Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, refused to allow the newspaper’s editorial board to endorse Kamala Harris for president, the former editor of the paper’s opinion section told a media news outlet on Wednesday.
Mariel Garza, a veteran California journalist who has worked for the Times’ editorial board for nearly a decade, resigned from the paper in protest of Soon-Shiong’s decision, she told the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR).
“In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up,” Garza told CJR.
Harris is the first presidential nominee from California in any political party since Ronald Reagan.
In a long social media post on X, apparently written in response to Garza’s comments, Soon-Shiong wrote that the Los Angeles Times editorial board had rejected a proposed alternative to a typical presidential endorsement editorial, which he described as “a factual analysis of all the POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE policies by EACH candidate during their tenures at the White House, and how these policies affected the nation”.
Soon-Shiong wrote that the paper’s opinion editors, who typically endorse one candidate each for a range of local and national offices and explains why each candidate is the best pick, were asked to instead present “clear and non-partisan information side-by-side, [so] our readers could decide who would be worthy of being President for the next four years.
“Instead of adopting this path as suggested, the Editorial Board chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision,” Soon-Shiong wrote. He ended with the words: “Please #vote.”
A spokesperson for the Los Angeles Times did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Soon-Shiong, a biotech billionaire, bought the Los Angeles Times in 2018, pledging to make it one of the “bastions of democracy in this country”. He said at the time that his $500m purchase of the Times and other California papers was an effort to fight fake news, which he called a “cancer of our time”.
So many comments about the @latimes Editorial Board not providing a Presidential endorsement this year. Let me clarify how this decision came about.
— Dr. Pat Soon-Shiong (@DrPatSoonShiong) October 23, 2024
The Editorial Board was provided the opportunity to draft a factual analysis of all the POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE policies by EACH…
The Los Angeles Times Guild, which supports the publication’s rank-and-file, said they were “concerned about Soon-Shiong decision to block an endorsement.
“We are even more concerned that he is now unfairly assigning blame to Editorial Board members for his decision not to endorse,” according to a statement released by the union. “We are still pressing for answers from newsroom management on behalf of our member.”
In the resignation letter she shared with CJR, Garza did not reference any potential reasons for Soon-Shiong’s decision to block the California newspaper he owns from endorsing Harris’s campaign for president.
But Garza argued that the decision was consequential and that it also had the potential to undermine the credibility of all of the editorial board’s future political recommendations.
“It’s perplexing to readers, and possibly suspicious, that we didn’t endorse [Harris] this time,” Garza told CJR.
Semafor reported on Tuesday that Terry Tang, the Los Angeles Times executive editor, had “told editorial board staff earlier this month that the paper would not be endorsing a candidate in the presidential election this cycle”, and that the decision had come from Soon-Shiong.
Garza told CJR that the editorial board had been preparing to endorse Harris, and that she had even prepared an outline of the endorsement, when Tang informed her on 11 October that Soon-Shiong had decided the paper would not be making an endorsement in the presidential contest.
In the resignation letter she shared, Garza said she had initially tried to convince herself that Soon-Shiong’s decision not to allow a presidential endorsement did not matter. “I told myself that presidential endorsements don’t really matter; that California was not ever going to vote for Trump; that no one would even notice; that we had written so many ‘Trump is unfit’ editorials that it was as if we had endorsed her,” Garza wrote.
But her feelings shifted after the news of the non-endorsement became public, Garza wrote.
She noted that the Trump campaign quickly seized on the news this week that the Los Angeles Times was not making a presidential endorsement, telling supporters on Tuesday: “Even her fellow Californians know she’s not up for the job. The Times previously endorsed Kamala in her 2010 and 2014 races for California attorney general, as well as her 2016 race for US Senate – but not this time.”
“Of course it matters that the largest newspaper in the state – and one of the largest in the nation still – declined to endorse in a race this important,” Garza wrote. “It makes us look craven and hypocritical, maybe even a bit sexist and racist. How could we spend eight years railing against Trump and the danger his leadership poses to the country and then fail to endorse the perfectly decent Democrat challenger – who we previously endorsed for the US Senate?”
On Wednesday, Semafor reported that the non-endorsement appeared to be costing the financially struggling Los Angeles Times some of its subscribers. “Cancelations were twice as high yesterday compared to Monday” and “nearly 400 subscribers cited ‘editorial content’ as the reason for canceling”, Semafor’s Maxwell Tani reported.
