(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) Two well-known American newspapers became more right-wing after the leaders realized they needed to adapt to the recent cultural change that primarily started after Donald Trump won the 2024 election.
The New York Post reported that the Los Angeles Times staffers revealed that Patrick Soon-Shiong, the newspaper’s billionaire owner, demanded that the editorial board “take a break from writing about” Trump.
It was also noted that Soon-Shiong, the physician and entrepreneur who bought the newspaper in 2018, has been recently “meddling” in editors’ work, which has become “more pervasive than previously realized.”
The news source also stated that Soon-Shiong took “a number of previously unreported steps” related to the commentary on Trump.
The New York Times also reported that Soon-Shiong blocked his newspaper from publishing an anti-Trump editorial in which leftists claimed that the Senate should not allow Trump to make recess appointments.
The Post also stated that, according to Terry Tang, executive editor of the newspaper, “several members” of the opinion section criticized Soon-Shiong for “[instituting] a new policy that prohibits editorials containing criticism of the president-elect unless they are presented side-by-side with another opinion piece representing the ‘opposing view.'”
Soon-Shiong also reportedly “required” the editors to email him “the text of every editorial and the name of its writer” ahead of publication.
“Editorial board positions and content have been preemptively censored before publication, and its arguments, headlines and topics subjected to boundaries that did not previously exist,” the memo that Tang received stated.
Among other right-wing decisions that the newspaper made was refusing to endorse former Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, firing the far-left editorial board and hiring conservatives. Soon-Shiong also stated that he plans to add the bias meter to the newspaper’s website in 2025.
Another newspaper that started to lean right politically was the Washington Post. The news source recently published an editorial in which the staff raised concerns about the insufficient evidence behind “gender-transition treatments” for children, such as puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries.
Like the Times, the Post also refused to endorse Harris for president. Soon after that, the newspaper’s owner and founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, stated in an op-ed that he wanted to see more conservative writers working for the newspaper. Additionally, the Post went as far as fact-checking former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and firing one of its senior editors.
