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Tech billionaires Patrick Soon-Shiong and Jeff Bezos’ efforts to overhaul two of America’s oldest newspapers in a bid to “restore trust” in the news media have sparked controversy among news advocates. There is a growing sense of caution.
Soon-Shiong, the biotech entrepreneur who bought the Los Angeles Times in 2018, said this week that he is “secretly building” an artificial intelligence-powered “bias meter” to tag the paper’s articles.
“So when someone reads an article, they understand that there is some level of bias in the source of that article. . . . And automatically, the reader presses a button and knows both sides of the exact same story. You can… then comment,” Soon-Shiong said on political commentator Scott Jennings’ radio show.
“I knew I had to say even to the newsroom, ‘Is your news really the news? Or is your news really your opinion on the news?'” he said. I did.
The comment was criticized by news organizations and journalists.
“He has declared himself against his own staff… You have declared that you do not trust them and that you intend to independently monitor and score them in public. ” said Anne Marie Lipinski, curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
“I think that’s just too unhealthy for an already fragile industry.”
Former NPR CEO Vivian Schiller described the plan as “everyone’s worst nightmare about billionaire owners.”
Newspaper companies in the United States have been in a precarious financial situation for decades, since the advent of the Internet disrupted the print advertising model that supported the industry.
A billionaire has emerged as the “white knight” buyer of a major American local newspaper that was in financial trouble but still wielding influence.
“It was like, Hey, this is great.” . They sit back and run the business, and we handle the journalism. Of course, we are now seeing the limits of that,” said Gabriel Kahn, a journalism professor at the University of Southern California.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013 and was previously credited with turning around the paper’s fortunes. But the Post lost momentum, losing most of its audience and tens of millions of dollars a year.
Bezos said at a press conference Wednesday that he has “a lot of ideas” for restoring the paper.
“I’m working on it right now. I have some little inventions there,” he said. “We are grappling with an issue that all traditional media grapples with: a very difficult and significant loss of trust.”
Mr. Soon-Shiong and Mr. Bezos sparked outrage in newsrooms when both newspapers withdrew their support for presidential candidate Kamala Harris just weeks before the U.S. presidential election.
“I’m proud of the decision we made. It wasn’t a cowardly one,” Bezos said Wednesday. He also said he was “very excited” about Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
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Soon-Shiong told Jennings on Wednesday: We knew that people didn’t like change. ”
Mr. Soon-Shiong recently appointed Mr. Jennings, who previously worked in the George W. Bush administration, to the LA Times editorial board to “create some balance.”
A Los Angeles Times spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
Trust in U.S. news organizations is at a historically low level. In 2024, fewer than one-third of Americans say they have “a lot” or “a lot” of confidence in the media to report the news fairly and accurately, compared to 1970, according to a Gallup poll. This is down from about 70% in the 1990s.
