The Scoop
The leader of the Los Angeles Times editorial board is resigning after the paper declined to endorse a candidate in this year’s presidential race.
On Tuesday, Semafor reported that in recent weeks, executive editor Terry Tang told the Los Angeles Times editorial board that the newspaper’s billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong did not want the board to endorse a candidate for president this election. The move was a break from recent tradition; the paper had endorsed a Democrat for president in every election since 2008.
In a brief email to Semafor on Wednesday, Mariel Garza, the paper’s editorials editor, confirmed that she was leaving the paper. Garza had served as deputy editorial page editor since 2021, but was elevated by Tang in April to lead the editorial board.
In an interview with former editorial board lead Sewell Chan for the Columbia Journalism Review, Garza said she was “resigning because 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.”
A spokesperson for the Los Angeles Times did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“A brave decision by a highly ethical editor and terrific boss,” Karin Klein, a former member of the paper’s editorial board, wrote in a Facebook group populated by current and former Times staffers, according to the San Francisco Standard.
In an email to unionized staff on Wednesday, the LA Times union said it had sent a letter to Tang and Soon-Shiong seeking an explanation for the lack of endorsement, but had not received one. The union said it was “concerned about our owner’s decision to block an endorsement in the presidential race.”
“We believe the company owes the staff an explanation about why this decision was made after years of endorsements in general elections,” the union wrote in the note.
In a social media post published after this story on Wednesday, Soon-Shiong did not dispute that he did not seek to endorse a candidate in the election. But he clarified that that he had given the paper’s editorial board 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.”
“Instead of adopting this path as suggested, the Editorial Board chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision,” he wrote. “Please #vote.”
Soon-Shiong’s decision seems to have had at least some immediate impact on the paper’s business. According to internal figures shared with Semafor, subscriber churn was nearly twice as high on Tuesday as it was the previous day. On Tuesday, 398 readers canceled their subscription citing “editorial content” as the primary reason.