The owner of the Los Angeles Times has been leaning on a veteran Republican who ran a pro-Trump PAC to shape the future of one of the West Coast’s biggest news organizations.
The pharmaceutical billionaire who owns the publication, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, has publicly expressed a desire to revamp the editorial board and appointed Scott Jennings, CNN’s pro-Trump commentator, to a role with the paper. He’s also said he did not want to run a piece criticizing Trump’s nominees for Cabinet roles if the paper did not publish an opposing view as well. (The paper’s unsigned editorials this year have focused exclusively on the dominant local issue — the fires.)
As part of the new strategy, Semafor has learned, Soon-Shiong recently enlisted Eric Beach [inset/aaespeakers.com] to help recruit new voices to join the editorial board and a new opinion forum that the LA Times is forming that will sit alongside it.
A veteran of California Republican politics, Beach ran Great America PAC, the pro-Trump super PAC that supported the Republican presidential candidate in 2016 and 2020, and paid a large FEC fine after accepting a contribution from undercover journalists from the Telegraph posing as representatives of a Chinese donor. Beach also worked to elect Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 2000s.
