Harry Litman, the newest opinion columnist to resign from the Los Angeles Instances, slammed the paper’s proprietor, Patrick Quickly-Shiong, for allegedly “currying favor” with President-elect Donald Trump in a “shameful capitulation.”
The longtime senior authorized columnist, who wrote for the LA Instances for greater than 15 years, introduced his resignation Thursday in his Substack e-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 different editorial board members who earlier resigned after Quickly-Shiong blocked the greater than 140-year-old newspaper from publishing a drafted endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris within the 2024 presidential election and vowed to carry extra conservative voices to the editorial board.
About 2,000 outraged readers canceled their subscriptions after the billionaire proprietor, who purchased the LA Instances 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, throughout an look on MSNBC’s “Deadline: White House,” Litman argued that newspapers have “an important role to play” now that Trump has gained a second time period 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 mentioned.
He torched Quickly-Shiong, together with Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Submit and equally blocked the paper’s endorsement of Harris, saying they “cowered” in a “shameful capitulation” to Trump.
Greater than 250,000 readers canceled their Washington Submit subscriptions after Bezos blocked the endorsement.
In November, Quickly-Shiong vowed to even out the Instances’ 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 mentioned.
Final week, he introduced conservative commentator and Trump supporter Scott Jennings could be becoming a member of the paper’s editorial board — one other resolution that sparked controversy.
Throughout a podcast look with Jennings on Wednesday, Quickly-Shiong revealed he has been working “behind the scenes” to create a “bias meter” for each article that comes out of the newspaper.
He mentioned he hopes the brand new device, which shall be backed by synthetic intelligence, shall be launched by January.
