Epic Self-Own: The LA Times Admits That They Are Racist

 Liberals are racist. There is no getting around this fact for them. They view everything as a matter of race, and they insist on judging people based on their color of their skin, not the content of their character. Of course, liberals and their progressive ilk don't have any character. They just have emotion and vehemence.

Now, the new owner of the Los Angeles Times has come clean and admitted that his newspaper is racist. Check out his open letter to this (very small) reading public.

I am not going to waste my time trying to sort through and comment on every aspect of this article. I am content to let the editorial and the open letter from the publisher speak for themselves.

The LA Times admits that they are racist!

The Times’reckoning on race and our commitment to meaningful change

By DR. PATRICK SOON-SHIONG

SEP. 27, 2020 3 AM PT

This year, with the pandemic and the resulting economic crisis, the systemic racism in our country has been laid bare. One need only look at who was vulnerable to and suffering from COVID-19 to understand how racial inequality disadvantages those who are discriminated against.

And then in May, as our physical environments remained limited and we were increasingly reliant on news media to stay connected to the world, we collectively witnessed — through a bystander’s cellphone video — the horrific killing of a Black man, George Floyd, in the custody of a white police officer. It was not an isolated event, but it was galvanizing, and it spoke to centuries of racism in America that started with the enslavement of Black people.

Since then, across America, we’ve engaged in conversations about race and discrimination that have been candid, direct and consequential. They are happening among friends and co-workers, through protests and political debates, at athletic events and in pop culture. And they are happening at the Los Angeles Times.

This news organization can succeed only to the degree it engages, examines and accurately reflects the city and the region. Much of its best work has succeeded because it has done that.

As the country grapples with the role of systemic racism, The Times has committed to examining its past. This project looks at our treatment of people of color — outside and inside the newsroom — throughout our nearly 139-year history.

More stories

But over its history, The Times has also mirrored, and in some cases propagated, the biases and prejudices of the world it covers, reflecting and shaping attitudes that have contributed to social and economic inequity. Today, we are beginning the process of acknowledging those biases of the past and taking positive action to affirm a commitment that our newsroom will not tolerate prejudice.

Since it began publication in the early 1880s, The Times has had blind spots. It has ignored large swaths of the city and its diverse population, or covered them in one-dimensional, sometimes racist ways. In part that is because the paper’s staff has never truly reflected the region. The paper employed no Black staff journalists until the mid-1960s. Latinos have never been represented on the staff in anything like their numbers in the community. The Metro staff didn’t have its first Asian American staff member until the late 1970s.

As the Los Angeles Times’ first nonwhite owners in its nearly 139-year history, my wife, Michele, and I are determined to increase diversity within the organization. We believe that The Times can better represent Los Angeles and California by providing more and better coverage of Black, Latino, Asian and other underrepresented communities in our English- and Spanish-language publications. We have committed to hiring more reporters and editors of color and to building an organizational culture that truly values representation and equity. We will strive to retain, mentor and promote journalists of color. And we will be transparent in this process.

These are issues deeply important to my family and me.

I met Michele when we were both teenagers in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, where my father had fled from China during World War II. I was a member of an anti-apartheid student union. Later, as a young, nonwhite doctor in a society predicated on racial prejudice, I received a salary that was 50% that of my peers at a hospital where my first white patient refused to let me touch him.

Michele vividly remembers being told there was no place for her in the entertainment industry, just as I remember being arrested by the police in South Africa for refusing to carry an identity card. We know well the pain of both explicit and unconscious racism, something you cannot fully understand unless you have experienced it yourself. For a person of color, the structural and interpersonal violence that is the legacy of colonialism, slavery and policies designed to disenfranchise human beings based on their race or ethnicity is unmistakable. It is part of everyday life.

Michele and I came to the United States in 1980 for the opportunities it promised and have made Los Angeles our home. We were attracted to Southern California, in part, because of its rich diversity, and we feel deeply rooted in this wonderful city where we have raised our children and made our lives. We have been immensely fortunate, and purchasing the Los Angeles Times in 2018 came from a desire to give back to a city that has given us so much.

Our guiding hope has been to rebuild The Times following years of disinvestment, strengthen the newsroom that plays a critical role in our democracy, and help make the paper a beacon of truth and inspiration. We also feel a deep personal responsibility and duty to fight racism and bias. The national reckoning on race and that within the Los Angeles Times are welcome developments that have already led to productive conversations, concrete plans and accelerated progress for us.

We are committed to change, both because it is just and because it is mission-critical for our business. Only a diverse newsroom can accurately tell this city’s stories. Only a newspaper that holds power to account and uncovers injustice can truly succeed.

The Times has committed to a close examination of its past, beginning with the project we are launching today. It starts with an overview by the editorial board of The Times’ history in covering and employing people of color and an acknowledgment of the paper’s failings. Over the following days, we will run stories by staff reporters and columnists examining in greater depth, and from a personal perspective, aspects of the paper’s coverage of nonwhite communities and treatment of journalists of color.

We eagerly embrace this self-examination because we believe we can move forward only by first understanding what came before. In South Africa, it was truth and reconciliation that led to meaningful change. By confronting the injustices of the past, we can meet this historic moment and make The Times an institution and publication that can serve you, our readers, and the community better.

We invite you along on our journey.

