Robert Greene and Karin Klein of the Los Angeles Times joined editorial page editor Mariel Garza on Thursday in departing the paper following its decision not to endorse a presidential candidate in the 2024 race.
A Semafor report published Tuesday claimed that Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong blocked the paper’s editorial board from endorsing a candidate midway through the board’s preparation to endorse.
“I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not okay with us being silent,” Garza said in an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review on Wednesday. “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up.” In addition to being the editorials editor, Garza was a member of the paper’s editorial board.
Greene was an editorial writer for the Times, covering water, drought, criminal justice reform, policing, mental health and Los Angeles County government. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing in 2021 for his work covering the Los Angeles criminal justice system. Klein is a former Times board member who wrote editorials about education, environment, food and science.
Hugo Martin, a member of the unit council for the LA Times guild, said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter that “the latest resignations of talented journalists is a huge loss for the newsroom and the editorial board in particular” and that “we stand by our colleagues who have been wrongly and unfairly blamed for this decision not to endorse.”
Martin added, “I can also say that most of the newsroom members are outraged by this. The guild was able to pull a zoom meeting to discuss it today and drew about 100 members with only a few minutes notice.”
Garza’s interview with CJR alleged that the paper’s editorial board had been ready to endorse Democratic candidate Kamala Harris for president, and that she had already begun writing an outline of an editorial announcing the decision. In her interview, Garza acknowledged that she didn’t believe the endorsement would sway Times readers’ voting decisions, given that the Times is a “very liberal paper,” but said the endorsement was important because “this is a point in time where you speak your conscience no matter what.”
In a message posted to X (formerly Twitter) on Wednesday afternoon, Times owner Soon-Shiong said that he had offered the editorial board the chance to write “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.” He had also asked the editorial board to present their vision for how policies outlined during the candidates’ campaigns might play out in the next four years if they were elected. “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,” he wrote.
“Instead of adopting this path as suggested, the Editorial Board chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision. Please #vote,” Soon-Shiong added.
THR has reached out to the Times for comment.
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