The Los Angeles Times’ owner Patrick Soon-Shiong on Wednesday revealed he has been working “behind the scenes” to create a “bias meter” for every article that comes out of the newspaper.
He said he hopes the new tool, which will be backed by artificial intelligence, will be released by January.
It’s the businessman’s latest project to balance out the newsroom, after he vowed to bring more conservative voices to the paper and faced heated backlash for blocking the paper’s endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.
Soon-Shiong discussed the upcoming venture with his recent editorial board pick, Scott Jennings, a conservative commentator and staunch Trump supporter.
Every article in the LA Times’ news and opinion sections will have a bias meter tagged to it, Soon-Shiong said on Wednesday as Jennings guest-hosted “The Mike Gallagher Show.”
“So that someone could understand as a reader that the source of the article has some level of bias,” Soon-Shiong, who bought the Times in 2018 for $500 million, said.
“The reader can press a button and get both sides of that exact same story, based on that story, and then give comments,” he explained.
The LA Times did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Soon-Shiong first vowed to even out the paper’s left-leaning political slant in November.
“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 said.
His pledge came despite fervent backlash the month before when he blocked the Times’ editorial board from endorsing Harris. Thousands of readers canceled their subscriptions and urged others to boycott the company on social media. Several outraged members of the editorial board resigned.
But Soon-Shiong doubled down and said the LA Times had “conflated news and opinion,” and promised to ensure both sides of the political spectrum will be “heard” and “represented.”
Last week, he announced Jennings would be joining the paper’s editorial board – another decision that sparked controversy.
The billionaire newspaper owner abruptly ended an interview with reporter Oliver Darcy, who left CNN and launched a standalone newsletter, after Darcy pressed him on his choice to hire Jennings.
In his Status newsletter, Darcy reported that the interview “began warmly enough” but took a turn when he pushed back on Soon-Shiong’s claim that Jennings was “respectful” and “thoughtful” on air alongside his fellow CNN panelists.
Darcy wrote that he said it was “very debatable” that Jennings was respectful and criticized him for defending President-elect Donald Trump and his “endless stream of lies and conspiracy theories.”
A “visibly annoyed” Soon-Shiong took issue with the conversation around Trump, snapping that Darcy was a “so-called reporter” before ending the interview, Darcy wrote in the newsletter.
