How a Meddling Socialist Trust-Fund Baby Killed the L.A. Times

Nika Soon-Shiong has helped run her rich daddy’s newspaper ... right into the ground.

This morning, I shared with some friends who still work in newspapers — the once-cherished media medium that is slowly dying —an article that explores the downside of billionaires owning newspapers.

The article details the surprising departure of Kevin Merida from the Los Angeles Times, which earlier this week laid off at least 115 people, including a quarter of its newsroom.

Merida—a respected media figure who over the decades had hung his hat at the Milwaukee Journal, ESPN and the Washington Post among others before joining the Times in 2021 as executive editor—apparently couldn’t handle the daughter of the newspaper’s billionaire owner, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong.

Via The Hollywood Reporter:

What went wrong? And why so quickly?

Some sources point to friction with Soon-Shiong’s 30-year-old daughter, Nika Soon-Shiong, who in recent years has apparently appointed herself the paper’s unofficial ombudsman, publicly upbraiding journalists when their politics don’t fall in line with her own progressive thinking.

The most recent clash — and the one that might have been the last straw for Merida — involved the paper’s coverage of the war in the Middle East. According to insiders, a group of senior editors approached Merida to express outrage that more than three dozen Times reporters had signed a Nov. 9 statement severely critical of Israel’s invasion of Gaza but barely mentioning the Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel launched from the Hamas-controlled territory. Insiders say Merida initially was reluctant to insert himself into the matter but decided to restrict, for 90 days, signers of the petition from participating in future coverage of the conflict. That decision reportedly did not go over well with Patrick Soon-Shiong, and couldn’t have thrilled Nika, either; she has made her pro-Palestinian views clear on her Twitter feed, where she has pinned a picture of the Palestinian flag and posted instructions to journalists to refer to Israel as an “apartheid state,” and even followed (and frequently “liked”) Quds News Network, a news agency often accused of being affiliated with Hamas.  

Yikes. Now, I’m not going to dive into the whole Israel-Palestinian conflict. That is a conversation for another day.

For now, I want to focus on Merida’s response to this thorny situation.

Merida’s reported reluctance to “insert to insert himself into the matter” regarding the war in Gaza sounds like good sense…at first. But in some ways it was hard for him to sit this one out. His hand was forced to some degree by the fact that at least some of the people who signed the letter in question were reporters covering the war in Gaza.

Journalists have a responsibility to cover events objectively, and this is more important when it comes to wars than just about anything else I can think of. So sending a signal to reporters that journalists are not supposed to be in the business of taking sides—they are not activists—was probably a prudent (and courageous) step by Merida, at least in terms of journalist integrity.

Unfortunately, it put him at odds with Soon-Shiong’s leftist daughter, who is an activist—it’s right there in her Wiki page—and highly sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.

If Ms. Soon-Shiong wants to be an activist, I have no problem with that.

But from what I can tell, she has little to no experience in the newspaper business—and no business telling Merida how to run the L.A. Times.

In fact, in her 30 years on this planet, Ms. Soon-Shiong’s appears to have accomplished strikingly little.

She’s notched a couple degrees (African studies and international relations) from elite universities, served on some boards, and written a few (poorly written) op-eds for a fringe non-profit media organization. Oh, she’s also working on another degree (a PhD from Oxford) and runs a small non-profit that advocates taking people’s money and giving it to the people she wants (“equity-based universal basic income,” she calls it).

Some people may be impressed by these accomplishments. I’m not.

In fact, Ms. Soon-Shiong’s life reminds me of a real-life version of American Pastoral, Philip Roth’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book that tells the story of a successful immigrant businessman who achieved the American dream—only to see his beloved daughter Merry radicalized in America’s university system during the era of the Vietnam War.

I can’t help but wonder if Ms. Soon-Shiong, in all her years here, has actually created anything.

Either way, you can now add a new item to her resume: she’s helped run her rich daddy’s newspaper right into the ground.

P.S. If you haven’t read American Pastoral, you really should.