AI Use Neuters Leftist Newspapers

A bare-bones recap of the past couple of decades in the American daily newspaper orbit makes it impossible to feel sympathy for the journalists now losing their jobs in the era of AI. Intensely biased leftist reporters and editors so completely alienated the vast majority of the public that once-thriving publications became financially unsustainable. They then turned to big-pocketed billionaires and well-heeled corporate conglomerates to shield them from this uncomfortable economic reality. And now they are discovering that these would-be sugar daddies won’t happily sustain endless losses in the name of a “social conscience” that placates their personal political orientations.

In early September, “dozens of reporters with at least 17 McClatchy newspapers from coast to coast – including the Miami Herald, the Kansas City Star and The Sacramento Bee – were laid off as the company pivots toward lifestyle content written by artificial intelligence chatbots,” Straight Arrow News (SAN) reported Sept. 17.

The article implies that this represents a major loss for the American people. Multiple references to Pulitzer Prizes follow in the next two paragraphs, further compounding the assumption. Journalists just can’t understand that the same tens of millions of people who have tuned them out have long since stopped regarding a Pulitzer as a prestigious honor.

AI News as Corporate Hellscape

The article does acknowledge the dire state of the industry. “Newspapers nationwide have struggled for decades, and some 40% of all local US newspapers have closed shop in the past decade, including more than 130 outlets in the last year alone,” SAN wrote. It also does a fine job of correctly identifying the mediocre (at best) nature of AI news.

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“From barbecue to bourbon, water sports to hiking, and golf to college sports, we are going to develop a steady stream of reader-focused, high-quality content for national and regional audiences,” a McClatchy job posting for its AI-fueled Content Innovation Lab was quoted as reading. “Producers will use AI to launch new brands ‘tied to dedicated communities of interest around travel, food, outdoor recreation, sports and even crime,’” SAN related.

Can you feel the passion?

“We have a company-wide effort to agentify the entire enterprise,” McClatchy CEO Tony Hunter declared at a virtual town hall in May. Oh, the corporate speak.

McClatchy either doesn’t see or doesn’t care that AI-generated news is not popular with Americans. Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative on Sept. 15 released its 2026 Chicago News Survey. It revealed a distinct disdain for AI among Chicago news consumers.

Among the findings:

·        Only 15% of respondents were comfortable with AI “deciding which stories to cover or to prioritize.”

·        Only 18% were comfortable with AI “writing a full news story generated from a reporter’s notes.”

·        Only 20% were comfortable with AI “personalizing an article so that it is tailored to your interests or location.”

Left unsaid is that Americans have long been uncomfortable with your average big-box media editor “deciding which stories to cover.” Which brings us to our point. Just because AI news has all the makings of an imbecilic nightmare doesn’t mean what is being washed away from the dominant news nexus doesn’t deserve its fate.

Subsidizing a Dead Horse Isn’t Working

As Liberty Nation News documented in December 2023, Medill is a champion of local news. Its solution to the problem of failing newspapers is government and big-philanthropy subsidization. You think any  conflict-of-interest issues may arise out of that?

“The good news: Philanthropists committed to major funding – $500 million – to support local news,” Medill’s “State of Local News” 2023 report proclaimed. “Public officials at the national and state levels considered programs to address digital and journalistic inequalities. And a growing number of news outlets forged promising business models.”

This is the credentialed “save local news” side that deplores the McClatchy AI kill floor. It is understating matters to say it is nothing to mourn over. But the corporate vision of AI news generation may pose an even more dire propaganda threat down the road.

While it’s hard to fathom a media industry more in lockstep than the elitist leftist playpen of the past 25+ years, AI offers the possibility, or better said the probability, of an intensely centralized production of the news that will remain spiked with the worst baked-in biases of the progressive ruling establishment.

Automatic Bias for the People

“Research from international scientists confirms what we’ve seen firsthand: [AI] chatbots disproportionately rely on left-wing media and politically charged sources… to generate their answers,” Media Research Center Vice President Dan Schneider told Fox News in May.

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The Washington Post confirmed these findings and then some. In June, it conducted a test on popular AI systems. “The model that powers ChatGPT answered nearly every question exclusively with left-leaning arguments and presented only right-leaning positions just once,” the paper found. “And even AI models marketed as having conservative views, including Elon Musk’s Grok, offered by his company SpaceX, cited left-leaning arguments more often, on average.” Gemini performed somewhat better.

What makes this so dangerous is that one can readily identify the partisanship of a Maggie Haberman (New York Times reporter). You can put a face to the heavy-handed “reporting.” A programmed automated machinery that spouts hardboiled bias as simple fact may be more wooden, more flat, but it will also be more all-encompassing. Think peak Pravda in the most generic way.

If this indeed is the approaching future of big-box journalism, it could not have been made possible without the dinosaurs now being culled from daily newspaper newsrooms throughout the United States. Massive and unchecked personal bias on the part of these journalists over the course of decades paved the way for the ongoing cheapening of what once was actually considered a “profession.”