Patrick Soon-Shiong promised on Fox News to make his Los Angeles Times Trumpier.
Soon-Shiong tweeted earlier in the week that he intended to make his paper Trumpier. Announcing his plan to create a new editorial board for his paper, he wrote, “When the President has won the vote of the majority of Americans then ALL voices must be heard. Opinions are just that. I will work towards making our paper and media fair and balanced so that all voices are heard.”
Before Soon-Shiong appeared to suck up in person, Fox correspondent William La Jeunesse went into great depth about just how liberal the paper has been.
Then anchor Trace Gallagher took his turn going after the Times. He cited a front-page headline, saying, "Trump's rally doubles down on hatred.” Gallagher sneered, “That's the news, it's not the op-ed, and I'm wondering, when you say you want this paper to be fair and balanced, do you plan to just fix the editorial section or are you planning to go over and re-do the entire paper?"
"I think the latter," Soon-Shiong replied. "We've conflated news and the opinion, so the first thing I want to do is ensure that we explicitly state ‘this is news,’ and if it's news, it should just be the facts period. And if it's an opinion, that's maybe an opinion of the news and that's what I call now ‘a voice,’ and so we want voices from all sides to be heard, and we want the news to be just the facts."
Gallagher asked, "When you tweeted, it seemed like you were going to get rid of the entire editorial board. They haven't all left. Is that the plan to re-do the entire editorial board or just fill in the people that have left?"
Soon-Shiong again stressed Fox’s old “fair and balanced” mantra. “Again, I think it's important for us to differentiate,” he began. “The editorial board is responsible for these opinions on these voices. So, right now we don't have an editorial board - if we’re really truly [honest] about ourselves - that are balanced. And so, I've gotten beaten up about ‘fair and balanced.’”
“So I'm looking for people like Scott Jennings,” Soon-Shiong continued. “Scott Jennings, who is on CNN and he's one out of six usually in the room, where we need to have all voices, the right, the left, and the moderate, the center. And I think it's important because the editors are responsible of stories that are told, stories are not told. Editors have these nuances of the word ‘hatred’ versus could the president-elect make a real impact. And we need views from both sides and my goal is now to change the entire editorial board for that perspective.”
Oh, you mean the Scott Jennings who wasted no time blaming Democrats in the aftermath of the first attempted assassination of Donald Trump? Who refused to criticize Trump’s dangerous lie about immigrants eating pets? Yes, that Scott Jennings.
But even with all this groveling to the right, Gallagher and La Jeunesse kept suggesting that the paper isn’t yet worthy of the public trust.
Gallagher asked, “How do you reach out” to readers in conservative counties and "get their trust back?"
Soon-Shiong said, "It is our responsibility to maintain democracy, to have the views of all our California readers, in fact, the views of all the national readers to be aired."
La Jeunesse piled on. "In her resignation letter, your editor said 'we've spent eight years railing against Trump.' Do you think that hurts the public trust? And do you have a problem of political bias at large" he “asked.” Oh, the irony!
"The trust of the population in the press is lower than that even of Congress today because of this,” Soon-Shiong answered. "How about having a paper that's completely having the views of all? So the fact that we wrote over the last four years, I don't know whether there was news or that was opinion, and mostly that was opinion, but conflated as if it's news."
Ellen has written about how Trump began his assault on the First Amendment before the election. Brian Stelter has written about the danger of “anticipatory obedience” to authoritarianism. Clearly, Soon-Shiong is engaging in exactly that.
You can watch Gallagher and La Jeunesse try to browbeat Soon-Shiong into even more obedience below, from the November 14, 2024 Fox News @ Night.
(Ellen contributed to this post)
The frantic move to not endorse VP Harris was clearly part of a push to beg Angry Right Wingers in the Vance White House for mercy.
At this point the LA Times is a shadow of the newspaper I grew up with in the 1970s and the 1980s. That newspaper ceased to exist over a decade ago, and the reporters who worked there are now long-retired or deceased.
We’re going into a new world of online journalism. We can only hope that enough outlets will stand up to the incoming fascism to help our democracy get through a decade of this stress test. It might be educational to look into what happened to the press in Germany in the early 1930s, as a preview of what’s coming.
