Two more LA Times editors quit after owner calls off Kamala Harris endorsement

Two more top editors at the Los Angeles Times resigned after the newspaper’s billionaire owner stopped the publication’s expected endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris.Editorial board members Robert Greene and Karin Klein quit Thursday, joining editorial page editor Mariel Garza, over the decision by biotech entrepreneur Patrick Soon-Shiong to stay silent about the upcoming election, according to reports.Greene, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for the Times, wrote editorials about drought, criminal justice reform, policing, mental health and Los Angeles County government. Klein wrote about education, environment, food and science.They followed their boss Garza out the door after she left Wednesday because Soon-Shiong blocked the editorial board midway through its preparation to endorse Harris, Semafor first reported.“I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not okay with us being silent,” Garza said in an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review.“In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up.

This is how I’m standing up.” Hugo Martin, a member of the unit council for the LA Times guild, told The Hollywood Reporter that “the latest resignations of talented journalists is a huge loss for the newsroom and the editorial board in particular” and that “we stand by our colleagues who have been wrongly and unfairly blamed for this decision not to endorse.”In her interview with CJR, Garza said that the paper’s editorial board had been ready to endorsee Harris for president and that she had already begun writing an outline of an editorial announcing the decision.While the editorial page editor acknowledged that she didn’t believe the endorsement would sway the already liberal readership of the LA Times, she said the endorsement was important because “this is a point in time where you speak your conscience no matter what.”She said after a series of editorials about the dangers of re-electing former Presiden...