How a ‘Good’ Billionaire Broke the LA Times Editorial Board
What happens when a once-“good” billionaire buys a newspaper — then goes full MAGA? That’s the story at the Los Angeles Times, where owner and publisher Patrick Soon-Shiong, once hailed as a savior, has become a destroyer.
In 2024, he banned the LAT editorial board — known for its scathing criticism of Trump — from endorsing Kamala Harris. This triggered the collapse of the paper's the Pulitzer-winning editorial board. Mariel Garza, then editorials editor, resigned in protest, making national headlines.
In this episode of The Nerd Reich podcast, we dig into her decision, the unraveling of the Times, and what it means when billionaires control the media.
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Below is a full transcript of the episode:
Why I Quit The LA Times (Featuring Mariel Garza)
Note: Transcripts are auto-generated, lightly edited, and may contain errors.
Gil Duran Welcome to The Nerd Reich. I'm Gil Duran. It's no secret that tech billionaires are buying up the biggest platforms and media outlets in the information landscape. But what makes today's tech oligarch owners more dangerous than their predecessors is just how much they're putting their thumbs on the editorial scales and exerting control. There's no subtlety here. They have an agenda. If you work there, you're promoting it. From Jeff Bezos with The Washington Post, Elon Musk with Twitter, and in this case, Patrick Soon-Shiong with the Los Angeles Times.
In this episode, we talk to journalist Mariel Garza about what happens when a billionaire buys your newspaper and decides to make it into a right-wing mouthpiece. Mariel was the editorials editor at the Los Angeles Times until she resigned in protest last year. She and other writers walked away after the paper's billionaire owner decided to transform the LA Times' respected opinion section into a pro-Trump MAGA outlet.
Now, the once respected editorial board, the same team that won a Pulitzer in 2021, has virtually ceased to exist. Being in the middle of that shift, as it was happening, gives us a unique perspective and an important one, because that oligarch ownership is only becoming more common. Here's that important conversation with Mariel.
Thanks for joining us here on the Nerd Reich podcast. So you've had a long career, leading editorial boards, working in newspapers in California. Let's start at the beginning before we dig a little more into your story. Why did you decide to make a career out of journalism and opinion journalism in particular?
Mariel Garza My pleasure.
Well, I started my journalism career back when I was still a teenager in college. I decided I wanted to be a journalist after taking a reporting 101 class. And I thought, wow, you can get paid to ask people pertinent questions and find things out. And I was also really drawn to, you know, at that age, you're sort of drawn to things that have meaning. You know, this is, this is the, this is the late 80s. So, you know, there's still the post-Watergate glow on journalism. And I liked the idea that you'd have a mission that there was principles of speaking truth to power, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable as the old cliché goes. So I became a journalist at a pretty young age, went to San Francisco State University for the journalism program. I worked at some of the smallest papers you've probably never heard of all over California, but I was a good 10 or so years into my career when I got recruited to the opinion page and this was in at the LA Daily News. I was a City Hall reporter and I loved being a City Hall reporter in LA City Hall. It's fantastic. But I'm always game for a new challenge and when the editor asked me if I would try the editorial board and sweetened it up by saying you could write columns whenever you want, I said well why not. Also came with a raise so that helped. So I thought I would go try it.
And if I didn't like it, I'd go back and I have never left because it's the most rewarding kind of journalism I've ever done. You use your same reporting skills to advocate for things, to call people out, speak, to literally speak truth to power, you know, rather than just, you know, here, here's what happened. You spell it out for people. So that's what drew me to this, to this profession. And I've been in it through some really hard times in this industry. And I'm surprised that, you know, I survived until 2024, to be honest.
Gil Duran You were at the Bee before me and for listeners who don't know, I was previously the editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee for about two and a half years from 2018 to 2021. And you were part of a crew that was there before I was. And by the time I got to the Bee in 2018, the paper was a ship that had sunk many times and been raised up again. And there'd been around eight staff on the editorial board before, in the two years before I arrived. And I got there, yeah, I had a staff of two.
