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.
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| 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 Andrรฉs 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.”
