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As the nation counted down this fall to a bitterly polarized election, the editorial board of The Los Angeles Times drew up a detailed outline for an endorsement that seemed obvious for an institution that had leaned liberal for generations: Vice President Kamala Harris should be the next president of the United States.
A California native and resident of Los Angeles, Ms. Harris was not only a unifying and inspiring generational figure, in the board members’ view, but also an important bulwark between Donald J. Trump and democratic institutions. They were unaware, however, that a different and more powerful group had been meeting — the family of Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the newspaper’s owner — with far different plans for the newspaper’s voice.
This week, the biotech billionaire who had bought the paper in 2018 for $500 million acted on those plans with scant internal or public explanation, abruptly vetoing the planned endorsement, informing the board through an intermediary that The Los Angeles Times would make no recommendation in the presidential race.
For days, readers in overwhelmingly liberal Southern California speculated angrily about a decision that was widely regarded as a favor to Mr. Trump and a vote of no confidence in Ms. Harris.
Thousands of readers canceled subscriptions. Three members of the editorial board resigned. Nearly 200 staff members signed an open letter to management demanding an explanation, complaining that the decision this close to the election had undermined the news organization’s trust with readers. The Times’s News Guild, the newsroom’s union, lodged a protest. In social media posts and subsequent interviews with his own news organization, Dr. Soon-Shiong framed the choice as an attempt at neutrality.
But in a statement on Saturday that was swiftly challenged by the paper, his daughter, Nika Soon-Shiong, 31, a progressive political activist who has frequently been accused of trying to meddle in the paper’s news coverage, said the decision was motivated by Ms. Harris’s continued support for Israel in its war in Gaza.
“Our family made the joint decision not to endorse a Presidential candidate. This was the first and only time I have been involved in the process,” Ms. Soon-Shiong, who has no formal role at the paper, said in a statement to The New York Times. “As a citizen of a country openly financing genocide, and as a family that experienced South African Apartheid, the endorsement was an opportunity to repudiate justifications for the widespread targeting of journalists and ongoing war on children.”
In a statement, Dr. Soon-Shiong said the daughter did not speak for the paper.
“Nika speaks in her own personal capacity regarding her opinion, as every community member has the right to do,” the owner said, according to a spokeswoman. “She does not have any role at The L.A. Times, nor does she participate in any decision or discussion with the editorial board, as has been made clear many times.”
The editor of editorials, who was among those who have resigned, said she was taken aback by the daughter’s assertion.
“If that was the reason that Dr. Soon-Shiong blocked an endorsement of Kamala Harris, it was not communicated to me or the editorial writers,” Mariel Garza, who resigned on Tuesday, said in a statement. “If the family’s goal was to ‘repudiate justifications for the widespread targeting of journalists and ongoing war on children,’ remaining silent did not accomplish that.”
Over the past six years, writers and editors have increasingly chafed at interference by Dr. Soon-Shiong, 72, and his family in the newsroom, where owners are generally regarded less as proprietors with the right to impose their personal views than as guardians of a public trust.
In January, Kevin Merida stepped down as executive editor after clashing with Dr. Soon-Shiong over an unpublished article about an acquaintance of the newspaper owner, as well as other conflicts in the newsroom. Just a few weeks later, the publication carried out its most widespread layoffs in more than a decade, cutting 115 journalists in a move that slashed the newsroom by more than 20 percent.
But the dispute over the endorsement — echoed two days later when The Washington Post announced that it would also not make an endorsement in the race — prompted urgent new questions about what had motivated the decision.
Speaking this week on the cable news outlet Spectrum, which regularly carries Los Angeles Times content, Dr. Soon-Shiong was asked about a possible political motivation. “I want us desperately to air all the voices on the opinion side, on the op-ed side,” he said. He said he did not know whether readers viewed him or his family as ultra-progressive or not. “But I’m an independent.”
In an interview with one of his own reporters on Friday, Dr. Soon-Shiong said that his stand was not based on any single issue, nor did he intend by withholding an endorsement to favor either Ms. Harris or Mr. Trump. “We should be an organization that stands up and says the facts,” presenting views across the political spectrum, he said. “I think that the country needs that desperately.”
