LA Times Editor Quits in Protest Over Owner’s Demands for No POTUS Endorsement

In response to the owner of the Los Angeles Times decreeing that the paper would not be endorsing a candidate in this year’s presidential race, Mariel Garza, the editor of editorials for the Times, has resigned from her position.

Health tech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, who bought the Times in 2018, told staff at the paper on October 11 that, while the editorial board could issue endorsements in lower ballot races, it could not endorse either Democratic candidate Kamala Harris or Republican candidate Donald Trump in the presidential race, marking the first time the paper hasn’t made a presidential endorsement since 2004.

The paper has backed Democratic candidates in every presidential election since that time.

In response to that order, Mariel Garza, who oversees the editorial board and the opinion section for the paper, resigned from her role in protest.

“I want to make it clear that I am not okay with us being silent. In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up,” Garza said in a phone conversation with Sewell Chan of the Columbia Journalism Review.

Within her resignation letter, Garza said that the paper was planning to endorse Harris and that it was difficult to justify not releasing an endorsement when the paper’s editorial board had made the case against a second Trump term in previous commentaries.

“How could we spend eight years railing against Trump and the danger his leadership poses to the country and then fail to endorse the perfectly decent Democrat challenger — who we previously endorsed for the U.S. Senate?” Garza wondered.

She added:

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.

In her conversation with Chan, Garza explained that it was important for the paper to outline its stance, even if readers could presume their position.

“This is a point in time where you speak your conscience no matter what,” Garza said.

After Garza’s resignation, Soon-Shiong posted on social media that he had invited the board 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.” He claimed that he ultimately accepted the board’s decision not to do so.

Garza rejected that notion, pointing out: “What he outlines in that tweet is not an endorsement, or even an editorial.”

Garza’s fears about the non-endorsement undermining the Times’s previous statements on Trump came to fruition later this week, when the Trump campaign seized on the paper’s refusal to issue a statement to falsely suggest they had qualms endorsing Harris.

“In Kamala’s own home state, the Los Angeles Times — the state’s largest newspaper — has declined to endorse the Harris-Walz ticket, despite endorsing the Democrat nominees in every election for decades,” the campaign bragged, purporting that “even her fellow Californians know she’s not up for the job.”

(In reality, polling data shows that Harris is leading Trump in the state by a huge margin — an aggregate of polls compiled by FiveThirtyEight, for example, shows her ahead of him by nearly 24 points.)

Soon-Shiong’s demand that the Times refrain from issuing a presidential endorsement has prompted many observers to question whether he hopes to capitalize on either candidate’s win. Indeed, Soon-Shiong has worked with the Biden administration on its cancer initiative and discussed the future of health care with Trump when he won the election in 2016. Soon-Shiong’s friendship with fellow billionaire (and Trump megadonor) Elon Musk has also called his motives into question.

“He thinks that Trump is going to win, and he doesn’t need to make an enemy,” said one former reporter, in comments to The Wrap about Garza’s resignation.

Notably, while Soon-Shiong promotes himself as a philanthropist, a Politico analysis in 2017 found that his supposed philanthropy often benefits his own companies. Indeed, a majority of the grants from Soon-Shiong’s organization were awarded to companies or entities that he himself owned, the report pointed out.

“The abuse is taking money that is supposed to be irrevocably dedicated to charitable purposes … and using it for other, self-benefiting purposes,” Lloyd Mayer, a Notre Dame law professor, told Politico at the time.