Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shione detailed his plans to move his publication toward sharing “everyone’s voice” during an appearance on Fox News Thursday night.
The owner, a billionaire biotech entrepreneur, said on Fox News @ Night that the Times, which he acquired in 2018, recently doesn’t differentiate between what stories are news and what stories are opinion. It was announced in “We have confused news with opinion,” Soon-Shiong said during the appearance. “So the first thing I want to do is make sure we clearly say, ‘This is news.’ And if it’s news, it should just be a fact. And if it’s an opinion. If anything, it’s probably an opinion on the news, which I now call a “voice.” ”
He also said, “I want voices from all sides to be heard.”
In this segment, senior national correspondent William La Jeunesse argued that “newspapers have moved considerably to the left in recent years, not just in the editorial department but on the news page as well.” When Fox News @ Night anchor Trace Gallagher asked how Mr. Soon-Siong would regain the trust of his conservative readers, Mr. Soon-Sion replied that he would “preserve democracy” and “all the ”It is the paper’s responsibility to represent the views of its readers, he said. “Because if you only have one side, it’s just an echo chamber,” he says. “So it’s going to be risky and it’s going to be difficult. We’re going to take a lot of heat because it already is.”
The appearance on Fox News @ Night follows an internal controversy over the paper’s last-minute decision to withhold support for the president during the 2024 election cycle, after Soon-Shiong announced a new editorial board on Nov. 10. This was done after tweeting that it would be installed. In response to this order, three editorial board members resigned, including Soon-Shiong, who told The Hollywood Reporter that the editorial board had been preparing to support Democratic candidate Kamala Harris even before the decision was made. including Karin Klein, who wrote, “It cut out the voices of people.”
“If Mr. Soon-Shiong had decided early last spring that he would no longer support the presidential election, it would have been fair, neutral, and legitimate,” Klein wrote. “However, making a decision at the eleventh hour when the candidates have been decided means that the polls are close and almost anything can change the race, so Soon-Shiong’s anti-editorial stance is In fact, it is a de facto decision to call the election. The editorial is a wordless, invisible whitewash that falsely alludes to Harris’s grave flaws and equates her with Donald Trump.”
Asked in a Fox News interview how he would form the new editorial board, Soon-Shiong said, “We’re looking for someone like Scott Jennings.” Scott Jennings is a CNN commentator who offers a conservative perspective. He added: “We need input from both sides, and my goal is not to convert the entire editorial board to that point of view.”
