A sponsored Israeli tourism advertisement running on the Los Angeles Times website has drawn public criticism from an unexpected corner: the daughter of the paper's own billionaire owner. Nika Soon-Shiong, 33, says the ad's map of Israel erases the occupied Palestinian territories, and she is not shy about saying so, even though her father, Patrick Soon-Shiong, controls the company that published it.
According to the New York Post, the advertisement appears to depict the West Bank and the occupied Syrian Golan Heights as part of Israel, with no border distinctions shown and landmarks including Jerusalem, Haifa, Acre and Tel Aviv highlighted across the map. Nika Soon-Shiong, who founded Drop Site News in 2024, responded to the ad with a blunt “What on earth?” Her outlet, which she was named publisher of in September 2025, described the map as showing a single borderless Israel stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River.
Nika Soon-Shiong argued the promotion does not break U.S. law but runs contrary to international law, per Drop Site News. The dispute centers on L.A. Times Studios, the commercial arm that produced and ran the ad — a separate company that uses Los Angeles Times branding for advertisements, sponsored content and other non-journalism material, and which is part of the Los Angeles Times Media Group that Patrick Soon-Shiong chairs as chief executive. The campaign, titled “Israel: Land of Creation” and tagged as a Paid Program on latimes.com, promoted a nine-day itinerary across Israel and the occupied territories and was paid for by Israel's Ministry of Tourism.
Newsroom Says It Had No Hand in the Ad
Los Angeles Times reporter James Queally said the newspaper itself was not responsible for the advertisement, but acknowledged that the lack of separation between the Times and L.A. Times Studios frustrates the entire staff. That friction is not abstract: the advertisement's masthead redirects to the Los Angeles Times homepage, and its URL uses the same domain name as the newspaper itself, blurring the line between journalism and paid promotion for readers clicking through.
The episode lands at a moment when the Los Angeles Times editorial operation has already been stretched thin. By March 2025, consecutive rounds of buyouts and layoffs had left the editorial board with no remaining full-time staff writers, with the Los Angeles Times Guild reporting 48 staff departures in that buyout round alone. Patrick Soon-Shiong acquired the Los Angeles Times and the San Diego Union-Tribune from Tronc for $500 million in February 2018, and in July 2025 he announced plans to take the paper public within a year, an effort he said was meant to let readers hold a stake on its board.
A Father-Daughter Rift With a 2024 Precedent
This is not the first time Nika Soon-Shiong has broken publicly with her father's newspaper over Middle East coverage. She has claimed the Los Angeles Times declined to endorse Kamala Harris ahead of the 2024 presidential election, a decision that followed the paper's practice of backing Democratic presidential candidates in every cycle since 2008. Editorials editor Mariel Garza and board members Robert Greene and Karin Klein resigned that October after Patrick Soon-Shiong blocked the planned endorsement.
At the time, Nika Soon-Shiong publicly attributed the blocked endorsement to opposition to the Biden-Harris administration's Gaza policy. Patrick Soon-Shiong responded with a statement saying his daughter speaks in her own personal capacity, has no role at the Los Angeles Times, and does not participate in editorial-board decisions or discussions.
Her advocacy on Middle East press issues extends beyond her father's paper. In June, Nika Soon-Shiong publicly criticized a Committee to Protect Journalists board proposal to redefine “journalist,” calling it a betrayal. Before her media career, she served as a Public Safety Commissioner for the City of West Hollywood from 2021 to 2022 and directed the Fund for Guaranteed Income, which ran basic-income pilots in Compton and Long Beach, before stepping down to finish her doctorate at the University of Oxford.
Questions Remain Over Commercial Policies
Whether the Los Angeles Times will revisit its commercial advertising policies around disputed territorial maps remains an open question, as does how the newsroom Guild will press the branding concerns Queally described. The California Post said it contacted both the Los Angeles Times and Drop Site News for comment.
