The billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times has accused his own journalists of promoting “division” by wanting to endorse Kamala Harris—and lashed out at subscribers too.
Patrick Soon-Shiong went on offense in his first interview since the West Coast’s biggest newspaper was roiled by him intervening to tell the paper’s editorial board it was not allowed to endorse Harris.
He spoke on local television as two more members of the editorial board quit, one of them a Pulitzer Prize winner, and a reporter at the paper called the chaos “an incredibly dark week.”
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Soon-Shiong, who describes himself as an independent, said he believes endorsing either candidate would “just add to the division.” He told Spectrum News 1 that he’d instructed the editorial board to put together pages of the “pros and all the cons” of each candidate to let “the readers decide.”
The billionaire, who’s worth an estimated $7.1 billion, also lambasted the scores of readers who’d cancelled their subscriptions amid the newsroom drama, claiming they were contributing to the demise of democracy.
“You can voice your opinion, but I hope they understand by not subscribing that it just adds to the demise of democracy and the fourth estate,” the billionaire said of his paper’s fed-up readers.
News of the blocked endorsement order came on Tuesday, exactly two weeks before Election Day.
Late Thursday editorial board members Robert Greene and Karin Klein announced they were quitting. Mariel Garza, who was the leader of the Times’ editorial board had already left over the decision.
Greene, 65, won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 2021 after he successfully pushed LA officials to implement changes on issues like policing, bail reform, prisons, and more. He released a statement explaining his decision to leave the Times.
“I recognize that it is the owner’s decision to make,” he wrote regarding the blocked endorsement. “But it hurt particularly because one of the candidates, Donald Trump, has demonstrated such hostility to principles that are central to journalism-respect for the truth and reverence for democracy.”
Klein wrote in a Facebook post that she was fine with Soon-Shiong “interfering” with editorials. What she wasn’t OK with, however, was that he waited until the eleventh hour to shut down the endorsement—thus offering a pseudo-endorsement to Trump.
“What steams me is that a decision against an editorial at this point is actually a decision to do an editorial—a wordless one, a make-believe-invisible one that unfairly implies that she has grievous faults that somehow put her on a level with Donald Trump,” she said.
Klein’s fears were almost immediately seized on by Trump. His campaign described the lack of endorsement from a major paper in Harris’ home state as a “humiliating blow” that supposedly showed “even her fellow Californians know she’s not up for the job.”
Chaos at the daily newspaper hasn’t been contained to its editorial board. Many subscribers shared online that they’d canceled subscriptions after the decision, prompting paper’s editorial guild released a statement that pleaded with readers to continue supporting their journalism despite their objections to Soon-Shiong, who’s also a minority owner of the Lakers.
“We know many loyal readers are angry, upset or confused, and some are canceling subscriptions,” the statement said. “Before you hit the ‘cancel’ button: That subscription underwrites the salaries of hundreds of journalists in our newsroom.”
The guild added that it was “deeply concerned” by Soon-Shiong’s endorsement decision. One of the guild’s members, local courts reporter James Queally, posted to X that it’s been “an incredibly dark week here.”
Garza, the first editor to resign amid the controversy, had perhaps the harshest words for the paper’s South African-born owner. She said the decision made the paper “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?” she wrote. “The non-endorsement undermines the integrity of the editorial board and every single endorsement we make, down to school board races.”
