Los Angeles Times editorials editor resigns after its billionaire owner blocks presidential endorsement
Columbia Journalism Review reports:
Mariel Garza, the editorials editor of the Los Angeles Times, resigned on Wednesday after the newspaper’s owner blocked the editorial board’s plans to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for president.
“I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not okay with us being silent,” Garza told me in a phone conversation. “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up.”
On October 11, Patrick Soon-Shiong, who bought the newspaper for $500 million in 2018, informed the paper’s editorial board that the Times would not be making an endorsement for president. The message was conveyed to Garza by Terry Tang, the paper’s editor.
The board had intended to endorse Harris, Garza told me, and she had drafted the outline of a proposed editorial. She had hoped to get feedback on the outline and was taken aback upon being told that the newspaper would not take a position.
“I didn’t think we were going to change our readers’ minds—our readers, for the most part, are Harris supporters,” Garza told me. “We’re a very liberal paper. I didn’t think we were going to change the outcome of the election in California.
“But two things concern me: 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. We have made the case in editorial after editorial that he shouldn’t be reelected.”
So why was an endorsement needed?
“It was a logical next step,” Garza told me. “And it’s perplexing to readers, and possibly suspicious, that we didn’t endorse her this time.”
Indeed, hours after Semafor reported on Tuesday that Soon-Shiong had blocked the endorsement, former president Donald Trump’s rapid-response team sent out an email calling the newspaper’s decision “the latest blow” for Harris. [Continue reading…]
Recent episodes involving major U.S. news organizations have stoked fears that outlets are preemptively self-censoring coverage that could offend former President Donald Trump, who remains neck-and-neck in the polls with Vice President Kamala Harris ahead of Election Day.
“One of the central media stories in the U.S. right now is the people who run big media companies making accommodations for a second Trump presidency and thinking about how to avoid antagonizing him,” Ben Smith, editor-in-chief and co-founder of the news site Semafor, tells NPR. [Continue reading…]