The Los Angeles Times editorial board official issued an apology for being racist:

Editorial: Anexamination of The Times’ failures on race, our apology and a path forward

Headline reads "Marauders from inner city prey on LA's suburbs" at the top of a 1981 Los Angeles Times front page

A story that reinforced harmful stereotypes about Black and Latino Angelenos appeared on the front page on July 12, 1981.(Los Angeles Times)

The headline was stripped across the top of the front page, “Marauders From Inner City Prey on L.A.’s Suburbs.” The story, published by The Times on July 12, 1981, described a “permanent underclass” in the city’s “ghettos and barrios,” fueling a crime wave that was spilling over from South Los Angeles into prosperous — and largely white — communities in Pasadena, Palos Verdes, Beverly Hills and elsewhere.

The article, the first of a two-part series, purported to be an ambitious look at a major social problem, and it cited a lack of education and jobs as underlying causes of inner-city distress. But it also reinforced pernicious stereotypes that Black and Latino Angelenos were thieves, rapists and killers. It sensationalized and pathologized the struggles of poor families and painted residents of South L.A. with a broad brush. It quoted police and prosecutors unskeptically and implied that more aggressive policing and harsher judicial sentencing were the only effective responses to crime.

For the record:

10:18 AM, Sep. 28, 2020An earlier version of this story identified Dean Takahashi as a Metro reporter in 1992. He was a business reporter.

The story lacked nuance and context, neglecting decades of government policies that had led to housing and school segregation and to the creation of ghettos and barrios, which were then provided with inferior public services. And it failed to give any real sense that the vast majority of the area’s residents were ordinary, law-abiding citizens, just trying to raise families and get by.

The series drew prompt and deserved criticism that highlighted an insidious problem that has marred the work of the Los Angeles Times for much of its history: While the paper has done groundbreaking and important work highlighting the issues faced by communities of color, it has also often displayed at best a blind spot, at worst an outright hostility, for the city’s nonwhite population, one both rooted and reflected in a shortage of Indigenous, Black, Latino, Asian and other people of color in its newsroom.

Our reckoning with racism

As the country grapples with the role of systemic racism, The Times has committed to examining its past. This project looks at our treatment of people of color — outside and inside the newsroom — throughout our nearly 139-year history.

More stories

Prompted by a pandemic, an economic crisis and a national debate over policing — all of which have spotlighted racial disparities in the United States — our nation now faces a long-delayed reckoning with systemic racism. We would be remiss, in the autumn of 2020, a season of grief and introspection, if we did not take part in that self-examination. This editorial is one part of that process.

A comprehensive and balanced history of Los Angeles journalism — a people’s history that tells the story of The Times from the perspective of its employees and its readers — has yet to be written. But a deep look at the paper’s pages over time tells part of that story.

Under Harrison Gray Otis, who controlled The Times from 1882 until his death in 1917, the newspaper stood for the raw exercise of industrialists’ and landowners’ power over Los Angeles.

For at least its first 80 years, the Los Angeles Times was an institution deeply rooted in white supremacy and committed to promoting the interests of the city’s industrialists and landowners. No one embodied this aggressive, conservative ideology more than Harrison Gray Otis, the walrus-mustachioed Civil War veteran who controlled The Times from 1882 until his death in 1917.

The modern notion that journalism’s core precepts include uncovering hard truths and exposing inequity would have been foreign to Otis and other press barons of the last Gilded Age. Far from a mission of “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable,” his newspaper stood for the raw exercise of power, and he used it to further a naked agenda of score settling, regional boosterism, economic aggrandizement and union busting.

Otis was a Lincoln Republican who had fought on the side of the Union and opposed slavery. But his Times was a newspaper aimed at the mostly Protestant white settlers who migrated to California from the Midwest and the Plains in the decades after it was seized from Mexico in 1848 and admitted to the Union in 1850.

Again and again, The Times sought to shape and dominate the region instead of merely chronicling it. Using a trade group known as the Merchants and Manufacturers’ Assn., Otis spearheaded a campaign to prevent and impede unionization. He weighed in on the side of San Pedro over Santa Monica in an epic 1890s battle over where to locate a federally funded deepwater port. His family meddled in the politics of Mexico, where they owned a huge ranch, in an attempt to preserve their land rights. He was part of a powerful syndicate that pushed for the acquisition of water rights from farmers in the Owens Valley in 1913 — a decision fictionalized in Roman Polanski’s 1974 film “Chinatown” — and the annexation of the San Fernando Valley in 1915.

And in all of his crusades, he enlisted the powerful voice of his newspaper.

During the early 20th century, as control passed from Otis to his son-in-law Harry Chandler and his heirs, The Times promoted the city’s explosive growth. But even as Dust Bowl migration, the World War II arms industry and a vast movement of Black Americans escaping Jim Crow segregation transformed the city, the newspaper remained nearly entirely white in its staff, its readership and its outlook.

A tragic example of why that was a problem was the newspaper’s support for wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans, one of the most egregious violations of civil liberties in our nation’s history. (The Times apologized in 2017 for that editorial position.)

Here’s another example: In 1943, sailors on leave from wartime service rampaged lawlessly in downtown Los Angeles, attacking young Mexican Americans fitted in so-called zoot suits — long coats and wide trousers pegged at the ankle. The Times largely ignored the context — the social and economic upheaval brought about by wartime mobilization and the racist trope of threatened white womanhood — and blamed the victims instead of their assailants. When First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt suggested that the rioting might have grown out of racial discrimination toward Mexican Americans, The Times vehemently denied that was possible, asserting in an editorial, “We like Mexicans and we think they like us.”