So was this real shrinkage that had taken place and it was sort of a crazy job, but people know I'm the kind of person who does crazy jobs. So that's why I think that that's why they recruited and people at the bee didn't talk much about the past, but I knew it had been rough. And I had kind of had the understanding that my career at the bee wouldn't be long. It would need to be a transitional move for me. And then I'd have to either prove myself and get somewhere else or get back out of journalism again, which I didn't want to do, but you got lucky for a while by ending up with the LA times.
And it was bought by a billionaire named Patrick Soon-Shiong. And there was a time when it really seemed like the place to be. I think some of us were annoyed by how happy and joyous all the LA Times people were acting because, they had money now and they were hiring and they had a future and they had a billionaire. But it would all change eventually. And we'll get to that. Tell us what it was like in the early days when it seemed like the LA Times had been saved by a good billionaire.
Mariel Garza A good billionaire. I am chagrined that I have actually uttered the words, “I never thought billionaires would save the industry.” Because that was the feeling at the time. You mentioned Tronc and Tronc was…a goofy name for Tribune Company, whatever. And they were planning on really gutting the newsroom to line their own pockets. And when Patrick Soon-Shiong bought the newspaper and said he was going to invest and started building this beautiful office, we really thought, you know, happy days are here again. And the first few years were invest, invest, invest, and we were hiring all over the place, trying podcasting and building up the studios.
And it felt a little like, you know, what the New York Times had been doing, which was invest, invest, which has paid off handsomely for them. We were in that early invest stage and it really did feel like anything was possible. You're right. We were, were, we were happy. We were, we felt like finally, after decades of the newspaper being, this newspaper in particular, being beaten up by owners of, you know, who are looking out for their own interests, we had one who was benign. And then the pandemic hit.
Things started to really hit the industry hard. I think they hit Patrick Soon-Shiong hard. I don't really know. I don't know much about his finances, but I know that first year of the pandemic, we, the staff were furloughed for quite a few months, just one day a week, but it was a serious, things were looking real bad. We didn't think we were going to get through it unscathed and we didn't. And that was kind of the beginning of the end.
However, the political sort of right turn that happened was really pretty much out of the blue for a lot of us. I mean, this is a man who wrote, this really powerful op-ed in 2020 about the reckoning with race and how the LA Times was gonna be this force for good and celebrated equality and diversity and talking about his own background in apartheid South Africa and the various guild caucuses, the Latino caucus, the black caucus. He was saying the right things were going to further diversify our newsroom because that's the healthiest and smartest way forward. It felt like his values aligned not only with Los Angeles and California at large, but also with his own editorial board, which we had been writing and taking positions, fairly liberal leading for decades. So this was nothing new and it was just very symbiotic. Obviously, that changed a little in 2024.
Gil Duran The Times won the Pulitzer for editorials in support of criminal justice reform. I've been reading those pages for years and there's always been a certain pro-democratic, in terms of democracy, voice.
Mariel Garza Very strong on criminal justice reform, very strong, very strong on vaccines, on COVID vaccines and pushing them. I mean, we didn't go back into the office. They didn't start repopulating until last summer because the owner was very, very worried about, you know, endangering his staff and the spread of the disease. To have him embrace RFK Junior is just stunning to us.
Gil Duran And that's what happens. There's been a trajectory where this seemingly benign billionaire with these aligned values that were strongly progressive in some respects, and who's the savior of the paper, suddenly transforms into something else. Somebody who is lining up behind Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who now is saying, we're going to have all these right-wing lying voices in the opinion page instead. Patrick Soon-Shiong undergoes this big transformation as the Trump movement rises.
He's aligning himself with other billionaires. I think part of our theme for this show is what happens when billionaires take control of the media. And so you have that direct experience. So let's talk about your decision to resign from the LA Times. When the publisher, Patrick Soon-Shiong, blocked the paper's endorsement of Kamala Harris, what went through your mind? Was there a moment when you just knew you had to go? It must have been a really hard decision to make for economic reasons at the very least. Tell us a little bit about that.
