(Bloomberg) -- Mariel Garza, the top editorial page editor at the Los Angeles Times, quit after the newspaper’s owner blocked a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris for president.
The editorial board had planned to endorse Harris but was stopped by Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire biotech magnate who bought the newspaper in 2018, Garza said an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review.
“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.”
The Times came out with a list of endorsements in other races and ballot measures this month but didn’t include one for president.
“We had written so many ‘Trump is unfit’ editorials that it was as if we had endorsed her,” Garza wrote in her resignation letter. “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.”
Garza couldn’t be reached for comment. Earlier in the day, a spokesperson for the Times said the newspaper wouldn’t comment on internal discussions or decisions about editorials or endorsements.
In a post on X, Soon-Shiong said 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.”
That would allow readers to decide “who would be worthy of being president for the next four years,” he said. “Instead of adopting this path as suggested, the editorial board chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision.”
The website Semafor first reported on Tuesday that the Times wouldn’t endorse for president for the first time since it backed Barack Obama in 2008. The article said the decision was made by Soon-Shiong.
(Updates with comment from editor’s resignation letter in fifth paragraph.)
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