After the war ended, The Times became an uncritical mouthpiece for Washington as it covered the Eisenhower administration’s Operation Wetback, which used military-style tactics to deport Mexican migrants — some of them U.S. citizens — who had been invited north to perform agricultural labor during the war.

Headlines read "Zoot suiters learn lesson in fights with servicemen" and "Inquiry on Jap activities set"

Coverage of the so-called Zoot Suit Riots and a congressional investigation into Japanese Americans appear in the June 7, 1943, edition of the Los Angeles Times. The newspaper blamed the zoot suit-wearing Mexican American victims of attacks by servicemen and supported the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans.(Los Angeles Times)

The most enlightened of the Chandlers was Otis, fourth and last of the patriarchs who controlled The Times for its first century. The Times’ standards and reputation improved under his tenure as publisher, from 1960 to 1980. He plowed what were then vast profits into the hiring of hundreds of journalists and reoriented the paper in a more politically neutral direction. Famously, Chandler authorized the publication, in 1961, of an investigation into the anti-communist John Birch Society, whose members included far-right white supremacists — and members of Chandler’s extended family (though he also presided over the paper’s 1964 presidential endorsement of Barry Goldwater, who strongly opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act).

By the standards of his time, Chandler was a moderate, if not always consistent. He endorsed most goals of the civil rights movement and in 1965, during the Watts uprising, served as an informal mediator between Black protesters and the Police Department. In 1969, The Times endorsed the historic mayoral candidacy of Councilman Tom Bradley, a grandson of slaves who in 1973 would go on to defeat Mayor Sam Yorty, the divisive white incumbent.

But even as The Times moved in a more progressive direction, its newsroom did not come close to representing the city’s demographics. The Times won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the August 1965 civil unrest in Watts, yet the reporters and editors on the story were nearly all white. A 24-year-old Black advertising messenger, Robert Richardson, covered the disturbances, driving to the scene and phoning in his reports. Named a reporter trainee after the riots, he was given next to no support and left the paper the next year.

“The View From Watts,” an in-depth series The Times published in October 1965, chronicled pent-up frustrations in the Black community, and an accompanying editorial recommended summer jobs, improved police-community relations, stronger school nutrition programs and similar reforms. But the project too often took a patronizing view of Black Angelenos, most egregiously in a piece called “Police Brutality: State of Mind?” that used selective examples and unexamined quotes from police officers to heavily imply that police brutality was a thing of the past.

The Kerner Commission, impaneled to study the root causes of 1967 uprisings in Detroit, Newark, N.J., and other cities, was prophetic in calling for the hiring of Black journalists. “The scarcity of Negroes in responsible news jobs intensifies the difficulties of communicating the reality of the contemporary American city to white newspaper and television audiences,” the panel found. That was certainly true at The Times.

It was not just that The Times saw fit to hire white men almost exclusively for its newsroom; the stories it told were largely for and about white people, which meant Angelenos weren’t getting an accurate account of their city, region and state at a time of rapid change.

Typical of the paper’s attitude was a 1978 interview in which Otis Chandler airily dismissed Black and Latino readers: “It’s not their kind of newspaper. It’s too big, it’s too stuffy. If you will, it’s too complicated.”

Chandler later stepped back from that, saying the paper was looking for readers in the “broad middle class” and “upper classes” regardless of race or ethnicity. “We are not a paper that’s sought after in the lower-class areas,” he said.

Around that time, in 1979, The Times was slow to cover the shooting of Eula Love, a 39-year-old Black homemaker who was shot to death by Los Angeles police officers in her South L.A. frontyard in a dispute over an unpaid gas bill. L.A.’s afternoon daily, the Herald Examiner, played the story big, and Black residents were outraged at what they saw as an egregious example of police abuse. After being hammered by other media outlets for underplaying the story, including in an Esquire article headlined “Mr. Otis Regrets,” The Times ran a long story by media writer David Shaw about how it had “muffed” the story, and top editors began rethinking how the paper covered the LAPD.

Eula Love

Eula Love was shot and killed Jan. 3, 1979, by Los Angeles police officers in her frontyard. The Times’ coverage of the killing was lacking.

As has often been the case in history, progress came from the bottom up. After the “marauders” series, Black reporters met with Editor William F. Thomas to register their objections. And in February 1982, a pioneering group of Latino journalists, gathering for pizza and beer in Downey, began conceiving of a staff-led effort to tell a rich and deep narrative of their growing community. “We keep seeing the same damn stories in the paper: about crime, gangs, illegal immigration,” Frank O. Sotomayor, one of the editors on the series, recalls his co-editor, George Ramos, saying. “We want to tell our stories.”

The result was a landmark series, published in 1983, about Latinos and how they were reshaping Southern California. Latino journalists initiated and carried out the project, and presented the Latino community in all its complexity, featuring gang members and wealthy entrepreneurs, priests, police officers, university students and politicians. It examined issues that impeded Latino progress and celebrated improvements. The project was recognized with the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for public service, the highest honor in American journalism. The same year, The Times’ parent company, Times-Mirror, established a Minority Editorial Training Program, or MetPro, which continues to this day.

Yet The Times remained a lonely place for journalists of color. In December 1990, Shaw, The Times’ media critic, wrote a series lamenting the dearth of diversity in journalism. He wrote of his own newspaper: “The Times is widely regarded — particularly by blacks, inside the paper and out — as having one of the poorest records for minority advancement of any major paper in the country.”

