Harry Litman, the latest opinion columnist to resign from the Los Angeles Times, blasted the paper’s owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, for allegedly “doing favors” with President-elect Donald Trump in a “shameful capitulation.”
The longtime legal columnist, who wrote for the LA Times for more than 15 years, announced his resignation Thursday in his Substack newsletter.
“I don’t want to continue working for a newspaper that is placating Trump and facilitating his attack on Democratic rule for some strange reason,” Litman wrote. “My resignation is an extraordinary protest and reaction against the behavior of the owner of the newspaper, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong.”
Litman follows three other editorial board members who previously resigned after Soon-Shiong blocked the more than 140-year-old newspaper from publishing a drafted endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election and vowed to bring more conservative voices on the editorial board. .
About 2,000 outraged readers canceled their subscriptions after the billionaire owner, who bought the LA Times in 2018 for $500 million, pulled the plug.
“He wanted to hedge his bets in the event Trump won — not even to hedge the newspaper’s assets, but rather his multibillion-dollar holdings in other areas,” Litman wrote. “Soon-Shiong threw the letter to the wolves. That was cowardly.”
Later, during an appearance on MSNBC’s “Deadline: The White House,” Litman argued that newspapers have “an important role to play” now that Trump has won a second term as president.
“Trump has taken over the political arena, maybe the Supreme Court, and now he’s going after the FBI, potentially the military, and, really, they’re one of the few institutions that can stand up and push back,” Litman said. . .
He blasted Soon-Shiong, along with Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post and similarly blocked the paper’s endorsement of Harris, saying they “coddled” into a “shameful capitulation” to Trump.
More than 250,000 readers canceled their Washington Post subscriptions after Bezos blocked approval.
In November, Soon-Shiong vowed to flatten the Times’ left-leaning political slant.
“If we were to be honest with ourselves, our current panel of pundits veered too far to the left, which is fine, but I think in order to have balance, you also have to have someone who would cut right, and more importantly, someone who would wait. in the middle,” he said.
Last week, he announced that conservative commentator and Trump supporter Scott Jennings would join the paper’s editorial board — another decision that sparked controversy.
During a podcast appearance with Jennings on Wednesday, Soon-Shiong revealed that he has been working “behind the scenes” to create a “bias meter” for every article that comes out of the paper.
He said he hopes the new tool, which will be supported by artificial intelligence, will be on the market by January.
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