Mariel Garza, the editorials editor of the Los Angeles Times, resigned on Wednesday after the publication’s owner blocked an endorsement for Vice President Kamala Harris.
Though the editorial board had planned to endorse Kamala Harris, owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, who bought the Los Angeles Times for $500 million in 2018, blocked the endorsement from happening. As Semafor reported:
According to two people familiar with the situation, executive editor Terry Tang told editorial board staff earlier this month that the paper would not be endorsing a candidate in the presidential election this cycle, a decision that came from the paper’s owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, a doctor who made his fortune in the healthcare industry.
The paper did not explain its decision, though it noted at the bottom of its online endorsement page that “the editorial board endorses selectively, choosing the most consequential races in which to make recommendations.”
An LA Times spokesperson told Semafor, “We do not comment on internal discussions or decisions about editorials or endorsements.”
Mariel Garza later told Columbia Journalism Review that she would be resigning in protest of the paper remaining silent.
“I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not okay with us being silent,” Garza said. “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up.”
“I didn’t think we were going to change our readers’ minds—our readers, for the most part, are Harris supporters,” Garza continued. “We’re a very liberal paper. I didn’t think we were going to change the outcome of the election in California.”
Garza felt the paper needed to speak its conscience.
“But two things concern me: This is a point in time where you speak your conscience no matter what. 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. We have made the case in editorial after editorial that he shouldn’t be reelected,” said Garza.
After the Los Angeles Times refused to endorse Kamala Harris, former President Donald Trump celebrated the decision as a political win.
“In Kamala’s own home state, the Los Angeles Times—the state’s largest newspaper—has declined to endorse the Harris-Walz ticket, despite endorsing the Democrat nominees in every election for decades,” the Trump campaign said. “Even her fellow Californians know she’s not up for the job. The Times previously endorsed Kamala in her 2010 and 2014 races for California attorney general, as well as her 2016 race for US Senate—but not this time.”
