Good day all. The recent election has had a number of interesting effects beside reelecting the Greatest President of the 21st Century, Donald Trump. One of the effects has been the owners of some of the more left wing making decisions to start pulling their papers back from the edge of complete irrelevance.
Some of the decisions have been Jeff Bezos deciding that the Washington ComPost wasn’t going to endorse anyone for president in 2024. This set off many of the Compost’s staffers and a few of them quit. The owner of the Los Angeles Times, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, made the same decision and several of his staffers also quit. In both cases, the leftists plan was to “Shame” the owners into backing down.
Not only didn’t that work, in the case of the L.A. Times and Dr. Soon-Shiong, he fired the entire editorial board with the plan to bring in people with a much wider political viewpoint. Now he’s going even further to try and correct the blatant biases in the news reporting in his paper. Here are the details from Fox Business News:
The Los Angeles Times could roll out an artificial intelligence-powered “bias meter” as soon as January, in the latest shakeup as the paper’s owner tries to reshape the outlet.
LA Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong announced the upcoming AI feature on Wednesday in an interview with conservative commentator and newly appointed Times editorial board member Scott Jennings on “The Mike Gallagher Show,” which Jennings was guest-hosting.
“Whether it be news or opinion — more likely the opinion or the voices — you have a bias meter so somebody could understand as they read it that the source of the article has some level of bias,” Soon-Shiong, a billionaire tech entrepreneur and doctor who bought the Times in 2018, said Wednesday.
He added that readers could then “press a button and get both sides of that exact same story, based on that story, and then give comments.”
This is an interesting development and frankly a bit sad. Sad in that having to put a “Bias meter’ on a story has to be even considered. It shows just how far the “News business” has fallen. In the “Olden days,” a reporter would write what he or she saw, heard or otherwise discovered. They may have made the story a bit on the salacious side, (They did need to sell newspapers after all), but in general, you got the facts as the reporter knew them.
The editorial side of the house was kept separate and for good reason. Back in the old days, you might have a number of papers in a city, and all of them would have opinions on how things should be done. Readers, (I refuse to use the term “Consumers.” That implies I’m eating the news, not reading or hearing it and then thinking about it), could decide for themselves which side they should be on.
With the rise of journalism schools and the huge media conglomerates merging everything into a smaller footprint, you lost the diversity of opinion and started seeing opinions entering into the general news section. As the general staff grew more and more leftist, they started manufacturing news, not reporting on it. This gave rise to the term “Fake News.” The result? The old news media, both print and broadcast, completely lost their credibility as more sources of information started coming into being. This is why you are seeing people like Jeff Bezos and Doctor Soon-Shiong now taking a more active roll.
The announcement comes amid promises by Soon-Shiong to overhaul the paper, which he said has “conflated news and opinion.”
“If it’s news, it should just be the facts, period,” Soon-Shiong told “Fox News @ Night” host Trace Gallagher last month, adding that he wanted the paper to be more than an “echo chamber.”
Currently, There isn’t a lot of information on how this bias meter or this button will work. Dr. Soon-Shiong is hoping to have it in place and operational in January. (Personally, I think we would be lucky to see it much before March or April) I have a suspicion that once this feature is in place and confirmed to be working, there are going to be some metrics generated that Dr. Soon-Shiong and the management can use to see just how far over the edge their writers actually are.
Normally, I don’t pay any attention to the screeches masquerading as news coming from either the Washington Compost or the L.A. Times. It will be interesting to see how these plans of Dr. Soon-Shiong work and whether or not he can pull the Times back to a more even keel. If it does work, I won’t be surprised to see something similar implemented by Jeff Bezos and the Washington Compost. We shall see.
Thatisall
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