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Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of the LA Times, continues to shock the progressives who work at and buy his newspaper. He made news when he killed an endorsement of Kamala Harris prior to the election. This move was overshadowed when the Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos, did the same thing. Last month, Dr. Soon-Shiong killed another editorial, this one critical of Trump’s cabinet picks.

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After President-elect Donald J. Trump announced a cascade of cabinet picks last month, the editorial board of The Los Angeles Times decided it would weigh in. One writer prepared an editorial arguing that the Senate should follow its traditional process for confirming nominees, particularly given the board’s concerns about some of his picks, and ignore Mr. Trump’s call for so-called recess appointments.

The paper’s owner, the billionaire medical entrepreneur Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, had other ideas.

Hours before the editorial was set to be sent to the printer for the next day’s newspaper, Dr. Soon-Shiong told the opinion department’s leaders that the editorial could not be published unless the paper also published an editorial with an opposing view.

The editorial never ran. Instead, they went with another piece which was less critical of Trump’s cabinet picks.

This is in keeping with a new push at the Times to expand the range of commentary. Last month Dr. Soon-Shiong said he wanted voices from “all sides.”

He followed that up with a staffing move that sent more shockwaves through the paper. He hired Scott Jennings as a contributor to the editorial board.

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There was immediate pushback to that move in the form of an aggressive interview by Oliver Darcy, formerly a media reporter at CNN who argued that Scott Jennings didn’t deserve the position. Dr. Soon-Shiong cut the interview short. Then, earlier this month, he announced plans to add a “bias meter” to articles published by the Times.

On news and opinion articles, “you have a bias meter so somebody could understand, as a reader, that the source of the article has some level of bias,” he explained in the interview. “And what we need to do is not have what we call confirmation bias, and then that story automatically — the reader can press a button and get both sides of that exact same story based on that story, and then give comments.”

That also didn’t go over well and received blowback from the union representing journalists at the paper and from a columnist who resigned in protest.

“Recently, the newspaper’s owner has publicly suggested his staff harbors bias, without offering evidence or examples,” the union’s leadership said in a statement on Thursday. The union said all Times staff members abided by ethics guidelines that call for “fairness, precision, transparency, vigilance against bias and an earnest search to understand all sides of an issue.”

Harry Litman, a senior legal affairs columnist for The Los Angeles Times’s Opinion section, announced Thursday that he was resigning from the paper because of recent actions by Dr. Soon-Shiong. “I don’t want to continue to work for a paper that is appeasing Trump and facilitating his assault on democratic rule for craven reasons,” he wrote of his resignation in a post on Substack.

“My resignation is a protest and visceral reaction against the conduct of the paper’s owner, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong,” he said. “Soon-Shiong has made several moves to force the paper, over the forceful objections of his staff, into a posture more sympathetic to Donald Trump.”

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Dr. Soon-Shiang hasn’t tried to interfere in the paper’s news coverage (according to the NY Times). It’s only the opinion side where he is weighing in with this new approach. In other words, he hasn’t done anything wrong here, he’s just telling the progressives who work for him that he wants a new tone at the paper he owns. He has every right to do this, whether they like it or not.

And as I’ve pointed out before, there’s good reason to shake things up at the LA Times. The paper has been losing $30-$40 million a year, year after year since he bought it in 2018. That means he is writing million dollar checks at least every other week to cover those losses. If he wants to do something to try to make the paper appeal to more readers, he has good reason to do so.

That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if the entitled progressives who work there, people who take it for granted that their opinions should be the only ones emanating from the paper, sabotage his efforts somehow. I would not be surprised to learn there is already a Trump-style resistance forming among employees to make sure the right people (meaning the left) retain control. How long will Dr. Soon-Shiong put up with that sort of thing before he gives up and sells the paper? That’s where I think this is headed. That said, I’d love to be wrong. I’d love to see a more balanced LA Times, one that even I would consider subscribing to. But the response from readers of this story doesn’t give me much hope.

Expect this kind of thing to happen more often. This is how authoritarians create a captive media, like in Russia. When the media is controlled by oligarchs with interest vested only in their own wealth and power, it might as well be state-run.

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For the left, asking for a balanced opinion page turns the paper into Pravda. Do they even hear themselves?

I had been a loyal LA Times reader since boyhood.

I canceled my subscription last month after it became clear that after Soon-Shiong’s buyout the LA Times was no longer a source of reliable information.

Again, no one is claiming Dr. Soon-Shiong has leaned on the newsroom to slant coverage. We’re only talking about the opinion side. But the readers seem not to have caught on to that difference.

Another rich guy trying to manipulate the news for his personal economic benefit. His editing of any reporting or opinions  that criticize Trump world makes him unfit to own a major newspaper or any other media outlet. The best advice is to end support for his newspaper. The existence of a free press is necessary to maintain our democracy.

Some people don’t seem to understand the concept of ownership. If you own it, you get to decide what its institutional voice sounds like.

Soon-Shiong clearly is trying to be deferential to Trump.

What is disturbing about his actions – along with what Bezos did to interfere with an editorial endorsement of Harris over Trump – is censorship. Both men as owners are allowing their particular political viewpoints to take precedence.

There’s more but you get the idea. Progressive just take it for granted that their opinions should always be front and center and subsidized by every media owner. The idea that someone else might deserve a chance at holding the mic for a moment grips them with horror. They fear balance because they have learned to expect unchallenged dominance.

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