Stupidest new idea in journalism: a ‘bias meter’

MAGA-friendly Los Angeles Times owner wants to make AI the ultimate editor.

I’m a longtime journalist. I wouldn’t presume to tell doctors how to improve cancer chemotherapy.

But Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, a wealthy innovator in the field of cancer chemotherapy, is presuming to tell journalists how to report the news. Soon-Shiong’s opinions on journalism would be easy to ignore except for one thing: He owns the Los Angeles Times.

Lately, Soon-Shiong has gone full MAGA, vetoing his editorial board’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris and adding right-wing CNN commentator Scott Jennings to his editorial board. Soon-Shiong was recently displeased by an opinion page headline about Elon Musk, so he ordered his editors to email headlines to him for his personal review before they’re published.

Soon he plans to take a step that’s even more outlandish. He wants to place an artificial-intelligence-powered “bias meter” next to news and opinion stories and use AI to create alternative versions of those stories to provide “both sides of that exact same story.”

If this happens – and Soon-Shiong says he hopes to roll it out next month – he will further vandalize a major American newspaper, with more and more talented journalists rushing for the exits.

Reaction to Soon-Shiong’s plans seems akin to the response when Donald Trump comes up with one of his crackpot ideas: a fervent hope that he doesn’t mean what he says. But Soon-Shiong is convinced that the Times is “an echo chamber, not a trusted source.” And in a podcast and radio interview with Jennings last week, he announced that he plans to fix this with AI:

Soon-Shiong: Not AI in the sense of making up stories, but imagine if you can now take, whether it be news or opinion and you have a bias meter so that, whether there be news or opinion, more like the opinion or the voices, you have a bias meter, so that someone could understand as they read it that the source of the article has some level of 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. Now, I’m giving you a little breaking news here, but this is what we’re quietly building behind the scenes, and I’m hopeful by January we launch this.

Jennings: So we’re talking about a fusion of content created by journalists and technology that you’re developing that will give the readers a more well-rounded view, or the complete view, of any given story at any given time.

Soon-Shiong: Correct.

The implications of this are frightening, though Soon-Shiong didn’t provide many specifics in his comments and hasn’t elaborated publicly since then. He says the “bias meter” would be for both news and opinion, but then suggests it might be more important for opinion. Yet opinion stories are labeled as opinion. Of course, they’re biased. Would Soon-Shiong’s AI provide readers with an alternate view of an opinion piece? Would an op-ed calling for abortion rights be accompanied by an opposing op-ed written by AI calling for the arrest of women who get abortions?

As for a “bias meter” for news stories, what would the gradients be? And wouldn’t it be devastating for the credibility of the reporting? Wouldn’t wrongdoers exposed by investigative reporting cite any level of perceived bias – even a dull pink – to try to undercut the stories?

And what would the alt version of a news story look like? There are more than two possible versions of every story. Which one would AI pick? Would the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol become a “normal tourist visit”?

Based on my decades of experience in newsrooms, I know how a “bias meter” for news would work in practice. Rather than reporters and editors producing news stories and then living with whatever judgment the “bias meter” rendered after publication, the newsroom would run those stories through the “bias meter” process before publication and then adjust the stories to get a “better” grade from AI. This would cripple the ability of journalists to tell hard truths. It would make the news mushy and vague.

Soon-Shiong says the Los Angeles Times and other mainstream media are biased. Well, of course, they are. No news outlet is truly objective. When I was metro editor at the Chicago Tribune, I didn’t green-light every story that was out there. I chose the ones that my fellow journalists and I thought were the most relevant to our city and our readership. It was a judgment call. And we did it just fine without AI.

Obviously, an AI system developed by human beings will have biases too. Especially if the AI is programmed by a person who thinks his own newsroom leans left and is “not a trusted source.”

In his recent actions, Soon-Shiong has shown that he fails to understand the value-added of journalism. It’s not just publishing what people say. It’s experienced journalists using historical context, statistics, expert opinions, and documentation to draw fair conclusions. Notice that I use the word “fair,” not “balanced.” Right-wingers want their own unsupported opinions to have the same status as verified information. They want the Big Lie about the 2020 election to be accepted simply because they keep saying it.

Soon-Shiong seems especially enamored with the idea of turning the Times into a chat board rather than a place where facts get verified. “The comments are more or as important as sometimes the story because you get a feel for what people are thinking,” Soon-Shiong says.

It’s feelings over facts – the information pollution that’s degrading our democracy. And now the right wants to exploit technology like AI to confer legitimacy on its favorite hoaxes.

Let’s hope this is just a “mad scientist” moment for Soon-Shiong and he’ll come to his senses soon before he wrecks the news organization he’s toying with.