With trust in the news media at deep lows, Los Angeles Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong is calling for a more tempered approach to covering political matters at his newspaper — even in the opinion section.
On social media, however, Soon-Shiong has posted repeatedly in support of President Trump's pick to oversee the Department of Health and Human Services. That would be Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic who has spread false claims about public health.
"I truly believe [Kennedy] has the American public's best interests at heart," Soon-Shiong tweeted Tuesday in a post he pinned to the top of his account on X, formerly Twitter, for much of last week. It was one of 18 messages promoting Kennedy that Soon-Shiong — a billionaire surgeon and medical inventor — posted over the course of four days, which included Kennedy's confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill.
Soon-Shiong attacked Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., for "grandstanding," writing that she was "why Americans are so tired about our politicians." He echoed a characterization of Caroline Kennedy as "malicious" for criticizing her cousin.
Soon-Shiong dismissed accounts that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. worked to undermine support for vaccines in American Samoa right before a measles outbreak, calling them "misinformation."
In 2019, under Soon-Shiong's ownership, one of the paper's columnists wrote that Kennedy had been "a walking health hazard" there.
The Los Angeles Times' current news coverage doesn't reflect the tenor of Soon-Shiong's posts, either, even though his X account identifies him as the paper's executive chairman. It has no publisher.
On Friday, however, the author of an opinion piece on Kennedy said the L.A. Times had edited his draft in such a way that, when published, reflected favorably on Kennedy — something he did not intend.
The piece, featuring a photo of Kennedy, was entitled, "Trump's healthcare disruption could pay off — if he pushes real reform."
The author, Eric Reinhart, had initially proposed a very different headline: "RFK Jr.'s Wrecking Ball Won't Fix Public Health."
The final version also did not include the concluding passage of Reinhart's original draft, which argued that Kennedy's "egomaniacal disregard for scientific evidence... seeks to use the law itself to inflict preventable death" on millions of Americans.
The L.A. Times' opinion editors gutted his piece by removing his caustic assessment of the nominee, says Reinhart, a Chicago-based social psychologist and physician who has previously written for the New York Times and The Nation magazine among other publications.
He tells NPR he does not begrudge the editing process in general. The editors struck from the same passage a tendentious connection between Kennedy and the man accused of killing UnitedHealthcare's CEO. (Reinhart had argued that they were both a response to corruption in the health care system.) Reinhart says that editorial choice was reasonable, but deleting the critique of Kennedy altogether was not.
"You do not change the author's fundamental intent, the fundamental argument of the author," Reinhart tells NPR. "I literally did not find out about it until after it went to press."
A former editor notes Soon-Shiong retweeted false claims
As published, Reinhart says, the opinion piece "could easily be turned by the owner of the paper to suggest that it is an endorsement of RFK and of Trump's health care plans, which it is not."
Indeed, Soon-Shiong did tweet it out, adding that Kennedy "is our best chance" for "real reform." The next day, the paper published an op-ed arguing that Kennedy's Democratic critics were hypocrites.
In a statement given to NPR by a spokesperson, the L.A. Times said its opinion editors work with op-ed contributors to edit pieces for length, clarity and accuracy, among other things. "No op-ed pieces are published, as edited, without the permission of the author," the spokesperson said. "That includes the op-ed written by Eric Reinhart." Reinhart says that he did not see the piece in its final incarnation before it ran.
Writing last week in the Columbia Journalism Review, former L.A. Times editor of the editorial pages Jim Newton noted that Soon-Shiong had retweeted false claims debunked by the paper itself as he castigated Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass for her handling of the recent deadly wildfires there.
"He's made himself into a joke," Newton wrote. "Sadly, he risks dragging his paper down with him."
Arrived as a financial savior of journalism
Soon-Shiong rescued the L.A. Times in 2018 from corporate owners who had cut it to the bone and invested money to revive it. The newsroom saw him then as a savior.
In recent months he has emerged with strong views that have been seen as a slap in the face by many of those who work for him. He has criticized how journalism works, how his own paper has operated and the media's coverage of Trump.
"The nation is severely polarized," Soon-Shiong told NPR in late December. "If you disagree with one side or the other, it is very aggressively discounted or ignored."
