He Quit His Job to Protest the Media Bending to Trump. Here’s What He Thinks the Press Needs to Do Now.
As of next month, we’re going to have a president in the White House who has been uniquely hostile to the press. Donald Trump has threatened to take cable networks who are too critical of him off the air, and to jail reporters who don’t give up their sources.
In the weeks before the presidential election, the billionaire owners of two of the nation’s biggest newspapers—seemingly anticipating a Trump win and wanting to get in his good graces—made some troubling moves. Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos demanded that the paper, for the first time in decades, not endorse anyone for president. It will also cease offering endorsements in future presidential races. And the owner of the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, killed an already-drafted endorsement of Kamala Harris at the last minute.
Soon-Shiong and Bezos both defended their decisions by arguing that this will allow readers to make up their own minds about candidates while also helping their papers mitigate a perception of bias. However, Bezos has a clear conflict of interest. His space company Blue Origin has been competing for government contracts, and Bezos himself spoke with Trump days before his paper announced it would no longer be issuing presidential endorsements. Meanwhile, Soon-Shiong has been making controversial changes at the Times since the election. He said he plans to introduce a “bias meter,” powered by A.I., to accompany stories in the news and opinion sections, and he hired conservative commentator Scott Jennings to sit on the paper’s editorial board.
In response, tens of thousands of readers of both papers ended up canceling their subscriptions. Several frustrated journalists have been resigning.
Harry Litman is an opinion columnist who worked at the L.A. Times for over 15 years and was also a contributing columnist at the Post from 2018–20. He’s one of many journalists who have quit recently over the newsroom’s decision to no longer publish presidential endorsements. After explaining his resignation on his Talking Feds Substack, Litman spoke with Slate about his decision and how he sees the future of journalism under a second Trump administration.
Here’s our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Shirin Ali: At what moment did you decide you wanted to leave the L.A. Times?
Harry Litman: Like a lot of people, including people who read either the Washington Post or the L.A. Times, I was struck and unnerved by the decision to pull the plug on the endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris and to do it in a pretty brutal way. The paper’s editorial page has been giving all kinds of arguments and covering different angles of the political landscape for a couple years, and they led pretty naturally to an endorsement of Harris. But to just decapitate an already drafted endorsement for one candidate struck me as pretty unusual and alarming, especially when it was done around the same time as it happened with the Washington Post, so two of the most prominent papers in the country had done it. This didn’t seem to be motivated by particular policy positions or thinking that the editorial boards had been biased or negligent in some way. It was the fact that we got a president-elect who was threatening the media—threatening pretty much all the guardrails of democracy, the media being a really important one.
So it struck me that the media, at least those papers, blinked at a really important time. From there, there were additional moves by the L.A. Times’ ownership, and it was obvious that the owner wanted to move the editorial direction of the paper, which he characterized expressly on Fox News as “fair and balanced.” It seemed to me that the notion was to curry favor with Trump—I thought the paper’s movements toward Trump weren’t about being more accurate, but rather being more pleasing to the would-be autocrat, and that struck me as really pretty bad, especially in tandem with the other things that Trump is doing.
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