Harry Litman, the latest opinion columnist to resign from the Los Angeles Times, slammed the paper’s owner Patrick Soon-Shiong for allegedly “currying favor” with President-elect Donald Trump in a “shameful capitulation.”
The longtime senior legal columnist, who wrote for the LA Times for more than 15 years, announced his resignation on Thursday in his Substack newsletter.
“I don’t want to continue to work for a paper that is appeasing Trump and facilitating his assault on democratic rule for craven reasons,” Litman wrote. “My resignation is a protest and visceral reaction against the conduct of the paper’s owner, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong.”
Litman follows three other editorial board members who earlier resigned after Soon-Shiong blocked the more-than-140-year-old newspaper from publishing a drafted endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election and vowed to bring more conservative voices to the editorial board.
About 2,000 outraged readers canceled their subscriptions after the billionaire owner, who bought the LA Times in 2018 for $500 million, axed the endorsement.
“He wanted to hedge his bets in case Trump won – not even to protect the paper’s fortunes but rather his multi-billion-dollar holdings in other fields,” Litman wrote. “Soon-Shiong threw the paper to the wolves. That was cowardly.”
Later, during an appearance on MSNBC’s “Deadline: White House,” Litman argued newspapers have “an important role to play” now that Trump has won a second term as president.
“Trump has captured the political arena, maybe the Supreme Court, and he’s going after now the FBI, potentially the military, and, really, they’re one of the few institutions to be able to stand up and push back,” Litman said.
He torched Soon-Shiong, along with Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post and similarly blocked the paper’s endorsement of Harris, saying they “cowered” in a “shameful capitulation” to Trump.
More than 250,000 readers canceled their Washington Post subscriptions after Bezos blocked the endorsement.
In November, Soon-Shiong vowed to even out the Times’ left-leaning political slant.
“If we were honest with ourselves, our current board of opinion writers veered very left, which is fine, but I think in order to have balance, you also need to have somebody who would trend right, and more importantly, somebody that would trend in the middle,” he said.
Last week, he announced conservative commentator and Trump supporter Scott Jennings would be joining the paper’s editorial board — another decision that sparked controversy.
During a podcast appearance with Jennings on Wednesday, Soon-Shiong revealed he has been working “behind the scenes” to create a “bias meter” for every article that comes out of the newspaper.
He said he hopes the new tool, which will be backed by artificial intelligence, will be released by January.
