Tag: Los Angeles Times

Investing in technology instead of human assets is bad for news and the public

LATimes owner Patrick Soon-Shiong has revealed and boasted about his plans to add a button to check the bias of articles written for his newspaper.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/los-angeles-times-owner-bias-meter-1236078458/


I’m confused…. Isn’t it the inherent role of media to present both sides of a story?
Isn’t that what journalists – trained and educated and practiced journalists – already do?

Soon-Shiong is admitting that he doesn’t trust the reporters on his payroll to present the news. Huh? What a revelation! He’s willingly paying people he thinks aren’t doing their jobs!
Have we reached a new depth of corporate insanity?


I see an even greater danger in aggregating viewpoints from AI, which hardly can distinguish truth from hallucinations itself, posting amendments or corrections to a story from cyberspace. This isn’t balance but risks making more noise and confusion… This risks perpetuating a universe of ‘alternative facts.’ Once upon a time, those of us in television news would decry an audience who believed anything they saw when the set box lights flickered. Relying on a bias meter seems equally preposterous.


Methinks his money might be better spent investing in the paper with more reporters and editors and less reliance in a faux technological solution.

Score 1 for Ethics

This is just worth sharing… Score one for ethics and leadership
NBC STATION IN L.A. ADMITS NOT LIVING UP TO JOURNALISTIC STANDARDS
from StudioBriefing, May 19, 2010
The NBC-owned television station in Los Angeles on Tuesday announced the departure of its “vice president, content” and simultaneously admitted that it had not lived up to “journalistic standards” when it aired a faked report about new credit card rules in February. In today’s (Wednesday) Los Angeles Times, media columnist James Rainey said that Tuesday’s announcements by KNBC-TV represented the culmination of a “psychodrama” at the station that “has pitted traditional television journalists .. against a nouveau crowd of content creators who prefer their sizzle served up hot, preferably without much steak.” In the faked report, Rainey said, the station hired reality show producer Vicki Gunvalson, who interviewed friends about the new credit card rules, then passed the friends off as ordinary “men in the street.” The interviews, Rainey indicated, were conducted at an Orange County boutique, owned by another friend of Gunvalson. A spokesman for the station told Rainey that it is “taking steps to prevent this from happening again.”