Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong purchased The Los Angeles Times in 2018, and he recently made news when his paper decided not to endorse a particular candidate in the 2024 presidential election.
You may have heard that the paper brought in CNN's token conservative, Scott Jennings. Coincidentally, Jennings was guest-hosting the Mike Gallagher Show yesterday, where he was scheduled to talk with Soon-Shiong, who would go on to tell him that The LA Times will soon be adding a "bias meter" to their articles.
But what is a "bias meter"?
Soon-Shiong explains:
Imagine if you now take - whether it be news or opinion - and you have a bias meter, whether news or opinion … you have a bias meter so somebody could understand as a reader that the source of the article has some level of bias.
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. Now, I'm giving you some little breaking news here but this is what we're currently building behind the scenes. And I'm hoping that by January we launch this.
A bias meter so the reader knows what he/she is getting into - and how much bias they're being fed?
And another side to every story will be available by simply clicking a button?
Sounds pretty good on paper!
Soon-Shiong also hinted at a sort of X-style Community Notes feature where readers can comment and add context to each individual story, which would be nice to see from a leftist newspaper.
I'm sure Scott Jennings will have a lot to do with this. He might be the voice on the conservative side of some of those articles, or at least have an impact on it.
I gotta say, it's just great to see at least one leftist outlet adapting to this new world where free speech actually means something again.
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