LA Times Owner’s Pro-MAGA ‘Meddling’ Ramps Up to Demand Ed Board ‘Take a Break From Writing About Trump’: Report
AP Photo/Danny Moloshok
The tension between Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong and the newspaper’s staff is growing, reported Oliver Darcy Monday evening, after demands that the editorial board “take a break from writing about Trump” — an odd request about an incoming president.
Soon-Shiong was criticized after he blocked the Times from endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president, a move that led to three staffers resigning as members of the editorial board.
In the aftermath of the controversy, Soon-Shiong posted on social media and spoken publicly about his intention to have a more “balanced” editorial board with a range of views — including specifically voicing his approval of Jennings, a conservative supporter of President-elect Donald Trump who has frequently made headlines for his on-air spats with fellow CNN panelists.
A spokesperson for Soon-Shiong abruptly ended a phone interview late last month with Darcy on this topic after it became “combative,” and the Status newsletter publisher had an update for his readers Monday evening about the festering conflicts at the Times.
According to Darcy, Soon-Shiong’s “meddling” has become “more pervasive than previously realized,” including taking a more active role in dictating the paper’s editorial columns and actively thwarting the publication of those critical of Trump.
Darcy reported that he had obtained a memo sent “in the last few days” to Times Executive Editor Terry Tang and signed by “several members of the newspaper’s Opinion section” that detailed “a number of previously unreported steps” Soon-Shiong had taken.
“Most notably, the staffers said in the memo that Soon-Shiong has requested the newspaper’s editorial board outright ‘take a break from writing about Trump,’ a move that would prevent the body from weighing in on the president-elect as he appoints extremists to key government posts, wades into foreign policy, teases mass deportations, floats upending vaccine requirements for children, issues threats to the news media, and more,” wrote Darcy.
Last week, New York Times media reporter Katie Robertson reported that Soon-Shiong had killed an op-ed bashing Trump’s Cabinet picks, requiring that it be accompanied by an op-ed supporting the nominees — a last-minute demand that the editors deemed impossible to satisfy before the print deadline.
But Soon-Shiong’s meddling has been “much broader in scope” than the quashing of that one op-ed, wrote Darcy, quoting the memo to Tang as accusing the owner of having “instituted a new policy” — applying only to Trump — “that prohibits editorials containing criticism of the president-elect unless they are presented side-by-side with another opinion piece representing the ‘opposing view.’”
This has “effectively killed or indefinitely delayed multiple editorials that have been written and edited but remain unpublished,” the memo continued, and Soon-Shiong has also mandated that the editorial board email him “the text of every editorial and the name of its writer” before anything can be published.
“Morale in the newsroom has plummeted in recent weeks,” Darcy wrote, with one staffer rating the “spirit of the newsroom” as “[o]n a scale of 0 to 10, it’s a negative 5.”
Read the full report at Status.
