Weeks after scrapping a presidential endorsement of Kamala Harris that had been prepped by his editorial board, the owner of The Los Angeles Times says his product team is working on a new tech-driven “bias meter” to add to articles on the paper’s website as soon as next year.
The idea, as Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong presented it, sounds like it’ll be a module that presents multiple viewpoints on a particular news item as well as allow some version of comments to be integrated. And it marks the latest signal from the billionaire that he plans to reshape the Times as the second Trump administration gears up and after the exits of multiple edit board members following the endorsement flap.
“Imagine if you now take — whether it be news or opinion — and you have a bias meter, whether news or opinion, more like the opinion, or the voices, you have a bias meter so somebody could understand as a reader that the source of the article has some level of bias,” Soon-Shiong elaborated in a radio segment hosted by incoming Times editorial board member Scott Jennings.
(The reveal of this news to Jennings isn’t a coincidence. In November, Soon-Shiong has used his X account to extoll the virtues of the CNN pundit — who amiably advances conservative viewpoints and rebuttals of Trump critiques on the cable news network — and the owner has said, “I’m looking for people like Scott Jennings” to staff his paper.)
The Los Angeles Times mogul added, “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. Now, I’m giving you some little breaking news here but this is what we’re currently building behind the scenes. And I’m hoping that by January we launch this.”
Jennings replied, “So we’re talking about a fusion of content created by journalists and technology that you’re developing that will give the readers a more well-rounded or complete view of any given story at any given time.”
“Correct,” Soon-Shiong said, adding: “Comments are as important as sometimes the story, because you get a feel of what people are thinking and, as you said, you can have a conversation, a discourse, a respectful disagreement.”
After the radio show segment was published the paper’s editorial guild released a statement in retort, saying “the newspaper’s owner has publicly suggested his staff harbors bias, without offering evidence or examples” and its members value “fairness, precision, transparency, vigilance against bias, and an earnest search to understand all sides of an issue.”
The “bias meter” idea has been bouncing around online as a product idea that readers theoretically would be interested in for some time. NewsGuard, founded in 2018, provides a browser extension that gives a “Full Nutrition Label” of a news website and its political leanings and who owns it. Captain America star Chris Evans launched a website in 2020 called A Starting Point that offers explainers on news topics with a “here’s three opinions from Democrats on this” and “three opinions from Republicans on this”-type format. And the short-lived news startup The Messenger (which Soon-Shiong was pitched on buying before it shut down early this year) had inked a deal with an artificial intelligence company, Seekr, to somehow help root out bias in its own reporting.
Soon-Shiong also addressed why he spiked the Harris endorsement, saying he believed the Times opinion section had been “an echo chamber and not a trusted source.”
“When my next level of people on the editorial board shared with me that they had prepackaged an endorsement without having met with any of the candidates, I was a little bit outraged and felt that whatever they were about to say should really be based on facts,” Soon-Shiong said.
He added, “I knew I was going to take heat, I knew it was going to be painful, I knew that people don’t like change and I knew I had to actually address even the newsroom by saying, ‘Look, are you sure your news is news or is your news really opinion of your news?’”
Speaking of alternative viewpoints, Los Angeles Times editorial board member Karin Klien, who resigned after the endorsement was scrapped, described how she saw the move by the paper’s owner to make the late call.
“If Soon-Shiong had decided early last spring that he no longer wanted to endorse on presidential races, that would have been fair, neutral and legitimate,” Klein wrote in a guest column for The Hollywood Reporter on Oct. 27. “An odd decision, not to weigh in on the most crucial election in my lifetime, but his call.”
Klein added, “But by making the decision at the 11th hour, when the candidates are in place, polls are tight and almost anything can throw the race one way or the other, Soon-Shiong’s anti-editorial stance is actually a de facto decision to do an editorial — a wordless one, a make-believe-it’s-invisible one that unfairly implies grievous faults in Harris that put her on a level with Donald Trump. Soon-Shiong is, whether he realizes it or not, practicing the opposite of the neutrality he professes to seek.”