In June 2020—a little over two years after the billionaire surgeon Patrick Soon-Shiong bought the Los Angeles Times—the newspaper embarked on what it called a “painful internal reckoning.” It was similar to other painful internal reckonings at other American institutions in the immediate wake of George Floyd’s death. Inside the newsroom there was “rancor,” grief, and outrage over the way the paper had covered the city over the decades and, as reporters saw it, fueled...