Los Angeles Times Editorials Editor Mariel Garza quit on Wednesday, weeks after the paper’s owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, announced it would not endorse any candidate this cycle.
With Election Day two weeks away, Garza took issue with her employer shifting away from the tradition of endorsing presidential candidates. The paper has backed the Democratic candidate since 2008. The Los Angeles Times is the biggest newspaper in Vice President Kamala Harris’s home state of California and endorsed Harris when she ran for the Senate in 2016 and for the office of attorney general before that.
“I told myself that presidential endorsements don’t really matter; that California was not ever going to vote for Trump; that no one would even notice; that we had written so many ‘Trump is unfit’ editorials that it was as if we had endorsed her,” Garza wrote in her resignation letter obtained by the Columbia Journalism Review. But then, Garza changed her mind weeks after her already-written editorial was rejected by Soon-Shiong.
“The non-endorsement undermines the integrity of the editorial board and every single endorsement we make, down to school board races. People will justifiably wonder if each endorsement was a decision made by a group of journalists after extensive research and discussion, or through decree by the owner,” Garza wrote. “In these dangerous times, staying silent isn’t just indifference, it is complicity. I’m standing up by stepping down from the editorial board.”
Soon-Shiong claimed he had proposed a negotiation with the editorial board instead of a flat-out endorsement.
“The Editorial Board was provided the opportunity to draft a factual analysis of all the POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE policies by EACH candidate during their tenures at the White House, and how these policies affected the nation,” Soon-Shiong wrote on X. “In addition, the Board was asked to provide their understanding of the policies and plans enunciated by the candidates during this campaign and its potential effect on the nation in the next four years. 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. Instead of adopting this path as suggested, the Editorial Board chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision.”
So many comments about the @latimes Editorial Board not providing a Presidential endorsement this year. Let me clarify how this decision came about.
The Editorial Board was provided the opportunity to draft a factual analysis of all the POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE policies by EACH…
— Dr. Pat Soon-Shiong (@DrPatSoonShiong) October 23, 2024
Subscribers swarmed to social media to say they would be canceling their subscriptions due to this fallout. Soon-Shiong responded by encouraging everyone to vote in the election.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
The Washington Examiner contacted the Harris campaign for comment.
Already, more than 2.8 million California voters have either mailed in their ballots or voted early in person. This is more than 10% of all voters but is a decline from years past. Amid the pandemic in 2020, more than a fifth of California voters had already turned in their ballots at this same time.