The Los Angeles Times saw more people quit after the newspaper’s owner blocked the paper’s editorial board from endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris.
Robert Green, an editorial writer for the paper, resigned after Patrick Soon-Shiong, the paper’s billionaire owner, blocked the endorsement, CNN reported.
“I recognize that it is the owner’s decision to make,” Green wrote in his resignation letter. “But it hurt particularly because one of the candidates, Donald Trump, has demonstrated such hostility to principles that are central to journalism-respect for the truth and reverence for democracy.”
Karin Klein, another member of the editorial post, also resigned, saying on Facebook, “What steams me is that a decision against an editorial at this point is actually a decision to do an editorial – a wordless one, a make-believe-invisible one that unfairly implies that she has grievous faults that somehow put her on a level with Donald Trump.”
Mariel Garza, the leader of the paper’s editorial board resigned on Wednesday over the non-endorsement.
Soon-Shiong said he offered the editorial board the chance to detail the policy differences between Harris and Trump, CNN reported. The paper had endorsed a candidate in every election since 2008, when it backed Barack Obama.
“My fear is that if we chose either [candidate] that it would just add to the division,” Soon-Shiong said in an interview. “I want us desperately to air all the voices on the opinion side, on the op-ed side. “I don’t know how [readers] look upon me or our family as ‘ultra progressive’ or not, but I’m an independent.”
In her resignation letter, Garza said the newspaper looked “craven, hypocritical” and maybe “sexist and racist” by refusing to endorse Harris.
“How could we spend eight years railing against Trump and the danger his leadership poses to the country and then fail to endorse the perfectly decent Democrat challenger—who we previously endorsed for the US Senate?” Garza wrote in her letter, published by the Columbia Journalism Review. “The non-endorsement undermines the integrity of the editorial board and every single endorsement we make, down to school board races.”