The police beating of Rodney G. King in 1991, and the unrest that followed the subsequent acquittal of the four LAPD officers charged with assaulting him, exposed once again why that mattered. With 63 people dead, the 1992 uprising was far deadlier than the earlier Watts riots, in which 34 people died.

The Times was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the disturbances, just as it was after Watts. But in later years academics argued that The Times overemphasized the role of Black Angelenos in the riots (half of those arrested by the LAPD were Latino) and sensationalized Black-Korean conflict (a Korean-born shopkeeper, Soon Ja Du, had killed a Black teenager, Latasha Harlins, the previous year inside her family’s grocery store).

Within The Times, newsroom tensions burst into the open. “When the riot spread and it became apparent that a number of white reporters could not gain access to the scene, minority reporters from the suburbs were shipped into the danger zone,” Dean Takahashi, then a young business reporter and one of few Asian Americans on staff, wrote in a May 1992 article for Editor & Publisher that drew national attention. “A black colleague of mine mockingly called it the ‘Los Angeles Times busing program.’”

As it had a decade earlier, The Times made some commitments to improvements. It hired several journalists of color and established a zoned section known as City Times to cover neighborhoods of South Los Angeles and East Los Angeles that had long been neglected — “the hole in the doughnut,” as editors said at the time. The effort lasted for only three years, folding in 1995.

But even as the editorial staff pushed for broader and better coverage of the city’s diverse communities, the newspaper was being torn by political divisions within the extended Chandler family that still owned the paper, some of whom felt The Times had leaned too far leftward. In 1994, the top business executive, Publisher Richard T. Schlosberg III, directed the editorial board to endorse Gov. Pete Wilson, a Republican, in his bid for reelection.

Wilson was the chief proponent of Proposition 187, an initiative on the same ballot that would decide his reelection. The measure sought to bar undocumented immigrants from access to state-funded healthcare and education. Staff members, especially Latinos, were disgusted. “Under normal circumstances, I would quietly accept that decision and move on. This time I cannot,” Deputy Editorial Page Editor Frank del Olmo wrote in a dissent that ran in the paper. “Because this is not just another political campaign. And the Wilson endorsement is not — as a senior colleague whom I respect tried to convince me — just another endorsement.”

He continued: “For me, a Mexican American born and reared in California and a journalist here for more than 20 years, this campaign is unprecedented in the harm it does — permanent damage, I fear — to an ethnic community I care deeply about and a state I love.”

Frank del Olmo gestures while sitting at his desk in 1991

Frank del Olmo was the first Latino editor on the masthead of the Los Angeles Times. The newspaper’s 1994 endorsement of Gov. Pete Wilson, who was pushing Proposition 187, drew his vehement dissent in the pages of The Times.(Los Angeles Times)

The summer after voters adopted Proposition 187 (it was later struck down by the courts), Janet Clayton was named editorial page editor, a Black woman and the first person of color to occupy that role. During her nine-year tenure, the opinion pages of The Times evolved to reflect an optimistic, progressive and inclusive political vision. The section won two Pulitzer Prizes, one in 2002 for a series on mentally ill people living on the streets, and the other in 2004 for a series on entrenched problems in California state government.

Halfway through Clayton’s tenure, The Times and its sister papers were sold to the Chicago-based Tribune Co. The new owners brought in two nationally esteemed journalists — John S. Carroll, who had overseen newspapers in Baltimore and Lexington, Ky., as editor, and Dean Baquet, the national editor at the New York Times, as managing editor.

With Baquet overseeing the day-to-day operations of the newsroom, Clayton overseeing the opinion pages (before moving to the Metro section) and art director Joseph Hutchinson serving as deputy managing editor for design, the newspaper for a time had three Black editors on its masthead. Del Olmo was the first Latino on the masthead, and the Mexican-born writer Andrés Martinez was later the second, as editorial page editor.

That diversity — a high point — proved short-lived. Del Olmo, 55, died of cardiac arrest after collapsing in his office at The Times in 2004; Baquet, who succeeded Carroll as top editor, was fired in 2006 after refusing to make more cuts; Clayton, Hutchinson and Martinez all left in 2007.

Since Baquet’s departure, The Times has seen a flurry of top editors and business executives come and go. One of them — Davan Maharaj, who joined The Times in 1989 as an intern and oversaw the newsroom from 2011 to 2017 — was of Indian ancestry and an immigrant from Trinidad.

Maharaj, the first Asian American to lead The Times, presided over a depleted newsroom that had spent four years in federal bankruptcy protection, ending in 2012. Newsroom diversity improved, but the staff was shaken by multiple rounds of buyouts. Nonetheless, it continued to do outstanding work, including a Pulitzer-winning expose of corruption in the city of Bell, a story co-written and uncovered by a Guatemalan-born journalist, Ruben Vives.

By the time The Times was sold in 2018, to the physician and pharmaceutical inventor Patrick Soon-Shiong, the paper was down to about 400 journalists, less than half of the 940 when Baquet left.

Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong smiles as he speaks into a microphone in the Los Angeles Times newsroom

Los Angeles Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, left, addresses staffers in 2018 shortly after his purchase of the paper. (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

Where does The Times go from here?

An organization should not be defined by its failures, but it must acknowledge them if it is to hope for a better future.

