|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
A billionaire heiress whose father owns the Los Angeles Times claimed that the newspaper withheld an endorsement of Kamala Harris for president due to her support for Israel in its ongoing war against the Hamas terror group.
Self-described progressive political activist Nika Soon-Shiong, who is the daughter of LA Times owner and biotech billionaire Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, told the New York Times that she had been influential in a decision to block the newspaper’s editorial board from publishing an Op-Ed officially endorsing Harris.
“Our family made the joint decision not to endorse a Presidential candidate. This was the first and only time I have been involved in the process,” Ms. Soon-Shiong, who has long been accused of improper meddling at the newspaper, told the New York Times in a statement.
“As a citizen of a country openly financing genocide, and as a family that experienced South African Apartheid, the endorsement was an opportunity to repudiate justifications for the widespread targeting of journalists and ongoing war on children.”
Patrick Soon-Shiong downplayed his daughter’s role in the newspaper’s decision not to endorse a candidate.
“Nika speaks in her own personal capacity regarding her opinion, as every community member has the right to do,” he told the Times via a spokeswoman. “She does not have any role at the LA Times, nor does she participate in any decision or discussion with the editorial board, as has been made clear many times.”
The newspaper’s owner said that the decision not to endorse Harris had come from the editorial board. That claim was virulently refuted by editors, who said that Soon-Shiong had made the decision not to allow the paper to formally endorse Harris.
Numerous longtime editors at the paper resigned over the move not to back Harris, which they said was the culmination of ongoing inappropriate interference by Soon-Shiong and his daughter in the editorial process.
“If that was the reason that Dr. Soon-Shiong blocked an endorsement of Kamala Harris, it was not communicated to me or the editorial writers,” Mariel Garza, who resigned last week, said in a statement.
“If the family’s goal was to ‘repudiate justifications for the widespread targeting of journalists and ongoing war on children,’ remaining silent did not accomplish that.”
An editor speaking anonymously to the Times that that many employees at the newspaper had suspicions that Nika Soon-Shiong was actually speaking on behalf of her father.
“You never know how much Nika is speaking for herself and how much Nika is speaking for her whole family,” the editor said.
Some have suggested that Soon-Shiong did not want to endorse Harris in order to stay in Donald Trump’s good graces, and that the family is using Gaza as a “smokescreen” to avoid liberal ire.
