Just when you think you’ve seen the most spectacular twist, turns and flops by major U.S. news organizations genuflecting toward the conquering national hero Donald J. Trump, along comes Patrick Soon-Shiong to sweep the table clean and start over.
For those not obsessed with the news industry (and here’s hoping, for the sake of all that is holy, most people fit this definition) Soon-Shiong is the currently extremely puckered owner of the once-august Los Angeles Times.
Aping competing self-aggrandizing billionaire Jeff Bezos, formerly of Seattle, Soon-Shiong in October ordered his newspaper editorial board to not endorse Trump’s opponent in the recent presidential election.
More recently, the biotech billionaire decreed that any opinion page piece with a — grasp a rail for this — opinion about Trump that might be construed as less than laudatory must be “balanced” by an opposing piece trumpeting the opposite viewpoint.
That was just the start of it. Drawing on technology he said comes from the source of his wealth — that champion of fairness and transparency, America’s pharmaceutical industry — Soon-Shiong announced his desire to create and swiftly deploy a digital “Bias Meter” to help readers grasp the political drift of L.A. Times news stories.
Where to start.
This is the sort of journalistic genius that will soon render satire moot, put The Onion out of business — and likely the Los Angeles Times in the process.
It is in fact a bold stroke toward a previously unimaginable abrogation of journalistic responsibility, given that fully half of the U.S. population now apparently views reporting of demonstrable fact as “bias.” The cure for avoiding “bias” under that definition is unique: repeating known falsehoods.
Purely craven; pure cowardice.
Having said that, is the news-content “meter” concept itself beyond redemption? Possibly not.
While I can confidently guarantee that no “bias meter” will never appear on a story at Cascadia Daily News, I admit to some fantasies about other, purely internal, uses of the same technology, which could be franchised to like-minded news orgs. To wit:
The Non-standard English/PhD-poisoned/Bureaucratese Meter: This gauge would warn potential readers about the degree of clarity pollution by the use of highfalutin’ lingo used by no other thinking human outside university campuses, think tanks, government offices and other dens of obtuseness.
The meter for example would peg off the chart in any story containing one or more uses of the word “center” as a verb, when just “listen” will do. IE, “The committee plans to center the complaints of multitudinous chronically underrepresented households in its next report on individuals who are experiencing houselessness.”
Additionally, any use of the word “scaffold” or “scaffolding” in any conjugative form to describe something other than an aluminum-pipe structure affixed to a building would send the needle to a full Level 11, in Spinal Tap terms (kids: ask Gramps).
The Insufferably Meaningless Sports-Lingo Meter: It pre-warns readers about the degree of Sports Center-spawned phrases such as “physicality” to refer to bodily collisions; “want-to,” as in, “look at number 37; that guy’s got a lot of want-to;” “triple-double,” “double-double,” “sextuple-quadruple” or any obtuse mathematical variations thereof; the notion of an athlete needing to “play within (him/her/themself,” as if playing outside oneself was a possibility; the expression “used his length” (as opposed to height); and last but not least, “in space,” as a reference to what a player can do (apparently) away from a crowd of other players.
Also, we have now seen countless numbers of football players take the ball “to the house” but still have no idea what or where the house is, or whether it meets current building codes and other standards for ADUs and smoke alarms.
We could go on but that would risk violating the Geneva Conventions agreements against reader torture.
The Courtesy-Title-Run-Amok Meter: An exclusive measurement gauge for harumph-worthy publications such as The New York Times, which still use “courtesy titles” to describe individuals on second reference, resulting in awkward constructions such as stories about the late singer Meat Loaf: “’Bat Out of Hell’ was a hit album for Mr. Loaf in 1976.”
The Why-the-Hell-Is-This-Even-Being-Reported-Then Meter: Measures the degree to which publications once thought to be in the truth business are asking you to suspend disbelief and read stories including the winky phrase, “without evidence.” Such as: “Mr. Gaetz insisted (without evidence) that the planet Earth is, in fact, flat” — simply because said genius is duly elected to some low-rent public office by a majority of other said geniuses in a reason-deficient place, likely Florida.
The Yes-We-Are-Aware-This-Is-BS-But-Oh-Well! Meter: Reserved for special cases of treating demonstrably false nonsense, such as the “mystery” of the existence of sasquatches, unicorns or winged fairies, and/or ongoing communications with the dead, in pieces parading as legitimate news stories.
The Thanks-But-I’ll-Pick-Those-Things-Out-On-My-Own Meter: For stories proclaiming, “Three Things You Need To Know about (subject x).”
The Impossible-to-Resist-Innacurate-Description Meter: Measures degree of use of terms of art coined by someone having a bad day in 1973 and somehow continue to survive, such as the knee-jerk reference in plane crash stories to a “black box” that is neither black, nor a box, because apparently “flight data recorder” is simply too difficult for the average person to imagine and/or type.
It all goes to show: We’re open to a ton of creativity in helping people get heaping spoonsful of only the content they like. Including the possible installation of a Long-Way-to-Go-For-This Meter on pieces pounding home a particular set of pet peeves of a cranky columnist.
Ron Judd's column appears weekly; ronjudd@cascadiadaily.com; @roncjudd.
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