Billionaire Owner of LA Times Plans to Use an AI-Powered ‘Bias Meter’ on Editorials

The billionaire owners of media companies are increasingly making their voices heard. Elon Musk is X’s top poster, and notably used the social media platform to help Donald Trump win the 2024 presidential election. Jeff Bezos recently put a halt to the practice of presidential endorsements at the Washington Post, just in time to (again) help Trump. Now, amidst other drastic changes to its workforce and culture, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times has said that he wants to integrate an AI-powered “bias meter” into the paper’s coverage, in an apparent effort to make its reporting more politically neutral.

News of the bias meter was first spotted by blogger Oliver Darcy, who wrote Wednesday about the apparent plan. Soon-Shiong initially mentioned the bias meter on the podcast of pro-Trump CNN contributor (and recent LA Times editorial board member) Scott Jennings. The point of the meter would be so that “someone could understand, as a reader, that the source of the article has some level of bias,” he told Jennings. Soon-Shiong elaborated that readers would be able to “press a button and get both sides of that exact same story, based on that story, and then give comments.” Soon-Shiong has said he wants to have such a function at the paper by as early as January of 2025.

Little is known about how such a meter would actually work. However, Darcy’s apparent push for algorithmically enforced “neutrality” comes at a time when sources close to the paper claim the billionaire is increasingly showing his own lack of it. Indeed, Darcy’s article notes that Soon-Shiong has increasing “morphed into a Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Jennings fanboy” and that since “Trump’s victory in November, Soon-Shiong has turned to X to criticize the news media, praise Trump’s cabinet picks, and appeal to a MAGA audience.” Soon-Shiong also previously sought a role in the first Trump administration.

Soon-Shiong recently fired a huge amount of staffers at the paper, laying off 115 people—in one of the single largest workforce reductions in the paper’s history. Other notable figures, like its editorials editor, have recently stepped down. All of the changes at the paper, combined with Darcy’s apparent rightward shift, have forced Times writers into a pessimistic corner. “The man who was supposed to be our savior has turned into what now feels like the biggest internal threat to the paper,” one anonymous staffer apparently told Darcy.

Another anonymously quoted employee made the situation at the West Coast’s largest paper sound grim: “We’ve gone through ups and downs,” they said. “But in previous times, there were always people who saw the upside. It is different now.”

While the idea of enforcing standards of neutrality in political reporting is a fine idea, the notion of using an algorithm to do it seems questionable at best. AI is still a developing technology and, as has been demonstrated time and time again, it is not a failsafe replacement for human judgment. It’s often just simply wrong. Algorithms can also be programmed to have their own biases, so unless Soon-Shiong’s bias meter is open-source and auditable, it will be of little value to readers.