Los Angeles Times billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong is planning to add an artificial intelligence-powered "bias meter" to his outlet’s news articles to help give readers "both sides" of a story, CNN reported.
"Somebody could understand as they read it that the source of the article has some level of bias," he said on CNN’s top Republican commentator Scott Jennings’s Thursday podcast. "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."
Soon-Shiong told Jennings—who will be joining the Times’s editorial board—he believes major media outlets have failed to separate news and opinion, which he suggested "could be the downfall of what now people call mainstream media," CNN reported.
The new plan comes after Soon-Shiong, the biotech guru who acquired the Times in 2018, faced an uproar from his staff the week before the election for blocking the paper’s endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris. Numerous Times staff, including members of its editorial team, resigned in protest and thousands of readers canceled their subscriptions to the paper.
"I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not okay with us being silent," said Mariel Garza, the Times editorials editor. "In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up."
In recent weeks, Soon-Shiong has praised President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet picks on his personal social media accounts.
The labor union that represents hundreds of the paper’s newsroom staffers condemned Soon-Shiong’s "bias meter," saying the move suggests "his staff harbors bias, without offering 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 Los Angeles Times Guild said in a statement Thursday. "Those longstanding principles will continue guiding our work."
One columnist for the Times’s opinion page, Harry Litman, resigned from the paper on Thursday, citing Soon-Shiong's support of Trump.
"My resignation is a protest and visceral reaction against the conduct of the paper’s owner, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong. Soon-Shiong has made several moves to force the paper, over the forceful objections of his staff, into a posture more sympathetic to Donald Trump," Litman wrote Thursday. "Given the existential stakes for our democracy that I believe Trump’s second term poses, and the evidence that Soon-Shiong is currying favor with the President-elect, they are repugnant and dangerous."
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