Mariel Garza

Los Angeles, California · Former Editorials Editor, Los Angeles Times · Co-founder, Golden State Report

Career

Mariel Garza is a California journalist and editorial editor who spent 35 years at California news organizations — spanning news reporting, editorial writing, and editorial leadership — and whose October 2024 resignation from the Los Angeles Times, in protest over owner Patrick Soon-Shiong's blocking of a presidential endorsement, became one of the most widely covered episodes of editorial independence and owner interference in recent American newspaper history. She began as a news reporter, working at publications including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Point Reyes Light (a weekly in West Marin County), the Riverside Press-Enterprise, the Los Angeles Daily News, and the Sacramento Bee. She also spent more than six years teaching journalism — first as an adjunct professor at California State University, Northridge, and later at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

She joined the Los Angeles Times editorial board in March 2015, coming from the Sacramento Bee where she had been deputy editorial page editor, and previously having served as editor of the editorial pages of the L.A. Daily News and the Los Angeles News Group. At the Times she wrote editorials focused on state government and politics, environmental issues (particularly plastic pollution), public health, and California policy. In 2021 she was promoted to deputy editorial page editor. In April 2024, following the departure of editor Kevin Merida and the subsequent naming of Terry Tang as editor in chief, Garza was promoted to editorials editor — the position she resigned from six months later.

The Resignation: October 2024

On October 11, 2024, Patrick Soon-Shiong — the biotech billionaire who purchased the Los Angeles Times in 2018 for $500 million — informed the paper's editorial board that the Times would not be making an endorsement for president in the 2024 election. The message was conveyed to Garza by Terry Tang. The board had intended to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris, and Garza had drafted the outline of a proposed editorial. She was told simply that the paper would not take a position.

"I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not okay with us being silent. In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I'm standing up."
— Mariel Garza, October 2024

Garza resigned within days. Her statement — direct, unadorned, and grounded in a specific ethical position rather than grievance — was widely shared across American journalism and earned what the Columbia Journalism Review described as "praise from journalists around the country." She disputed Soon-Shiong's public account of what had happened. "What he outlines in that tweet is not an endorsement, or even an editorial," she said, noting that she had not received a request for an analytical piece as he had claimed; she had been told plainly that no endorsement would be published.

Her stated reasoning was not primarily about the election outcome — she acknowledged that California was not going to vote for Trump, and that the Times' endorsement was unlikely to change minds among its predominantly liberal readership. Her concern was institutional integrity in the specific context of what the editorial board had already been writing: "This is a point in time where you speak your conscience no matter what. And an endorsement was the logical next step after a series of editorials we've been writing about how dangerous Trump is to democracy, about his unfitness to be president, about his threats to jail his enemies. We have made the case in editorial after editorial that he shouldn't be reelected. It was a logical next step. And it's perplexing to readers, and possibly suspicious, that we didn't endorse her this time."

The episode occurred at a moment when Soon-Shiong's ownership of the Times had already generated significant internal and external turbulence, including the departure of previous editor Merida and ongoing questions about the owner's editorial direction for the paper. Other Times editorial board members also resigned in the weeks following. The blocking of the endorsement and Garza's resignation were reported across major national outlets and prompted significant debate about the relationship between newspaper ownership, editorial independence, and the institutional role of editorial boards in American democracy.

After the Times: Golden State Report

Following her resignation, Garza co-founded Golden State Report with Paul Thornton, a former Los Angeles Times Opinion section editor who had left the paper in February 2025 after nearly 20 years. The publication — described on its about page as "your source for fearless, informed news and commentary in California" — is an independent newsletter, "no billionaires in control," published on Substack. The contrast with the circumstances of her departure from the Times is implicit and explicit in every element of the venture's framing.