDERSON, Circuit 

Judge, and WILLIAMS, Senior Circuit Judge. 

Opinion for the Court filed by Senior Circuit Judge

WILLIAMS. 

WILLIAMS, Senior Circuit Judge: Petitioner Ampersand 

Publishing, LLC, publishes a daily newspaper, the Santa 

Barbara News-Press. In 2006 a long-smoldering dispute 

between Ampersand and newsroom staff, regarding control of 

the News-Press’s content, burst into flames. We are asked to 

review the National Labor Relations Board’s conclusion that 

Ampersand committed various unfair labor practices in the 

course of the fight. We hold that the National Labor Relations 

Act did not protect the bulk of the employees’ activity and 

that the Board’s misconception of the line between protected 

and unprotected activity tainted its analysis. Because we can 

conceive of no principle by which the Board could cleanse 

that taint, we grant the petition for review, vacate the Board’s 

decision and order, and deny the cross-application for 

enforcement. 

* * * 

Wendy McCaw, Ampersand’s owner, purchased the 

News-Press in 2000. Between 2004 and the spring of 2006 

there were a number of wrangles between her and the news 

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staff over what she perceived as bias in their reporting. She 

backed her claims with survey data indicating that readers saw 

the News-Press reporters as injecting their views into their 

reports, and with specific critiques of articles that in her view 

tended to slight the interests of wildlife (and the friends of 

wildlife) in interactions between wildlife and residents. 

Ampersand Publishing, LLC, 357 NLRB No. 51, at 14-15 

(2011) (ALJ Op.). In 2006 McCaw and Arthur von 

Wiesenberger became the newspaper’s co-publishers, and the 

clash intensified. As the Board put it, the dispute was over “a 

series of management decisions . . . that led employees to 

believe that the new publishers were inappropriately 

interfering with the work of the employees on the newsgathering side of the paper.” Id. at 1 (Board Op.). In May 

2006 reporters took umbrage when the publishers limited 

coverage of a News-Press editor’s arrest and sentencing for 

driving while intoxicated. In June, the publishers 

reprimanded a reporter and three editors for printing the home 

address of a prominent actor living near Santa Barbara. Id. at 

16-17 (ALJ Op.). The same day as the News-Press published 

the actor’s address, management circulated a new policy 

banning “unauthorized disclosure, release, sharing or leaking 

of any proprietary, personnel or other information involving 

the New[s]-Press to [any] other news organization or media 

outlet.” Id. at 18. More than a dozen employees resigned, 

calling the policy a “gag order.” 

On July 3, the two publishers left for vacation and the 

editor who had been arrested for alleged drunk driving 

became acting publisher. Two editors resigned July 5, and a 

raft of additional resignations ensued (at least nine on July 6, 

and one on each of July 7, 12 and 18), accompanied by a 

flurry of angry memos relating to control over content. Id. at 

18-19. One employee, later fired, sought out the assistance of 

the Graphics Communications Conference of the International 

Brotherhood of Teamsters, and arranged a meeting in her 

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house on July 6. Id. at 19. On July 13, 2006, the employees 

served News-Press management with four demands, the first 

of which was aimed at limiting the publishers’ “interference” 

with news content: 

1. Restore journalism ethics to the Santa Barbara NewsPress: implement and maintain a clear separation between 

the opinion/business side of the paper and the newsgathering side. 

2. Invite back the six newsroom editors who recently 

resigned . . . . 

3. Negotiate a contract with the newsroom employees 

governing our hours, wages, benefits and working 

conditions. 

4. Recognize the [union] as our exclusive bargaining 

representative. 

Id. at 2 (Board Op.). 

Union-supporting employees held a series of rallies and 

demonstrations, most of which took place in a public square 

outside the News-Press headquarters. At the first rally, on 

July 14, 2006, approximately 20 employees protested the “gag 

order” by putting duct tape over their mouths. Employees 

held another rally four days later, whose theme, according to a 

staff-written article in the News-Press, was “restoring the wall 

between opinion and the news.” 

