{"id":195817,"date":"2026-06-26T10:25:04","date_gmt":"2026-06-26T18:25:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=195817"},"modified":"2026-06-26T12:11:56","modified_gmt":"2026-06-26T20:11:56","slug":"terry-tang-and-the-custody-of-the-los-angeles-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=195817","title":{"rendered":"Terry Tang and the Custody of the Los Angeles Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Terry Tang<\/a> (b. circa 1959) is an American journalist, editor, and former lawyer who has served as executive editor of the Los Angeles Times<\/a> since April 2024. She is the first woman to lead the newspaper’s newsroom in its history, and she holds that post while retaining oversight of the Opinion section, a combination of duties that gives her authority over both reported journalism and institutional editorial voice. Her appointment came at a low point in the financial and institutional life of the paper, after a large round of newsroom layoffs and the departure of her predecessor, and her tenure has unfolded against the steady contraction of metropolitan print journalism in the United States.<\/p>\n

Tang was born in Taipei, Taiwan. Her father served as a diplomat for the Republic of China<\/a>, work that took the family to Japan before they immigrated to the United States when she was six. They settled in Gardena, California<\/a>, in the South Bay region of Los Angeles County, and Tang grew up there among the mixed immigrant and working populations of postwar Southern California. She has returned to that early attachment to the region in public remarks, framing it as a source of her sense of what California is and whom the Los Angeles Times serves.<\/p>\n

She earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Yale University<\/a> and a Juris Doctor from New York University School of Law<\/a>. She trained as an attorney and then left law for journalism, a path she has described as a more direct route into public argument and the holding of institutions to account. The legal training marks her editorial habits. She attends to evidence, to questions of fairness and due process, to constitutional law, and to the structure of public policy, and these concerns recur across her work in opinion journalism. During the 1992-93 academic year she held a Nieman Fellowship<\/a> at Harvard University<\/a>, a midcareer award that sits among the more selective honors in American journalism.<\/p>\n

Tang began in the press in the Pacific Northwest. She joined Seattle Weekly<\/a> as a staff writer, then moved to The Seattle Times<\/a>, where she wrote editorials and a column. There she covered regional politics, government, and civic affairs and built the craft of editorial writing that defined much of her later career.<\/p>\n

The longest chapter of her working life ran about twenty years at The New York Times<\/a>. She moved through a sequence of editorial posts across opinion, metropolitan news, technology, and digital publishing: editorial writer, assistant editorial page editor, deputy technology editor, major beats editor on the metro desk, op-ed editor, and deputy editorial page editor. Among her more lasting contributions was the founding and editing of Room for Debate, a digital opinion forum that gathered scholars, journalists, policymakers, and other experts to argue competing positions on public questions. The project reflected a view she has held throughout her career, that opinion journalism should widen informed argument rather than enforce a single line.<\/p>\n

In 2017 she left daily journalism to become director of publications and editorial at the American Civil Liberties Union<\/a>. She supervised the editorial output of one of the country’s principal civil liberties organizations through a period of heavy constitutional litigation and sharp political division. The post moved her outside commercial newspaper work for two years and deepened a familiarity with civil liberties and constitutional argument that her legal training had begun.<\/p>\n

She joined the Los Angeles Times in July 2019 as deputy op-ed editor. The paper had passed in 2018 to the biotechnology entrepreneur Patrick Soon-Shiong<\/a>, who bought it from Tribune and returned it to local ownership after two decades of cutbacks, circulation decline, and changes at the top. Tang helped manage opinion coverage across politics, economics, science, culture, technology, and California public affairs. In 2022 she became editorial page editor and took charge of the Opinion section, where she sought to widen the range of contributors while holding a clear line between reported news and the paper’s editorial positions.<\/p>\n

In January 2024 the executive editor Kevin Merida<\/a> resigned, and the paper carried out one of the largest newsroom reductions in its modern history. Tang was named interim executive editor. She reorganized newsroom leadership, promoting Hector Becerra<\/a> to managing editor and moving Maria L. La Ganga into Becerra’s former role, and she shifted emphasis back toward original reporting on California government, immigration, climate, technology, and local affairs. On April 8, 2024, the paper removed the interim title and named her executive editor, making her the first woman to lead the newsroom since the paper’s founding in December 1881. She kept oversight of Opinion alongside the newsroom.<\/p>\n

Her central argument as an editor concerns the value of a metropolitan newspaper at a moment when local papers face falling advertising revenue, competition from digital platforms, and public distrust of the press. She has held that the paper’s worth lies in reporting that readers cannot find through aggregation, social media, or national outlets, and she has organized her newsroom around that claim.<\/p>\n

The sharpest episode of her tenure came in October 2024. Soon-Shiong decided that the paper would make no endorsement in the presidential election, though the editorial board had prepared one. The editorial page editor Mariel Garza resigned in protest, as did the editorial board members Robert Greene<\/a> and Karin Klein, and the paper lost thousands of subscriptions amid criticism from parts of the staff. The decision rested with the owner and not with Tang, yet she carried the responsibility of leading the newsroom through the turmoil while holding reader confidence in the paper’s reporting.<\/p>\n

She has become a visible public voice on the condition of journalism. In April 2025 she joined a keynote conversation at the International Symposium on Online Journalism in Austin, where she discussed newsroom restructuring, economic pressure, and the problem of editorial independence under private ownership. In February 2026 she spoke at the Athenaeum of Claremont McKenna College<\/a> on the threats facing American journalism, the erosion of public trust, and the importance of strong local newsrooms. She framed those remarks against a darkening backdrop: government suits against broadcasters and publishers, the arrest of reporters covering protests, the end of the print edition of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution<\/a>, and a round of roughly three hundred job cuts at The Washington Post<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Her leadership has also coincided with corporate change at the paper. In 2025 Soon-Shiong announced plans to reorganize Los Angeles Times Media Group<\/a> and to pursue public ownership through a Regulation A offering and an eventual stock listing. The timetable has moved, but the proposal points to a continuing search for a financially sustainable model for one of the largest metropolitan papers in the country. Tang therefore leads the newsroom through editorial and technological change and through a reworking of the paper’s ownership structure at the same time.<\/p>\n

