For years, the Los Angeles Times has been a hard-left newspapers – one of the many in major cities around the country.
But is that about to change?
The first hint was last month, when the paper’s owner, no doubt infuriating the paper’s staff, declined to endorse Democrat and former Los Angeles District Attorney Kamala Harris for President – thus resulting in its editorial editor, Mariel Garza, to summarily resign.
And now we have this, via Ben Kew’s article at thegatewaypundit.com:
The owner of the Los Angeles Times has fired his entire editorial board as he seeks to return the paper to its journalistic roots.
Posting on the X platform, the paper’s owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, said he was proud to have posted a letter opposing attacks on white women for voting for Donald Trump and that the paper would be undergoing some major changes moving forward.
Soon-Shiong, a billionaire who invented the cancer drug Abraxane, had previously responded to Trump’s victory by stating that the “American people have spoken” and pledging to provide “factual and balanced coverage” to help heal America’s political divide.
If this is true, if this bears out, it would mean a great deal more than a significant change in the editorial page. It would mean a significant change in the news coverage as well….which, I would think, will cause more resignations from the Times staff.
It seems logical this would also cause a good many subscription cancellations, from people who like their news hard-left.
But, then again, those cancellations might, in part or in total, be offset by an increase in readership among people who could not abide the hard-left lean of the paper until now.
Let’s remember that Los Angeles voters just dispatched the city’s “defund the police/look the other way at crime” DA, George Gascón. And the state also passed – by a more than 2 to 1 vote – Proposition 36, which finally toughened up penalties for theft and drug crimes which, for years, had generated little or no law enforcement.
Maybe, therefore, this is not a case of Mr. Soon-Shiong simply changing the direction of his newspaper. Maybe it is Mr. Soon-Shiong reacting to a change in the attitudes/values of its readership.
We’ll see how it all shakes out soon enough.