The brutal death of a Black man, George Floyd, on May 25 while in the custody of police in Minneapolis shocked the world. It also prompted news organizations like The Times to reflect on how they cover, frame and promote stories at a time when the 24/7 news cycle moves faster than ever. Amid nationwide demonstrations over racial injustice, members of the Los Angeles Times Guild established caucuses for Black and Latino employees. The caucuses have called for improvements in coverage, hiring and career development, a public apology for The Times’ poor record on race, and equal pay. They have insisted, rightly, on reframing and recentering our coverage of communities of color.

The Times in 2020 has new owners, new leaders, a new labor union representing its journalists and a new headquarters in El Segundo. But the shadows of the past loom over our institution.

Newspapers are described as a first rough draft of history. But in truth, the first rough draft written by this newspaper — and those across the country — has been woefully incomplete.

On behalf of this institution, we apologize for The Times’ history of racism. 

BINGO! They admit it! The LA Times is racist!

We owe it to our readers to do better, and we vow to do so. A region as diverse and complex and fascinating as Southern California deserves a newspaper that reflects its communities. Today, 38% of the journalists on our staff are people of color. We know that is not nearly good enough, in a county that is 48% Latino and in a state where Latinos are the largest ethnic group. We know that this acknowledgment must be accompanied by a real commitment to change, a humility of spirit and an openness of mind and heart.

The Times will redouble and refocus its efforts to become an inclusive and inspiring voice of California — a sentinel that employs investigative and accountability reporting to help protect our fragile democracy and chronicles the stories of the Golden State, including stories that historically were neglected by the mainstream press. Being careful stewards of this new company, privately owned but operated for the benefit of the public, is our first obligation. But that stewardship will also require bold and decisive change. If we are to survive as a business, it will be by tapping into a digital, multicultural, multigenerational audience in a way The Times has never fully done.

We make this pledge in recognition of the many journalists who battled over the decades to make The Times a more inclusive workplace and a newspaper that reflected the real Los Angeles in its pages. As we reorient this institution firmly and fully around the multiethnic, interfaith and dazzlingly complex tapestry that is Southern California, we honor their contributions.

The Wrap offered their own commentary on this self-own:

LA TimesApologizes for ‘History of Racism,’ Vows Diversity in Coverage and Staff

Los Angeles Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong vowed to increase diversity in the newspaper’s coverage and staff in a letter published Sunday along with a series of sweeping, introspective reports into the Times’s long history of racism.

“The Times has also mirrored, and in some cases propagated, the biases and prejudices of the world it covers, reflecting and shaping attitudes that have contributed to social and economic inequity,” Soon-Shiong wrote. “Today, we are beginning the process of acknowledging those biases of the past and taking positive action to affirm a commitment that our newsroom will not tolerate prejudice.”

The articles examine the LA Times’ history dating back to its creation in the 1880s and its repeated failure to cover critical issues affecting millions of nonwhite Angelenos. Those issues include racist abuse from law enforcement, redlining practices that segregated Black and Latino residents into environmentally and economically poor neighborhoods, and willful bias on behalf of wealthy interests dating back to the paper’s first major publisher, Harrison Gray Otis.

 Again and again, The Times sought to shape and dominate the region instead of merely chronicling it,” the Times Editorial Board wrote.

The criticisms have continued to today, as reporters of color at the Times have accused executive editor Norman Pearlstine of failing to diversify the Times’ newsroom as well as failing to modernize the paper to meet digital subscription benchmarks. Over the summer, Black and Latino caucuses within the Times have published public statements criticizing the paper’s leadership, noting that its editors remain predominantly white and do not reflect the diversity of Southern California.

“This very much feels like a sink-or-swim moment for the paper. And when the people who are supposed to be guiding the ship, so to speak, don’t seem to be aware of what’s going on — if they’re even around — it’s alarming. It’s very, very alarming,” one reporter told TheWrap in August.

In his letter, Soon-Shiong notes that he and his wife are the first nonwhite owners of the Times, and as such “feel a deep personal responsibility and duty to fight racism and bias.” Along with today’s editorials and introspective reports, Soon-Shiong says that more articles from the Times’ reporters of color will be published in the coming days examining the paper’s coverage of nonwhite communities.

“The national reckoning on race and that within the Los Angeles Times are welcome developments that have already led to productive conversations, concrete plans and accelerated progress for us,” he wrote. “We are committed to change, both because it is just and because it is mission-critical for our business. Only a diverse newsroom can accurately tell this city’s stories. Only a newspaper that holds power to account and uncovers injustice can truly succeed.”

LA Times' New Owner Pledges to Fight "Fake News" ... Really

Patrick Soon-Shiong, biotech billionaire born in South Africa, now living in the United States, has completed his acquisition of the failing, flailing Los Angeles Times.

The new headquarters will be located along Imperial Highway in El Segundo, CA, which guarantees nothing but a terrible commute for the vast majority of reporters and staff which still remain with the newspaper.

The liberal chattering classes are celebrating this move because it means "local control" has returned to this newspaper. Lying is still lying, however, and liberal bias remains liberal bias, whether the owner of a media company is located right next door to the employees or is situated one thousand miles way.

Soon-Shiong also pledged not only to compete with the New York Times, but to fight as hard as possible against Fake News.

Check out his open letter to readers (what few remain) and the general public below:

Today marks a new era for the Los Angeles Times, The San Diego Union-Tribune and publications across the California News Group. My family and I are truly honored and privileged to assume the mantle of these storied institutions of democracy. To me, this is the culmination of an immigrant’s American Dream.

