LA Times Endorsement Scandal Reveals Soon-Shiong Family Dispute

The world of weird surrounding the 2024 presidential election just got even weirder. Days after SoCal paper of record the LA Times announced that its editorial board would not endorse a candidate for president, a puzzling and contradictory narrative has emerged. Its owner since June 2018, billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, claims that the issue is its opinion section’s leadership, which refused to comply with his directive to draft a policy detail compare and contrast list. They instead “chose to remain silent,” he claimed, a statement that past and present Times staffers say is untrue. Then on Saturday, Soon-Shiong’s daughter, 31-year-old Oxford University student Nika Soon-Shiong, threw another position into the mix. She claims that her family decided as a unit not to allow the paper to issue a recommendation for who is most fit to occupy the highest office in the land due to concerns over US support of Israel in the war in Gaza. But according to a spokesperson for her father, that statement—which she has repeated a number of times via social media—isn’t true at all.

This isn’t the first time that the Soon-Shiong’s family business has caused problems for the newspaper. In 2022, over three dozen past and present staffers spoke out about Patrick’s alleged efforts to encourage stories on businesses he has an interest in, while Nika was called out for allegedly attacking public safety coverage that she believed was too supportive of the police. The in January, the paper’s executive editor, Kevin Merida, abruptly resigned in January after—per the New York Times—Patrick attempted to block reporting into lawsuits against one of his acquaintances. Patrick denies those allegations, while Nika told Politico in 2022 that she disputes the “suggestion that I control the editorial decisions of the paper.”

That latter statement might be one of the few things that the wealthy father and daughter agree on this weekend. On Wednesday, Mariel Garza, the LA Times‘s editorial editor resigned, telling the Columbia Journalism Review that on October 11, the paper’s executive editor, Terry Tang, informed its editorial board that Patrick Soon-Shiong would not allow its editorial board to issue an endorsement for president. In her resignation letter to Tang, Garza wrote that “In these dangerous times, staying silent isn’t just indifference, it is complicity,” and said that the decision—which at that point had been widely reported “without so much as a comment from the LAT management”—”makes us look craven and hypocritical, maybe even a bit sexist and racist.”

Later that night, Patrick took to X (formerly Twitter) to explain the decision, clearly the ideal platform to indicate that one is neither craven, nor sexist, nor racist. “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,” he wrote, adding that “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,” he concluded. But according to Garza, that tweet was false. First, she says, “What he outlines in that tweet is not an endorsement, or even an editorial,” making the spreadsheet-style analysis Patrick says he requested the wheelhouse of the newsroom, not the separate section of the paper that oversees opinions. In addition, she told the CJR that “she had not received a request for such an analysis.”

A few hours after Patrick’s tweet of explanation, Nika issued a tweet of her own. Embedding a screengrab of text from an interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates published by The Guardian that quotes him as saying “I don’t have much hope for a Harris presidency,” the scion wrote “The topic is Apartheid. Apartheid is the topic.” Moments later, she tweeted again, this time embedding her father’s earlier explanation with another screengrab of text, this one from a story about Patrick published in 2020 on coffee industry website Brooksy that detailed his experiences in apartheid-era South Africa.

Two days later, she issued a follow-up thread on X that appeared to more directly address the endorsement controversy. “There is a lot of controversy and confusion over the LAT’s decision not to endorse a presidential candidate.” she began the thread. “I trust the Editorial Board’s judgment. For me, genocide is the line in the sand.” In several subsequent tweets, she detailed her family’s experiences in South Africa, likening it to the current war in Gaza.

“This is not a vote for Donald Trump,” she wrote toward the end of the thread. “This is a refusal to ENDORSE a candidate that is overseeing a war on children,” a remark that is presumably in reference to current vice president and Democratic candidate for president, Kamala Harris. “I’m proud of the LA Times’ decision just as I am certain there is no such thing as children of darkness. There is no such thing as human animals.”

(That tweet has since been appended with a correction from X users, which reads “The LA Times editorial board did not make this decision. The board voted to make an endorsement and were overruled by the owner, who is the poster’s father. There is no evidence that his decision was even partly based on the Gaza conflict.”)

Soon thereafter, Nika issued a clearer statement to the New York Times, saying “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.”

“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.”

But according to Patrick, Nika’s remarks are false. “Nika speaks in her own personal capacity regarding her opinion, as every community member has the right to do,” the told the NYT through a spokesperson. “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 dispute put Garza in the odd position of almost agreeing with her now-former boss. “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,” she told the NYT. “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.”

In an interview with the paper he owns, Patrick repeated that the decision not to endorse was in no way related to the war in Gaza. “I think it was exactly the right decision,” he said. “I think we stand for more than that. We should be an organization that stands up and says the facts.”

In the days following the decision, Garza’s fellow board members, Robert Greene and Karin Klein, also departed the paper. “I’m disappointed by the editorial [board] members resigning the way they did,” Patrick said in response. “But that’s their choice, right?”

Patrick isn’t the only one expressing disappointment these days. According to CBS, remaining editorial board member Tony Barboza announced on the LA Times’s internal message system that a planned series of editorials that would have been capped by a Harris endorsement in today’s paper “was killed.” But even more troubling, he wrote, was that he is seeing “these facts mischaracterized, and the owner’s decision not to endorse in this consequential race blamed on his employees.”

It’s a messy situation, made messier by similar situation playing out at the Washington Post. Like the LAT, the Post is owned by a billionaire businessman with little media experience—in the Post‘s case, Jeff Bezos—who has reportedly also blocked his paper from endorsing a presidential candidate.

According to a minute-by-minute account from the New York Times published Sunday, after Bezos met with Post opinion editor David Shipley and post CEO and publisher Will Lewis, staff was informed of the paper’s “new endorsement policy,” and would instead encourage readers to “make up their own minds.” That policy spurred an op-ed in dissent that the Post published late on Friday, signed by 18 members of its opinions team. “The Washington Post’s decision not to make an endorsement in the presidential campaign is a terrible mistake,” it begins, continuing that “This is a moment for the institution to be making clear its commitment to democratic values, the rule of law and international alliances, and the threat that Donald Trump poses to them.”

Unlike the situation at the LAT, the Post decision has thus far been unmuddied by conflicting accounts from its owner (or its owners family members). But in the end that might not matter, as media watchdogs say that the end result remains the same. In either case, “Announcing a sudden change in policy so close to the election suggests cowardice more than conviction, however much airbrushing the apologists do,” Harvard University media and public policy center head Nancy Gibbs writes in an NYT op-ed published today.

According to Brian Stelter, these decisions not to endorse seem to be implicit bets that Trump is about to win. “But all the polls suggest this is a toss-up election,” he writes, asking “What if Harris wins next month?” The answer to that question might be clear when it comes to the Post‘s presumptive Bezos-focused business decision, as the Amazon founder has tussled with Trump many times in the years past. What’s less clear is how the results of the election will impact the Soon-Shiong family, which seems to be struggling to issue any sort of coherent political message.