There is a real opportunity for the L.A. Times to help heal the nation, he argued, by enabling "all voices to be heard, but to be heard in a sort of very factual, honest way."
After leading the paper relatively quietly for over six years, Soon-Shiong set off sparks last fall with the decision to kill a presidential endorsement — already drafted — of then-Vice President Kamala Harris.
His editorials editor and several other opinion writers resigned. Nearly 20,000 people canceled their digital subscriptions in a matter of days — a record number for the paper, if a pittance compared to the 300,000 who canceled their Washington Post subscriptions when its owner, Jeff Bezos, made the same move.
Soon-Shiong openly and successfully campaigned for Trump-friendly CNN pundit Scott Jennings to join his editorial board and says others are in the works. Soon-Shiong also suggested an AI-generated "bias-o-meter" should appear next to every L.A. Times news article and opinion piece. (He appears now to be suggesting it will complement opinion pieces.)
Trump pressures the press
Both in and out of office, Trump has used the courts and the levers of government to pressure the media. ABC News agreed to pay his foundation $15 million to resolve one case that media law experts believed the network could win; Meta agreed to pay $25 million to settle another.
Meanwhile, CBS is giving the Federal Communications Commission the unedited transcript of a 60 Minutes interview after the chairman demanded it, while the network's parent company is in talks to settle a Trump suit over the same interview, much to the dismay of journalists there. Legal observerssay the case is flimsy. The proposed acquisition of CBS parent Paramount comes before the FCC for review because it involves the transfer of the company's local television stations.
Soon-Shiong made his fortunes as a medical innovator and has his own interests in front of federal regulators. He sought to play a role in advising Trump on health during the president's first term and he has myriad patents up for review by government officials. He had patents approved in the waning days of the Biden administration and in the first days of Trump's second term.
Soon-Shiong praised Trump's response to the recent Southern California wildfires and affirmed Trump adviser and X owner Elon Musk's laudatory tweets about Trump's order of the release of water from California dams. The paper's reporting suggested that was risky and harmful to the state's farmers.
In his interview with NPR in December, Soon-Shiong dismissed the idea that he was trying to cozy up to Trump and the White House by making the decision to kill the endorsement or in his new approach to posting on social media, which included affirming comments about Trump and Kennedy.
"We have not, as a board, met with Kamala Harris"
"I got a call that we had a pre-packaged draft of endorsing Kamala Harris," he recounted. "I said, 'Well, that is surprising. We have not, as a board, met with Kamala Harris'.... I don't think it is appropriate for us to make an endorsement as though we are an echo chamber for a candidate." Soon-Shiong said he understood Trump's outlook through conversations they had as he entered his first presidential term.
Soon-Shiong said, in order to be fair to both candidates, the paper should take two pages and, rather than make an endorsement, detail the "factual activities" of the two major nominees for readers to evaluate.
On social media posts, he has indicated the paper's editorial support for Mayor Bass was a mistake.
Newspaper owners and publishers are typically involved in making or approving endorsements. Harris, however, was a known quantity to the Los Angeles Times and its readers; she had been previously elected to statewide office as California's attorney general and as U.S. senator.
Even so, Soon-Shiong said it was of paramount importance to set out the dueling records — Harris in the Biden administration against Trump's first term — and to meet face-to-face with candidates. In an earlier incarnation, the paper had been part of the state's Republican establishment and had helped lift Richard Nixon to national prominence. In recent years, the paper's editorial stance became more liberal.
Soon-Shiong conceded that the paper's editorial board had not met with Biden before endorsing him in the 2020 race. He said he had been tied up in trying to combat Covid-19. At the paper, Soon-Shiong developed strong protocols urging masking, social distancing and vaccinations.
Trump was surrounded by tech titans during his inauguration, including Musk, Bezos, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google's parent company chief Sundar Pichai. Soon-Shiong, who reportedly sought a top health position under Trump at the outset of his first term, tweeted a series of links to the paper's live stream of the ceremony.
"The cynical argument assumes I have a bad relationship with President Trump and therefore I have to fix it," Soon-Shiong said. "That's the cynical view — exactly what I'm trying to stop."
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