That doesn't make any sense, Patrick

An embarrassing and avoidable episode for the owner of the Los Angeles Times.

Like with many news outlets of all stripes, it’s been a hard couple of years for the Los Angeles Times. As the chair of the newsroom union’s bargaining committee, I spent a decent chunk of my remaining time in the newsroom negotiating over the proposed layoffs of about 150 of my coworkers. The economic numbers precipitating the layoffs were brutal. A big part of the problem is sectoral — see: Google, The unlawful business model of — but the other part of the problem, of course, was managerial. Two rounds of massive layoffs without a strategic plan attached to them.

One of my last bargaining sessions at The Times, over the second one of those layoffs, was off the record. I won’t divulge any secrets, but I don’t think it’s a breach of confidence to disclose here that I did not come away from that session concluding that billionaire Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong was someone I should be working for anymore. Shortly later, I volunteered for a buyout to save a coworker’s job. If I’m being truthful, I left for a lot reasons, and the biggest of them wasn’t billionaire stinginess: A lot of people don’t understand exactly how much money he has poured into journalism in Los Angeles, which allowed The Times to pile up quite a few Pulitzers and do a lot of aggressive journalism in recent years, criticism of the paper notwithstanding. The investment, a rarity in local news these days, plus the relative journalistic freedom a lot of us got in comparison, is why so many journalists and executives have held and still hold their tongues about the things Patrick does that aren’t so great.

Except my old colleague Mariel Garza, head of the Times Editorial Board, who laudably resigned yesterday after Patrick decided, without public explanation, that the board shouldn’t issue an endorsement of the Democrat, Vice President Kamala Harris, as planned, in this year’s U.S. presidential election. Like her colleagues on the editorial board, I know Mariel as a conscientious and thoughtful journalist, and her explanation to my old boss Sewell Chan of the Columbia Journalism Review made sense to me:

“I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not okay with us being silent,” Garza told me in a phone conversation. “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up.” …

The board had intended to endorse Harris, Garza told me, and she had drafted the outline of a proposed editorial. She had hoped to get feedback on the outline and was taken aback upon being told that the newspaper would not take a position.

“I didn’t think we were going to change our readers’ minds—our readers, for the most part, are Harris supporters,” Garza told me. “We’re a very liberal paper. I didn’t think we were going to change the outcome of the election in California.

“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.”

“It was a logical next step,” Garza told me. “And it’s perplexing to readers, and possibly suspicious, that we didn’t endorse her this time.”

I have never worked on an editorial board and don’t have sophisticated opinions about what role they should serve in the journalism of tomorrow. What’s historically true is that the owners and publishers of newspapers tend to get free reign to meddle in editorials in exchange for staying out of the news coverage. That’s the bargain, and it’s what allows me to devour the stellar business reporting in the Wall Street Journal while reading the opinion pages for laughs.

One of those editorial prerogatives of the publisher is to not issue an endorsement at all. The no-endorsement editorial has an honored tradition in opinion journalism. Sometimes democracy really doesn’t serve you up with truly viable options. Like it or not, the historically predominant democratic activity of eligible voters in the U.S. is abstention. All that said: If there were ever an election for a journalistic opinion-making organ to put itself on the record about where it stands, this year’s presidential election is one of them.

In a tweet yesterday, after Mariel’s noisy resigation and subscriber protests (including many cancellations) turned up the heat, Patrick explained:

So many comments about the @latimes Editorial Board not providing a Presidential endorsement this year. Let me clarify how this decision came about.

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. In addition, the Board was asked to provide their understanding of the policies and plans enunciated by the candidates during this campaign and its potential effect on the nation in the next four years. In this way, with this clear and non-partisan information side-by-side, our readers could decide who would be worthy of being President for the next four years.

Instead of adopting this path as suggested, the Editorial Board chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision. Please #vote.

This is embarrassing, not least because a billionaire is throwing his own employees under the bus because of his own decision not to make an endorsement (like when he blocked the editorial board from endorsing Elizabeth Warren in the 2020 Democratic primary). What Patrick is describing is a voter guide. Voters guides are often prepared in the news department, not by the editorial pages. And the L.A. Times has already produced one of those here, including on Harris and Trump’s policies.

The news department describes the world as it is; the opinion pages describe what ought to be. An editorial endorsement will usually contain a description of the candidates’ relative strengths and weaknesses, and they are incredibly important in local races where voters don’t get nearly as much exposure to the candidates. And then the endorsement will suggest what you should do. It’s not a commandment. But it is an argument.

I don’t know what just happened here — and the longer I spend away from the paper, the less my opinion on these things matters — but I do come away with the impression that the owner of California’s preeminent journalistic institution is either acting incompetently or not being straightforward about his motives, and the comprehending public, and his journalists, have suffered for it.