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CNN
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Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong plans to block the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris and shake up its editorial board, but he is using artificial intelligence to “bias” the paper’s news stories. Meter” and said it would offer readers “both sides” of the story.
Soon-Shiong, the biotech billionaire who bought The Times in 2018, told CNN political commentator Scott Jennings, who will join the paper’s editorial board, that he was “quietly building” the AI meter “behind the scenes.” He said he was doing it. The meter, scheduled to go on sale in January, uses the same augmented intelligence technology he has been developing for medical purposes since 2010, Soon-Shiong said.
“I think some people will realize as they read that there’s some degree of bias in the source of the article,” he said on Jennings’ Flyover Country podcast. “And what we have to do is make sure we don’t have what’s called confirmation bias, so automatically that story comes up. Readers can press a button and based on that story. You can get both sides of the same story and comment on them.”
Soon-Shiong said major publishers have so far failed to properly separate news and opinion, suggesting this “could lead to the downfall of what we now call mainstream media.”
The comments prompted a rebuke from the union representing hundreds of Times news staff, which said Soon-Shiong had “publicly suggested, without providing evidence or examples, that staff are biased.” Ta.
The Los Angeles Times Guild says, “Our members and all Times staff members are committed to a series of commitments that demand fairness, accuracy, transparency, vigilance against bias, and a passionate quest to understand all sides of an issue.” “We adhere to strict ethical guidelines.” in a statement Thursday. “These long-standing principles will continue to guide our work.”
The controversial move by the paper’s owners also led to the resignation of Harry Littman, senior legal columnist for the Times’ opinion page.
“My resignation is a protest and visceral reaction to the actions of the paper’s owner, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, who over the strong opposition of his staff has led the paper to become more sympathetic to Donald Trump. performed several movements to force him into a comfortable position,” Littman wrote Thursday. “They are disgusting and dangerous given the existential risks to our democracy that I believe a second term for President Trump poses and the evidence that Mr. Soon-Shiong is rallying support for the next president.”
Littman’s resignation comes days after Kelly Kavanaugh, deputy editor of the paper’s op-ed page, also announced her resignation, Status first reported. In addition to major changes to the editorial board, Soon-Shiong has begun reviewing the headlines of all opinion pieces before publication, the people said. A Times spokeswoman did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.
The move comes as Soon-Shiong is considering reorganizing the paper’s editorial board, telling CNN last month that the paper’s opinion column would be more conservative and centrist in the wake of President-elect Donald Trump’s victory. He said he plans to strike a balance with the voices of the sect.
“To be honest, the current opinion writers committee is very left-leaning, and that’s fine, but in order to balance it out, we need people who lean to the right, and more importantly, people who lean to the right. I think we need someone who is ‘in the middle’,” Soon-Shiong told CNN in November.
The reorganization follows Soon-Shiong’s controversial decision to block Vice President Harris’ draft endorsement two weeks before Election Day, which resulted in resignations from several of the paper’s editorial boards, staff protests and Thousands of readers canceled their subscriptions. According to the Times website, only three of the eight members of the editorial board remain. On Wednesday, Soon-Shiong told Jennings he was “furious” when he shared that the editorial board had “pre-compiled” an endorsement for the president “without meeting with any of the candidates.”
“We didn’t want our newspaper to become part of a vehicle for information, misinformation and disinformation,” he said.
“Everyone’s entitled to an opinion. That’s fair,” Soon-Shiong said, adding that the paper “needs to actually create some balance when it comes to opinions and columnists, and then actually let readers know this.” “There is,” he emphasized. It’s an opinion. ”
In his resignation Thursday, Littman called the owner’s decision to surge support for the president “a grave insult to the paper’s readership.”
“Mr. Trump has made it clear that he will cause trouble for the media that engages him,” Littman wrote. “Rather than react with indignation to this challenge to his paper’s vital function in a democracy, Soon-Shiong threw the paper to the wolves. That was cowardly.”
