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It has been a tough year for the LA Times. Earlier this year the paper underwent a round of layoffs amounting to 20% of the staff. Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the paper’s owner, had been covering the paper’s losses of $30-$40 million per year, but said he couldn’t keep that going any longer. Naturally there was some whining from the left including the paper’s union which held a walkout in protest, but the cuts were made anyway.

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The year ended with another outrage when Dr. Soon-Shiong told the paper it could not publish an endorsement of Kamala Harris. Several people on the editorial staff quit over that and what followed was a series of sometimes conflicting statements about why this decision had been made. It started with this claim on X, saying the editorial board was given an option and chose to remain silent.

Dr. Soon-Shiong has a very progressive adult daughter named Nika who then inserted her own version of events. She wrote a thread about Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza and insinuated that was the reason the editorial board had not endorsed Harris.

But Nika’s version of events also suggested this was a decision by the editorial board, not her father. That claim got a community note saying it was false.

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She then told the NY Times a different version of the story, one in which she and her family had collectively made the decision not to endorse Harris because of Gaza.

“Our family made the joint decision not to endorse a Presidential candidate. This was the first and only time I have been involved in the process,” Ms. Soon-Shiong, who has no formal role at the paper, said in a statement to The New York Times. “As a citizen of a country openly financing genocide, and as a family that experienced South African Apartheid, the endorsement was an opportunity to repudiate justifications for the widespread targeting of journalists and ongoing war on children.”

So she moved the decision from the board to herself and her family but Dr. Soon-Shiong quickly said this wasn’t true.

“Nika speaks in her own personal capacity regarding her opinion, as every community member has the right to do,” the owner said, according to a spokeswoman. “She does not have any role at The L.A. Times, nor does she participate in any decision or discussion with the editorial board, as has been made clear many times.”

The editor in charge, who resigned over the decision, agreed with Dr. Soon-Shiong that Nika was wrong as far as she knew.

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The editor of editorials, who was among those who have resigned, said she was taken aback by the daughter’s assertion.  

“If that was the reason that Dr. Soon-Shiong blocked an endorsement of Kamala Harris, it was not communicated to me or the editorial writers,” Mariel Garza, who resigned on Tuesday, said in a statement. “If the family’s goal was to ‘repudiate justifications for the widespread targeting of journalists and ongoing war on children,’ remaining silent did not accomplish that.”

In sum, there were quite a few different stories told about what happened and why. Who knows what really happened behind closed doors, but it does seem clear that the ultimate decision was made by Dr. Soon-Shiong and not by the editorial board which very much wanted to endorse Harris. 

Last weekend, Dr. Soon-Shiong wrote on X that he wanted to see the LA Times become more “fair and balanced” borrowing the slogan from Fox News.

Yesterday, Dr. Soon-Shiong appeared on Fox News to double-down on that message.

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“If it’s news, it should just be the facts, period. And if it’s an opinion, that’s maybe an opinion of the news, and that’s what I call now a voice. And so, we want voices from all sides to be heard, and we want the news to be just the facts,” he explained…

“It is our responsibility to maintain democracy, to have the views of all our California readers, in fact, the views of all the national readers to be aired. Because if we just have the one side, it becomes nothing else but an echo chamber,” he said.

“And so, it’s going to be risky and difficult. I’m going to take a lot of heat, which I already am, but you know, I come from the position that really it’s important for all voices to be heard.”

It’s frankly hard to believe that after 6 years owning this very left-leaning paper, Soon-Shiong has suddenly had a change of heart. This has to come down to economic survival. The LA Times has been on a downward slide for a while. Maybe that combined with the results of the election, in which Trump did much better even in deep blue California, have convinced him that if he doesn’t make a change the paper could fail. The far left is not ascendant like it was in 2020. Even Californians are moving right on many issues so it makes sense one of the state’s biggest papers would do so as well. 

Whether he can actually make that change at the LA Times is another matter. The people who work there now are all on the left and they aren’t going to change, they can only be fired and replaced. I guess we’ll see if that’s something Soon-Shiong is willing to do. In any case, it’s revealing that the owner of one of the country’s big left-wing papers is saying, in so many words, that going woke has left them broke. They have to make a change to survive. Here’s a bit of what he said on Fox News.

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