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Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, recently announced plans to introduce a “bias meter” next to the paper’s news and opinion coverage.
Soon-Shiong officially announced the news on an episode of Scott Jennings’ “Flyover Country” podcast. Jennings is an opinion contributor for CNN, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times.
For news and opinion articles, he explained in an interview, “we have a bias meter so that someone as a reader can understand that there is some level of bias in the source of the article.” “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.”
The tool is scheduled to debut in January.
In an interview, Soon-Shiong said he considered his newspaper “an echo chamber and not a reliable source of information.”
The LA Times Guild, which represents LA Times journalists, released a statement regarding Soon-Shiong’s latest comments.
“Recently, a newspaper owner publicly suggested, without providing evidence or examples, that his employees were biased,” union leadership said in a statement Thursday. The union said all staff at the Times adhere to ethical guidelines that call for “impartiality, accuracy, transparency, vigilance against bias and a passionate quest to understand all sides of an issue.” .
Some Los Angeles Times reporters, such as Harry Littman, a senior legal columnist in the Los Angeles Times opinion department, have left the paper in the wake of Soon-Shiong’s recent actions.
Littman was not the only employee to resign recently. Mariel Garza, the paper’s former editorial editor, resigned in October following Soon-Shiong’s decision to block the editorial board’s plan to endorse Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris for president.
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