In an impressive display of fear and greed, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times declares war on journalism.

[Celerity]

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-12-10-media-mogul-amok/

Pharmaceuticals billionaire Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong waves as he arrives in the lobby of Trump Tower in New York for a meeting with Donald Trump, January 10, 2017.

Connoisseurs of moral collapse have had a bang-up month since Donald Trump’s election, watching our native billionaire class flock to his banner. Among some moguls of the news media, this has entailed not just a rightward gallop but a repudiation of empiricism, or, at least, empirical journalism. Consider the case of Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times. Soon-Shiong first drew notice in October, when he forbade the paper’s editorial board from endorsing Kamala Harris. He followed that up last week by adding CNN’s designated right-winger, Scott Jennings, to that board.

But all that pales alongside his pronunciamento last week that he viewed the Times coverage as “not a trusted source” of news. Accordingly, he announced that in January, he would install a “bias meter” that his presumably scientific team was creating, which would monitor the paper’s news and opinion articles, he told Jennings on a podcast, “so somebody could understand, as a reader, 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.”

Let’s envision how that would apply to the events of the day. Over the weekend, Trump said that members of the January 6th Committee, including Adam Schiff (California’s newly elected senator) and Liz Cheney, should be jailed. A subsequent Times story might note that the committee was investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, quoting people to that effect. The bias meter would then note that many Americans believe that Trump was innocent and that he actually won the 2020 election. It would quote somebody to that effect. Readers could then add their doubtless measured comments to that effect as well. In fact, Soon-Shiong’s brainstorm comes at a moment when the MAGA movement is dead set against empiricism, and exists to support a political leader whose rise has been powered by nearly constant Big Lies.

Under the wafer-thin guise of objectivity, the “bias meter” will give equal weight to fictions that undercut the facts that the Times reports. That this meter will apply to the paper’s opinion pieces as well as its news reporting is, well, mind-boggling. No opinion piece of any merit has ever been published to which someone didn’t object. For that matter, what about pro-Dodger sports columns? Movie reviews? I don’t write this as someone who thinks the Times is flawless. From 1989 through 2001, I was the news and politics editor of L.A. Weekly, in which capacity I would periodically comment on stories that I thought the Times had gotten wrong or simply missed. But I never thought that the journalists at the Times weren’t scrupulously conscientious in digging for and reporting the facts, and they remain so today.

snip

[Jit423]

1. I often wonder why MAGA's are not upset about Trump's ethnic picks to run and ruin our country.

I guess as long as his picks are not African Americans or Native Americans they are ok with Trump?

[obamanut2012]

2. LA Times was such a good investigative paper

The Miami Herald still is, but it's one of a handful left.

[Hekate]

6. 😢I'm feeling such a sense of shock. This is the paper my parents read, as did I ...

Last edited Tue Dec 10, 2024, 09:08 PM - Edit history (1)

With the only exception being a move out of state for awhile. It has been one of the great regional newspapers of the US. The columnists are sterling. The investigations likewise.

There’s no replacement for that.

[Hassler]

3. Another apartheid lover from South Africa

[yardwork]

4. It's interesting how many of them are South African.

[GenThePerservering]

5. They're just obeying in advance

frightened and spineless.

[applegrove]

7. That 'bias meter' could work to liberal advantage and save time by people

Last edited Wed Dec 11, 2024, 12:54 AM - Edit history (2)

only reading articles that are about helping humanity rather than billionaires. Maybe something like AI could list all the 'liberal' articles (the truly Democracy building articles as liberalism is) and distance people from having to wade through the fascist ones.