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Long before its current owner embarked on a campaign of vanity and self-regard, the Los Angeles Times has weathered its ownership.
Founded in the 1880s, when Los Angeles was a mere pueblo in a floodplain, the Times served the interests of its family stewards. Harrison Gray Otis purchased the paper in 1884 and bequeathed it to his son-in-law Harry Chandler in 1917; Chandler, in turn, handed it over to his son Norman in 1936. They were businessmen, not journalists, and their great project was the creation of modern Los Angeles. The Times was an instrument in that long campaign.
The Chandlers owned land in the San Fernando Valley, and that land needed water to be valuable, so their paper supported the construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. Voters approved the bond. The water arrived from the Owens Valley, where some farmers lost out. But the city—and its family-owned newspaper—did just fine. Los Angeles acquired room to grow, thanks in large measure to the influence of its paper.
A century after the aqueduct opened, a copy of the front page reporting the news of that day still hung in the editorial-board room of the Times, a prickly reminder that private profit and public interest sometimes do reinforce each other.
The paper’s dominance in civic life was not limited to water. Unions were bad for the owners of the Los Angeles Times, so the Los Angeles Times championed a nonunion city. That got the paper bombed in 1910, but the bombing only reinforced the Times’ antipathy to organized labor. The slogan “True Industrial Freedom” was etched into the paper’s headquarters, and its editorial pages carried that message to the public. Egged on by the Times, Los Angeles grew up without significant union presence, deliberately in contrast to San Francisco. It wasn’t great for workers, but it suited owners, including those of the Times.
As the city entered the first rank of American metropolises, the Times’ owners feared that its evolution would be threatened by a reputation for lawlessness. Public order was thus considered essential to the prosperity of the city and its paper, even if that meant that the Los Angeles Police Department had to be protected from certain types of scrutiny. The Los Angeles Times offered a shield, and the LAPD used it to maintain control, even at the cost of violating constitutional rights and fomenting resentments.
As late as the 1960s, the LAPD would develop its annual budget and share it first with the owners of the Times before bothering to run it across the street to City Hall. Ed Davis, who went on to become chief of the LAPD, told me that story when he was in retirement, still amused that the Times had wielded that degree of influence.
In those and other respects, the Times of old was a paper that put its owners’ interests first, that imagined that what was good for the Chandlers must be good for the city. It built some great things—and harmed some others. It did not foster great journalism.
Indeed, the Times in those years was a newspaper that great journalists mostly avoided. At least until Otis Chandler took command, in 1960—and even for some time after that—the Times was regarded as a family mouthpiece, advancing the fortunes of the politicians it favored—Richard Nixon was the most prominent of those—and championing the causes it cared about, from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to the value of Southern California real estate.
But Otis Chandler’s tenure broke that reign. He saw the Times as something more than a mouthpiece. He envisioned a journalistic enterprise of the first order, and he built it. The paper grew in size and ambition. It recruited some of the nation’s best journalists and treated them well, giving them space to write thoughtful stories, protection to probe and investigate, and creature comforts, too: Times reporters were paid well and, famously, flew first-class. Once at the Times, few good journalists left. The paper’s nickname? The Velvet Coffin.
Under Otis Chandler’s leadership, the Times finally joined the first rank of American newspapers. On any given day, its report stretched around the world, with dispatches from its vast foreign staff to critical coverage of local government. By the time Otis left the building, his family’s paper was one of the greatest on earth—and one of the most profitable, too.
Which brings us to Patrick Soon-Shiong. The billionaire doctor has owned the Los Angeles Times since 2018, and he deserves credit for rescuing the paper from the clutches of the bandits who preceded him. That notorious bunch called themselves Tronc and had embarked on a campaign to diminish the paper’s reach and ambition, detaching it from its responsibilities to Los Angeles. Easy for them, since they were based in Chicago and consumed by the bottom line, without even nominal regard for the work of newspapers in bolstering their communities.
Soon-Shiong paid them to go away and saved the Times from a bleak fate. He also should be appreciated for what he did next: he quietly invested millions of dollars from his immense fortune to patch a few of its holes and keep the paper afloat.
The Times today produces some great stories. Its reporters write well on politics and the environment and a few other subjects; it produces occasional gems of literary merit. The performance of its news staff over the past two weeks, since the Palisades and Altadena caught fire in early January, has offered a reminder of the courage, resilience, and ability of reporters who have had to endure so very much—and despite their leadership rather than because of it.
Meanwhile, however, Soon-Shiong has distracted from their achievements with his relentless determination to make himself the story. On X and in interviews, he spouts off on presidential politics and the leadership of California and Los Angeles. He offers his views on public health, where he has some knowledge, and local government, where he does not. It’s as exhausting to watch as it is egotistical of him to perform.
