CNN analyst Scott Jennings filled in for Salem Radio talk show host Mike Gallagher this week, and one of the most interesting interviews was with Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times. He divulged to Jennings he’s privately developing a "bias meter," a new AI-powered technology to enhance the balance of the news stories at his paper.
The medical mogul added, “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.”
Jennings replied, “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 or complete view of any given story at any given time.”
“Correct,” Soon-Shiong said, adding: “Comments are as important as sometimes the story, because you get a feel of what people are thinking and, as you said, you can have a conversation, a discourse, a respectful disagreement.”
This did not go over well with the staff. The paper’s editorial guild released a statement in retort, saying “the newspaper’s owner has publicly suggested his staff harbors bias, without offering evidence or examples” and its members value “fairness, precision, transparency, vigilance against bias, and an earnest search to understand all sides of an issue.”
The Hollywood Reporter compared this to NewsGuard, founded in 2018, which provides a browser extension that gives a “Full Nutrition Label” of a news website and its political leanings and who owns it. But as our colleagues at Free Speech America have shown, NewsGuard acts very much like it is owned and operated by the Liberal Media Elite. The liberal elites are all trustworthy, and the conservative elites are menacing misinformers.
Not every watchdog is a reliable critic. The website MediaBiasFactCheck.com has judged National Public Radio wrongly: "NPR’s news reporting is consistently low-biased, factual, and covers both sides of issues." This is not right at all. It's not "low-biased" and it doesn't cover both sides. NPR media reporter David Folkenflik filed a story on Pete Hegseth's nomination for Defense Secretary that quoted an unnamed accuser that Hegseth got "handsy" with her at a bar. Hegseth's lawyer denied the allegation, but all of these allegations have accumulated, making each one sound more plausible.
But NPR, like the other networks, didn't cover the allegations that Kamala Harris's husband Doug Emhoff brutally slapped a girlfriend at the Cannes Film Festival in 2012, a year before he met Harris. Only some damaging personal information is considered newsworthy -- the ones that help Democrats and hurt Republicans.
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