New York — The leader of the Los Angeles Times’ editorial board said Wednesday she has resigned from her post in protest after the newspaper’s owner blocked a decision to endorse Kamala Harris in the presidential election.
“I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not okay with us being silent,” Mariel Garza told the Columbia Journalism Review in an interview. “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up.”
Garza’s resignation comes after Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire doctor who purchased the publication in 2018 for $500 million, told the Times’ editorial board not to endorse in the presidential race, she said. The newspaper has endorsed a candidate in every presidential election since it backed Barack Obama in 2008.
As California’s most widely-circulated newspaper, as well as one of the country’s largest, the Times’ decision not to endorse a presidential candidate raised questions about potential political interference. Garza told CJR the editorial board had intended to endorse Harris, who previously served as a US Senator from California and the state’s attorney general.
“I didn’t think we were going to change our readers’ minds—our readers, for the most part, are Harris supporters,” Garza told CJR. “We’re a very liberal paper. I didn’t think we were going to change the outcome of the election in California.”
A Los Angeles Times spokesperson did not respond to a CNN request for comment, but in a social media post Soon-Shiong wrote, “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.”
“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,” he wrote. “Instead of adopting this path as suggested, the Editorial Board chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision.”
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Garza’s resignation comes a month after the Times published its electoral endorsements for the November election, which notably did not include the presidential race.
“This is a point in time where you speak your conscience no matter what,” Garza told CJR. “And an endorsement was the logical next step after a series of editorials we’ve been writing about how dangerous Trump is to democracy, about his unfitness to be president, about his threats to jail his enemies.”
“It’s perplexing to readers, and possibly suspicious, that we didn’t endorse her this time,” Garza told CJR.
The Times’ decision not to endorse was first reported Tuesday by Semafor. The Trump campaign quickly seized on the news, calling it a “humiliating blow” for Harris, indicating that “even her fellow Californians know she’s not up for the job.”
In a resignation letter to the Times’ executive editor Terry Tang and published by CJR, Garza wrote that she struggled with her “feelings about the implications of our silence.”
“I told myself that presidential endorsements don’t really matter; that California was not ever going to vote for Trump,” she wrote. “But the reality hit me like cold water Tuesday when the news rippled out about the decision not to endorse without so much as a comment from the LAT management, and Donald Trump turned it into an anti-Harris rip.”
“In these dangerous times, staying silent isn’t just indifference, it is complicity,” Garza added. “I’m standing up by stepping down from the editorial board. Please accept this as my formal resignation, effective immediately.”
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