• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, May 4, 2025

Patrick Soon-Shiong, who is reviled by some critics as a “MAGA publisher,” is receiving additional negative publicity. 

On Friday, Ben Mullin of The New York Times posted that Soon-Shiong’s newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, was laying off roughly a dozen employees.  

The total figure appears to be 14. 

That is not a staggering number, certainly nothing like the 100+ employees who lost their jobs at the paper in 2024. But it hurts, especially if you’re one of those who were let go. The New York Times has also offered some buyouts this year. 

The Los Angeles Times reportedly has lost both circulation and advertising, and has been suffering from a revenue drain. This follows, but was probably not solely caused by, Soon-Shiong’s killing of a planned editorial endorsement of Kamala Harris last year. 

When he saw the endorsement, Soon-Shiong recently told Tucker Carlson, “This is unacceptable. And as you can see, because it’s a left lean, they wrote terrible stories about President [Donald] Trump.”

Under Soon-Shiong, the paper has added a so-called “bias” meter to weed out anything resembling an opinion. 

”If a piece takes a stance or is written from a personal perspective, it may be labeled Voices. Any content written from a point of view may be labeled between what’s news and what’s not,” Soon-Shiong wrote.  

The Washington Post has gone in a similar direction under Jeff Bezos, refusing to endorse candidates and overhauling its opinion section so that it now focuses on supporting free markets. 

It makes you wonder: why do billionaires like Soon-Shiong and Bezos want to own a newspaper? Is it an ego trip, or are they truly trying to shape opinion in their liberal cities?  

The only hope for journalists who resist these trends at those papers may be for nonprofits to take them over.