This major newspaper’s plan for identifying its own bias will leave you rolling in laughter

Just about anyone with a brain knows that so-called “mainstream” media is biased toward one side of the aisle or the other.

But that doesn’t mean that every single person who reads or watches the news catches these blatant cases of bias.

And now this major newspaper’s plan for identifying its own bias will leave you rolling in laughter.

LA Times owner wants to use AI-powered “bias meter”

Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong says he has plans to implement a new, Artificial Intelligence-powered “bias meter” on the paper’s news articles.

Soon-Shiong claims the meter will provide readers with “both sides” of a story.

The biotech billionaire acquired the newspaper in 2018 and recently told CNN political commentator Scott Jennings that he has been “quietly building” an AI meter “behind the scenes.”

The meter is set to be active in January and is powered by the same augmented intelligence technology that Soon-Shiong has been building since 2010 for healthcare purposes.

“Somebody could understand as they read it that the source of the article has some level of bias. And what we need to do is not have what we call confirmation bias and then that story automatically, the reader can press a button and get both sides of that exact same story based on that story and then give comments,” he told Jennings.

The newspaper owner also said that major publications have failed to adequately separate news and opinion.

He suggested that this “could be the downfall of what now people call mainstream media.”

His comments have sparked a firestorm from the union that represents hundreds of Times newsroom staffers who said Soon-Shiong “publicly suggested his staff harbors bias, without offering evidence or examples.”

The Los Angeles Times Guild said in a statement, “Our members – and all Times staffers – abide by a strict set of ethics guidelines, which call for fairness, precision, transparency, vigilance against bias, and an earnest search to understand all sides of an issue.”

“These longstanding principles will continue guiding our work,” the statement continued.

The move from Soon-Shiong led to the resignation of Harry Litman, a senior legal affairs columnist for the newspaper’s Opinion page.

“My resignation is a protest and visceral reaction against the conduct of the paper’s owner, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong. Soon-Shiong has made several moves to force the paper, over the forceful objections of his staff, into a posture more sympathetic to Donald Trump,” Litman wrote.

“Given the existential stakes for our democracy that I believe Trump’s second term poses, and the evidence that Soon-Shiong is currying favor with the President-elect, they are repugnant and dangerous,” he continued.

More trouble looms for the newspaper

Litman’s resignation came just days after the newspaper’s assistant editorial page editor, Kerry Cavanaugh, said she was leaving. 

A person familiar with the situation said Soon-Shiong has started to review the headlines of all opinion pieces before they are published.

Meanwhile, Soon-Shiong plans to restructure the newspaper’s editorial board and told CNN he plans to balance the opinion section with more conservative and centrist voices after Donald Trump’s victory.

In November, he told CNN, “If we were honest with ourselves, our current board of opinion writers veered very left, which is fine, but I think in order to have balance, you also need to have somebody who would trend right, and more importantly, somebody that would trend in the middle.”

He also blocked a drafted endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris just two weeks before Election Day, resulting in several members of the editorial board staff’s resignation.

Some staff members protested as a result, and the paper saw thousands of people cancel their subscriptions. 

Only three of the newspaper’s eight editorial board members remain, so time will tell what will happen to the Los Angeles Times next.