Mariel Garza Yeah, it was a really hard decision. I'd say it was weeks in the making because, we kind of got a sense, you know, in September that something was off. You know, we were doing all our endorsements for all the race from Senate down to, you know, judges and city council. And he had been fine with all of them. And, you know, because this was a, the, the big, you know, endorsements, we sort of passed by him, first of all, just to not catch him, flat-footed, big, you know, the US Senate, things like that. And my boss, Terry Tang, the executive editor, she's the one who was in regular contact with him, not the rest of us. He didn't meet with the editorial board. He spoke through Terry. And when she told him about our plan to endorse Kamala Harris, he didn't give a blessing. He didn't. It was sort of like hemming and hawing. And this went on for weeks for her, for her trying to get an answer. And I just had a sinking feeling. I thought for whatever reason, he's not going to let us endorse in this race. And I, you know, I really wrestled with this. On one hand, I thought, does it really matter? I mean, nobody, nobody looks at the LA Times or any presidential endorsement and thinks, “I was going to vote for Trump, but now I'll vote for Kamala.”
I mean people make their minds up about presidential candidates. Where we can move the needle is in races where people don't know people as much. State legislative races, council races, college board races. Those are the, those are the endorsements that are meaningful, but it is a statement of values. And for us, we had been writing editorials for months and years actually saying, literally saying, Trump is not fit for the White House or unfit for the White House. He should never return. You know, it was sort of a given we would endorse her. Also, you know, we endorsed her for Senate. You know, despite what the owner says, we have individually and as a group met with her on several occasions over the years. We knew her flaws, we knew her strengths, but we still were going to endorse her. Editorial writers, and you know this too, one of the things that you're writing about or saying either in subtext is that people have to stand up for what is right. And I have personally written those words many times over the years. And I was now faced with a situation of like, well, “am I going to stand up for what's right? Or am I gonna — this is not a normal time — these stakes are so high. And if I don't say something, then I'm complicit.”
And so I knew I had made this decision, but I was still, I was still trying to talk myself out of it. You know what I mean? You're still going back and forth and gaslighting yourself like, it's not that big deal. I'm overblowing the thing. And finally I woke up and I thought, all right, one morning, this is, this is ridiculous. I have to go. I can't live with this. I can't be quiet about this because that's the wrong thing to do. So yeah. So then I quit.
The next day, two other editorial writers quit. Three, if you count, we have one emeritus member who was writing freelance pieces for us from Washington and he quit. He said he wouldn't write for us anymore. And as of today, today's the last day for the final editorial writer. She's leaving. She took the buyout. There won't be an editorial board after this unless they reconstitute it. It's just gone.
Gil Duran What do you think happened to him, the billionaire owner?
Mariel Garza I don't know. When I'm feeling generous, I think in his very, very twist, in this very twisted way, he thinks that appeasement is the way to save the paper. When I'm not feeling generous, I think this is more about his own, his other businesses, his own ego. I mean, there's a ruling class of billionaires right now and he's not quite in it.
So.
Gil Duran Could be all of the above to write all those things you mentioned could be true.
Mariel Garza I don't believe that he suddenly had a political change of heart. I just, don't think that your values can change that dramatically. And his were pretty progressive, you know, unless it was all bullshit. Can I say that? Sorry.
Gil Duran No, you could say that definitely. It's just a podcast.
Producer Voice: A quick note from the Nerd Reich producers. For future reference, it is always OK to use the word bullshit on this podcast, especially when talking about mendacious billionaires and oligarchs. Thank you.
Gil Duran If you want to take away a man's courage, give him a billion dollars. And if you want to make him crazy, give him more is my heuristic for how I understand things these days. I wonder if journalism can exist with billionaires or if it can exist without them, you know, even at The Sacramento Bee — this is largely forgotten now — but it was acquired by a hedge fund, Chatham, while I was there. And the first thing that happened was a couple of weeks later, we got this edict from corporate that we would no longer be endorsing in the presidential races. And some of us protested, internally. I wrote a memo explaining why I thought that was a bad idea to do a few months before the 2020 election. I thought, if you want to do this, let's do this after this election. This one's really important. We've got Donald Trump, who, I said in the memo, this is before the election, we're not even sure if he'll leave office if he loses. So I don't think this is the one to end endorsements. And it ended up being the January 6th insurrection.