From today, our important work protecting and building on a rich history of independent journalism begins — with a sense of urgency and purpose.

I believe that fake news is the cancer of our times and social media the vehicles for metastasis. Institutions like The Times and the Union-Tribune are more vital than ever. They must be bastions of editorial integrity and independence if they are to protect our democracy and provide an antidote to disinformation. We will continue our papers’ dedication to truth, integrity, journalistic independence, and storytelling that engages, informs, educates and inspires with care and compassion.

Editorial integrity and independence have fallen into increasingly short supply in the United States. The media has become so obsessed with Donald Trump, looking for every perverse opportunity to see him fail rather than simply reporting what he is doing and what other newsworthy events are taking place in Los Angeles and around the country.

Notice also that Soon-Shiong refuses to define "Fake News". What is he talking about? Does he have any intention of writing the truth about individuals? Let's hope that he expects his writers, reporters, and staffers to get the whole story

In an era of digitally enabled disruptions which pose an existential threat to the traditional newspaper industry, the California News Group must be run as a business in order to grow and thrive, never losing sight of the needs and interests of our readers. 

To run successfully as a business, however, the Times must provide a service which people want.

Most people don't want the left-wing propaganda pablum which passes for news in the LA market. Can Soon-Shiong takes necessary steps to get rid of the wannabe social just warrior reporters at the Times?

As a private, locally owned enterprise, we will invest in the group’s future. While ad-supported print publications will continue to feel the pressures occasioned by the digital era, we are confident that our print products will remain viable and vital. This is especially true for those readers who, like myself, still enjoy the tactile and leisurely experience of a physical newspaper. Yet we are impatient and ambitious when it comes to introducing new products that will inform and delight local and global audiences.

I predict that the paper will fold within one year. The print market is falling on harder times. It's just so much easier to look up articles on-line. It's also become easier to see through the corrupt bias of the mainstream media.

Many of you may wonder why we bought these publications. The decision is deeply personal. America and, more particularly, Southern California, have given me unimaginable opportunities. Here is where I deepened my education, built a family, found ways to contribute to advances in medicine and science, and took inspiration from sports, entertainment and the arts. I grew up in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, the son of a working-class shopkeeper.

Working-class and now upper-class. Will he remain committed to doing what is best for working and middle-class Americans? For Californians?

My parents had fled southern China during World War II after the Japanese occupied their ancestral homes. When I was 14 years old, I began earning money to fund my college education by distributing copies of the Evening Post newspaper.

Oh, that's how personal his connection to print media has become. Interesting.

I still recall the sounds and smells of the printing presses as the first papers rolled off the conveyor belt. I would grab as many as 800 copies from an ink-stained pressman, handing them off to my cadre of “runners” who would then deliver them to local businesses and residences.

This is a nostalgia move. I doubt that it's going to generate any long-term victories, however. Just because someone has a strong sentiment about the newspaper industry does not mean that consumers will warm up to the brand.

Newspapers were not only in my blood, they also engaged my mind. Reading the Post’s headlines and stories, I learned what it meant to grow up “non-white” under apartheid. I came to understand the evil consequences of racism and discrimination. I began to appreciate the essential role journalism plays in fostering and sustaining democracy and free societies.

Really? We have another social justice warrior at the top of the newspaper food chain again, it seems. We need newspapers to report the news, not push an agenda. Or if they are going to push an agenda, it should push principles and values in line with the truth.

We purchased the California News Group because we want to preserve the integrity, honesty and fairness we’ve observed in our decades as avid readers of the Los Angeles Times. My family and I fervently believe that The Times, the Union-Tribune and our other titles must continue to serve as beacons of truth, hope and inspiration binding our communities.

"Integrity, honesty, fairness" - I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Dr. Soon-Shiong still does not explain how his prior experience with selling newspapers makes him qualified to ensure quality reporting. 

We view the publications we acquired as a quasi-public trust. We understand they will be the voice and inspiration for our cities, our state, the nation and the world.

We also understand the importance of editorial integrity and independence. We share our commitment to both with the talented journalists at our publications. They are our lifeblood.

I grew up believing the best newspapers are the voice of the people. None of my personal success has changed that belief.

The press has become the voice of the corporate interests and the political class, which is more invested in telling people what they should be believe and what to think. They have pushed an interest for open borders, cheap labor, the destruction of natural marriage and spiritual values. The smug elitism of the printing-press class is particularly damnable.

Will Soon-Shiong ensure that discrimination against all Americans, all Californians receives due exposure, including hatred of citizens of European and Asian descent?

We are grateful for the opportunity to serve you. The California News Group will continue to play its pivotal role in our communities, from Los Angeles to San Diego, projecting out to the world. This region is an incubator for change, innovation and discovery, and we are deeply committed to telling its stories.

When I came to Los Angeles, decades ago, I could not imagine the opportunities this region and this country would provide for me. My family and I are deeply grateful for this opportunity to support our institutions and to continue this vital mission.

Sincerely,

Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong

Final Reflection

I have a strong sense that this venture is going to collapse right before the good doctor's eyes. His discussion about the "cancer" of Fake News is well-played, considering that he is a researcher and scientist working to eradicate that terrible physical scourge.

But the true cancer of Fake News has been the liberal, anti-American bias of the local and national press. Will Dr. Soon save the LA Times?

No, he will be the final hospice care clinician for this rotting corpse, nothing more.

