With the recent news of massive layoffs, an exodus of senior editorial staff, and rumors of additional layoffs looming, some believe that the Los Angeles Times is on the brink of collapse. Last week The Messenger, a relatively new entrant to the news landscape, which was populated by "experienced journalists from POLITICO, the New York Post, the Los Angeles Times, NBC News, Reuters and elsewhere," suddenly shuttered, and the Wall Street Journal laid off 20 staffers in its Washington, D.C. bureau.

If you scroll through Twitter/X, some have been cheering these developments, while others are bemoaning them, especially the L.A. Times' difficulties, believing that some sacred role of bringing the "truth" to people will somehow not be performed in the absence of traditional media sources. But the role of one sector of the news media machine in America was being ignored: independent journalists such as those here at RedState.

The LA Times has been in severe trouble since 2018 when a new billionaire owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, bought the Times and allowed his liberal activist daughter to influence reporting, editorial, and endorsement decisions. However, the Times had been in trouble long before that due to the news media company shedding both paper and print subscribers. As reported by Jen Van Laar, the Times had been losing at least $30 million a year. That alone will eventually kill any company, but for some reason, the Times continued down a path of what more and more people saw as "activist journalism." 

A prime example of activist journalism is when the LA Times editorial staff endorses a far-left activist District Attorney for re-election, even when that DA has turned the city and county of Los Angeles into a dumpster fire of crime, homelessness, and general decline in public safety. Tone-deaf doesn't even begin to accurately describe the editorial staff's decision to endorse a person like that - if, in fact, it was the editorial staff's decision. (Some reports claim that owner Patrick Soon-Shiong's activist daughter, Nika, was calling the shots on endorsements.) Another example is when the same editorial staff has a member write an article "asking nicely" for people fleeing California not to bad mouth the state to others while admitting in the same article that California has become a bad place to live.