Her career gathers several of the larger shifts in American journalism into a single biography. Many earlier newspaper editors rose through reporting alone. Tang combines legal training, opinion journalism, digital publishing, nonprofit communications, and executive management of a newsroom. Her path tracks the move of journalism from print to digital while she has worked through the economic strain, political division, and technological disruption that have reshaped the industry.<\/p>\n

Her work illustrates the changing relation between news and opinion. She spent much of her career running editorial pages before she took charge of a whole newsroom, and she has held that reported journalism and institutional opinion serve distinct functions that complement each other. She has tried to keep the older separation between reporting and editorial advocacy while acknowledging that digital platforms now place both before readers inside one stream.<\/p>\n

As executive editor she runs one of the most influential regional news organizations in the United States. Under her the paper continues to cover California politics, immigration, climate, technology, entertainment, and the Pacific Rim. Her tenure has become a case study in whether a legacy metropolitan newspaper can sustain ambitious public interest journalism while it adapts to the financial and technological conditions of the present century.<\/p>\n

Hero System<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

The building sits in El Segundo, near the airport, a glass office block on Imperial Highway with rental-car lots and aerospace tenants for neighbors. The paper moved there in 2018 from the downtown building it had held for most of a century, the one with the eagle over the door and the name cut into stone. A driver passing the new address might take it for an insurance firm. Inside it, several hundred people make a thing dated 1881.
\nThe date is the work’s claim on permanence. A newspaper of record promises its people a kind of afterlife. Your byline goes into the bound volumes and the morgue and the database, and the institution carries it forward after you stop breathing. The masthead outranks any single editor, and serving it well earns a place in something that does not die when you do. This is the hero system Terry Tang entered as a young writer in Seattle and now governs from the glass box by the runways. Ernest Becker (1924-1974)<\/a> developed the frame in The Denial of Death<\/a>. Men build symbolic projects to outlast the body. The project tells you what counts as significance, and it converts the animal fact of dying into the human hope of mattering. A hero system is the local answer to oblivion, and its central words carry the whole weight of that answer.
\nTang’s central word is independence. She uses it the way her trade uses it, to mean a press that stands apart from the powers it covers, owing its judgments to evidence and to readers and to no one else. Around it sit the other holy terms of the newsroom: trust, the public interest, voice, the wall between reporting and opinion. When she speaks in public she reaches for them without strain, because inside her hero system they need no defense. She told an audience at Claremont McKenna in February 2026 that the work newsrooms do is the thing under threat, and she meant the independent work, the reporting a reader cannot get from aggregation or a press release. The owner who hired her, Patrick Soon-Shiong (b. 1952), used the same register at her appointment, calling the paper a pillar of democracy and praising its attention to voices that go unheard.
\nHold the word independence up against other lives and it stops being one thing.
\nA Carthusian in his cell treats independence as the enemy. The point of the order is to kill the separate self, to surrender the will, to become nothing apart from God. What the journalist consecrates, the monk renounces. Autonomy is the sin he came to the mountain to starve.
\nA man relearning to dress after a stroke means by independence the dignity of buttoning his own shirt without his daughter’s hands. His hero system is the body and its small recovered competences. The word names the floor of a life, not its summit.
\nA central banker uses independence as a term of art. It marks the insulation of monetary policy from the politician who wants cheap money before an election. The sacred thing is the distance from the voter, a technocratic remove that the journalist, who serves the public, might find cold.
\nAn Algerian who was a child in 1962 hears in independence the war and the dead and the tricolor coming down. The word is sovereignty bought at a price, and it was the colonizer’s word too, spoken while the occupation held. The journalist’s polished usage might strike him as a luxury good.
\nA founder with venture money on the cap table means by independence the round she did not raise, the board seat she did not give away, control of the company she built. Her hero system is the firm and the wealth and the proof of her own judgment. Independence there is leverage, a thing you trade and guard, closer to property than to conscience.
\nSet Tang’s independence beside these and it shrinks to its true size. It is parochial. It makes sense inside the cathedral of the press and almost nowhere else in the same shape. To the monk it looks like pride, to the founder like an asset, to the colonized like a word with blood on it. The journalist treats independence as the load-bearing beam of a temple. Outside the temple it is a plank that holds up other roofs, or none.
\nThat parochial quality does not make the value small to the people who hold it. It makes it total. And totality is why a routine decision in October 2024 detonated.
\nSoon-Shiong decided the paper would endorse no one for president. The editorial board had prepared an endorsement. He stopped it. The editorial page editor Mariel Garza resigned, and the board members Robert Greene and Karin Klein resigned, and thousands of readers canceled. The dispute looked from outside like a quarrel over one race. Inside the hero system it was a breach of the holy thing. To stay and accept the owner’s hand on the editorial would be to admit that the independence was always conditional, that the work served the patron and not the public, that the bound volumes record stenography. For a journalist of the older faith, that admission is a small death. It says the life did not buy what the hero system promised it would buy. Garza did not resign over a candidate. She resigned because the contract that converts daily labor into lasting significance had been shown to have an owner’s clause.
\nThe collision is sharper than owner against staff. It is two rescuers, each certain he is saving the same temple, each seeing the other as the man defiling it.
\nSoon-Shiong’s hero system is not the newsroom’s. He is a surgeon and a biotech entrepreneur whose life’s project is the defeat of death in the literal register, the cancer drug, the cure. His relation to the paper is the relation of a rescuer to the thing he saved. He bought it from Tribune in 2018 and returned it to local hands after two decades of cutting. In his telling, a paper that joins the herd of partisan endorsers lowers itself, and a paper that abstains rises above the fray. He experiences the non-endorsement as an elevation. He experiences the resignations as betrayal by the people whose institution he kept alive. Inside his project the word independence means standing clear of the political tribe. Inside theirs it means standing clear of him. The same five syllables, two cathedrals, and no shared floor on which the argument can be settled, because each speaker hears the other profaning a word that holds up his sky.
\nTang stands in the middle of this, and her position has a particular shape. She did not order the non-endorsement. The decision sat with the owner. Her duty was to keep the newsroom running through a desecration she could neither command nor reverse. She is the priest who must hold the liturgy together after the patron has moved the altar and the most devout of the congregation have walked out. She kept reporting on the front, reorganized her leadership, promoted Hector Becerra and moved Maria L. La Ganga, and turned the staff back toward the work that the hero system can still consecrate, the reporting no rival can match. A priest can do that. He can keep the daily office through a crisis of the patron. What he cannot do is pretend the altar never moved.
\nHer standing is doubled by a second hero system she occupies at the same time. She is the first woman to lead the newsroom in the paper’s history, the first in 142 years. That is its own route to permanence, immortality through being the one history records as having opened the door. The barrier-breaker enters the record by going first. And the two projects arrived in the same season. She reached the highest mortal honor her trade confers, command of the newsroom and a line in the history of the institution, in the same months the institution’s independence was shown to have a ceiling. The honor and the wound came together. She wears the laurel of the first woman to run the place and the burden of running it through the hour its conscience resigned.
\nReturn to Becker and the comparative passage pays out. A hero system is the local answer to a particular death, and the holy word names the death it wards off. Ask of each independence what oblivion it holds at bay.
\nThe monk’s surrender wards off the death of the proud separate self, which Becker would call the lie at the root of the project, and the monk has simply chosen a different and older system to die into. The stroke patient’s buttoned shirt wards off the death of helplessness, the slow erasure of the man inside the failing body. The central banker’s distance wards off the death of the currency, the inflationary ruin that follows when policy bends to the next election. The Algerian’s sovereignty wards off the death of the people, the erasure that occupation performs on a nation’s record of itself. The founder’s control wards off the death of subordination, the verdict that her judgment was never her own.
\nThe journalist’s independence wards off the death of meaninglessness. The fear under the word is that the work was only a job, that the archive records nothing that needed an honest witness, that the byline in the bound volume marks a life spent flattering power and calling it service. A press that can be told what to print is a press whose people served the patron and will be forgotten as the patron’s servants. That is the oblivion Garza refused to live inside. That is the reason the resignations felt to the resigners less like a career choice than like an act of faith.
\nTang has not resigned, and her choice carries its own theology. She holds that the work survives the breach, that a newsroom can keep its consecrating power even after an owner has overruled its board, that the reporting itself remains the thing that buys a place against oblivion. She might be right. The reporting outlives the endorsement quarrel, and the bound volumes will carry the investigations long after the names of the men who fought over a single presidential race have faded. Or the readers who canceled might be the truer reckoners, the ones who sensed that a word with an owner’s clause has stopped warding off the death it was built to ward off, and that the temple, kept running, has become a building where a service is still performed but the god has gone quiet.
\nThe El Segundo office gives no sign either way. The lights stay on past the runways. The thing dated 1881 goes out each day. And the woman who runs it carries two projects at once, the priest who keeps the office through the patron’s incursion and the first of her kind to hold the post, defending against two different deaths with the same daily work, hoping the word still means what her whole life staked on its meaning.<\/p>\n