And I think people just largely weren't interested or didn't care about that. But to me, it was an early sign. And really, when that happened, I knew that it was time to start looking for a way out. I had to get out of there. I didn't want to stay. I briefly thought of quitting, but I thought, “don't be dramatic. It's not going to be that big of a deal.”
Looking back now, I kind of wish that I had.
Then I worked at another paper where there was a wealthy publisher who — things were fine at first, but over time decided that he would decide what I got to write or not write. And I was gone from there in a year because that wasn't the way — I didn't come back to journalism from politics to do PR. I'd always tell him jokingly, “my PR rate is 500 bucks an hour. If you want me to be a journalist, then I'm going to do what I want.” But that wasn't respected.
So I kind of had to find my own way, but I do see there's this real tension between a billionaire ownership, which means there's money maybe in jobs, at least for a while. And being outside of that in the kind of falling apart corporate model, which ends up being bought up by a billionaire anyway. So I'm kind of really wondering about whether billionaires and journalism can coexist.
Mariel Garza The answer is no, they cannot. Not in, I mean, not … they could. I mean, newspapers were kind of started by the equivalent billionaires, the Hearst, the Pulitzers, were, you know, even the Chandlers, you know, the people who had their axes to grind and had a newspaper to do it with. I'm not sure that's viable anymore.
Gil Duran And you did have these journalism families like the McClatchys who owned the Bee and other papers. You had Knight Ridder, the Grahams. And it seems like what's happening now is billionaires are acquiring these things from a relative pittance and they have no interest in journalism, at least not over time. They're more interested in using it purely as a vehicle for their own power. And it seems like they, because they're so disconnected from journalism, that they don't have that same moral commitment to the principles of journalism. They want to dictate what journalism is. And I think that's the danger is some of these families that traditionally were in the newspaper business had a certain ethical outlook, a certain moral community duty. And their level of wealth simply can't keep up with what the billionaires have now. And so the billionaires can acquire these.
Mariel Garza Exactly. You, know, the wealth gap has gotten so much bigger that, you know, instead of a wealthy family in Riverside County — I worked for the Press Enterprise owned by a wealthy family — but their wealth was nothing like the ridiculous, obscene amounts of accumulated wealth that we see now amongst the mostly tech and other billionaires. And I think you've mentioned this in your podcast, that kind of money really warps people's worldviews. And we're seeing that played out in Washington, DC. And I think it means that their brand of ownership is going to be different from the wealthy families of yore.
Gil Duran You've experienced what it's like to walk away from a high-profile role on principle. What did you learn about the cost of that or maybe the freedom of doing that?
Mariel Garza What did I learn about? One thing that sort of shocked me was that it would get so much attention because I just figured people quit jobs on principle a lot, but it's not true. People don't. I don't know if that's bravery or recklessness. I've always sort of been a jump first, think about it later kind of person. You know, I’d do it again. I have days where I just feel like “wasn't there something I could have done?” But they're rare. I know that this was the only decision I could have made. I've talked with my colleagues who left, they feel the same way. I'm unemployed, I'm still working a lot. I'm just not getting paid much for it. I'm lucky because I'm at a point in my career where I can walk away and not immediately lose my house.
I have support and, you know, if I were a twenty-something, well, first of all, I wouldn't be in position of power, but it would be a whole different calculation. I had colleagues with young children and families to support who, it was a much harder decision, I think, for them to leave than it was for me. It's really hard to give up, not just a paycheck, but when you have a gig that feels prestigious and powerful, and being an editorial writer can be very powerful. It's hard to give that up. And I've given up my definition of who I am. So it's been tough.
