Well, Patrick Soon-Shiong lied

The owner of the Los Angeles Times now says the Biden's administration's handling of Gaza did play a factor in his non-endorsement decision.

Good morning, everyone. I thought we’d finally put Endorsementgate 2024 behind us, having exhausted all our takes on the decisions of owners Patrick Soon-Shiong of the Los Angeles Times and Jeff Bezos of the Washington Post to block their editorial boards’ planned endorsements of Kamala Harris.

Well, I was wrong. I have one more to add. From Liam Reilly and Hadas Gold at CNN this morning:

In an interview with CNN on Tuesday, Soon-Shiong stated publicly for the first time that Harris’ support for Israel’s war in Gaza played a role in his decision to block the endorsement and said he plans to “balance” the paper’s opinion page with more conservative and centrist voices.

…

After news of the Times’ non-endorsement broke last month, Soon-Shiong’s 31-year-old daughter, Nika, told The New York Times that “our family made the joint decision” over Harris’ stance on the war in Gaza. Soon-Shiong later denied in a statement that his daughter had played role in the decision. In an interview with the Times, he also reportedly said “the decision was not tied to the war in Gaza and his daughter’s views were ‘her opinion.’”

But, in the interview with CNN, Soon-Shiong confirmed that the war in Gaza played a role in his decision to block the endorsement.

“Somebody had asked me, ‘was that the reason?’ I said, ‘well, that wasn’t the only reason.’ Clearly, that was one of the reasons, and there are many other reasons, but I think that should be exposed really transparently about all the reasons,” he said.

I wish I could say this more plainly, but really, as an L.A. Times alum, I can only fit my feelings on this into an angry run-on sentence:

If you own large newspaper and have strong opinions about Israel’s war in Gaza, and those opinions about Gaza directly affect how you influence the newspaper’s engagement with politics and the public during an election, then you should probably print your opinion about Gaza in the newspaper you own instead of publicly dumping on your employees and claiming you’d asked them to do some other nonsense that you hadn’t actually asked them to do, and then lying to reporters about your opinions on Gaza not having influenced your political decisionmaking while publicly scolding your daughter for telling the New York Times hey my dad did this because of Gaza, which you followed by writing an internal email to your chief operating officer and executive editor to more or less elaborate at length that hey I did this because of Gaza (feelings which themselves have already gotten watered down in the only-sort-of-coming-clean interview with CNN).

Stop blaming other people and say what you really mean with your goddamned chest! Patrick Soon-Shiong’s L.A. Times reprimanded many of my coworkers who publicly signed their names to a Gaza letter late last year largely expressing the same concerns that the owner apparently has. That whole episode was controversial across the journalism industry for about five different reasons, and you can still break open some long arguments by bringing it up. But one thing that seems clear now is that my coworkers on all sides of that issue had, and still have, a courage of conscience and a will toward honesty that their powerful owner doesn’t share.