The Set<\/strong><\/p>\n

Picture the room where the set knows itself. A hotel ballroom in Austin in April, the International Symposium on Online Journalism<\/a>, lanyards and tote bags, a stage with two armchairs and a low table holding water bottles nobody opens. Terry Tang<\/a> sits in one chair. The moderator names her titles and the room responds to the phrase first woman, a soft current of approval, because the room keeps a ledger of firsts and likes to be present at the reading of it. Outside the ballroom the trade is dying by the hundred. Inside it, the trade affirms that it is sacred. Both things are true at once, and the set has learned to hold them together without flinching, because holding them together is part of what membership requires.<\/p>\n

The set is small. It runs through a handful of mastheads and a smaller handful of credentials. Tang carries the standard pedigree: Yale, then New York University law, then a Nieman<\/a> year at Harvard in 1992-93, then two decades at The New York Times<\/a>. The Times is the high altar of the caste, and a person who has served there carries that service for life, the way a man carries the regiment he fought with. She worked under the executive editors of her era, Dean Baquet<\/a> (b. 1956) and later Joseph Kahn<\/a> (b. 1964), and beside the opinion people, and she helped build Room for Debate, the forum that gathered the credentialed to argue in public. When she crossed to the Los Angeles Times<\/a> in 2019 she brought the Times manner with her, the way an officer transferred to a frontier post brings the bearing of the capital.<\/p>\n

The local set in El Segundo<\/a> has its own roster. Patrick Soon-Shiong<\/a> (b. 1952) owns the paper and stands half inside the set and half outside it, the patron who is not a member of the guild and whom the guild watches with the wariness reserved for a man who signs the checks and does not share the faith. Kevin Merida<\/a> ran the newsroom before her and left. Mariel Garza ran the editorial page and resigned. The board members Robert Greene<\/a> and Karin Klein resigned with her. Hector Becerra<\/a> and Maria L. La Ganga rose when Tang reorganized. Chris Argentieri runs the business side, and the business side is a separate tribe with a separate language, the tribe that says revenue where the newsroom says public interest, and the line between the two tribes is policed with old and practiced suspicion.<\/p>\n