The Self-Inflicted Mass Murder of the Press (Steve Lopez Editorial)

The press isn't dying because of outside assailants.

The press is dying due to self-inflicted wounds, from its incapacity to innovate, to its perverse attachment to out-of-touch, elitist sentiments with no grounding in reality.

Working people get tired of reading how being working people is somehow something to be ashamed of.

Just to show how much they have lost their way, one of the few remaining editorial writers still calls the United States a "democracy", and he is convinced that democracy is in danger as the printed press loses power and presence.

The staggering body count as California newspapers founder, and democracy loses

Steve Lopez is bemoaning the fact that he will be out of a job soon, too.

The body count is staggering.

In my 43 years as a journalist, armies of trained bloodhounds have been run out of newsrooms where I've worked, victims of layoffs, and buyouts, and battle fatigue. I've lost so many hundreds of colleagues, I can't keep track of where they ended up.

They were never really colleagues, I suppose. What business were they supposed to be in? Telling the truth, reporting the facts, informing the public. The press turned into a propaganda mill for the left, pushing hard to make readers think the way they wanted them to think.

That is not acceptable. Not at all.

Of course, the histrionics of "body count" shows the self-importance with which reporters view themselves. It's time that they were scuttled out. The moment you start believing the headlines, or believe that you had everything to do with the headlines in the paper, that's the moment you become expendable.

These were smart, curious reporters, photographers and editors who told stories that defined place and time and made us all know each other a little better. They covered the arts and the local sports teams. They bird-dogged city councils, courts, law enforcement, school districts and other agencies that spend our tax dollars, bearing witness, asking questions and rooting out corruption.

So much self-serving praise from Skelton. Where are your jests now, O Yorrick!

There is less watching today, even though California's population has nearly doubled since I began my career, and we are all poorer for it.

The state of California is poorer since the state's population doubled, since much of the in-bound migration consists of deadbeats, welfare queens, and illegal aliens.

Yes, mass migration has made California poorer, much poorer.

It might seem like the opposite is true — that there's more information available than ever, because of incessant chirping on cable news, nightly car chases on local outlets, digital news sites and social media news feeds.

There is more reporting, that's for sure. Americans want news still, but the liberal press was not interested in reporting the news, as much as shaping it and then making it. How many false reports are unsubstantiated rumors ended up on the front page of national periodicals like Gospel truth? How many reporters were canned from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other periodicals because of failing journalistic standards?

But what's vanished or been greatly diminished in far too many places is good, solid reporting on local and state affairs, and we don't even know what that has cost us through mismanagement, misuse of funds and outright corruption.

Was it solid? Is the reporting gone?

Individual citizens with community interest at heart have provided plenty of reporting on their own. Activists can record events live, in person, and get the whole story out to the public without a filter. The corrupt, destructive nature of the mainstream media can no longer color to distortion what is going on in the world.

Sure, the Los Angeles Times and other papers can still pull off exposes such as the freeloading scandal in Bell or the payola bonanza involving the developer of a Harbor Gateway project. Just note the Pulitzer won by the East Bay Times last year for its coverage of the Ghost Ship fire — an achievement its staff earned after years of deep cuts and consolidation.

Regular, everyday citizens can do this, and do it more often in their own cities. They have a more intense interest to do so, since it's their own cities which they fight to protect.

But those investigations take lots of time and people, and they don't happen as often as they should because fewer and fewer snoops are checking records, knocking on doors and making a nuisance of themselves.

To better describe what's happened to the business, let me take you back to 1975. I'd just gotten my first job out of college, as a sportswriter in the Sacramento suburbs. I was assigned to the Davis branch of the Woodland Daily Democrat at a weekly salary of $135.

Let's also talk about how the forced wage hikes and regulatory burdens that are hurting businesses large and small. Their devastating consequences hurt newspapers and media industries, too!

Today, there is no Davis branch. When I checked with the Daily Democrat last week, editor/reporter/photographer Jim Smith told me that in the last 20 years, his staff of 15 has gone down to just five.

I moved from the Daily Democrat to three nearby newspapers over the next few years — the Pittsburg Post-Dispatch, Concord Transcript and Oakland Tribune, where I pulled a switch from sports to news.

None of those papers still exist.

Papers are disappearing in large numbers, or they are folding into larger newspapers. Just now, I found out that the Ventura County Star is part of the larger Southern California News Group, which covers pretty much every major newspaper in, you guessed it, Southern California.

Funny but true. The main story in all of these papers focused on the efforts of pro-Trump, pro-rule of law activists going from one city council to the next denouncing sanctuary state and pushing for the restoration of the federal immigration law as the Supreme Law of the Land. The story had wide enough currency that readers could get something out of it, I suppose. But we have only begun to fight, and there is so much work to be done in Ventura County.

My next stop was the San Jose Mercury News, a storied newspaper with a first-rate editorial staff of about 400 at its height. Today the Mercury News is down to about 110 people and has lost about 70% of its staff in the last two decades, even as Silicon Valley became one of the most important stories in the world.

Ouch! I would submit that there is a direct correlation with the number of middle-income earnings fleeing the region and the state to the declining circulation of the print media. What do you think?

I saw the same trends in my years with the Philadelphia Inquirer and Time magazine, and the problem was never a lack of public demand for news. What changed was that the internet offered new options to advertisers, and newspaper revenues diminished despite ongoing attempts to make the industry more digitized. Soon, newsrooms had so many empty desks, they looked like furniture showrooms.

