New Journalism 2025 – another person flees from the LA Times

On December 5, 2024, attorney/journalist Harry Litman explained in his newly launched Substack column why he couldn’t work for the Los Angeles Times any more, even though he’s been contributing to the paper for more than 15 years, and still loves doing it. 

For the past three years in particular, Litman has been the paper’s senior legal columnist, bringing readers essays that benefit from his breadth of knowledge and experience in the legal world, all of which made his columns a worthwhile read, wherever the reader stood on the issue in question.

A glance at Litman’s bio shows that, among other positions, Litman served as a deputy Attorney General under Janet Reno, in the U.S. Department of Justice, then was appointed by then president Bill Clinton as the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania. Early in his career, Litman clerked for legendary U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, and later for Justice Anthony Kennedy. At present, in addition to his journalism, et al, Litman teaches constitutional law at U.C.L.A. and U.C.S.D, and previously taught at Georgetown, Rutgers, University of Pittsburgh, and UC Berkeley, and…anyway, you get the picture

Now his columns will live on Substack, where Litman is gathering more readers daily.

You can also find him other places. He’s the creator and host of the “Talking Feds” podcast and he’s a regular commentator on MSNBC, CNN and CBS News.

In any case, as of last week, Litman’s name has been added to the list of gifted journalists who, in recent days and weeks, felt they could find no ethical way to handle their relationship with the Los Angeles Times other than resignation, thanks to the actions of the paper’s owner.

This list includes Robert Greene, editorial writer for the LA Times for 18 years, whose work repeatedly and measurably changed things for the better in the city, and the county, and the state that he covered for nearly two decades. (Greene was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2021 for a series of editorials that advanced the cause of criminal-justice reform.)

After his exit, Greene published an essay for the Atlantic in which he wrote that “one can reasonably question the value of endorsements.” Yet in this instance, according to Greene, the timing suggested that LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire doctor who purchased the publication in 2018 for $500 million, along with the other suddenly-non-endorsing newspaper owner, the Washington Post’s Jeff Bezos, were “preparing for a possible Trump victory by signaling a willingness to accommodate the coming administration rather than resist it.”

Like Greene, Marial Garza, the former leader of the LA Times editorial board, resigned after Soon-Shiong blocked the board’s decision to endorse Kamala Harris at the last possible minute, even though the newspaper’s editorial board had endorsed a candidate in every presidential election since it backed Barack Obama in 2008.

Matters were not helped when the paper’s owner reportedly lied about his interaction with his ed board, when he announced the spiking of the endorsement.

“I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not okay with us being silent,” Garza told the Columbia Journalism Review in an interview.

 “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up.”

And now Harry Litman, who closed his Substack announcement by quoting former editorial editor, Mariel Garza: “I want to make it clear that I am not OK with us being silent. In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up.”

On the topic of standing up, just to be clear, back at the Los Angeles Times there are many extremely hardworking, skilled, ethical, and— in a great many cases—spectacularly talented journalists, columnists, and editors who are doing their own version of standing up by, for the moment, still putting out a newspaper, while wondering how long they can hold on.

We owe them mountains of gratitude for doing so.

Oh, and while we’re on the topic, if you subscribe to the LA Times please don’t cancel your subscription, as that will only hurt the people we need to support.

In the meantime, during a recent podcast appearance with former Republican strategist Scott Jennings, Soon-Shiong told Jennings that his newest project is the creation of a “bias meter” in order to to measure the  “bias’ of every story that comes out of the 45-Pulitzer-prize-winning newspaper, which he owns but seems not to understand.

Welcome to New Journalism, version 2025