For its first eight decades, the Los Angeles Times was a reliably rightwing newspaper, and since late October its current owner, biotech billionaire Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, shows disturbing signs of returning the Times to its roots. It began when he quashed the editorial board’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris and then lied about, causing a wave of resignations and roughly 20,000 canceled subscriptions, but that was only the beginning.
The week after the election, he fired the entire editorial board, his first big step in shifting the paper sharply to the right in the name of “balance,” just like Fox News. More recently it’s been revealed he quietly spiked an editorial calling for the Senate to hold fast to its constitutional duty to scrutinize and vote on Trump’s cabinet appointees. It could only run alongside an editorial arguing the opposite, he decreed — in effect, that Trump should have absolute power. The pro-democracy side has to be balanced with the anti-democracy side. Pro-truth with anti-truth, too, it would seem.
In its rightwing heyday, the Times played a key role in Richard Nixon’s meteoric rise from fledgling congressional candidate in 1946 to vice president just seven years later. But Los Angeles today is a far cry from what it was then, so a similar full-throated rightwing reversion would swiftly crash and burn, making 20,000 canceled subscriptions look like a walk in Griffith Park.
So, what Soon-Shiong is aiming for is something along the lines of Vichey France or Quisling’s Norway during WWII: a collaborationist institution claiming to preserve its cultural heritage and independence, while doing everything the outside dictator wants. California is deep blue, which in part means open-minded, so the false flag of faux open-mindedness will be Soon-Shiong’s Quisling flag of choice, hailing free-thinkers no matter how rigid and anti-thought they may be.
And so we get the absurd spectacle of his Nov. 23 tweet, in which he implicitly praised TV snake-oil salesman Dr. Oz as a “critical thinker” while explicitly praising Trump’s “inspired” appointment of him as part of a trio of health-related agencies. There’s a long history of hucksters and conspiracy theorists posing as “critical thinkers,” playing on the simplistic idea that criticizing what’s commonly accepted automatically makes you a “critical thinker” worthy of a certain respect. Why, you could be the next Galileo! But such figures invariably have little or no tolerance for critical thinking about their beliefs.
And so it is with Dr. Oz, who touted the worthless virtues of ivermectin on dozens of appearances on Fox News early on in the pandemic. Oz owned stock in two companies who sell ivermectin, McKesson Corporation and Thermo Fisher Scientific, and has longstanding financial ties with a third, Sanofi, CNBC reported during his unsuccessful 2022 Senate campaign. There was never any evidence the anti-malarial drug had any value in combating COVID, but Oz never thought twice about pushing it on TV. We have no way of knowing how many people died as a result of relying on ivermectin, much less how many did so because of Dr. Oz. But we do know that COVID deaths were needlessly much higher because of bad medical advice from Trumpworld. And Dr. Oz was perhaps the most well-known figure giving out such advice.
Long before COVID, Oz had received more than $50 million in ad revenue from Usana Health Sciences, described by the Associated Press as “a Utah-based supplement manufacturer that has been investigated by federal authorities, sued by its own shareholders and accused of operating like a pyramid scheme.” Its ads appeared “in regular segments that often blurred the line between medical advice and advertising, while also donating millions of dollars more to Oz’s charity,” they reported.
This isn’t how a critical thinker behaves. It’s how a snake-oil salesman does. So if Soon-Shiong thinks Oz is a critical thinker, it raises a question: perhaps he’s a snake-oil salesman, too?
His plans to revamp the LA Times strongly indicate that he is, and that all his talk about balance is merely a ruse.
In early December he announced some details on what he had in mind, on a podcast with a rightwing public relations professional he recently appointed to the editorial board. First, he’s having the tech team at his biotech company create a “bias meter” to expose the bias of the paper’s stories, and he’s also having them create a button to generate two AI-written versions of “both sides” of the story.