They probably provide a better service as show rooms. Ha Ha! Empty desks tell no tales, right?

Bankruptcies and shutdowns followed, independent voices became corporatized, and the cost of continued profits was more bloodshed.

What a crock. The Big Media empire had been corporatized for decades. How else did we get a creep like Barack Obama in office? How about the fact that Bill Clinton got away with lying under oath to a grand jury?

Consider this:

The first five newspapers I worked for — in Woodland, Pittsburg, Concord, Oakland and San Jose — were folded into a single company over time. That company is Digital First Media, which has followed the same consolidation pattern with its newspapers in Southern California.

I have considered it, and it's awesome!

A smarter guy would have gotten out of the business. But I didn't know how to do anything else, so I kept moving, like a man trying to outrun a wildfire. Behind me, the earth was scorched. But there was no smoke rising in Los Angeles when I arrived 17 years ago, so I told myself this was it. Between the mountains and the beach, a million untold tales. No more running for me, except to chase good stories and bad actors.

Now Steve Lopez shows some humility. Newspapermen aren't that smart anymore. They are so committed to their liberal regressive worldview, that there is no right or wrong, but rather environment and culture determine relative interests and commitments. What a shame, since that biased shameful sham of worldview colored every aspect of their reporting, to the hurt of the readers and the general public. No wonder so many editors were comfortable with "We only have to be right for one day."

Now their papers may not see the light of day.

I wish I could tell you it's been nothing but cupcakes and cartwheels ever since, but the Los Angeles Times got hit by the same beetle that sawed through the rest of the industry, and the staff today is just more than one-third the size it was when I started.

And you are all moving to El Segundo!

I can't tell you how many clowns, buffoons and scoundrels have taken the reins of the parent company, promised great things and then fled in the night with blood on their hands and briefcases full of money.

Do you think it's a good idea to mock your employers, there, Stevie boy? They still don't get that they work for others, that they have a service and a product to provide to consumers. Most people simply don't want what they are delivering anymore.

You get to thinking there's no way out. Then you wake up one day and hear that somebody wants to come to the rescue.

Naturally, you're skeptical. It's a professional duty.

Once again, that flimsy distance from that funny thing called "truth." Journalists stopped believing in objective reality, or something? Perhaps it's racist. That kind of thing matters more than reporting the events, since social justice warriors are the only ones seeking degrees in journalism.

I've never met billionaire Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, who is closing a deal to take over The Times, the San Diego Union-Tribune, Hoy and our community newspapers. You'd think a man whose goal is to cure cancer would have his hands full, but now the good doctor wants to take on a different kind of terminal patient.

Notice that Lopez calls his parent paper "terminal patient." There's no helping this rag.

Soon-Shiong dropped by the office Friday and told his story. He grew up in South Africa during apartheid, locked out of all-white schools as an Asian. In his first job as a doctor, he got half the pay of white doctors. He moved on to Canada and later Los Angeles, making a home — as an Asian African American — in one of the most diverse places in the world.

There's a telling irony in this new publisher. He cuts through the lies of the modern liberal mindset about poverty, race, and class. This doctor came from a tough, troubled background, yet accomplished so much. He would have fallen into a "victim class" according to many reporters.

But he was no victim. He has done great deeds, and maybe his final effort will be shuttering the Los Angeles Times for good.

He said he wanted to grow the paper, that he believes in compassion and consideration, and that the business model is quality, and that the newspaper's role in the community is vital. He wants The Times to be a beacon, a barrier against the tides of fake news, a voice of the West and beyond.

Soon-Shiong is concerned about fake news. How about calling it what it really is--lies? If he wants to protect "The West", then the paper needs a decidedly conservative tilt.

But will there be anything close to that? What community does the new publisher hope to target?

Was this a hoax?

Right after Soon-Shiong said the newspaper is a public service in the private sector, I wondered if he'd pull off a mask to reveal the face of a Tribune or Tronc executive.

But it didn't happen, and it was nice, after years of casualties, to hear someone talk about rebuilding locally, nationally and internationally.

Does the Good Doctor have any business experience or business sense? I have a feeling that he is going to discontinue print workings entirely and move to an entirely digital experience.

Dying of thirst, we wanted to drink the Kool-Aid, even after Soon-Shiong shocked the room with news that the home office is moving to El Segundo, with a satellite office downtown.

Talk is cheap, though, as we were repeatedly reminded by previous owners.

We'll work hard. We'll hope for the best.

We'll see.

I can't kid you. We've lost tons of knowledge and experience over the years. But what's left is a lot of talent, hunger, young energy and diversity, and a fighting spirit that led to formation of a union to take on the evil deeds of corporate thugs and beat a drum on pay disparities. Here's hoping Soon-Shiong comes through on the promise to grow the paper's staff and reach, because the city and state need more watchdogs, more eyes and ears in places where today there is no witness to the daily dramas that shape our lives.

The buzz word "Diversity" emerges out of the paragraph. Even Steve Lopez has been taken in by the dissimulation. This is the final standard, a newspaper office filled with people who just happen to have different shades of skin color. Whatever happened to judging people--and their reporting--by their content?

I feel like I was in hospice and a new doctor said hold on, don't plan the funeral just yet. With appreciation, I thought back on how I almost ended up in an entirely different line of work.

So much histrionics. This is not a death for the reading public, but an expansion and an opportunity for real journalism which exposes waste, fraud, corruption, and the like.