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Red Pilled and Reviled

Staffers at the Los Angeles Times ripped owner Patrick Soon-Shiong in the company's Slack channel after he criticized the staff, according to messages obtained by Status.

Author

Oliver Darcy
February 06, 2025

Los Angeles Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong. (Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)

On the final Monday of December, just as 2024 was coming to a close, Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong convened a meeting with staffers who make up the opinion division of his troubled newspaper. Earlier in the month, opinion staffers had sent a note to Executive Editor Terry Tang, expressing concern over a number of steps that the billionaire owner had taken to meddle in their affairs. Those steps were aimed at making the opinion pages of the West Coast broadsheet friendlier to the MAGA movement, which Soon-Shiong had started making open appeals to. Among them was a highly unusual requirement for columnists to pause writing about Donald Trump.

In an apparent effort to clear the air, a meeting was called. And so, just before ringing in the new year, members of the opinion unit joined a Zoom call with Soon-Shiong to talk things over. The internal meeting, which has gone unreported until now, did not go well. In fact, I'm told that it went quite poorly. Soon-Shiong did most of the talking, according to people familiar with the matter, and he repeatedly…

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The Information Wars

Donald Trump. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Trump's CBS Tirade: Donald Trump took aim at CBS News again Thursday, going so far as to demand the network be banned from broadcasting. His outburst was triggered by CBS releasing the “60 Minutes” transcript of its interview with Kamala Harris, which revealed no wrongdoing by the network. Despite the facts, Trump falsely claimed the interview was “Election-changing ‘stuff,’” accusing CBS of election interference and fraud at a level “never seen before.” He even called for "60 Minutes" to be shut down and the show’s hosts fired. But, as Variety’s Brian Steinberg pointed out, CBS doesn’t even have a broadcast license to revoke. There is also this pesky thing called the First Amendment that guarantees the network the right to free speech, which the right claims to be in favor of.

MAGA Gone Wild: Trump also on Thursday floated a baseless — but unfortunately popular — right-wing conspiracy theory that posited USAID was funding media outlets. That's simply not true. Government agencies have paid outlets such as POLITICO, Axios, and The NYT for subscriptions to their services. That’s far different than providing them grants, which is how it has been framed to audiences in MAGA Media. Trump surely knows that. But he portrayed the situation as…

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