On July 20, 2006, the employees began a campaign for 

News-Press readers to threaten to cancel their subscriptions if 

Ampersand did not accede to the employees’ demands. They 

distributed subscription cancellation pledge cards outside 

News-Press headquarters that day, as well as at public events 

in the following weeks. At rallies, they displayed a banner 

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reading “Cancel Your Newspaper Today.” The cancellation 

drive rested overwhelmingly on the employees’ quest for 

autonomy. For example, the printed pledge cards stated that 

the reason for the signers’ threat to cancel was that they 

“support[ed] the Santa Barbara News-Press newsroom staff in 

its effort to restore journalistic integrity to the paper, obtain 

union recognition and negotiate a fair employment contract.” 

Joint Appendix (“J.A.”) 1601 (emphasis added). 

Journalistic ethics and autonomy remained the theme in 

the ensuing weeks. At a public forum on July 26, 2006, staff 

writer Melinda Burns described her remarks as being “on 

behalf of a majority of newsroom employees who desperately 

want to be able to practice our profession in an atmosphere 

of . . . journalism ethics. . . . Above all, we hope to restore the 

News-Press as a place where openness and fairness in 

reporting—the foundations of a free press—will again flourish 

and thrive.” Id. at 1602-03. After employees elected the 

union as their collective-bargaining representative on 

September 27, 2006, an employee told an interviewer, “We 

need a contract that guarantees that journalistic integrity is 

returned to this newsroom. . . . We need a contract that 

guarantees we’re treated with the respect we deserve. And we 

need a contract that gives this community a newspaper it 

deserves.” Id. at 1609. 

On the morning of February 2, 2007, several employees 

hung two large banners on either side of a footbridge over 

Highway 101 in the Santa Barbara area, urging viewers: 

“Cancel Your Newspaper Today.” Smaller, ancillary signs 

urged drivers to “Protect Free Speech.” Ampersand 

Publishing, 357 NLRB No. 51, at 47, 50 (ALJ Op.). 

In the course of the dispute, Ampersand discharged nine 

union-supporting employees—two allegedly for biased 

reporting, a third for refusing to fire one of the allegedly 

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biased reporters, and six for participating in the Highway 101 

event. Petitioner cancelled another union supporter’s column 

and gave four others lower annual evaluation scores than they 

had received in the past. After the union and a former 

newsroom supervisor filed complaints against Ampersand, the 

ALJ found—and the Board affirmed—that each of these 

actions violated § 8(a)(1) and/or § 8(a)(3) of the Act. The 

ALJ and Board further concluded that Ampersand violated 

§ 8(a)(1) by coercively interrogating employees about union 

activity, surveilling union activity, and requiring employees to 

remove buttons and signs that said “McCaw Obey the Law.” 

In its decision, the Board asserted that the employees’ 

concerted actions “were not in protest against a change in the 

[paper’s] editorial stance,” id. at 3 (Board Op.); it thus 

implicitly acknowledged the publishers’ right to decide on 

such matters as political endorsements. Rather, it said, the 

management decisions that the workers protested “had and 

threatened to have a direct impact on the autonomy [that 

employees] had enjoyed in performing their work according 

to their perceptions of applicable professional norms as well 

as on their actual, day-to-day duties.” Id. These 

“[r]estrictions on their autonomy and threats to their 

professional ethics directly implicated their interests as 

employees.” Id. The Board also noted that besides the 

“journalistic ethics” issues, the employees were seeking 

recognition of the union “as their representative for purposes 

of bargaining over wages, hours, and other terms and 

conditions of employment generally.” Id. at 3-4. 

Between the ALJ’s and the Board’s decisions, the 

Board’s Regional Director petitioned for an injunction 

requiring (among other things) that the News-Press reinstate 

the discharged employees. The district court for the Central 

District of California denied the petition. McDermott v. 

Ampersand Publishing, LLC, No. 08-1551, 2008 WL 8628728 

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(C.D. Cal. May 22, 2008). The Ninth Circuit affirmed. 

McDermott v. Ampersand Publishing, LLC, 593 F.3d 950 (9th 

Cir. 2010). Both courts rejected the Board’s parsimonious 

view of the publisher’s First Amendment rights. The district 

court observed: “The Union was organized, in part, to affect 

[Ampersand’s] editorial discretion and undertook continual 

action to do so. It therefore does not seem possible to 

parse . . . [Ampersand’s] animus toward the Union generally 

from its desire to protect its editorial discretion. The motives 

necessarily overlapped in this case.” McDermott, 2008 WL 

8628728, at *12, quoted in McDermott, 593 F.3d at 961. 

