The Brooklyn Rail

The billionaire owner of The Los Angeles Times says he’s soon going to install a “bias meter” next to all the news and opinion pieces in his paper, so readers will be able to push a button and tell ahead of time what the bias of the writer is, so they can decide whether or not to read the material, or how much credence to give it. This is true authoritarian thinking. It sees everything as being biased in a binary way, and one needs only to balance the binary biases to arrive at an imagined symmetry. You can’t trust the reader to make these decisions herself. God forbid. She must rely on the input of a bias machine, which is, presumably, divinely unbiased. Dr. Soon-Shiong says he’ll use technology developed in his health care businesses to build these “bias meters” into the news reporting in his newspaper.

Hopefully, Dr. Soon-Shiong will find a way to install “bias meters” everywhere, not just in The Los Angeles Times. Portable, hand-held devices would be a welcome innovation. Think of all the time you will save! They would come in very handy, for instance, in mass deportation sweeps.

But imagine what this will do for the field of journalism. Until Dr. Soon-Shiong discovered this breakthrough technology, journalists operated under the fanciful illusion that they could approach phenomena based on facts and reason, objectively, and leave it to their readers and viewers to discern bias. This is clearly no longer workable. Everybody knows that all journalists can be divided into two groups now: those who support the regime and those who do not. Those who support the regime are telling the truth and those who do not support the regime are Fake News and should be prosecuted. The Leader has known this for a long time, and has told us over and over again.

Dr. Soon-Shiong is just taking the next step in a process that has been active for some time. As Heather McGhee told Anand Giridharadas at The Ink on November 11:

We need to look at the fact that we are now three decades into a right-wing takeover of our information ecosystem that is fundamentally changing people's frameworks. We're talking about the loss of local news. More than half of American counties have no access or very limited access to local news. We're talking about Sinclair, a right-wing operation taking over local broadcasts that reaches over 70% of the American population, with a deliberate agenda and a focus on crime, homelessness, and drugs. Add in social media—where so many people get their news—and how easily manipulable that is at its best. And at its worst, it's Elon Musk.

You combine that with the crisis in authority that was created by the Covid pandemic and the foreign disinformation campaigns that have become so brazen that people in the federal government are just saying, "We are helpless to do anything about it. All we can do is point out that it's wrong." You take all of that together, plus Fox News and conservative radio. Plus the entertainment ecosystem around men, especially young men: podcasts, and video games. And the rigorous journalism, meanwhile, is behind paywalls. So we can now see a full 360-degree wraparound alternate universe, for most people without a New York Times subscription.

That doesn't diminish the material concerns and the real privation facing working-class families. But it does mean that the meaning-making about why they're struggling to make ends meet, who's to blame, and who can fix it, is controlled by the right wing. 

Filings from the Federal Election Commission reveal that Elon Musk spent at least $250 million to get Trump re-elected. $20 million of that was spent to support a super PAC named after Ruth Bader Ginsburg which was designed to help Donald Trump soften his anti-abortion positions and make women voters think that Trump’s views on abortion align with the late Supreme Court Justice’s. Musk also spent $40.5 million to pay people in swing states to vote. But Musk’s actual total spending on the election will probably never be known because some of the money went to dark-money groups that no longer (after Citizens United) have to reveal their sources.

Steve Bannon said of Elon Musk: “He came in with the money and the professionals. To be brutally frank, it’s the reason we won.” What did Musk receive for his investment of a quarter of a billion dollars to get Trump back into power? And it is becoming increasingly clear that Musk wants to turn America into pre-1990s South Africa.