Gil Duran These are identity jobs. It's not just a job you do. It becomes part of a public identity. And I've left a few of those and I know early on, I learned how to do it. And the first time I left a big identity job, there was a great emptiness. Who am I without this meaning, without these things that I'm a part of? And I was able over time to go in and out of these jobs now. And I'm kind of happy when I leave them too, because it's whatever. It's actually not who you are, but it can seem like it.
And it's a very powerful thing to have to leave having that position and something a lot of people cling to even when they should give it up. And it leads to a lot of problems in politics and media and a lot of places. It's good to know there's a rule, you got to know when to leave and you kind of want to leave on top, which brings us to our next question.
You recently wrote a New York Times essay that called on Senator Chuck Schumer to follow your example by stepping down. You wrote: “Stepping down from a leadership role isn't a surrender. Sometimes it's just the right thing to do.”
That line really hits. And in political leadership and in journalism, we often talk about principles and ethics and morals. We're supposed to aspire to the highest ideals and stand up for what's right. Yet this is a time when all of our characters are being tested. And many people in both politics and in journalism are falling short and caving in. Same thing for some of these law firms that are just giving up and giving Trump whatever he wants so that they are not under pressure.
Do you think resigning on principle can change anything in today's landscape? Or do you think it's more about modeling integrity at a time when so few people are willing to give up power to make an important point?
Mariel Garza I think it rarely changes the trajectory of anything, but it calls attention to things. If the entire editorial board had not quit the LA Times, would people have realized that the shift or would have been more insidious? If really high-profile journalists hadn't left the Washington Post and outrage, would it have resonated as much? So I think what resigning does, it calls attention to a problem. But we don't, we don't really have much of a culture of this.
And it's something I've been researching, you know, in the, in the past, I don't know, 150 years, there've just been a handful and a small handful of that, of very top public officials who have resigned in protest. There have been resignations, but it's mostly, you know, I don't want to be associated with this. And so they sort of slip out quietly and then you know, come back into the administration with some other job. But a few have quit and made a stink about it. William Jennings Bryan, the Secretary of State under President Wilson in 1915 resigned because he felt that the actions the president was taking was leading them into World War I. They were, it did.
His resignation didn't do anything really, but it did call attention, I think, to the trajectory towards war. And if it helped the public understand what was going on, then I would argue that it had meaning. Other countries have much more of a tradition of resigning in protest, which does, or at least has changed politics a little bit more, but we just don't have that here. There have been some high-profile resignations in the US attorney's office in Manhattan when they were ordered to drop the corruption charges against Mayor Adams. You saw a handful of people leave on principle. And I'm sure we're going to see a smattering of people doing that as well, but probably not in the cabinet level because those are sweet, sweet gigs. No one wants to give that up.
Gil Duran I've resigned in protest a few times. I highly recommend it. It's scary at first, but “the obstacle is the way.” And all the adventures I've had in my life all came through that. And I think that you got to do what's right. What you feel is right. And if you're in the wrong place, you have to find some other place to be. Don't be afraid to give up what you think you have, because if you're thinking of quitting in protest, you probably actually don't have it anymore.
Mariel Garza Can I just make one last point? Since we're talking about billionaires in ownership of newspapers, I think there is a role for billionaires in newspapers and that is in charitable giving to nonprofit news organizations. I think it's absolutely appropriate that they contribute to that, but yet have no part of the editorial control.
Gil Duran I think that's a good point. People who have great wealth, who want to give it no strings attached to journalism or organizations, that can be a good thing. I do think it becomes a problem when the ego of the wealthy person and their own political desires are directly engaged. I don't think that ever leads to anything good, even if at first it seems like it does. Because the idea of a newspaper editorial board, I think should never reflect one person's self-interest. It should be for the community, for what's best for the city, the state, the country. And that's going to have different definitions, but those shouldn't be dictated by one person's financial interests. There can be conservative views, there can be liberal views, but when it's just one billionaire making the decision, I think it's a bit of a fake game. And I think we're becoming highly aware of that when it comes to billionaire ownership of things, for instance, Twitter. All right, well, thank you for joining us today. And we'll talk again soon.