Soon-Shiong’s transition from modest, quiet owner to babbling bloviator first revealed itself to the public last fall, when, after the paper’s editorial board had decided to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for president, he stepped in and blocked it from publishing the piece. Editors failed to convince him of the error of that idea, which he then compounded by blaming the board itself.
Why? Cynics—a/k/a journalists—wondered about his personal or financial stakes in matters that Donald Trump might control, from drug approvals to ambassadorships; the doctor denies any such conflicts. Who knows? Perhaps he is just by nature a sycophant, eager to be patted on the head by a man in power.
The consequences were indisputable. Readers were incensed, with some twenty thousand canceling their subscriptions; talented journalists quit, and Los Angeles overwhelmingly voted for Harris—a trifecta of blowback from Soon-Shiong’s unethical ineptitude.
In the aftermath, Soon-Shiong made pouty noises about being misunderstood and inveighed about the need for balance, seeming not to understand the difference between news coverage and editorial opinion matters—it is worth noting that it’s odd that a newspaper owner would neither read nor understand his own paper. He then veered into cuckoo-ville with yammerings about debuting a “bias meter” to accompany stories. This meter, which exists mostly in his head, would, if rolled out, helpfully alert readers to those articles that they should not trust—but that the Times was nonetheless electing to publish. If there is a journalistic logic in there somewhere, it escapes me.
But okay, anyone can have a bad month. Or two. But then Los Angeles was visited by what may turn out to be the most devastating event in its history, the eruption of fires across the region.
The early days of that event were filled with catastrophe, tension, and grief—the loss of homes on a gigantic scale, neighborhoods leveled, families struggling to escape and survive. Soon-Shiong decided that was the moment to engage in disinformation. “Fires in LA are sadly no surprise, yet the Mayor cut LA Fire Department’s budget by $23M,” he posted on X. “Competence matters,” he added. For a guy who wants to install a “bias meter,” Soon-Shiong’s irony meter seems to be on the fritz.
To its credit, the Times itself debunked that accusation, noting that while the mayor’s initial budget proposal had called for cuts in new equipment purchases, the actual budget eventually passed by the City Council and signed by the mayor increased the department’s budget by 7 percent. The increase included pay raises for existing firefighters and purchases of new equipment.
Good for the Times, but yet another reminder that Soon-Shiong’s meddling makes good reporting harder, not easier.
Rather than explain or apologize, he plowed right along. As the fires spread and thousands were evacuated, Soon-Shiong continued his campaign against the mayor—whom the Los Angeles Times, under his leadership, endorsed, by the way. Last week, he seemed even to lose grasp of spelling and grammar. “looks like Angelina’s are taking action,” he posted on Thursday. “Demand the immediate resignation of Mayor Karen Bass.”
In his post, he promised “we will follow this closely,” presumably a reference to the editorial staff of the paper he owns. That seems to suggest he’s directing coverage, but really, he’s undermining and debasing it.
Here’s something to remember about the family influence of the Chandlers compared with that of Soon-Shiong. The Chandlers earned their place in the civic conversation; Soon-Shiong purchased his. It was in the Chandlers’ interest for Los Angeles to prosper because they understood that the best interests of Los Angeles and those of the Times were inextricable.
Indeed, the Chandler project was unique among the standout American newspaper families. New York was not built by the Sulzbergers, nor Washington by the Grahams. Those families created great newspapers to serve cities that already had their standing. Los Angeles, by contrast, is the city that it is—from its landscape to its race relations—in some measure because of the family that created it, along with its newspaper.
That was not always a roaring success in journalistic terms, and it has not always worn well. It gave too much license to police. It fashioned a landscape that depended on water imports. It erected a civic leadership that was white and Protestant and conservative even as the city became more Latino, liberal, and unionized. The paper’s coverage was boosterish when more critical analyses would have been better for readers.
But, for better or worse, Los Angeles had a paper and owners who did their best to comprehend the city’s best interests. The crowning moment of that enterprise came once Otis Chandler ascended, and the city that his family built at last could count on journalism worthy of the metropolis they imagined into being.
Soon-Shiong is not the rightful heir to any of that. He does not have a voice in civic life because he built a great newspaper. He bought a great newspaper and now thinks it gives him expertise in civic life. It doesn’t.
It is, to state the obvious, impossible to imagine Harrison Gray Otis or Harry Chandler, whatever the depths of their interests or the drive each possessed for riches and influence, behaving as childishly as Soon-Shiong has during these fires. The city is struggling. His staff is performing nobly. He’s shrieking and posting false claims on X.
That’s a step past tragedy and into farce. And that’s what Soon-Shiong has brought the Times to at this point in its history. He’s made himself into a joke. Sadly, he risks dragging his paper down with him.
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