The owner of the Los Angeles Times has forbidden the paper’s editorial board from backing Kamala Harris in this year’s US presidential election, bucking two decades of Democratic endorsements, Semafor has reported.
The editorial board was preparing to endorse Harris for the presidency, until Executive Editor Terry Tang intervened earlier this month and ordered no endorsement be published, Semafor reported on Tuesday, citing two anonymous sources.
According to the sources, the order came directly from the paper’s owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong.
A South African-born medical doctor and billionaire entrepreneur, Soon-Shiong bought the ailing LA Times in 2018. While he managed to reverse decades of losses and headcount reductions, the newspaper’s advertising revenue plummeted during the Covid-19 pandemic, and more than 100 employees were sacked earlier this year.
Soon-Shiong’s decision to block the endorsement of Harris will be seen as a major blow to the vice president, as the LA Times is the most prominent newspaper in her home state of California.
The newspaper endorsed Republican candidates in every election from the 1880s until 1972, when it backed Richard Nixon against South Dakota Senator George McGovern. The decision, which came months after the Watergate scandal emerged, angered some of the newspaper’s reporters, and the LA Times avoided endorsing a US presidential candidate again until it sided with Barack Obama in 2008. It has endorsed Democrats in every subsequent election.
The editorial board noted last week that “this may be the most consequential election in a generation.” However, it made no further mention of the presidential race, instead endorsing more than two dozen mostly Democratic candidates for positions ranging from school boards to the US Senate.