Several senior editors at The Times said they were not briefed on the reasons for Dr. Soon-Shiong’s decision, but they noted that he had often been critical of the Biden administration, had boasted of having dinner with Mr. Trump after he won the presidency in 2016 and often has approvals pending with the federal Food and Drug Administration. They speculated that he may have been hedging his bets over a range of issues.
One person potentially in a position to know was the publication’s current executive editor, Terry Tang, who replaced Mr. Merida. In a departure from the practice at most major news organizations, which have a clear organizational separation between news and opinion, Ms. Tang, who had been the publication’s editorial page editor, took on oversight of both departments when she became the executive editor. Ms. Tang previously served as an editor at The New York Times for 20 years.
Ms. Tang did not respond to requests for comment and did not appear to have addressed the staff over the issue.
Mariel Garza, the editorials editor who resigned, said that she had been caught completely off guard. Dr. Soon-Shiong, she said, had been told in late September that the board planned to endorse Ms. Harris, an unsurprising choice given The Times’s past criticism of Mr. Trump and its generally liberal editorial stances. Ms. Harris, who is originally from the Bay Area, has been married for more than a decade to a Los Angeles entertainment lawyer, Doug Emhoff, and has kept a home in the upscale West Los Angeles neighborhood of Brentwood.
Ms. Garza said she became increasingly concerned as weeks passed without approval of the endorsement from the owner. Two weeks ago, she said, she learned from Ms. Tang that Dr. Soon-Shiong had decided against issuing an endorsement. She said Ms. Tang told her that he had not given a clear rationale for the decision.
Ms. Garza, who was the first to resign on the editorial board, said she felt no choice but to leave.
“This is our duty,” she said in an interview on Friday. “It is. This is a scary time, and we all need to be brave, and not be cowed.”
By the end of the week, two more editorial board members, Karin Klein and Robert Greene, a 2021 Pulitzer Prize winner, had also resigned. All vigorously contested Dr. Soon-Shiong’s assertion that they had chosen to remain silent.
“This is not about disagreeing with the owner,” said Ms. Klein, an author and specialist in education who has been with The Times for 35 years, 22 of them as an editorial writer. “To do this a couple weeks before the election is truly doing an editorial — a make-believe, invisible editorial that sends a message that we have doubts about Kamala.”
The confrontation over the endorsement comes after years of uneasy relations between the owner and the newsroom.
Reporters and editors have chafed at phone calls, emails and social media postings offering questions and suggestions about news coverage both from Dr. Soon-Shiong and his daughter. In the past, she has been critical of the publication’s coverage of crime, policing and Israel’s war in Gaza, among other things.
Several reporters interviewed described Ms. Soon-Shiong contacting them directly with critiques of their coverage, or publicly posting her negative opinions about their stories on social media. A former editor recalled reporters worrying about whether her comments were actually coming from her father.
“You never know how much Nika is speaking for herself and how much Nika is speaking for her whole family,” the editor said.
Early in the coronavirus pandemic, Dr. Soon-Shiong wanted medical reporters to investigate connections between Covid-19 and cancer, which many perceived as a story that, if published, would further his business interests, two people with knowledge of the situation said.
Late last year, he tried to dissuade the former executive editor, Mr. Merida from publishing a story about a doctor who was an acquaintance of his. After clashing with Dr. Soon-Shiong over staffing levels and newsroom management, Mr. Merida left the paper in January.
Several sources told The New York Times at the time that Dr. Soon-Shiong had stepped in to make inquiries about the newspaper’s reporting on the doctor, who was embroiled in dueling lawsuits with a woman who claimed to have been bitten by his dog.
At one point, Dr. Soon-Shiong contacted Mr. Merida demanding to see a copy of the story and suggesting that it should not be published, the New York Times reporting showed. Dr. Soon-Shiong also told Mr. Merida on a call that he would fire journalists if he learned they were concealing the completed article from him. A story was finally published in April.