What the set values is legible in what it praises and what it will not say in mixed company. It praises the scoop, the investigation, the document nobody else has, the official caught in the lie. It praises the byline in the bound volume and the prize that certifies the byline, the Pulitzer<\/a> above all, the medal that converts a year of labor into a permanent mark on the name. Robert Greene won one for the board’s editorials on incarceration, and the win sits on him as rank sits on a soldier, visible to everyone in the room who can read the insignia. The set praises the beat held for decades, the source cultivated for a generation, the reporter who knows where the bodies are. And it holds a quieter set of values it states only in its own company: that the work outranks the money, that the people who serve it are a better sort than the people who merely profit, that a life given to the record is a life that counts.<\/p>\n

That last belief is the heart of the hero system. The masthead dated 1881 promises its people something a salary cannot. It promises that the work goes into the permanent account of the country, the first rough draft of history, and that a name attached to honest work in that account has bought a small immortality. The set will tell you, in the keynote and the commencement address and the retirement toast, that journalism is how a democracy knows itself, that without the watchdog the powerful run unchecked, that the reporter is the citizen’s proxy in the rooms the citizen cannot enter. These are the load-bearing sentences. They convert a job that pays poorly and ends in layoffs into a vocation that outlasts the body. A man can accept the falling pay and the shrinking newsroom if the work still buys the immortality. The day it stops buying it, he resigns, and the resignation is itself an act of the faith, a refusal to let the sacred thing be shown to have a price.<\/p>\n

The status games run on a few axes, and the set plays them without naming them. The first axis is the masthead. The Times of New York sits at the top, then the national papers, then the great regional papers, the Los Angeles Times among them, then the rest in descending order down to the weekly where a career begins. Tang’s path runs up this ladder: Seattle Weekly<\/a>, then The Seattle Times<\/a>, then twenty years at the summit in New York, then the high regional command in Los Angeles. Every move up the ladder is a move up in the order of precedence, and the set reads a resume the way a herald reads a coat of arms.<\/p>\n

The second axis is the prize and the fellowship. A Nieman year confers membership for life. A Pulitzer confers rank. A Polk<\/a>, a Loeb<\/a>, a Peabody<\/a>, each is a feather, and the feathers are worn at the conferences where the set gathers to confirm one another’s standing. The third axis is the scoop and the byline count, the raw output that says you do the work and do not merely manage it. The fourth is access, the senator who returns your call, the source inside the agency, and access carries a danger the set knows and warns its young about. Too much access and you become the thing they call a stenographer, the reporter who writes down what power says and calls it news, who has traded the watchdog’s bark for a seat at the table. The accusation of access journalism is a demotion in the set’s eyes, a charge that you serve the powerful and not the public.<\/p>\n

The fifth axis is newer and the set distrusts it even as it counts it: the follower, the platform, the reporter who is a brand. The young arrive with audiences the old never had, and the old suspect that an audience is not the same as a record, that a viral thread buys attention but not the permanent account. The set has not settled this quarrel. It plays the follower game and disdains the follower game in the same afternoon.<\/p>\n

The normative claims are stated as rules of the craft, and the set treats them as obvious rather than as choices. News and opinion must stay apart, the reporting on one side of a wall and the editorial judgment on the other, and a reader must always know which he is reading. The reporter must verify before he prints. He must give the accused a chance to answer. He must keep his own views out of the news column. He must protect the source who risks himself to tell the truth. He must afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, the old slogan that doubles as a moral program. These rules carry the force of commandment inside the set, and a member who breaks them loses standing the way a soldier loses it for cowardice.<\/p>\n

Tang embodies the first rule and complicates it at the same time, because she now sits above both the newsroom and the editorial page, holding the wall from the one office that stands on both sides of it. The set notices this and mostly does not say it aloud, because to say it aloud would expose the rule as an arrangement rather than a law of nature.<\/p>\n

The essentialist claims sit under the normative ones and give them their heat. The set holds that a journalist is a kind of person, not merely a person with a job. The real reporter has the nose, the instinct for the story, the constitutional inability to leave a lie alone. The set speaks of people who are journalists to the bone and of people who merely work at newspapers, and the distinction is moral, not contractual. It holds that the press is the fourth estate<\/a>, an organ of the republic as fixed as the three branches, that the watchdog function is built into the nature of the thing and not granted by anyone who might revoke it. It holds that there is a public interest, single and discernible, and that the trained journalist can see it where the layman cannot. These are claims about essence, about what journalism is rather than what it does, and the set needs them, because an essence cannot be laid off. A function can be cut when the revenue falls. An essence endures the cut and reproaches the men who ordered it.<\/p>\n

The moral grammar follows from all of this with the regularity of liturgy. There is a holy word, independence, and there are the profane acts that violate it: capitulation, censorship, the owner’s hand on the editorial, the advertiser’s threat honored. There is the villain, the meddling proprietor or the partisan or the censor, and there is the martyr, the one who resigns rather than serve the profane act, and there is the hero, the investigator who brings the powerful down with a document. The set tells its history as a calendar of these figures. Watergate<\/a> is the founding miracle, the two reporters and the source and the president brought low, the proof that the hero system pays out, that the work can topple a king and earn its people the immortality the masthead promised.<\/p>\n

October 2024 entered this grammar at once. Soon-Shiong stopped the presidential endorsement the board had prepared. In the set’s grammar this read as the patron’s hand on the editorial, the profane act in its textbook form. Garza resigned, and Greene and Klein resigned, and the set knew the script for what they had done before the resignations were a day old. They were martyrs in the proper sense, members who paid in their own careers to keep the holy word from being shown to have a price. The thousands of canceled subscriptions were the congregation’s answer, the laity withdrawing its tithe from a temple it judged defiled. And Soon-Shiong, who does not share the faith, experienced the same act as an elevation, a paper rising above the partisan herd, and could not understand why the guild treated his good deed as a desecration. The patron and the priests stood in the same building speaking the same language and meaning opposite things, and the set closed around its martyrs and marked the owner as the man who had touched what he should not have touched.<\/p>\n

