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The editorial chief for the Los Angeles Times resigned Wednesday because the publication’s owner wanted to show bipartisanship by ending its editorial board’s years-long tradition of endorsing a candidate for president.

According to the New York Times, the publication has endorsed a Democratic president in every presidential race since 2008 when President Barack Obama made history as the nation’s first non-white president, and the board was ready to endorse the person who could become the nation’s first woman and woman of color, Vice President Kamala Harris. Unfortunately, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, a billionaire who acquired the L.A. Times in 2018, has put a stop to it, deciding that, this year, the paper won’t endorse a candidate at all. That’s why the now-former leader of its editorial board, Mariel Garza, is out.

From the NY Times:

Ms. Garza submitted her resignation letter to the paper’s executive editor, Terry Tang, who oversees both the newsroom and the opinion department. Ms. Tang came to the paper after previously serving as an editor at The New York Times for 20 years.

Dr. Soon-Shiong, who bought The Los Angeles Times in 2018 for $500 million, pushed back on Ms. Garza’s version of events. In a social media post on Wednesday, he said that the editorial board had not followed through on a directive to “draft a factual analysis of all the POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE policies by EACH candidate during their tenures at the White House, and how these policies affected the nation.”

“With this clear and non-partisan information side-by-side, our readers could decide who would be worthy of being President for the next four years,” he said. “Instead of adopting this path as suggested, the Editorial Board chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision.”

Here’s the thing: A lot of supposedly progressive new sites have come under criticism for helping to normalize Donald Trump in the name of non-partisanship. They won’t call him racist, despite the fact that he consistently spreads white supremacist-style hate speech against Black and Latino migrants, he tried to disenfranchise mostly Black voters with his election fraud propaganda, he has promised to fight fictional “anti-white” oppression if he’s elected, and because he spearheaded the propaganda-reliant attack on critical race theory, DEI and non-whitewashed Black history. (And this is just a short list of examples of his racism, honestly.) They won’t say flat out that he tried to cancel democracy with his “stop the steal” campaign. They won’t say, without equivocating, that his lies directly inspired and instigated Jan. 6. They won’t say that he lies about crime in America, the economy, the police, pet-eating Haitians, and — well — essentially everything, actually. Media publications treat it all like it’s normal in order to appear at least somewhat unbiased, but that’s not journalism — that’s just plain patronizing the general public.

So, Soon-Shiong wanted his publication to ride the fence, and that’s why he wouldn’t allow the board to endorse a president. To justify his decision, he accused the board of not doing what he tasked it with, which is basically just to write another political analysis — which has nothing to do with the decision not to make an endorsement.

“What he outlines in that tweet is not an endorsement, or even an editorial,” Garza wrote in a text message to the Times.

Garza isn’t the only one at the L.A. Times who feels this way. In fact, top members of the publication’s union, the Los Angeles Times Guild, said in a statement Wednesday night that they were “deeply concerned” about Soon-Shiong’s decision.

“We are even more concerned that he is now unfairly assigning blame to Editorial Board members for his decision not to endorse,” the union said.

More from the NY Times:

In her resignation letter, which Columbia Journalism Review published in full, Ms. Garza said it mattered that the largest newspaper in California declined to endorse “in a race this important. And it matters that we won’t even be straight with people about it.”

“It makes us look craven and hypocritical, maybe even a bit sexist and racist,” she wrote. “How could we spend eight years railing against Trump and the danger his leadership poses to the country, and then fail to endorse the perfectly decent Democrat challenger — who we previously endorsed for the U.S. Senate?”

Exactly.