LA Times: We won’t participate in coordinated editorials against Trump

The Los Angeles Times on Thursday said it won’t participate in a coordinated effort by newspapers across the country to publish editorials fighting back against President Trump’s ongoing assault on the media.

“This is not because we don’t believe that President Trump has been engaged in a cynical, demagogic and unfair assault on our industry,” editorial page editor Nicholas Goldberg wrote early Thursday morning.

{mosads}As evidence, he pointed to an editorial from April 2017 titled “Trump’s War on Journalism,” which accused the president of trying “to discredit, disrupt or bully into silence anyone who challenges his version of reality.”

“We still believe that,” Goldberg continued. “Nevertheless, the editorial board decided not to write about the subject on this particular Thursday because we cherish our independence.”

Goldberg emphasized that while the L.A. Times’s editorial board might often agree with papers like The New York Times or the Chicago Tribune, “we reach our own decisions and positions after careful consultation and deliberation among ourselves, and then we write our own editorials.”

“We would not want to leave the impression that we take our lead from others, or that we engage in groupthink,” he wrote.

He also added that the newspaper didn’t want to inadvertently play into Trump’s hands.

“The president himself already treats the media as a cabal,” he wrote. “The idea of joining together to protest him seems almost to encourage that kind of conspiracy thinking by the president and his loyalists. Why give them ammunition to scream about ‘collusion’?”

Trump on Thursday did in fact attack the newspaper campaign, accusing the Boston Globe, which initiated the effort, of “collusion,” along with the other participating publications.

The L.A. Times “will continue to write about the issue on our own schedule,” Goldberg wrote.

The newspaper was not alone in its stance. The San Francisco Chronicle also announced it would not participate, similarly arguing that it wants to maintain its own independence. And the Baltimore Sun’s editorial board on Wednesday penned a piece criticizing the coordinated opinion pieces as playing into Trump’s hands.