Tang stood where the grammar gives no clean role. She had not ordered the act and could not undo it. She was the senior priest who stays when the patron moves the altar and the most devout walk out, who keeps the daily office running so the work can go on, and the set holds an unspoken double judgment about such a figure. Staying is loyalty to the institution, which the set honors. Staying is also a kind of accommodation with the profane act, which the set does not honor, and which it will not name to the face of a sitting editor because she is one of their own and because the set protects its own until it does not. She continued to be the first woman to hold the post, and the set kept that entry in its ledger of firsts with full approval, even as it filed the endorsement quarrel under the older and darker heading where it keeps the times the patron’s hand showed and the word independence was found to have a clause.<\/p>\n

The Athenaeum talk at Claremont McKenna College<\/a> in February 2026 showed the set performing its grammar in public. Tang named the threats, the suits against broadcasters, the reporters arrested at protests, the print edition of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution<\/a> shut, the three hundred cut at The Washington Post<\/a>. The naming is a rite. The set gathers its losses and recites them, and the recitation does two things at once. It mourns, and it sanctifies. Every closed paper and dismissed reporter becomes a martyr in the longer story, and the longer story is the one that keeps the hero system standing while the revenue falls out from under it. The set cannot save most of the jobs. It can promise that the work was holy and that the people who did it mattered, and in a trade dying by the hundred, that promise is the last thing the masthead has left to give.<\/p>\n

The Voice<\/strong><\/p>\n

The diction is the standard tongue of the senior newsroom, and she speaks it without strain. The vocabulary runs to the abstract nouns of the trade: mission, democracy, community, indispensable, the work that matters. Her appointment statement is built from them. The paper and its journalists make a difference every day in the life of California and this nation. It is an honor to lead an institution that serves our community. These are not sentences a person reaches for in private. They are the coins of the guild, minted long before her and spent by every editor who takes a post like hers. The diction tells you she has mastered the official language so completely that she can produce it on cue, which is itself a fact about her: she is fluent in the register that signals belonging, and she does not depart from it in public.
\nThe syntax is declarative. Subject, verb, object. She does not build the long subordinated periods of the essayist, and she does not perform. The sentences are the sentences of someone trained to be understood on first reading by a wide audience, which is the house style of the newspaper itself. This is professional plainness, the prose of a person who has spent forty years cutting other people’s adjectives.
\nThe rhetoric, where you can hear it, runs through a few moves. The first is the recitation of threats, and it is her most characteristic public gesture. At Claremont McKenna she named them in series: the suits against broadcasters, the reporters arrested at protests, the closing of the print Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the three hundred cut at The Washington Post. The list is the instrument. She does not argue that journalism is under threat so much as she enumerates, and the enumeration does the persuading. This is the lawyer’s habit surfacing through the editor, the marshaling of the record, the brief built from particulars rather than from a thesis announced and defended. She trained at New York University law before she came to the press, and the cast of mind shows here more than anywhere: she lays out facts in a row and lets them carry the weight a conclusion would otherwise carry.
\nThe second move is the appeal to indispensability, and it is her one repeated argument. The paper’s value lies in the reporting a reader cannot get elsewhere, not from aggregation, not from social media, not from the national outlets. She returns to this claim across both public appearances. It is the load-bearing sentence of her tenure, and she states it as a near-syllogism: the metropolitan paper survives if it produces what no one else can, therefore the work must be original reporting. The argument is structural, not emotional. She does not plead for the paper. She makes a case for it.
\nThe third move is the careful distinction, again the lawyer. News and opinion serve different functions. The wall between them must hold even as the platforms present both in one stream. She draws the line and then concedes the complication, which is the move of a person trained to anticipate the counterargument and fold it into her own statement before an opponent can use it. This is not the rhetoric of the advocate who wants to win. It is the rhetoric of the judge who wants to be seen weighing.
\nWhat you do not hear is as telling as what you do. There is no autobiography in the public voice, or almost none. She will mention Gardena and the immigrant arrival from Taiwan when the occasion calls for it, a biographical note offered to an audience, but she does not work in the confessional or the personal anecdote. There is no ideology on display. For a woman who ran an editorial page and worked two years at the American Civil Liberties Union, she keeps her own political views almost entirely out of her public speech, which is discipline rather than absence. An editor who wants to be trusted by a divided readership learns to hold her positions close, and she holds them very close. There is no heat. The speaking manner is even, measured, unhurried. She does not raise the temperature. The threats she names are grave, and she names them gravely, but she does not perform alarm. The affect is the affect of the institution: calm under pressure, sober, declining to give the audience a show.
\nThe overall instrument, then, is the voice of the office. Some editors keep a distinct personal voice that cuts through the institutional one. Tang appears to have submerged hers into the role, and the submersion is consistent across every appearance. The lawyer shows in the structure, the marshaled facts, the careful distinctions. The opinion-page veteran shows in the fluency with the abstract civic vocabulary. What does not show is the private idiom, the tic, the joke, the wound, the thing that would let you recognize a paragraph as hers with the name stripped off.
\nLike Joe Kahn<\/a>, the Editor of the New York Times, her voice is built not to be recognizable. An executive editor leading a divided newsroom through layoffs, an endorsement revolt, and an owner’s reorganization has reasons to speak in a voice that gives nothing away, that could belong to the chair as much as to the woman in it. The blandness is not a failure of personality. It is a professional achievement, the same achievement as a good gray newspaper’s front page, and she produces it with the ease of someone who has been making other people sound institutional for most of her working life.<\/p>\n

