by Matt Funicello, RedState:
With the recent news of massive layoffs, an exodus of senior editorial staff, and rumors of additional layoffs looming, some believe that the Los Angeles Times is on the brink of collapse. Last week The Messenger, a relatively new entrant to the news landscape, which was populated by “experienced journalists from POLITICO, the New York Post, the Los Angeles Times, NBC News, Reuters and elsewhere,” suddenly shuttered, and the Wall Street Journal laid off 20 staffers in its Washington, D.C. bureau.
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If you scroll through Twitter/X, some have been cheering these developments, while others are bemoaning them, especially the L.A. Times’ difficulties, believing that some sacred role of bringing the “truth” to people will somehow not be performed in the absence of traditional media sources. But the role of one sector of the news media machine in America was being ignored: independent journalists such as those here at RedState.
The LA Times has been in severe trouble since 2018 when a new billionaire owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, bought the Times and allowed his liberal activist daughter to influence reporting, editorial, and endorsement decisions. However, the Times had been in trouble long before that due to the news media company shedding both paper and print subscribers. As reported by Jen Van Laar, the Times had been losing at least $30 million a year. That alone will eventually kill any company, but for some reason, the Times continued down a path of what more and more people saw as “activist journalism.”
A prime example of activist journalism is when the LA Times editorial staff endorses a far-left activist District Attorney for re-election, even when that DA has turned the city and county of Los Angeles into a dumpster fire of crime, homelessness, and general decline in public safety. Tone-deaf doesn’t even begin to accurately describe the editorial staff’s decision to endorse a person like that – if, in fact, it was the editorial staff’s decision. (Some reports claim that owner Patrick Soon-Shiong’s activist daughter, Nika, was calling the shots on endorsements.) Another example is when the same editorial staff has a member write an article “asking nicely” for people fleeing California not to bad mouth the state to others while admitting in the same article that California has become a bad place to live.
Shortly after Donald Trump announced his candidacy for President of the United States on June 16, 2015, media giants like the Times went on a full-court press to write anything they could find that could negatively affect his candidacy. Stories of the “Russian Collusion” went on for years, and even when the collusion story was finally debunked by the Mueller probe, the Times and others kept it alive. Throughout the Trump presidency, media giants, including the Times, reported on anything about his administration that made Trump look bad. There was an obvious ideological imbalance in the media coverage, something that is not supposed to be there.
The real display of bad-faith reporting and lack of journalistic integrity came with the outbreak of COVID in late 2019. In fact, not only did we see the Times and other news media companies lazily report the news, but we also saw them break a cardinal rule of journalism: Always verify a source and their information. When it came to reporting on the vaccine rollouts under then-President Trump, the Times and others were critical of the pace at which they were developed. They scoffed at the real efficacy of the vaccines and, with questions regarding the origin of the disease, they went into full panic mode. But then, when President Biden took over, the criticism of the vaccines went away, the efficacy claims disappeared, and when the Biden White House issued statements or gave pressers, the Times and others took their word for it and never challenged anyone on the data.
During the first years of COVID, the Times attacked people who questioned the vaccines in any way, even going as far as saying that “mocking” the deaths of people opposed to the vaccine was “necessary.”
