Billionaire heiress says Harris endorsement blocked due to her support for alleged “ongoing war on children.”

By World Israel News Staff

A billionaire heiress whose father owns the Los Angeles Times claimed that the newspaper withheld an endorsement of Kamala Harris for president due to her support for Israel in its ongoing war against the Hamas terror group.

Self-described progressive political activist Nika Soon-Shiong, who is the daughter of LA Times owner and biotech billionaire Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, told the New York Times that she had been influential in a decision to block the newspaper’s editorial board from publishing an Op-Ed officially endorsing Harris.

“Our family made the joint decision not to endorse a Presidential candidate. This was the first and only time I have been involved in the process,” Ms. Soon-Shiong, who has long been accused of improper meddling at the newspaper, told the New York Times in a statement.

“As a citizen of a country openly financing genocide, and as a family that experienced South African Apartheid, the endorsement was an opportunity to repudiate justifications for the widespread targeting of journalists and ongoing war on children.”

Patrick Soon-Shiong downplayed his daughter’s role in the newspaper’s decision not to endorse a candidate.

“Nika speaks in her own personal capacity regarding her opinion, as every community member has the right to do,” he told the Times via a spokeswoman. “She does not have any role at the LA Times, nor does she participate in any decision or discussion with the editorial board, as has been made clear many times.”

The newspaper’s owner said that the decision not to endorse Harris had come from the editorial board. That claim was virulently refuted by editors, who said that Soon-Shiong had made the decision not to allow the paper to formally endorse Harris.

Numerous longtime editors at the paper resigned over the move not to back Harris, which they said was the culmination of ongoing inappropriate interference by Soon-Shiong and his daughter in the editorial process.

“If that was the reason that Dr. Soon-Shiong blocked an endorsement of Kamala Harris, it was not communicated to me or the editorial writers,” Mariel Garza, who resigned last week, said in a statement.

“If the family’s goal was to ‘repudiate justifications for the widespread targeting of journalists and ongoing war on children,’ remaining silent did not accomplish that.”

An editor speaking anonymously to the Times that that many employees at the newspaper had suspicions that Nika Soon-Shiong was actually speaking on behalf of her father.

“You never know how much Nika is speaking for herself and how much Nika is speaking for her whole family,” the editor said.

Some have suggested that Soon-Shiong did not want to endorse Harris in order to stay in Donald Trump’s good graces, and that the family is using Gaza as a “smokescreen” to avoid liberal ire.

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The Washington Post admits that headline about Israeli strikes paired with photo of Majdal Shams mourners “lacked context.”

By World Israel News Staff

The Washington Post newspaper ran a clarification regarding a headline and illustrative photo it recently paired in the daily, after the misleading juxtaposition omitted Hezbollah’s responsibility for the Majdal Shams massacre.

On Monday, the Post’s lead story in its print edition featured a photo of Druze families mourning children who were killed in a Hezbollah rocket attack, with the headline of the article directly underneath it reading “Israel hits targets in Lebanon.”

Notably, the caption to the photo also failed to state that Hezbollah was behind the deadly attack, stating only that the killing was caused by a “strike” on the Golan Heights.

Considering that the headline only mentioned Israeli strikes – without discussing the massive rocket barrages by Hezbollah – a reader may have thought that the photo was illustrating a funeral for those killed by Israel.

The pairing sparked intense backlash from pro-Israel and Jewish groups in the U.S., blasting it an example of media bias against the Jewish State.

“Even with a photo from the funeral of an Israeli child killed by Hezbollah, @washingtonpost chose to frame Israel as the aggressor in the headline. Shameful journalism,” wrote the Israeli Embassy in the U.S. on its official X account.

“This isn’t journalism. It’s a dangerous distortion of reality,” tweeted the American Jewish Committee.

In an editor’s note in the paper on Tuesday, the outlet acknowledged that a “headline and subheadline that accompanied a July 29 Page One photo and article about Israeli strikes on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon did not provide adequate context.”

“The headlines should have noted that the Israeli strikes were a response to a rocket strike from Lebanon that killed 12 teenagers and children in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights. The photo depicted mourning for one of those victims, as the caption noted,” the note read.

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As a pro-Palestinian mob rampaged through an airport in Dagestan, Russia, on Sunday in search of Jews, U.S. news headlines made the attempted pogrom sound like a rowdy political protest.

By Drew Holden, The Washington Free Beacon

It was the media’s latest failure to frankly report on an international surge of anti-Semitism in response to Israel’s war of self-defense against Hamas.

Washington Post: “Protesters Storm Russian Airport To Try To Block Plane From Tel Aviv”

New York Times: “Mob Storms Plane Arriving in Russia From Tel Aviv, Authorities Say”

Associated Press: “Crowd Storms Russian Airport To Protest Flight From Israel”

CNN: “At Least 10 Injured as Crowd Storms Russian Airport After Flight Arrives From Tel Aviv, Officials Say.”

Reuters: “Police Take Control of Russia’s Dagestan Airport After Anti-Israeli Protests.”

Amid backlash, some of the outlets improved their headlines overnight to at least allude to the mob’s targeting of Jews.

But the media had enough information to get it right the first time. The Washington Post, the New York Times, and CNN cited already-circulating social media footage that clearly showed the mob was hunting Jews.

The Jerusalem Post reported on Sunday that hundreds of locals gathered at the airport in Dagestan, an overwhelmingly Muslim Russian republic, to attack Jews arriving on a flight from Israel:

According to N12, the pilots were warned of the mob and rerouted the plane to land at a nearby airport. The rioters reached that one as well. The flight staff ordered the locking of all aircraft exits, while security forces closed the area off. Russian aviation authority Rosaviatsia said all aircraft were diverted to other airports. A security source said that a small number of Israelis and Jews were secured in the airport, and were set to be evacuated to Moscow “at the earliest convenience.”

More than 20 people were reportedly injured, including nine police officers, and 60 were arrested.

Flashback: The widespread soft-pedaling of news about the riot came days after similar coverage of an anti-Semitic protest at Cooper Union College in New York City, during which activists tried to force their way into a locked library where Jewish students were hiding from them.

New York Times: “Israel-Hamas War Protest Leads to Tense Scene at Cooper Union Library”

CBS News: “Pro-Palestinian Rally at Cooper Union Leads to Tense Moments at School Library”

Daily Beast: “Cooper Union Pro-Israel Students Locked in Library During Tense Protest”

By contrast, earlier this month, news outlets rushed to accuse the Jewish state of a massacre of Palestinians at a Gaza hospital. The deaths were actually the fault of Islamist terrorists.

Flash forward: Even well into Monday morning, the New York Times—which has employed open anti-Semites to cover the Israel-Hamas war—was apparently unsure what the Dagestan mob was after.

Just before 5 p.m., the newspaper of record updated its follow-up story to report the actual news.

New York Times: “Riot Over Plane From Israel Alarms Jews and Draws Condemnation: A mob in the Russian republic of Dagestan stormed runways looking for a flight carrying Jewish passengers. The episode highlighted the threat of ethnic strife in Russia.”

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