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‘A civic disappointment’: Fallout continues after Los Angeles Times chooses not to endorse

Updated Oct 25, 2024, 4:34am EDT
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The Scoop

Two more members of the Los Angeles Times editorial board resigned on Thursday over the paper’s decision not to endorse a candidate in the 2024 presidential election, which the page’s former editor described in an interview as a “civic disappointment.”

Robert Greene and Karin Klein each confirmed to Semafor that they are leaving the paper, following the resignation of Mariel Garza, the leader of the paper’s editorial board.

The meltdown at the Los Angeles publication’s opinion section comes after its owner, Patrick Soon Shiong, vetoed a Kamala Harris endorsement and instead suggested the editorial board lay out policy differences between the candidates. It also touched a sore spot at the paper, which ended its endorsements after backing Richard Nixon amid the Watergate scandal, and only resumed them in 2008, endorsing Democrats in the last four presidential elections.

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The editor who revived the tradition, Jim Newton, said in an interview that the non-endorseemnt “is a civic let down and a disappointment. Bad for the paper, bad for Los Angeles, bad for the campaign.”

He continued: “Not only does it sometimes affect races, affect politics, influence people, but it also allows people to understand how the editorial board reasons and what values it seeks to uphold. So I think that they’re good for politics, but they’re also good for the paper and good for its relationship with readers, even with readers who disagree with the endorsement. I think that at its best, a thoughtful endorsement says to readers, ‘here’s what we care about.’”

Newton said the lack of explanation to readers about the non-endorsement undermines the paper’s credibility, and contributed to the proliferation of theories and assumptions. He said it had undercut some of his own trust in the paper he worked at for over two decades.

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“It makes you wonder, and when people wonder, they assume the worst,” he said.

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Know More

The paper’s editorial union said in a statement on Wednesday that it was deeply concerned by the paper’s decision not to offer an explanation for a lack of an endorsement. Staff have also expressed frustration and concern with the fact that the paper hasn’t written about the news. Like many news organizations, the Times has a long history of covering its own scandals. But over two days after it became public that the paper would not endorse, the paper’s media section still had not covered the situation despite an internal debate over whether to do so.

Readers also appeared miffed by the decision not to publish. Internal figures shared with Semafor on Wednesday showed that subscriber churn was nearly twice as high on Tuesday when 1300 readers canceled their subscriptions, doubling cancellations from the previous day. Of the cancellations that day, 398 readers cited “editorial content” as the primary reason for halting their subscription.

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Room for Disagreement

In an interview on Spectrum in LA on Thursday, the billionaire owner said that the Times’ editorial page needs to diversify the viewpoints represented in order to better reflect the ideological diversity of the country. He also said he was caught off guard by the way his position has been framed by Garza and the news media.

“I shared with our editors that maybe this year we have a page or two pages of all the pros and all the cons and then the readers decide,” he said. “I think my fear is if we chose either, it would just add to the division. And look what’s happened to the Twitter feed, it’s gone a little crazy, when we just said ‘You decide.’”

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