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Tech billionaires Patrick Soon-Shiong and Jeff Bezos’ efforts to overhaul two of America’s most famous newspapers to “restore trust” in the news media are raising alarm among members of the press.

Soon-Shiong, a biotech entrepreneur who bought the Los Angeles Times in 2018, said this week he had “secretly” built an artificial intelligence-based “bias meter” to attach to the paper’s articles.

“So someone reading it might understand that the source of the article has some degree of bias. . . And then the reader can automatically press a button and get both sides of the same story. . . and then make comments,” Soon-Shiong said during an appearance on political commentator Scott Jennings’ radio show.

“I knew I had to even reach out to the newsroom by saying, ‘Look, are you sure your news is news?’ Or is your news really (your) opinion of your news?'” he said.

The comments were criticized by members of the press and journalists.

“He declares himself to the public as an enemy of his own workforce. . . “You have expressed your lack of trust in her and stated that you will independently monitor and evaluate her in a public place,” said Ann Marie Lipinski, trustee of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.

“I just think it’s so unhealthy for an already fragile industry.”

Vivian Schiller, NPR’s former executive director, described the plans as “everyone’s worst nightmare about a billionaire owner.”

U.S. newspapers have been in financial transition for decades after the advent of the Internet wiped out the print advertising model that had kept the industry afloat.

Billionaires have become “white knights” as buyers of major regional U.S. newspapers that were strapped for cash but still had influence.

“It was like, Hey, this is great. . . You will sit back, run the business and we will do the journalism. Of course we see the limits now,” said Gabriel Kahn, a journalism professor at the University of Southern California.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos acquired The Washington Post in 2013 and was previously credited with leading the newspaper’s turnaround. But the Post has lost momentum, losing much of its audience and tens of millions of dollars a year.

Bezos said at a conference on Wednesday that he had “a lot of ideas” to restore the paper.

“I’m working on that right now. And I have a few little inventions,” he said. “We are struggling with the problem that all traditional media struggles with, which is a very difficult and significant loss of trust.”

Soon-Shiong and Bezos both caused outrage in their newsrooms when they withdrew support for presidential candidate Kamala Harris in their newspapers just weeks before the US election.

Bezos said on Wednesday: “I’m proud of the decision we made, and it was anything but cowardly.” He also said he was “very hopeful” about Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

Soon-Shiong told Jennings on Wednesday: “I knew I was going to get heat, I knew it was going to be painful. I knew people didn’t like change.”

Soon-Shiong recently appointed Jennings, who previously worked in the George W. Bush administration, to the LA Times editorial board to “provide some level of balance.”

A spokesman for the Los Angeles Times did not respond to requests for comment.

Trust in the US news media is at an all-time low. According to Gallup polls, in 2024, fewer than a third of Americans said they had “a lot” or “fairly a lot” of trust in the media to report the news fairly and accurately. In the 1970s it was around 70 percent.