Watergate as Democratic Ritual<\/a> & Cultural Trauma<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Jeffrey Alexander (b. 1947) builds his account of public crisis on a refusal. The event does not speak. In his reading of Watergate, collected in The Meanings of Social Life, he insists that the break-in of June 1972 sat inert for two years, a third-rate burglary that three-quarters of Americans called just politics, until society told it as something else. The facts changed little. The telling changed everything. Scandals are not born, they are made, he writes at the close of that essay, and the line carries the whole method. A scandal is a social fact, produced by carrier groups who lift public attention from the level of goals, where politics runs as interest and maneuver, up to the level of values, where the sacred lives and can be profaned.
\nHold the Los Angeles Times against this and October 2024 stops looking like a quarrel over one race.
\nThe owner Patrick Soon-Shiong decided the paper would endorse no candidate for president. The editorial board had prepared an endorsement. He stopped it. On the level Alexander calls goals, the act is ordinary. Owners set the editorial line, and a paper that abstains in one race has done nothing a hundred papers have not done before it. Had the decision stayed on that level, it would have passed as a house matter, a disagreement over editorial judgment, mundane and profane in Alexander’s sense, the sense that carries no charge. It did not stay there. Within days the editorial page editor Mariel Garza resigned, and the board members Robert Greene and Karin Klein resigned with her, and thousands of readers canceled. The decision had been generalized. Public attention moved off the goal, the single race, and onto the value the goal was now said to threaten: the independence of the press.
\nAlexander’s term for this upward movement is generalization, and his point is that it does not happen on its own. The raw act has no inherent charge. Someone has to perform the lifting, and the lifting can fail. In The Meanings of Social Life he lays out the conditions a crisis needs to climb from goal to value: enough consensus that the act reads as polluting to more than a fragment of the public, a sense that the pollution threatens the center, the entry of controls, the formation of countercenters by autonomous elites, and effective symbolic work that fixes the labels. The resignations supplied the symbolic work. They were the claim.
\nIn the cultural-trauma essay, from Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, Alexander gives the claim a sharper shape. A trauma is not a wound an event inflicts. It is a representation, broadcast by a carrier group, projected to an audience, built from four assertions: the nature of the pain, the identity of the victim, the relation of the victim to the wider public, and the attribution of responsibility. Garza, Greene, and Klein made all four at once and made them by leaving. The pain was the override of the board, the silencing of a prepared judgment. The victim was the independent editorial voice, and behind it the readership that relies on that voice. The relation to the wider public ran through the civic claim that a free press serves the reader and the republic, so that an injury to the page is an injury to the citizen. And the responsibility fell on the owner, the man whose hand had stopped the endorsement. A resignation is a costly signal in Alexander’s speech-act sense, an illocution that asks the audience to read the act as profanation rather than as policy. The canceled subscriptions answered. The audience took up the claim, and in taking it up confirmed that the carrier group’s representation had landed.
\nThe reason the representation could land sits in Alexander’s other book, The Civil Sphere. He describes a civil sphere structured by a binary code, a discourse that sorts motives and relationships into the sacred and the profane. On the sacred side: openness, honesty, autonomy, the capacity to reason in the common interest. On the profane side: secrecy, deceit, dependence, the pursuit of private interest against the public. Journalism casts itself as a regulative institution of that sphere, the watchdog, the open eye. Its holy word, independence, names the sacred pole directly. So when Soon-Shiong called the paper a pillar of democracy at Terry Tang’s appointment, and when Tang at Claremont McKenna recited the threats to the press, the suits against broadcasters, the reporters arrested, the closures and the cuts, both were speaking the civil binary aloud, placing the press on the sacred side and its adversaries on the profane. The vocabulary was already in the room. The carrier group had only to move the owner across the line, from patron who saved the paper to proprietor whose private hand had touched the sacred page. The same binary that sanctifies the press supplies the terms for condemning anyone who controls it.
\nAlexander asks, in the stratification section of the trauma essay, a question that reads as if written for this case. Who owns the newspapers? To what degree are journalists independent of political and financial control? He poses it to show that institutional arenas and ownership shape whether a trauma claim can travel. At the Los Angeles Times the question is the crisis. The independence the editorial page consecrates rests on a page an owner controls, and the resignations dramatized the gap between the professed sacred and the structural fact. That is the content of the claim. The owner’s control, ordinary and legal, was represented as the profanation, and the representation could persuade because the civil code holds private control of a public voice to be the very image of the anti-civil.
\nThe framework also explains the scale, and the scale is where the Tang episode parts from Watergate. Alexander warns that modern rituals are rarely complete and that full generalization is rare indeed. Watergate climbed all the way, from a burglary to a threat to the sacred center of the republic, because all five conditions aligned across two years: national consensus, fear for the center, the courts and committees as controls, alienated elites forming countercenters, and the televised hearings as the purification rite. The non-endorsement climbed partway and stopped. Consensus formed inside the journalistic civil sphere and among the paper’s readers, not across the society. The center threatened was the center of the press, the integrity of its own institution, not the center of the nation. No court convened, no committee sat, no liminal televised rite gathered a watching public into a communitas. The countercenter was real, the resigners and the canceling readers and the trade press that covered them, but it was bounded. The contemporaneous move at the Washington Post, where the owner spiked a presidential endorsement in the same season and drew his own resignations and cancellations, fed the generalization by suggesting a pattern, two billionaire proprietors reaching into two editorial pages at once, which let the carrier groups raise the charge from one owner’s choice to a threat to the independent press as such. Even with that lift, the trauma stayed a trauma of the guild and its readership. It branded the paper. It did not brand the country.
\nThis bounded outcome is the finding, not a hedge. Alexander’s comparative cases, Nanking that never generalized beyond its region, Watergate that became a national rite, show that the same kind of event can produce trauma at one scale or none at all depending on the carrier group’s resources and the receptivity of the arena. The Los Angeles Times episode generalized within a sphere that already shared the code and stalled at the edge of that sphere, where the general public reads an unendorsed election as just politics, the profane reading the resigners had set out to defeat.
\nTang stands at the one position the framework makes hardest to occupy. She is not the carrier group. She did not make the claim, did not resign, did not broadcast the pain. She is not the villain. The decision was not hers and she could not reverse it. The trauma process ran through the editorial page she also oversees, and she could neither author the generalization nor command it to stop. Her task was the management of the newsroom while the wound was being made beside it.
\nRead against Alexander, that task runs against the carrier group’s. The carrier group pushes the event up, from goal to value, from policy to profanation. Tang’s institutional work pushes the newsroom down, back toward goals and interests, back toward the profane in Alexander’s neutral sense, the level where reporting is a job that gets done rather than a sacrament under threat. She reorganized her leadership, promoted Hector Becerra and moved Maria L. La Ganga, and turned the staff toward the reporting no rival can match. Each of those moves keeps the newsroom on the level of the work. The wall between news and opinion, the rule she embodies while sitting above both sides of it, does trauma-containment labor here. It quarantines the reporting from the pollution spreading through the opinion page, so that the investigations keep their standing as fact-finding rather than become further evidence in the carrier group’s brief against the owner. The executive editor, in this reading, is the agent of routinization working in real time, the figure whose job is to keep the work mundane and therefore functional while the sacred drama plays out one floor over.
\nAlexander’s last movement is the calming down. The spiral flattens, the effervescence evaporates, charisma routinizes, and the lessons of the trauma settle into objects, monuments, museums, the institutionalized memory that no longer burns. The Tang record shows the flattening on schedule. By the Austin symposium of April 2025 and the Claremont talk of February 2026, the heat of October 2024 has cooled into a standing narrative, the press under threat, delivered as a recitation of losses, the broadcasters sued, the reporters arrested, the Atlanta paper’s print edition ended, the Washington Post’s three hundred cut. The recitation is the routinized form of the trauma. It gathers the wounds into a litany and a lesson, detaches the affect from the original breach, and converts a particular profanation that cost the paper its editorial board into a general civic teaching about the fragility of the free press. Alexander notes that audiences sometimes greet this routinization with relief and sometimes with regret at the desiccation. Tang delivers it as the institution’s settled voice, which is the voice routinization produces.<\/p>\n

