
In June 2020—a little over two years after the billionaire surgeon Patrick Soon-Shiong bought the Los Angeles Times—the newspaper embarked on what it called a “painful internal reckoning.”
It was similar to other painful internal reckonings at other American institutions in the immediate wake of George Floyd’s death.
Inside the newsroom there was “rancor,” grief, and outrage over the way the paper had covered the city over the decades and, as reporters saw it, fueled the same kind of violence that had taken Floyd’s life. This was spelled out in an all-staff email from executive editor Norman Pearlstine on June 5, 2020:
“At a moment when thousands of protesters are pushing America to examine how systemic racism has shaped our institutions, we would be remiss in not examining our own institution as well,” Pearlstine—whom Soon-Shiong told me he had “begged” to run his newsroom—said.
This was followed by a winding auto-critique that had, by then, become a ritual in progressive America.
“The Los Angeles Times,” Pearlstine went on, “has a long, well-documented history of fueling the racism and cruelty that accompanied our city’s becoming a metropolis.” He blamed the paper for fomenting “the hysteria” that led to the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, race riots, redlining, and police abuse of black Angelenos. “Our coverage didn’t simply ignore people of color—it actively dehumanized them.”
Over the next few months, there would be dispatches and editorials about Covid disproportionately killing people of color, and worsening race relations and structural racism in LA’s private schools and the criminal-justice system, and columns about critical race theory and reporting while black, and many, many letters about being Latino in LA, and being Asian in LA, and being white and feeling guilty. “I can now see how much systemic racism has framed my views of society and our communities, and how it did so just by reading this newspaper,” one woman wrote in. It was all capped off with an editorial headlined “An Examination of The Times’ Failures on Race, Our Apology, and a Path Forward,” and an op-ed penned by Soon-Shiong.
“As the Los Angeles Times’ first nonwhite owners in its nearly 139-year history, my wife, Michele, and I are determined to increase diversity,” he wrote.
Soon-Shiong went a long way toward fulfilling that promise when, in June 2021, he replaced Pearlstine with Kevin Merida, a black, former Washington Post managing editor.
By 2022, the anti-racist fever had cooled, but it was still the state religion inside legacy media. So it was hardly surprising when, in October of that year, the paper endorsed Congresswoman Karen Bass, who was running against developer Rick Caruso to be mayor of Los Angeles.
The endorsement only flicked at identity—Bass is a black woman; Caruso, a white man—but it stressed that Bass was “already doing the work of trying to repair the damage caused by leaked racist, us-versus-them remarks” made by Los Angeles city councilmembers—all of whom were Latino. (That “work” entailed organizing a meeting.)
Soon-Shiong, 72, said: “I can’t recall in detail how the decision came about, but one of the issues then was, ‘Okay, we would need interaction with the federal government, wherever that may be, and she came from Congress, and she understands LA, and blah blah blah.’ ”
Ultimately he said the endorsement, which he now regrets, came about because of “confirmation bias” and “echo chambers” and “false assumptions” about race and politics coursing through his newsroom.