Evan Vucci/AP Photo
Pharmaceuticals billionaire Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong waves as he arrives in the lobby of Trump Tower in New York for a meeting with Donald Trump, January 10, 2017.
Connoisseurs of moral collapse have had a bang-up month since Donald Trump’s election, watching our native billionaire class flock to his banner. Among some moguls of the news media, this has entailed not just a rightward gallop but a repudiation of empiricism, or, at least, empirical journalism.
Consider the case of Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times. Soon-Shiong first drew notice in October, when he forbade the paper’s editorial board from endorsing Kamala Harris. He followed that up last week by adding CNN’s designated right-winger, Scott Jennings, to that board.
But all that pales alongside his pronunciamento last week that he viewed the Times coverage as “not a trusted source” of news. Accordingly, he announced that in January, he would install a “bias meter” that his presumably scientific team was creating, which would monitor the paper’s news and opinion articles, he told Jennings on a podcast, “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.”
Let’s envision how that would apply to the events of the day. Over the weekend, Trump said that members of the January 6th Committee, including Adam Schiff (California’s newly elected senator) and Liz Cheney, should be jailed. A subsequent Times story might note that the committee was investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, quoting people to that effect. The bias meter would then note that many Americans believe that Trump was innocent and that he actually won the 2020 election. It would quote somebody to that effect. Readers could then add their doubtless measured comments to that effect as well.
In fact, Soon-Shiong’s brainstorm comes at a moment when the MAGA movement is dead set against empiricism, and exists to support a political leader whose rise has been powered by nearly constant Big Lies. Under the wafer-thin guise of objectivity, the “bias meter” will give equal weight to fictions that undercut the facts that the Times reports.
That this meter will apply to the paper’s opinion pieces as well as its news reporting is, well, mind-boggling. No opinion piece of any merit has ever been published to which someone didn’t object. For that matter, what about pro-Dodger sports columns? Movie reviews?
I don’t write this as someone who thinks the Times is flawless. From 1989 through 2001, I was the news and politics editor of L.A. Weekly, in which capacity I would periodically comment on stories that I thought the Times had gotten wrong or simply missed. But I never thought that the journalists at the Times weren’t scrupulously conscientious in digging for and reporting the facts, and they remain so today.
Time was when the Times was an organ of the state’s Republican Party. Its chief political columnist, Kyle Palmer, often functioned as the party’s one-man primary electorate, selecting its nominees not only by touting them in print but actually dictating formal endorsements in closed-door party meetings. But that all ended in 1960, when a new publisher—Otis Chandler—compelled the paper to become, in a word, empirical. Indeed, when Richard Nixon lost the 1962 gubernatorial election to Democrat Pat Brown, he attacked the Times for failing to boost his campaign in its news coverage, the kind of thing that had been routine in the pre-Otis days. One can only imagine the flood of accusations his supporters would have inserted in the paper’s stories had they then been able to access Soon-Shiong’s bias meter. And Nixon’s supporters weren’t remotely as sloshed in the kind of pervasive fictions that “inform” the MAGA faithful of today.
Soon-Shiong made his fortune, currently estimated to be roughly $8 billion, in biotech, an industry whose participants are ever attuned to such matters as government regulations and approvals. The Times is a side project for him, just as The Washington Post is a side project for its owner, Jeff Bezos, whose fortune, of course, overwhelmingly consists of his stock in Amazon. Like Soon-Shiong, Bezos compelled his paper’s editorial board not to run the Harris endorsement it had drafted, and like Soon-Shiong, he is surely cognizant of Trump’s power to adversely affect his wealth and power.
CEOs and the mega-rich are reportedly adding to their security details since the murder last week of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO. The real threat to Soon-Shiong, I suspect, isn’t some earthly miscreant, but rather, as with Don Giovanni, a ghostly one: the shade of John Peter Zenger, patron saint of the American free press, rising from the grave and dragging him down to hell.
