The billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times has cited the war in Gaza as a reason for vetoing the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris for president.
In an email sent to the paper’s top editor, president and chief operating officer, Patrick Soon-Shiong identifies Harris’s support for Israel’s year-long offensive in the Palestinian coastal territory, which he terms as “genocide”, as a compelling reason to withhold support from the Democratic nominee.
The email, obtained by the Drop Site News website, confirms a previous suggestion by his daughter, Nika, who posted on social media that the issue reminded her father of his family background in apartheid South Africa and had shaped his decision on candidate endorsement.
Soon-Shiong subsequently dismissed Gaza as a reason in an interview with the newspaper. But his email to his senior underlings appears to confirm it.
“Has there ever been a time in our history when our nation is knowingly providing arms to another nation using those weapons to kill children, women, innocent people and target the press, doctors and medical workers?” Soon-Shiong writes. “And policies enabling this are supported it seems by both candidates?”
He adds: “We can and must acknowledge concerns for democracy and the Jan 6 episode and the horific [sic] [October 7] Hamas attacks. But how do we ignore the counter issues of the innocents being killed now? Do we accept that indeed genocide is happening and that we stand as a country of willing arms suppliers and yet remain silent?”
Soon-Shiong – a biotech entrepreneur who bought the paper for $500m in 2018 pledging to fight against fake news – also wrote that the publication was seeking to endorse Harris without having met her or her opponent, Donald Trump.
“Why is a collection of 6 or so board members filled with such wisdom that we can endorse one candidate versus the other without meeting either face to face?” he wrote. “Are we group thinkers following the crowd? The fact that for the past 3 years we wrote negatives on one but nothing (since nobody knew her) of the other candidate, automatically means that the candidate for which we know little is the candidate we therefore endorse?”
Soon-Shiong’s veto of the planned Harris endorsement prompted the resignation of three members of the paper’s editorial board and the cancellation of thousands of subscriptions. Mariel Garza, one of the board members who resigned, told the Columbia Journalism Review: “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up.”
His decision was followed days later by a similar move by the Washington Post, whose owner, Jeff Bezos, killed off the paper’s article announcing editorial support for Harris. That decision, too, triggered a wave of subscription cancellations and resignations of editorial board members.
Bezos subsequently wrote in the Post that his veto had been driven by a widespread decline in public trust of the media, dismissing criticism that his stance had been motivated by a desire to placate Trump and ward off the possibility of retribution against his business interests.
As controversy raged over her father’s decision, Nika Soon-Shiong posted a long thread on X, declaring: “There is a lot of controversy and confusion over the LAT’s decision not to endorse a presidential candidate…..For me, genocide is a line in the sand.
“The temptation is to speak in muffled tones about an issue the international courts have called a plausible genocide. But this moment requires opposition to crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and Apartheid – as my parents did in South Africa.
“This is not a vote for Donald Trump. This is a refusal to ENDORSE a candidate that is overseeing a war on children.”