Accordingly, the district court denied the injunction on the 

ground that it would “significantly risk[] infringing the First 

Amendment rights of” the News-Press. McDermott, 2008 

WL 8628728, at *5. 

* * * 

 We review the Board’s decision under the usual 

substantial evidence standard and the requirement that the 

Board’s interpretation of the Act be “reasonable and 

consistent with applicable precedent.” Fashion Valley Mall v. 

NLRB, 451 F.3d 241, 243 (D.C. Cir. 2006). We owe no 

deference to the Board’s resolution of constitutional 

questions. See, e.g., Lead Indus. Ass’n v. EPA, 647 F.2d 

1130, 1173-74 (D.C. Cir. 1980). 

Section 7 of the Act gives employees “the right to selforganization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to 

bargain collectively through representatives of their own 

choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the 

purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or 

protection.” 29 U.S.C. § 157. The “mutual aid or protection” 

clause protects employee efforts to “improve terms and 

conditions of employment, or otherwise improve their lot as 

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employees.” Eastex, Inc. v. NLRB, 437 U.S. 556, 565 (1978). 

The courts’ construction of § 7 leaves the Board broad 

authority, see, e.g., Stephens Media, LLC v. NLRB, 677 F.3d 

1241, 1251 (D.C. Cir. 2012), but there are limits. Concerted 

activity loses protection “if it fails in some manner to relate to 

‘legitimate employee concerns about employment-related 

matters.’” Tradesmen Int’l, Inc. v. NLRB, 275 F.3d 1137, 

1141 (D.C. Cir. 2002) (quoting Kysor/Cadillac, 309 NLRB 

237, 237 n.3 (1992)). 

Newspapers, like other employers, are subject to the 

National Labor Relations Act. Associated Press v. NLRB, 301 

U.S. 103, 132-33 (1937). Nonetheless, “otherwise valid laws 

may become invalidated in their application when they invade 

constitutional guarantees, including the First Amendment’s 

guarantee of a free press.” Newspaper Guild of Greater 

Phila. v. NLRB, 636 F.2d 550, 558 (D.C. Cir. 1990). Where 

enforcement of the Act would interfere with a newspaper 

publisher’s “absolute discretion to determine the contents of 

[its] newspaper[],” the statute must yield. Passaic Daily News 

v. NLRB, 736 F.2d 1543, 1557-58 (D.C. Cir. 1984). 

Given the publisher’s First Amendment rights, issues of 

what is published and not published are not generally a 

“legitimate employee concern[]” for purposes of § 7’s 

protection. The reporters and the Board are of course free to 

characterize these issues as ones of reporter “autonomy” and 

“journalism ethics” for their own purposes, but the power to 

so characterize them is not a power to conjure editorial control 

out of the publisher’s hands. 

The First Amendment affords a publisher—not a 

reporter—absolute authority to shape a newspaper’s content: 

The choice of material to go into a newspaper, and the 

decisions made as to limitations on the size and content of 

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the paper, and treatment of public issues and public 

officials—whether fair or unfair—constitute the exercise 

of editorial control and judgment. It has yet to be 

demonstrated how governmental regulation of this crucial 

process can be exercised consistent with First 

Amendment guarantees of a free press . . . . 

Miami Herald Publishing Co. v. Tornillo, 418 U.S. 241, 258 

(1974). We echoed this in Passaic: “The Supreme Court has 

implied consistently that newspapers have absolute discretion 

to determine the contents of their newspapers.” 736 F.2d at 

1557. And our holding in Passaic underscored the identity of 

the “newspaper” for these purposes. Though upholding the 

Board’s finding of a violation in the paper’s scrubbing a 

reporter’s column in retaliation for his union activities 

(activities wholly unrelated to content or editorial judgment), 

id. at 1546-48, 1554-55, we set aside its order to publish the 

reporter’s column every week for the foreseeable future, 

observing that the order would “invite[] the Board to . . . 

become directly involved with the Company’s exercise of 

editorial control and judgment,” id. at 1559. 

