Prison Guards Target Newspaper

The California Correctional Peace Officers Assn. has launched a "statewide action" against the Sacramento Bee and other McClatchy newspapers — a "Beecott," as they call it — over recent editorials and the newspaper's use of "prison guards" instead of "correctional officer." The PacoVilla blog written by CCPOA members wrote: "When the Sacramento Bee's editorial board published a mean-spirited, personal attack upon CCPOA members asserting we are 'whiners' who don't do a very dangerous job at all, well, those are fighting words!"

That appears to refer to a Nov. 18 editorial headlined "The Cloak of Victimhood," which said the 30,000-member union was "using its formidable political war chest to run ominous television ads to put pressure on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to do a repeat of the giveaway 2001-2006 prison guard contract."

From the Bee:

"The CCPOA portrays a guard's work life as one of unending suffering and victimization. The reality is that a California prison guard can go to work every day for 20 years and never break up a fight and never get assaulted. What makes the job so stressful and dangerous is uncertainty — the prospect that routine boredom could be broken at any time by violence."

It concluded: "The union needs to get out of its current 'I am victim, hear me whine' mode."

PacoVilla said guards are planning to picket in front of the Sacramento Bee offices on Dec. 22, and it wants to pressure McClatchy advertisers as well. In the past few years, the Bee's editorial pages have become livelier and more pugnacious under the direction of David Holwerk, the former managing editor at the Lexington Herald-Leader in Kentucky. I called him up and he's not backing down. "We stand by our editorials," he said, "and our editorials speak for themselves."