LA Times owner on spiking Harris endorsement: ‘I knew I’d get pushback’

The billionaire owner of The Los Angeles Times in a new interview defended a decision not to endorse a presidential candidate in last year’s presidential election.

“I knew I’d get pushback. If you want to lead, you have to lead, so we took that position,” Patrick Soon-Shiong told Fox News Digital. 

“Competence matters.  And, you know, did we feel as a group that she was a competent leader?” he added, referring to former Vice President Kamala Harris.

Soon-Shiong, who is worth an estimated $6 billion according to Forbes, sparked widespread backlash inside The Los Angeles Times newsroom and criticism from some media observers who suggested he is trying to curry favor with President Trump, as other leading business and media executives have seemingly done in recent months.

But for Soon-Shiong, the decision not to run an editorial endorsing either candidate was one he said was made to maintain the news outlet’s objectivity.

“I worried [the endorsement] would actually express that she was maybe the most consequential vice president in the history of the United States, which may be the opinion of some people and may be laughed at by other people,” he told Fox Digital. 

The LA Times was one of several top news outlets to forgo an editorial endorsement in 2024.

Billionaire Jeff Bezos sparked similar outrage last November when The Washington Post decided against running an editorial backing Harris, which the opinion staff at the newspaper drafted and was preparing to publish before Bezos stepped in.