The Board recognized the First Amendment problem in 

the present case, only to dismiss it out of hand. It said that its 

order “raise[d] no ‘serious questions’ under the First 

Amendment” because nothing in it “requires [Ampersand] to 

grant” the employees’ demand that it “refrain from interfering 

with their autonomy in reporting the news.” Ampersand 

Publishing, 357 NLRB No. 51, at 5. The Board addressed the 

hypothetical case of a classification of the employees’ 

concerns as a mandatory subject of bargaining, under which 

circumstances the employees could, with government support, 

apply direct economic coercion to Ampersand in the form of a 

strike. Not to worry, said the Board. Assuming the employee 

demands were merely a permissive and not a mandatory 

subject of bargaining—which the Board did not decide—the 

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union would commit an unfair labor practice if it insisted to 

impasse on the demands; any resulting strike “may be 

unprotected by the Act.” Id. at 7. This brush-off completely 

overlooks the order’s clear coercive effect: it sanctions 

Ampersand for trying to discipline employees who sought to 

remain on its payroll and at the same time call on newspaper 

readers of Santa Barbara to cancel their subscriptions because 

Ampersand would not knuckle under to the employees’ 

demands for editorial control. The First Amendment bars 

government pressure of this sort. 

More conventional labor-law principles buttress the 

conclusion that a publisher’s editorial policies do not 

constitute a “term or condition” of employment in which 

employees have a legitimate § 7 interest. “In general, 

‘employee efforts to affect the ultimate direction and 

managerial policies of the business are beyond the scope’ of 

Section 7.” Riverbay Corp., 341 NLRB 255, 257 (2004) 

(quoting Lutheran Soc. Serv. of Minn., 250 NLRB 35, 41 

(1980)). The quality of the “product” is an aspect of these 

managerial prerogatives, so that social workers’ demands 

relating to patient care constitute “[p]rotest against the quality 

of the product” and are “not encompassed by the ‘mutual aid 

or protection’ clause.” Lutheran Soc. Serv., 250 NLRB at 42; 

see also Orchard Park Health Care Ctr., Inc., 341 NLRB 642, 

645-46 (2004) (concurring opinion) (“Although employee 

interest in [an employer’s] product is desirable, it is not 

thereby converted into a working condition. Factory 

workers . . . may manifest a strong interest in the goods they 

produce, but the nature of those goods is not a condition of 

employment . . . . ”). 

Here, newsroom employees’ conduct was focused largely 

on protecting the quality of the relevant product, as they 

perceived it, from Ampersand’s editorial policies. For 

example, union supporter Melinda Burns warned participants 

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in a public forum that “the once-proud institution of the 

News-Press . . . is in real danger. . . . The question before us 

is, Will the News-Press reflect the world as Wendy McCaw 

sees it, or will it reflect the lives and hopes and vision of the 

entire community?” (Burns’s reference to the “hopes and 

vision of the entire community” did not include the logically 

necessary qualifier: “as perceived by the News-Press’s 

reporters.”) This appeal—well-intentioned as it may have 

been—went directly to the quality and managerial policies of 

the newspaper. And not only was the employees’ goal 

unprotected, but in many aspects of their campaign they also 

used prohibited means—public disparagement of 

Ampersand’s product. Such disparagements, then, were 

doubly unprotected. See Diamond Walnut Growers, Inc. v. 

NLRB, 113 F.3d 1259, 1267 n.8 (D.C. Cir. 1997) (en banc) 

(citing NLRB v. Local Union No. 1229, Int’l Bhd. of Elec. 

Workers (Jefferson Standard), 346 U.S. 464, 477-78 (1953)). 

The Board points out that employees who were 

disciplined in connection with editorial policies they were 

protesting had testified before the ALJ that the policies 

“undermined their integrity as journalists,” causing them to 

lose credibility with sources and otherwise hampering their 

job performance. But to the extent that “journalistic 

integrity,” as conceived by the Board and the reporters, 

requires a publisher’s cession of some of its editorial control, 

the First Amendment precludes government coercion in its 

name. As the Court said in Tornillo, “A responsible press is 

an undoubtedly desirable goal, but press responsibility is not 

mandated by the Constitution and like many other virtues it 

cannot be legislated.” 418 U.S. at 256. 

The Board also argues that, even if the employees’ 

objective of gaining editorial control is unprotected, the 

Board’s findings of unfair labor practices should stand 

because the campaign was not focused solely on increasing 

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employees’ journalistic autonomy. Indeed, one of the 

demands the employees served on News-Press management 

was to “[n]egotiate a contract with the newsroom employees 

governing our hours, wages, benefits and working 

conditions.” Ampersand Publishing, 357 NLRB No. 51, at 2. 

