Laura Castañeda (left) had been deputy opinion editor of The San Diego Union-Tribune until Thursday. (Times of San Diego photo illustration)
Editor’s note: This report is republished with the permission of the Times of San Diego. Click here for the original version.
A fired San Diego Union-Tribune opinion editor is accusing the paper’s owners of “censorship at its best” after she was let go at the same time an editorial was blocked from running.
Laura Castañeda on Friday announced her layoff on social media, tweeting: “On the same day a team editorial at @sdutOpinion on the ICE protests was pulled, my position as deputy editor was suddenly eliminated.”
Castañeda told Times of San Diego that Frank Pine, executive editor of the Southern California News Group, informed her Thursday evening that her position was eliminated.
The five-year U-T veteran — president of the local chapter of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists — shared the subject of the editorial.
She said it was about the protests and ICE raids in Los Angeles and across the country and “how Trump overstepped Gov. (Gavin) Newsom with deployments of Marines and National Guard.”
SCNG, which runs 11 newspapers, is a subsidiary of Denver-based MediaNews Group controlled by majority shareholder Alden Global Capital, a privately held hedge fund in New York.
Via email, Castañeda said her firing came as a surprise. Several weeks earlier, she said, a staff meeting was told that no layoffs were expected at the U-T.
Castañeda says she asked Executive Editor Pine if he was sure her layoff was not in retaliation to an editorial written earlier in the day.
“The piece was rejected by Publisher Ron Hasse, who apparently said it was ‘too one-sided,’” she said. “And it would not publish.”
Pine insisted the two actions were not related, she said. But Castañeda added: “You do the math — one plus one does not equal three.”
Even before her conversation with a human resources representative in Denver, she was cut off from her company computer, she said.
U-T Senior Editor Lora Cicalo didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Neither did Pine nor publisher Hasse.
“To have this happen to me and then watch Sen. (Alex) Padilla be arrested, handcuffed and manhandled was a tough day,” Castañeda said.
The U-T has been subject of scrutiny for its reputed lack of editorial courage, including a recent failure to run a Sunday Doonesbury cartoon about Trump. (It replaced the strip with an old one.)
An Emmy award-winning journalist with three decades of storytelling experience in two languages, Castañeda also worked for ABC affiliates in Chicago, Tucson and San Diego as well as independent projects for PBS affiliates.
“After spending 15 years in the classroom as a college professor, I decided to get back into the industry full-time,” says her LinkedIn bio. “I will always teach part-time. I believe in mentoring young journalists and teaching them how to become better storytellers and live performers.”
She ended her note to me: “I know my worth and I’ll take a bit of a break before deciding my next chapter.”
And on Twitter, she said: “Thanks 🙏🏽 to the SD community for allowing me to lift your voices. My next chapter TBA. I won’t be silenced and neither should you.”
This report is republished with the permission of the Times of San Diego. Click here for the original version.
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