The Puppeteers Abandon Kamala

There are a couple of bellwether items in this morning's news. Most intriguing: Los Angeles Times editorials editor quits when owner won’t endorse Harris:

Los Angeles Times Editorials Editor Mariel Garza quit on Wednesday, weeks after the paper’s owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, announced it would not endorse any candidate this cycle.

With Election Day two weeks away, Garza took issue with her employer shifting away from the tradition of endorsing presidential candidates. The paper has backed the Democratic candidate since 2008. The Los Angeles Times is the biggest newspaper in Vice President Kamala Harris’s home state of California and endorsed Harris when she ran for the Senate in 2016 and for the office of attorney general before that.

On one hand, this is not your grandfather's LA Times:

The news shook Southern California like an earthquake: Los Angeles Times, family owned for 118 years, was being sold to Chicago-based Tribune Co. . . . On March 11, there were three great American newspaper families: the Sulzbergers of the New York Times, the Grahams of the Washington Post and the Chandlers of Los Angeles's Times Mirror Co. A day later, there were two.

. . . The family patriarch, Gen. Harrison Otis, bought the newspaper in 1886. In the succeeding years, he and his son-in-law, Harry Chandler, bought most of Southern California -- at least the parts worth having. At the turn of the century, it was an Otis-Chandler syndicate that quietly purchased tens of thousands of acres of parched farmland in the San Fernando Valley, knowing that the fix was in to steal water rights from Owens Valley farmers 200 miles to the north.

As the Chandlers and their newspaper gained influence, every up-and-coming politician in the Southland made sure to kiss their ring. Richard Nixon owed his career to favorable notices in the Times. Harry's son, Norman, and his activist wife, Dorothy, transformed Los Angeles into a cultural mecca, creating the Los Angeles Music Center and luring world-class talent to play there. "No Easterner can understand what it has meant in California to be a Chandler," David Halberstam wrote in a famous run-on sentence from his media history, The Powers That Be, "for no single family dominates any major region of the country as the Chandlers have dominated California, it would take in the East a combination of the Rockefellers and the Sulzbergers to match their power and influence."

However, the LA Times was sold again in 2018:

The Los Angeles Times, the largest newspaper in California, is being sold by the news company Tronc to the pharmaceutical billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, The Washington Post reported.

. . . Soon-Shiong, who is 63, would also acquire The San Diego Union-Tribune in the deal, according to the Post.

Soon-Shiong, who was born in South Africa to parents of Chinese descent, is best known for his high-profile crusade to fight cancer by matching genetic drugs to particular tumors through a high-powered database. But he has recently expanded his assets to include management over seven hospitals, two public companies, and a stake of the Los Angeles Lakers, among other holdings.

Soon-Shiong has also been moving in political circles, having worked on a blue-ribbon panel for former Vice President Joe Biden’s “Cancer Moonshot.” After the election of President Donald Trump, Soon-Shiong was reportedly considered for multiple administration roles, including the head of the National Institutes of Health.

Not covered in either ownership story linked above is the political move of the Chandler family from Nixon Republican under Norman Chandler (1899-1973) to leftist Democrat under his widow, Dorothy (1901-1997). This reflected the general political realignment of the post-Civil War industrial family fortunes over the same period. Through their political donations, as well as their control of corporate media, philanthropy, and univeristy endowments, they reflected and drove the overall cultural move to the left.

In this, politicians, especially leftist Democrats and moderate Republicans, served largely as their puppets, and this formula succeeded until the advent of Trump on one hand and the failure of Biden as a puppet on the other. A major outcome of Trump's success as a politician has been to realign a new generation of influential wealth, such as Elon Musk, away from the traditional post-Civil War industrialist agenda. It should be no surprise that many members of the new elite, like Musk and Soon-Shiong, don't originally come from the US themselves.

If nothing else, Soon-Shiong isn't just limning the political postures of the Sulzbergers or the Grahams, and we can only surmise that the puppet politicians that were routinely controlled by the traditional media families no longer meet his own needs.

But another phenomenon late in this year's presidential campaign has been the effective abandonment of Harris by other corporate media outlets. This includes Fox, whose interview of Harris by Bret Baier had the effect the Murdochs had previously hoped to gain by having Megyn Kelly interview Trump in 2020 -- namely, effectiverly ending his campaign -- and now CNN: Anderson Cooper Gives Kamala Harris a Bruising CNN Town Hall:

Cooper asked Harris why she pledged to reintroduce the bipartisan border bill if she won in November, considering her past opposition to a border wall. The Democratic nominee replied, "I'm not afraid of good ideas where they occur."

The CNN host then said, "So you don't think it's stupid anymore?" Harris, referring to Trump, replied, "I think what he did and how he did it did not make much sense because he actually didn't do much of anything."

The Trump War Room, an account affiliated with Trump's presidential campaign, posted a clip of the exchange on X, formerly Twitter, where it received more than 250,000 views.

The account also posted another clip from the town hall, which has been viewed more than 220,000 times. In the video, Cooper asked Harris about "record border crossings" in 2022 and 2023 before President Joe Biden issued an executive order in June 2024 that placed limits on the number of asylum-seekers allowed across the U.S.-Mexico border.

The host questioned why the administration didn't issue such an order in previous years. Harris replied, "Because we were working with Congress and hoping that actually we could have a long-term fix to the problem instead of a short-term fix."

Kamla's problem is that even the friendliest media interviews, like the one on The View, can't make her look good. Instead, like Joe Biden, she's turning into a defective puppet, something the puppeteers just can't use, and they've discarded her.