Has Dr Pat Soon-Shiong Been Redpilled?

“Competence matters”: LA Times owner says that it was a “mistake” for his paper to endorse Karen Bass for Mayor in 2022pic.twitter.com/Y6btIn2dW7

— Rantingly (@rantinglydotcom) January 13, 2025

Mark Halperin had Dr Patrick Soon-Shiong, currently best known as the owner of the Los Angeles Times, on his Morning Meeting 2WAY show yesterday morning for an extended interview, along with his co-hosts Sean Spicer and Dan Turrentine. For all rhe hoopla, there wasn't much to it: Dr Soon-Shiong is best known for vetoing the Times editorial board's decision to endorse Kamala for president last November, then asking CNN conservative commentator Scott Jennings to join the same editorial board.

More recently, as we see above, he's said it was a “mistake” for his paper to endorse Karen Bass for Mayor in 2022, which he repeated in the Halperin interview. And that's just about it. What's the big deal? Wikipedia says Jennings "worked in the George W. Bush administration and has been described as an adviser to Senator Mitch McConnell." The man is hardly a firebrand.

Beyond that, Soon-Shiong has owned the LA Times since 2018. Why is he making these changes only now? Beyond that, according to the link,

In 2020, Soon-Shiong blocked the editorial board from making any endorsement in the Democratic presidential primaries, overruling its intended endorsement of Elizabeth Warren; the paper did endorse Biden in the general election.

During Soon-Shiong's ownership of the Los Angeles Times, his daughter, Nika Soon-Shiong, became interested in the newspaper and sought to influence coverage, in both the newsroom and opinion pages. Many Times staffers expressed alarm at the younger Soon-Shiong's activity, which they viewed as meddling, including privately and publicly contacting staffers to advocate her views.

As it happens, Nika Soon-Shiong has her own Wikipedia entry.

Nika Soon-Shiong (born February 26, 1993) is an American politician and activist who served as a Public Safety Commissioner of West Hollywood from 2021 to 2022. She is the founder and Executive Director of the Fund for Guaranteed Income and was also part of the Compton Pledge and Long Beach Pledge guaranteed income programs.

Guaranteed income? Sounds a little woozy to me. During her time as a Public Safety Commissioner of West Hollywood,

As a commissioner representing concerns of the citizens, she questioned policing in the city. Soon-Shiong was met with backlash for this, with [West Hollywood council member Lindsey] Horvath responding to the backlash against Soon-Shiong saying it was "rooted in racism". In June 2022, the West Hollywood City Council voted to reduce the number of sheriffs in the city and replace them with unarmed security guards, a move which Soon-Shiong called "pragmatic and fiscally responsible", but said it "could have gone further."

It's worth noting that the questioning from Halperin, Spicer, and Turrentine was generally fawning and didn't mention his daughter's far-left politics or her own meddling at the Times.

While I mentioned an LA Times story favorably in last Saturday's post because, unlike any other media coverage, it gave a timeline and hard specifics of the so-called "Sunset Fire" that threw into question the other sensationalist coverage, the Times itself hasn't provided general coverage of the fires that even its own opinion writer wished it would:

Once we reached our destination I began what would turn into a 24-hour obsession with fire maps — on The Times website, the Watch Duty app, protect.genasys.com. None of which told me what I wanted to know: How fast was the fire moving toward my home and those of my friends and neighbors?

In fact, it took Fox News a week finally to put up the sort of map people had been wanting to see, not the Times (click in the image for a larger view; there's also more info at the link):

In fact, the Halperin interview had me scratching my head. When the Chandler family owned the Times, especially during the Norman Chandler era, there was a sense of community responsibility that went with publishing a regional paper. Indeed, there was something of a consensus among influential figures, certainly the Chandlers, but others like H F Ahmanson, the Disneys, the Gettys, and Leo S Bing, on what was good for the region -- and this would have included a reliable water supply and effective fire protection.

What puzzled me most about the Soon-Shiong interview was Patrick's apparent shallowness about the continuing need for this kind of leadership. Instead, he just makes glib statements on how “competence matters”. Where does he fit in? Where does the Times fit in? If our current leaders aren't competent, what are influential citizens going to do about it? I'm getting no sense of direction.

Instead he hears people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg making noises, and he thinks maybe he should look like he's making the same sort of noises -- but there's no there there.