Billionaire LA Times Owner Reportedly Quashed Op-Ed Critical Of Trump’s Cabinet Picks
AP Photo/Danny Moloshok
The billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times moved to kill a recent opinion piece on President-elect Donald Trump’s controversial cabinet picks, according to new reporting by The New York Times on Thursday.
Media reporter Katie Robertson scooped the fact that Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong intervened when he found out that the paper would publish a piece titled, “Donald Trump’s cabinet choices are not normal. The Senate’s confirmation process should be.”
Robertson wrote, “One writer prepared an editorial arguing that the Senate should follow its traditional process for confirming nominees, particularly given the board’s concerns about some of his picks, and ignore Mr. Trump’s call for so-called recess appointments. The paper’s owner, the billionaire medical entrepreneur Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, had other ideas.”
Soon-Shiong, who was born in South Africa, has stirred controversy in recent months after he also stopped the paper from publishing its endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris ahead of the presidential election – despite it already being written.
The decision prompted a backlash within the paper and led to several high-profile resignations. Soon-Shiong has since vowed to reshape the paper under the guise of making it more balanced.
Robertson reported on his latest move, explaining in detail how it unfolded:
Hours before the editorial was set to be sent to the printer for the next day’s newspaper, Dr. Soon-Shiong told the opinion department’s leaders that the editorial could not be published unless the paper also published an editorial with an opposing view.
Baffled by his order and with the print deadline approaching, editors removed the editorial, headlined “Donald Trump’s cabinet choices are not normal. The Senate’s confirmation process should be.” It never ran.
Dr. Soon-Shiong’s intervention, recounted by four people inside The Times who would speak only anonymously, is one of a string of events in which he has waded into the publication’s opinion section in ways that he hadn’t until this fall’s presidential campaign.
Soon-Shiong recently cut off an interview with media reporter Oliver Darcy after Darcy pressed him on his hiring of Scott Jennings – the pro-Trump pundit on CNN. Darcy asked Soon-Shiong if he believed putting an avowed partisan like Jennings on the editorial board was the right way to balance it out, which abruptly ended their conversation.
