The LA Times is a leading voice for news across the LA Metropolitan Area with many notable achievements, including 47 Pulitzer Prize awards, 1.3 million daily readers, and 27 million monthly website visits, which also gives it a national profile. At times, however, the newspaper receives criticism for having a liberal bias. This leads The Factual to ask two questions: how credible is the LA Times, and how biased is its coverage?
How Does The Factual Rate News Sources?
The Factual analyzes more than 10,000 news stories every day to help readers find the most informative, least-biased articles. Our news-rating algorithm scores each article along four metrics: (1) cited sources and quotes, (2) publication history, (3) writing tone, and (4) author expertise. These scores combine in a weighted average we call a Factual Grade, which ranges from 0–100%. (See our How It Works page to learn more about our algorithm.)
For this study, we analyzed ~1,000 articles each from 240 news sources. The average Factual Grade for the entire dataset was 62.5%. Based on these averages, we can compare the performance of news sites across the media ecosystem. The entire dataset can be explored in greater detail here.
How Factual Is the LA Times?
The LA Times scored an average Factual Grade of 69.0%, placing it in the 80th percentile of our dataset. The publisher performs positively across most of our metrics. For example, the paper employs experienced journalists who routinely author high-quality articles on the same subjects, indicating topical expertise. Lower-scoring articles from the LA Times appear to be due to no assigned author (meaning a low score for author expertise) or due to a lack of hyperlinks (meaning a low score for cited evidence).
Like any news source, scores for articles from the LA Times varied widely based on factors like author expertise and cited evidence. For example, some scored above 80%, while others scored below 60%.
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How Opinionated Is the LA Times?
One of the metrics The Factual uses is the Writing Tone, which measures how opinionated the writing is in an article. For this metric, the algorithm looks for signs of subjective commentary (e.g., first person pronouns and unnecessary adverbs), as well as the emotional nature of selected words, and sees how prevalent they are for a given length of text. More neutral text receives higher ratings, with “0” being the most opinionated and “1” being the most neutral.
The LA Times had an average Writing Tone score of 0.64, placing it in the 56th percentile in our dataset. This suggests that articles from the newspaper tend to incorporate a moderate amount of opinionated language. This can be seen in headlines such as “Cheney defeat a Trump win and blow to fading GOP establishment” and “Yes! California just banned the sale of new gas cars. This is a big deal.”
How Biased Is the LA Times?
The Factual classifies news sites by political bias as either Left, Moderate Left, Center, Moderate Right, or Right. This classification comes from third-party assessments from media bias organizations such as AllSides and Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC). Based on this data, The Factual assigns the LA Times a Moderate Left bias.
AllSides assigns the LA Times a “Lean Left” media bias, based on community feedback and independent research. In a survey of 8,591 users across the political spectrum, AllSides found most people agreed that the newspaper had a “Lean Left” bias. Yet, a survey in 2016 found there to be a majority of people that disagreed with the bias rating. Among those who disagreed, users viewed the LA Times as presenting a “Center” bias, and the average media bias remains between “Center” and “Lean Left.” AllSides maintains low confidence in this rating, as more research needs to be done.
Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC), another media bias organization, concluded the LA Times has a “slight-to-moderate liberal” or “Left-Center” bias. This is in part due to reporting that utilizes “loaded” words. This reflects an attempt to influence readers regarding a certain cause through the use of emotional appeal or stereotypes. However, MBFC recognizes the paper as a continued source of trustworthy information with a “high credibility” due to factual reporting. This includes a clean fact-check record to date.
MBFC notes implicit in headlines such as, “Outgoing White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly Defends Rocky Tenure” and “Engaging with the world doesn’t make Americans ‘suckers’.” Within the latter article, the Editorial Board makes loaded statements such as “Congress needs to focus not only on how amateurishly Trump executes foreign policy but the clear shortcomings of the policy itself.” These examples—one politics article and one opinion piece—show how news stories from the LA Times at times may exhibit a liberal bias.
Who Owns the LA Times?
Biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong—a surgeon, scientist, and entrepreneur—bought the LA Times in 2018. Soon-Shiong’s interests in non-partisan news led to his active ownership in several newspapers. These include the San Diego Tribune and several community papers. In 2014 and 2016, Forbes declared Soon-Shiong the richest doctor in history. He was also the highest-paid CEO in 2016, with a package worth $148 million. Today, Soon-Shiong is the wealthiest man in Los Angeles, with a net worth of $7.9 billion.
This shift in ownership has resulted in some criticism over Soon-Shiong’s vision to transform the daily newspaper into a multimedia platform for independent, innovative, and “engaging journalistic skills.” This includes a shift to shortened information formats aimed at younger generations and playing into hyperpartisan discourse. However, he maintains that the goal is to detach unbiased news, factual reporting, and non-partisan media from fake news.
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How to Mitigate Biases
News articles are bound to have bias because all authors have some frame of reference within which they describe a story. Political bias ratings are helpful in understanding this framing. However, it can be more beneficial to know how factual an article is based on quantifiable metrics that can be seen across the media ecosystem, such as cited evidence, author expertise, and writing tone. This is what The Factual ascertains.
Reading several, highly rated articles from across the political spectrum helps counter the bias of any news source or story. To have the day’s most factual news stories delivered to your inbox every morning, subscribe to our daily newsletter.
Article updated on September 19, 2022 to reflect new data.