The Field and Its Poles<\/strong><\/p>\n

Pierre Bourdieu<\/a> (1930-2002) treats journalism as a field, a structured space of positions with its own stakes, its own currency, and its own line of internal tension. The tension runs along a single axis. At one pole stands autonomy, where worth comes from inside the field, conferred by peers who recognize the craft, the scoop, the investigation, the work that other journalists rank highly whether or not it sells. At the other stands heteronomy, where worth comes from outside, from sales and ratings and the favor of advertisers and owners, from the audience counted as a market rather than as a jury of the competent. Every position in the field sits somewhere on that axis, and every journalist feels the pull of both ends. Bourdieu’s claim in On Television and in The Field of Cultural Production is that the field’s character at any moment is set by which pole is winning, and that the economic pole has been winning for a long time.
\nThe currency of the field is capital, and Bourdieu distinguishes the kinds. Economic capital is money and what money commands. Cultural capital is competence, training, the internalized mastery a long education installs. Symbolic capital is recognition, the prestige a field confers on those it judges to have served it well, the Pulitzer and the Nieman and the byline that other journalists respect. Inside the journalistic field the autonomous pole runs on symbolic capital, the peer’s regard, while the heteronomous pole runs on economic capital, the owner’s money and the market’s attention. The two are convertible but not freely, and the rate of exchange is itself a stake of struggle. A reporter can sometimes turn prestige into a salary and an owner can sometimes turn money into influence over the line, but each conversion meets resistance, and the resistance is the field defending its autonomy.
\nTerry Tang’s job is an unusual object because it straddles the axis inside one office. She holds the newsroom and the editorial page at once.
\nThe newsroom sits near the autonomous pole. Its product is reporting, and reporting earns its standing from the field, from the peers and the prizes and the standards of verification that no reader enforces directly. A newsroom defends its autonomy by insisting that the work answers to evidence and craft rather than to the owner’s preference or the market’s appetite. Tang’s repeated argument, that the paper’s value lies in reporting no one else can produce, is in Bourdieu’s terms a defense of the autonomous pole. It says the field’s own product, the original investigation, is the source of worth, and it says so against the heteronomous claim that worth is whatever draws the largest audience at the lowest cost.
\nThe editorial page sits closer to the political field. Its product is position-taking, prise de position in Bourdieu’s vocabulary, the public stand on candidates and policies. Position-taking points outward, toward the field of power, toward parties and officials and the contests of the political world. An endorsement is the purest form of it, a direct intervention in the political field by the journalistic one. So Tang’s dual portfolio is, on Bourdieu’s map, a single person holding a position near the autonomous pole and a position near the heteronomous-political boundary, with the internal tension of the whole field running through her one desk.
\nAbove her sits the owner, and the owner is the economic pole made flesh. Patrick Soon-Shiong controls the capital that keeps the field’s local instance alive. In Bourdieu’s analysis the owner’s power is structural rather than personal. He need not dictate copy. His control of the economic base sets the conditions under which the autonomous pole can operate at all, and the autonomy of the journalists is always autonomy on sufferance, a space the field wins and holds against the pull of the money that funds it. The October 2024 non-endorsement is, in this reading, the moment the structural power became an act. The owner overruled the board.
\nStrip the episode to its field terms and it is a contest over who sets position-taking. The editorial board claimed the right to take the position, grounding the claim in journalistic capital, the competence and standing of the people whose work is judgment on public questions. The owner claimed the same right, grounding it in economic capital, the ownership of the thing. Bourdieu would not call this a clash of opinions about one election. He would call it a struggle over the exchange rate between two kinds of capital, a test of whether economic capital can convert directly into control of the field’s most political product, or whether journalistic capital can hold that product as its own. The board lost the test. Garza, Greene, and Klein resigned, and the resignation is the move available to holders of symbolic capital when economic capital overrides them. They could not outvote the owner. They could withdraw their persons and their accumulated prestige, taking their symbolic capital out of the institution and, by leaving loudly, converting it into a public verdict on the owner’s act. The canceled subscriptions were readers withdrawing economic capital in turn, the audience using the only currency it holds.
\nThe structure of the crisis maps onto the poles, then, with the owner at the economic end forcing a conversion the autonomous end resisted. The structure of Tang’s career maps onto something else in Bourdieu, the slow accumulation of capital across fields.
\nShe trained in law at New York University before she came to the press. Legal training is cultural capital of a transferable kind, and Bourdieu would note that it carries its own field’s marks, the brief built from particulars, the careful distinction, the marshaling of evidence toward a judgment. She brought that capital into journalism, where it converts into a recognizable competence, the editor who thinks like a lawyer, attentive to fairness and to the structure of an argument. The Nieman year at Harvard added symbolic capital of the purest journalistic kind, a consecration the field confers and recognizes for life. The two decades at the New York Times added more, since standing at the field’s high altar transfers to anyone who served there, the way Bourdieu describes the prestige of a dominant institution clinging to its alumni. Room for Debate added capital in the digital subfield, an early position in a space the older players had not yet occupied.
