LA Times Owner To Personally Review Opinion Headlines To Avoid Offending Elon Musk

Billionaire media owners are getting bolder in their attempts to suppress opinions they dislike. The latest example comes from LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, who reportedly plans to personally review all opinion headlines to ensure they don’t offend Elon Musk or others that Soon-Shiong is trying to impress.

Considering the billionaire class keeps pretending that they’re concerned about free speech, then doing shit like this suggests it’s really speech criticizing themselves and the levels of corruption and obscene wealth that they actually dislike.

In October, we covered the decisions by the billionaire owners of the LA Times and the Washington Post to block both papers from running editorials endorsing Kamala Harris. WaPo owner Jeff Bezos tried to defend this decision by claiming that it was in response to Americans losing trust in the media. However, as we pointed out, it seemed a lot more likely that billionaires aggressively trying to control our lives through the media is a better explanation for that loss of trust.

We had noted that LA Times owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, had tried to get a cabinet position in the first Trump administration, which might have explained his reasoning. And now it appears he’s taken things to a new level. According to Oliver Darcy (who is very plugged in to the media world), Soon-Shiong got so upset about an opinion piece that criticized Elon Musk that he has declared that all headlines for opinion pieces must be run through him personally before the pieces can be run. This has alarmed the newsroom.

As Darcy notes, this all seems part of a pattern of Soon-Shiong trying to ingratiate himself into Trump/Musk circles:

Soon-Shiong, who once fashioned himself as a Black Lives Matter-supporting vaccine proponent, has morphed into a Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Jennings fanboy. Since Trump’s victory in November, Soon-Shiong has turned to X to criticize the news media, praise Trump’s cabinet picks, and appeal to a MAGA audience. The change in behavior has confounded his journalists, who wonder what happened to the Soon-Shiong whose newspaper enforced strict Covid restrictions and emphasized its support for social justice causes.

But Soon-Shiong’s efforts to reduce the appearance of bias go beyond just reviewing headlines. Darcy notes that Soon-Shiong’s supposed “solution” to complaints of “biased news” is that all stories published by the LA Times will have an AI-powered “bias meter” on them.

This seems like a deeply misguided idea, designed mainly to placate critics who see any coverage they dislike as biased, rather than to do anything useful. Especially in an age where it has been shown repeatedly, and scientifically, that the Republican world is buried in layers upon layers of bullshit. That means, as Stephen Colbert once noted, “reality has a liberal bias.” In such a world, reporting accurately may be deemed as “biased” towards liberal beliefs.

When one political party is increasingly untethered from facts, attempting to artificially “balance” coverage is not actually going to improve trust or accuracy. It’s just going to cause people to dig in further on their beliefs across the board, based on AI systems whose entire purpose is to make shit up.

This kind of meddling by billionaire owners will only further erode public trust in media. It sends the message that news outlets serve the interests of the wealthy and powerful rather than the public. And in an era of rampant misinformation, it will drive more people to retreat into confirmation bias bubbles, explaining away any news they dislike as “biased.”

We like to think that a big part of the media’s role in society is to hold the powerful accountable. But now the powerful are transforming the media to make sure they can’t be held accountable at all.

Yes, of course, as the owner of the newspaper, Soon-Shiong has every right to do whatever stupid shit he wants to do with it. He has the right to do all of this. Just as I have the right to call out how stupid and trust-destroying it is.

And, as Darcy notes, it’s demoralizing the reporters in his newsroom:

The meddling has alarmed staffers, some of whom now harbor concerns that the billionaire presents an active danger to the paper they once believed he might help rescue.

“The man who was supposed to be our savior has turned into what now feels like the biggest internal threat to the paper,” one staffer confided in me Wednesday, speaking on the condition of anonymity, like others, because they were not authorized to talk to the press.

This story is based on nearly a dozen conversations over the last week with current and former staffers at the newspaper. The staffers described a publication depleted of its spirit in which employees are “offended,” “confused,” and “frustrated.” After a year of turbulence in which the Times underwent painful layoffs and lost top editor Kevin Merida, along with several other high-ranking editorial leaders, staffers are now coming to terms with their rule-by-tweet owner using the newspaper as an apparent vehicle to appeal to Donald Trump. Several veteran staffers told me that morale has never been lower, with some people even wondering whether the newspaper will be disfigured beyond recognition under this new era of Soon-Shiong’s reign.

It’s difficult to see how any of this is useful as journalism. It seems entirely based around massaging the egos of certain billionaires.