Dr Patrick Soon-Shiong, declared by Forbes magazine in 2014 as “The richest doctor in the history of the world,” has bought the LA Times.
A surgeon Soon-Shiong, born in South Africa to Chinese parents and California’s most successful but enigmatic billionaires, made a fortune in trying to cure cancer said not only fake news is the “cancer of our time” – but also short-attention spans and hyper-partisan discourse.
Soon-Shiong bought the 136-year-old daily Los Angeles Times for $500m, with other smaller news outlets such as San Diego Union-Tribune, Spanish-language Hoy and several small community papers.
According to The Guardian, “Soon-Shiong is now seeking to remedy a very different source of malignant metastasis: new. Fake news, superficial news, clickbait news, shrill, shouty, polarising news, he plans to tackle all these ailments in his latest incarnation as a media mogul.”
“I’m a news junkie number one, a complete news junkie,” he told the Guardian. “It’s got nothing to do with the business analysis. It’s got to do with an analysis of what’s important for humanity.”
“Soon-Shiong, 65, wants to turn his flagship daily into a multimedia leviathan of independent, innovative journalism in the Trump era – a font of essential reading, viewing and listening to rival the Washington Post and New York Times.
“Can we compete with them? Not can, must, we must compete with them,” he said. Compete in a positive way so that all thrive. “All of us have to be the bastions of democracy in this country. We have to be this fourth estate – institutions that will tell the news.”, reported The Guardian.
