The publisher of the Los Angeles Times resigns after the newspaper owner blocked plans to endorse Harris

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CNN
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The editorial director of the Los Angeles Times said Wednesday she resigned from her position in protest after the newspaper's owner blocked a decision to support Kamala Harris in the presidential election.

“I’m resigning because I want to make it clear that I don’t agree with us remaining silent,” Mariel Garza said in an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review. “In dangerous times, honest people must stand up. So I get up.”

Garza's resignation came after Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire doctor who bought the publication for $500 million in 2018, told the Times editorial board not to run for president, she said. The newspaper has endorsed a candidate in every presidential election since it endorsed Barack Obama in 2008.

As California's largest-circulation newspaper and one of the largest in the country, the Times' decision not to endorse a presidential candidate raised questions about possible political interference. Garza told CJR that the editorial board intended to support Harris, who previously served as a U.S. senator from California and the state's attorney general.

“I didn’t think we would change our readers’ minds — our readers are largely Harris supporters,” Garza told CJR. “We are a very liberal newspaper. I didn’t think we would change the outcome of the election in California.”

A spokesperson for the Los Angeles Times did not respond to a CNN request for comment, but in a social media post, Soon-Shiong wrote: “The editorial board was given the opportunity to provide a factual analysis of each candidate's POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE policies during the election.” “Their terms in the White House and how those policies affected the nation.”

“With this clear and impartial information, our readers could decide who is worthy of being president for the next four years,” he wrote. “Instead of taking this route as suggested, the editorial team chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision.”

Garza's resignation comes a month after the Times released its voting recommendations for the November election, which notably did not include the presidential election.

“This is a time to speak your conscience no matter what,” Garza told CJR. “And confirmation was the logical next step after a series of editorials we wrote about how dangerous Trump is to democracy, about his inability to be president, about his threats to put his enemies in prison.”

“It is confusing and potentially suspicious to readers that we did not support them this time,” Garza told CJR.

The Times' decision not to agree was first reported by Semafor on Tuesday. The Trump campaign quickly seized on the news, calling it a “humiliating blow” to Harris, suggesting that “even her fellow Californians know she's not ready for the job.”

In a resignation letter to Times executive editor Terry Tang published by CJR, Garza wrote that she was struggling with her “feelings about the impact of our silence.”

“I told myself that the president’s support doesn’t really matter; that California would never vote for Trump,” she wrote. “But reality hit me like cold water on Tuesday when news of the decision not to support her broke without even a comment from LAT management, and Donald Trump turned it into an anti-Harris accusation.”

“In these dangerous times, silence is not just indifference, it is complicity,” Garza added. “I am stepping down by resigning from the editorial team. Please accept this as my formal resignation, effective immediately.”