LA Times Owner May Add Bias Meter To Site Next Year

Authored by Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov via Headline USA,

The Los Angeles Times’ owner recently revealed that the newspaper will add a bias meter to its website in 2025…

Patrick Soon-Shiong, the biotech billionaire who acquired the newspaper in 2018, told CNN political commentator Scott Jennings on his Flyover Country podcast that he’s been “quietly building” an AI meter “behind the scenes,” adding that it would be available on the website in January 2025.

“Somebody could understand as they read it that the source of the article has some level of bias,” he said.

“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 then stated that the reason why the mainstream media is dying is because the major news outlets failed to separate news and opinion sections.

The Los Angeles Times Guild, the union representing hundreds of the newspaper’s newsroom staffers, criticized the Times owner for claiming that the newspaper is highly biased, stating that Soon-Shiong didn’t provide any evidence or examples.

“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,” the union stated Thursday.

“Those longstanding principles will continue guiding our work.”

The recent news came after the newspaper decided not to endorse former Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris for president, which resulted in leftists canceling their newspaper subscriptions and journalists at the Times quitting their jobs to protest the decision.

Soon after the 2024 election, the newspaper’s leadership announced that it fired everyone on its far-left editorial board to ensure the newspaper would become politically neutral. After doing that, the Times hired Jennings to be a part of the new, unbiased editorial board.