\nThe two years at the American Civil Liberties Union are the move Bourdieu’s framework reads most sharply. She left the journalistic field for the field of advocacy, the nonprofit world where capital takes a different form, the standing of the cause and the legal-constitutional expertise the organization trades in. Then she returned. In Bourdieu’s terms she made a circuit through an adjacent field and brought its capital back, the constitutional fluency, the standing among the civil-liberties world, the experience of editorial work outside the commercial press. Each move added a kind of capital the next position could use, and the sum is what made her legible for the top job: a holder of cross-field capital, law and opinion and digital and advocacy and management, the rare figure whose accumulated currency spans the autonomous and the political and the institutional at once. Bourdieu would say her trajectory fitted her for a position that itself spans those poles. The dual portfolio wants a person whose capital is plural, and her career assembled exactly that plurality.
\nThe person who holds capital across several fields holds a pure quantity of none. The lifelong investigative reporter accumulates journalistic capital of one dense kind and is recognized by the field as a journalist to the bone, in Bourdieu’s sense the holder of a deep field-specific habitus. The cross-field manager accumulates breadth, and breadth reads to the autonomous pole as a partial defection toward the heteronomous one, since management itself sits near the heteronomous end, concerned with budgets and structures and the owner’s confidence rather than with the byline. Tang’s standing as an editor who rose through opinion and management rather than through reporting places her, on the field’s internal map, nearer the boundary the autonomous pole watches with suspicion. The newsroom honors the executive who defends its autonomy and watches warily the executive whose other capital ties her to the owner’s side of the house. Her position requires her to be both, the defender of the autonomous product and the manager answerable to the economic pole, and the field gives no clean standing to a person who must be both at once.
\nThis doubled position explains the shape of her conduct in the crisis better than any account of her preferences. She did not resign, because resignation is the move of the holder of pure journalistic capital, the person whose entire standing is symbolic and who can therefore spend it all in one withdrawal. Her capital is managerial and cross-field, and its value lies in occupying the position, not in vacating it. She did not endorse the owner’s act in the field’s symbolic terms, because to do so would spend her journalistic capital on the heteronomous side and forfeit her standing with the autonomous pole she still has to lead. She did the thing the structure leaves open to her. She kept the newsroom working at the autonomous pole, defending the value of original reporting, while absorbing the fact of an economic-pole decision she could not reverse. Bourdieu would call this the characteristic position-taking of the dominant-but-dominated agent, the figure who holds power within the field yet remains subordinate to the economic power that funds it, and who therefore manages the field’s autonomy rather than embodying it in a single heroic refusal.
\nThe owner’s own trajectory completes the map. Soon-Shiong holds economic capital of an order the journalistic field cannot match, made in biotechnology, a field whose currency is patents and markets and the literal defeat of disease. He entered the journalistic field as an owner, which is to say he entered at the economic pole without the field-specific capital the autonomous pole recognizes. Bourdieu would predict the friction exactly. The field treats the owner who lacks journalistic capital as a heteronomous force by definition, a holder of money who has not earned the field’s recognition and whose interventions therefore read as the economic pole asserting itself against the autonomous one. His framing of the non-endorsement as a rise above the partisan herd was an attempt to claim journalistic virtue, autonomy from party, in the field’s own sacred vocabulary. The field rejected the claim, because in its eyes an owner who overrides the board has demonstrated heteronomy in the act of professing autonomy. He spoke the language of the autonomous pole while performing the power of the economic one, and the field heard the performance over the language.
\nWhat the frame yields, in the end, is a single coherent picture in which the job and the crisis are the same structure seen twice. The job is the field’s autonomy-heteronomy axis compressed into one portfolio, the autonomous newsroom and the political editorial page held by a single manager who answers to the economic pole. The crisis is that axis put under load, the economic pole forcing a conversion the autonomous pole resisted, the holders of symbolic capital answering with the only move their capital allows, the withdrawal. And Tang’s career is the accumulation that fitted her to stand at the junction, a store of cross-field capital that qualifies her to manage the tension and disqualifies her, by the same token, from resolving it in the field’s heroic register. She is the right holder of capital for a position whose whole nature is to absorb a strain it cannot end.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Terry Tang (b. circa 1959) is an American journalist, editor, and former lawyer who has served as executive editor of the Los Angeles Times since April 2024. She is the first woman to lead the newspaper’s newsroom in its history, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,50,76],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-195817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journalism","category-los-angeles","category-los-angeles-times"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t