LA Times editorials editor quits after billionaire owner reportedly blocked paper from endorsing Harris

Billionaire doctor and biotech entrepreneur bought struggling paper in 2018 for $500m

The editorials editor of the Los Angeles Times has resigned in protest at billionaire owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong reportedly ordering the paper to withold a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.

“I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not okay with us being silent,” Mariel Garza told the Columbia Journalism Review of her decision to leave. “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up.”

Garza added that while most of the paper’s California readers were probably liberals who would be inclined to support Harris anyway, the endorsement was still important.

“This is a point in time where you speak your conscience no matter what. And an endorsement was the logical next step after a series of editorials we’ve been writing about how dangerous Trump is to democracy, about his unfitness to be president, about his threats to jail his enemies,” she said. “We have made the case in editorial after editorial that he shouldn’t be reelected.”

The Independent has contacted the paper for comment.

In a statement posted on X on Wednesday afternoon, the paper’s owner framed the lack of an endorsement as the editorial board’s own doing. Soon-Shiong said he tasked the editorial board with providing analyses of each candidate’s policies and what sort of impact they would have on Americans.

“In this way, with this clear and non-partisan information side-by-side, our readers could decide who would be worthy of being President for the next four years,” he wrote. “Instead of adopting this path as suggested, the Editorial Board chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision.”

Earlier this month, as the editorial board was preparing a planned Harris endorsement, staff members were told that Soon-Shiong had decided the paper would not be backing a candidate for 2024, Semafor reported on Tuesday.

Los Angeles Times owner reportedly blocked editorial board from endorsing Kamala Harris (Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)

“We do not comment on internal discussions or decisions about editorials or endorsements,” the paper said in response to the report.

The decision prompted heated discussion in- and outside the paper’s newsroom.

The Trump campaign seized on the non-endorsement, pointing out how the Times has endorsed a string of Democratic candidates for national office, a run of support dating back to Barack Obama in 2008.

“In Kamala’s own home state, the Los Angeles Times—the state’s largest newspaper—has declined to endorse the Harris-Walz ticket, despite endorsing the Democrat nominees in every election for decades,” the campaign said in an email blast.

The paper’s union has also spoken out about the reported pullback on the editorial, according to Semafor.

Patrick Soon-Shiong has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in revitalizing the Los Angeles institution (Getty Images)

“We believe the company owes the staff an explanation about why this decision was made after years of endorsements in general elections,” it wrote in an email to staff on Wednesday.

Soon-Shiong, a South African-born billionaire doctor and biotech entrepreneur, purchased the paper in 2018 for $500m, investing over $100m in revitalizing the historic outlet.

In 2020, he reportedly stopped the editorial board from endorsing Senator Elizabeth Warren in the Democratic primary.

The paper has continued to struggle in recent years. In January, it announced it was laying off 115 people, one of the largest cuts in the paper’s 143-year history.