A Los Angeles Times spokeswoman said in a statement this year that Dr. Soon-Shiong had not wanted the newspaper to be used as a “source of exploitation” in the legal dispute. “He simply urged the editors to ensure that an investigation was done before any story was published.”
Ms. Soon-Shiong had telegraphed the concerns over Ms. Harris’s Israel policy in a post on social media earlier this week about the publication’s decision not to endorse.
“This is not a vote for Donald Trump. This is a refusal to ENDORSE a candidate that is overseeing a war on children. I’m proud of the LA Times’ decision,” she posted on X.
But until her statement to The New York Times on Saturday, she had remained silent about how to interpret the posting.
“For the sake of the living and in the name of the dead, for the sake of our collective humanity — we must raise the moral floor,” she said in the statement.
In his own social media post this week, Dr. Soon-Shiong had pushed back on Ms. Garza’s version of events surrounding the endorsement decision. He wrote on X that he had directed the editorial board to compare the policies of each candidate, and let readers decide whom to choose. “Instead of adopting this path as suggested, the Editorial Board chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision,” he said.
In Southern California, civic leaders have expressed outrage at what many have viewed as an abdication of responsibility by a major news outlet in the most populous state in the nation.
“Newspapers serve as the civic conscience for communities around the country. In that role, they have the ability to speak truth to power,” said Austin Beutner, a local financier who has served in a number of high-profile leadership positions in Los Angeles, including a brief stint a decade ago as publisher and chief executive of The Los Angeles Times. “It’s a terrible loss for society when they abdicate that responsibility.”
But it is inside the Times newsroom where most of the alarm has spread.
“We endorsed every other race on the ballot this year — it doesn’t make sense to pull your punch with the most consequential office in the most consequential election that any of us can remember,” said Robin Abcarian, a columnist who has worked there for more than three decades. “And this is what’s puzzling to everybody: It’s this lingering feeling that something isn’t being expressed, and we don’t know what.”
Some were urging a more public explanation of the politics behind the endorsement decision, if there was any.
“If there’s an explanation, he should say so,” said Ms. Klein, the former editorial board member. “When you have a gap in information like this, the tendency among readers is to fill it in. Is this his daughter expressing opposition on Gaza? Is he hoping Trump will lower his taxes? Does he have pharmaceuticals pending before the F.D.A. and he’s worried about approval from a Trump administration? He should tell people.”
Jim Newton, a former editorial page editor of the paper who is now a historian and lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles, shared an email exchange he had with Ms. Tang, after the news broke, in which he urged Ms. Tang to reconsider. The decision not to endorse, he told her, set back years of effort to restore the paper “to a place of civic responsibility and candor with readers” and “unravels a lot of hard, important work, and at a particularly unwise time.”
Ms. Tang responded with a brief thank you, and later told him that she did not believe Mr. Newton understood the situation.
“Seems like maybe you don’t either,” he replied. “You assured me a few months ago that the editorial board controlled endorsements. You sure about that?”
Dan Morain, a former Los Angeles Times staff writer who went on to become the editorial page editor of The Sacramento Bee, said that a paper can justify not endorsing in a presidential campaign because people usually have enough information.
“The blunder here is that the decision was announced almost on the eve of the election, so it becomes fodder for one of the candidates,” he said. “If The Times wasn’t going to endorse in this presidential race, where a hometown candidate was running, they should have announced this six months ago. But they didn’t. So it plays into Trump’s hands, which is just terrible. And it raises so many questions about the owners and whether their financial interests are trumping their journalistic obligations.”
Ms. Abcarian, the Times columnist, said she remained grateful that Dr. Soon-Shiong saved the publication when he did, and continues to invest in it during a difficult time for the news business. But she said that his explanations for pulling the endorsement felt inadequate.
She has been heartbroken by the public response to the endorsement debacle, she added. One of her closest friends, who had subscribed to the paper for 40 years, canceled this week.
“The staff is demoralized on a number of fronts, and this just kind of pours salt in the wound,” she said.
Benjamin Mullin and Katie Robertson contributed reporting.
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