Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong has announced plans to install an AI-driven "bias meter" next to every news article and op-ed published — as an effort to build credibility with readers. It’s expected to launch in January. This comes less than two months after Soon-Shiong prevented The Times’ editorial board from endorsing Kamala Harris in the November presidential election. Five of the eight editorial board members have departed, as well as other staffers.
Legal affairs columnist Harry Litman made his resignation public last week, after spending 15 years with the paper.
“[The AI meter] can't tell you what's true,” Litman tells KCRW. “It can give you an overall balance of opinion, but that's not what the north star of newspapers should be. They should be, rather, to inform accurately. And I think they are veering away from that under pressure from [President-elect Donald] Trump.”
He continues, “That's really a departure from papers’ traditional role and essential role, especially now when so many guardrails are under assault.”
Jim Newton, former LA Times editor at large and current professor of communications and public policy at UCLA, deems the AI meter “clownishly stupid” and an undermining of the paper’s staff.
“I just see no way for it to work. No way for it to be meaningful. … The way to produce thoughtful, analytical, truthful news is to hire editors and reporters who are experienced and who can do that, and then trust them to do it, not to insert some bot into their work,” Newton says. “It just strikes me as doomed to fail and to be ridiculed on the way.”
Newton says his former LA Times colleagues are outraged, puzzled, and bewildered. “It really quite explicitly says that he doesn't trust them to do the job that they are hired to do, which is to present the news; that somehow the insertion of this bot will correct what appears to be his lack of confidence in them. So I don't think there's any way for people who work there to respond to it other than to be angered by it.”
Alongside the meter’s announcement, Soon-Shiong says he’s hiring Scott Jennings, a pro-Trump political opinion contributor to CNN.
Litman says he doesn’t have anything against Jennings, but he believes that Soon-Shiong has bought Trump’s claim that papers don’t treat him fairly. “[Soon-Shiong] just seems to be ready to push in Trump's direction, but that is necessarily a push away from fact, truth, and constitutional values.”
Litman emphasizes, “I do want to be clear: It's not a Democrat versus Republican thing, and he should hire whom he wants. And balance on an editorial board, I think that's perhaps one of his legitimate lookouts. That's very different from the violent actions … of uprooting editorials or changing stories. … But again, it's whether or not the paper is presenting facts and truth or shading things.”
Litman notes that beyond the newspaper industry, there seems to be “serious preparation for assault on democratic rule and embrace of giant steps toward authoritarian rule.”
Litman points out that he was never censored from writing about Trump, and he quit because he didn’t want to be part of an LA Times that he says is being recast in the identity of curing favor with Trump.
Newton adds, “What he seems to be fashioning now, or seems to want to do, is to create a Patrick Soon-Shiong newsletter that might reflect his interests and his views, but doesn't present the readership with the collective wisdom of the journalists who work there or thwarts that in some way.”
He continues, “It might be satisfying for him personally, but it so degrades the quality and the integrity of the newspaper that raises questions about why anyone could read it. I mean, he has the right to do these things. He owns the paper. But I also have the right not to read the paper.”