But the record on appeal makes clear that autonomy was the 

focus of the campaign. The record is replete with discussion 

of journalistic ethics and who rightfully controlled the content 

of the News-Press. Wages, benefits, and working conditions 

(apart from the reporters’ concern for editorial control) drew 

scant reference. For example, when asked what newsroom 

employees sought to achieve through a collective bargaining 

agreement, reporter Dawn Hobbs (one of the named 

beneficiaries of the Board’s order) testified that they thought it 

was “the only way that [they] could protect [them]selves” 

from “ethical breaches” “and protect [their] credibility and 

[their] integrity.” When asked whether they sought any other 

“contractual procedures or provisions or benefits,” she 

responded, “At that time, I think we were just really focused 

on that . . . .” 

Of course employees’ simultaneous pursuit of multiple 

goals—some protected by § 7 and some not—poses a 

conundrum. But whatever the ultimate answer, we do not 

think that employees can extend § 7’s protections by wrapping 

an unprotected goal in a protected one, by tossing a wage 

claim in with their quest for editorial control. Judge Friendly 

addressed a comparable dilemma in endeavoring to apply the 

rule emerging from A Book Named “John Cleland’s Memoirs 

of a Woman of Pleasure” v. Attorney General of 

Massachusetts, 383 U.S. 413 (1966), that government cannot 

proscribe a work “unless it is found to be utterly without 

redeeming social value.” Id. at 419. Urged by the 

government in United States v. A Motion Picture Film 

Entitled “I Am Curious-Yellow,” 404 F.2d 196 (2d Cir. 1968), 

to require at least a nexus between “the scenes of nudity and 

USCA Case #11-1348 Document #1410688 Filed: 12/18/2012 Page 12 of 14
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sexual activity and the problems of the girl . . . in trying to 

work out her relationship with life,” id. at 201, Judge Friendly 

responded: 

Although Memoirs did not in terms require such a nexus, 

I would agree that the presence of “redeeming social 

value” should not save the day if the sexual episodes were 

simply lugged in and bore no relationship whatever to the 

theme; a truly pornographic film would not be rescued by 

inclusion of a few verses from the Psalms. 

Id. (Friendly, J., concurring). Here, of course, the First 

Amendment wholly favors protection of the employer’s 

interest in editorial control, the main issue in dispute; it is hard 

to imagine that employees can prevail over that simply by 

adding “a few verses” of wage demands. 

Finally, the Board argues that its decision should stand 

because there is no evidence that Ampersand’s actions were 

motivated by a desire to protect its First Amendment rights, 

rather than by union animus. The Board concluded that 

Ampersand’s explanations for its actions were pretextual—for 

example, Ampersand claimed that it discharged two union 

supporters because of their biased reporting—and that union 

animus thus must have been the true motivator. But here we 

return to the observation of the district court in the injunction 

proceeding, reiterated by the Ninth Circuit, namely, that this 

analysis “rests on a false dichotomy. The Union was 

organized, in part, to affect [Ampersand’s] editorial discretion 

and undertook continual action to do so. It therefore does not 

seem possible to parse . . . [Ampersand’s] animus toward the 

Union generally from its desire to protect its editorial 

discretion. The motives necessarily overlapped in this case.” 

McDermott, 2008 WL 8628728, at *12, quoted in McDermott, 

593 F.3d at 961. 

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Even if the Board properly found that Ampersand 

proffered pretextual reasons for its actions—a finding whose 

validity we do not decide here—the Board’s analysis was 

tainted by its mistaken belief that employees had a statutorily 

protected right to engage in collective action aimed at limiting 

Ampersand’s editorial control over the News-Press. The 

Board acted with full awareness of the analysis in the 

McDermott decisions, and evidently discerned no way to 

disentangle Ampersand’s attitude toward the union “from its 

desire to protect its editorial discretion.” We therefore vacate 

the Board’s order and deny the cross-application for 

enforcement without addressing the parties’ arguments 

regarding the details of the individual violations the Board 

found or the propriety of the remedy imposed. 

* * * 

Ampersand’s petition for review is granted, the Board’s 

decision and order are vacated, and the Board’s crossapplication for enforcement is denied. 

So ordered. 

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