From the journalism side, long-time press critic Dan Froomkin wrote that, with the button, “Patrick Soon-Shiong, the erratic billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, is touting the single worst idea ever seriously contemplated by a newspaper executive and trust me that is saying something.”
He called the bias meter “utterly ridiculous,” noting, “The results would be specious and all it would accomplish at best would be to undermine his own staff,” which, given his recent track record, may be the whole point. The he continued:
But the button is the real killer. Leave aside that there aren’t two and only two sides to a lot of topics, how do you create “both sides” versions of a story based on reported facts? What’s the “other side” of a fact?
But if the journalism side looks bad, the tech side may look even worse, as Karl Bode reported at Techdirt:
Of course since AI is mostly a simulacrum of knowledge, it can’t “understand” much of anything, including bias. There’s no possible way language learning models could analyze the endless potential conflicts of financial or ideological interests running in any given article and just magically fix it with a wave of a wand. The entire premise is delusional. It’s a sales pitch for Soon-Shiong’s software and competency.
In short, it’s snake-oil salesmanship, pure and simple.
But even if AI magically could do what’s claimed, what’s claimed is illusory, if not incoherent. The idea that there’s a simple one-dimensional measure of ideology which can map onto all subjects, all news stories or editorials, is simply not true. What’s more, being “unbiased” in this sense has nothing to do with being honest or right.
For decades the corporate media treated the climate crisis in just such an unbiased way. They gave equal voice to scientists warning of the crisis, and “skeptics” who denied it. But at least since 2004, when Naomi Oreskes published the study, “Beyond the ivory tower. The scientific consensus on climate change,” it’s been known that there actually is no scientific uncertainty or debate. The small number of scientific papers arguing otherwise have been studied and found to have repeated patterns of similar mistakes. And we now know that fossil fuel companies themselves have known this for roughly seventy years.
In short, false balance in dealing with the climate crisis has done immeasurable harm. And the same is true with false balance in dealing with the threat of rightwing authoritarianism under the rubric of “polarization” as if both sides were mirror reflections, equally to blame.
That is the position that Soon-Shiong is taking, but it’s really just more snake oil. As Froomkin goes on to say, “Both-sides reporting is the worst way to deliver the news. We need reporters to distinguish between the truth and lies, not simply present both and let the reader decide.” And reporters doing this have found, for example, that Trump made more than 30,000 false or misleading statements while he was president in his first term. This was documented on a daily basis.
But Soon-Shiong simply waves it away as matter of opinion, as Oliver Darcy reported on his Status newsletter:
Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, believes it is an “opinion,” not a matter of fact, that Donald Trump lies at a higher rate than other politicians.
“A lot of politicians lie a lot,” Soon-Shiong declared to me on the phone Tuesday evening, pushing back against the assertion that Trump is an abnormality in American politics.
Darcy reported that in a post titled “The Lost Angeles Times,” and for good reason. Fact-checkers themselves could fact-check Soon-Shiong. Poltifact noted earlier this year, “American fact-checkers have never encountered a politician who shares Trump’s disregard for factual accuracy.” To have a newspaper owner in denial of that is to guarantee a newspaper that’s fundamentally uninterested in truth, despite the best efforts of all the dedicated journalists working there who might strenuously disagree.
But counting fact-checks only scratches the surface. In “A Brief History of Fascist Lies,” Finchelstein, Federico writes:
Fascist lying in politics is not typical at all. This difference is not a matter of degree, even if the degree is significant. Lying is a feature of fascism in a way that is not true of those other political traditions. Lying is incidental to, say, liberalism, in a way that it is not to fascism. And, in fact, when it comes to fascist deceptions, they share few things with other forms of politics in history. They are situated beyond the more traditional forms of political duplicity. Fascists consider their lies to be at the service of simple absolute truths, which are in fact bigger lies.
Some still may quibble over calling Trump a fascist. If Hitler and Mussolini were alive today, they’d certainly deny being fascists, too. And they would have their Quisling, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, to bless and nod along with them.
