Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | News | March 5, 2025
Good morning. We’re not going to waste time dissecting last night’s address to Congress—mostly because, for anyone who even bothered to tune in, it was the same speech he always gives, peppered with the usual attacks on the previous administration. The only silver lining? At least a few Democrats made some noise. That said, I don’t understand why they insist on trotting out a moderate Dem for the response.
What we will talk about, however, is the ongoing self-sabotage of legacy media. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why billionaires buy newspapers just to run them into the ground. The Washington Post thrived during Trump’s first term by leaning into resistance coverage. You can’t just change a newspaper’s audience midstream, but that’s exactly what Will Lewis is attempting—pushing the Post toward libertarianism while reportedly courting more conservative voices. The result? It’s hemorrhaging readers. No one is switching from The Wall Street Journal or The Federalist to read a Bezos-backed quasi-right-wing Post. If Jeff Bezos doesn’t believe in the paper’s mission or worries about business conflicts, the solution is simple: sell it. But reshaping it for a conservative audience? That’s just lighting money on fire.
And then there’s The Los Angeles Times. Who in their right mind looks at LA — one of the most liberal cities in America — and decides that what it really needs is a shift to the right? That’s financial suicide. Yet billionaire doctor Patrick Soon-Shiong has done just that, gutting the newsroom, chasing out its best editorial voices, and replacing them with people like CNN jackass MAGA pundit Scott Jennings. If you don’t know how to run a paper for its existing audience, then sell it to someone who does.
His latest brilliant idea? Using AI Insights to slap political labels on news articles. Over the weekend, the Times ran a piece about the dangers of AI. An AI tool then labeled it “center left” before generating a 150-word rebuttal defending AI. If you’re wondering how that makes a newspaper look, the answer is: Stupid.
But that’s nothing compared to what happened yesterday. In a piece on the history of the KKK in Anaheim, the AI tool saw fit to provide a sympathetic response, noting that “critics argue that focusing on past Klan influence distracts from Anaheim’s modern identity as a diverse city, with some residents claiming recent KKK rallies were isolated incidents unreflective of current values.”
This kind of nonsense not only destroys morale in an already battered profession, but it also whitewashes the worst kind of racism —in California, no less. It’s bad politics, sure, but it’s also just terrible business. You’d think billionaires would be smarter than this.
As if that weren’t enough, the Times also ran an op-ed from Scott Jennings yesterday with the headline: “President Trump came through for Los Angeles.” For god’s sake, know your audience.
