Objection has overruled itself. This spring, Peter Thiel’s high-profile new startup had sought to disrupt journalism by establishing a tribunal in which reporters would be dragooned into AI-powered arbitrations paid for by the unhappy subjects of their articles. Now, the company has been renamed The Primary, pivoting to a system in which journalists are ranked on a digital scoreboard by the expertise of a large language model.
Objection’s CEO is Aron D’Souza, the entrepreneur-provocateur behind Enhanced Games, known as the “steroid Olympics,” who first gained fame as the legal mastermind behind Thiel’s bid to secretly finance Hulk Hogan’s successful invasion of privacy suit against the media outlet Gawker, which the right-wing tech billionaire despised.
Objection’s first tribunal, in April, targeted The Hollywood Reporter for its 2021 coverage about an heir to the Sackler family, whose Purdue Pharma fortune was built off OxyContin. In an interview, D’Souza told THR that “many journalists are more powerful than billionaires,” explaining, “I can’t tell you how many billionaires and CEOs have called me in absolute tears about their lives being destroyed by one article.”
D’Souza and Objection’s CTO Kyle Grant-Talbot — who met at Oxford, where they first founded a laundry service in 2018 — acknowledged they’d found it difficult to build proprietary software that wouldn’t be accused of outputting slop justice. “The AI-based reasoning models are easy in comparison to adjudication,” D’Souza said. (Objection pivoted before issuing a verdict in THR‘s tribunal.)
D’Souza and Grant-Talbot since arrived at a solution for their quandary by determining, as Objection’s home page now reads in AI-cadenced English, that “verdicts punish failure. They don’t fix the incentive. They do not solve the root cause.” Ergo: The Primary, “a robust public methodology that scores, ranks and indexes journalists on the rigor of their reporting.”
The company’s founders lay out their latest thinking in a white paper, as well as the metrics they’ve determined that their AI model should weigh to determine journalistic credibility — a balance of factors including source attribution, coverage tone and right of reply. The Primary ranks outlets as well as individual journalists.
D’Souza elaborated on Objection’s transformation into The Primary in an email he sent to THR on July 15.
“This is less of a pivot than it looks from outside,” his note began. “The question I’ve been chasing since I ran the litigation strategy against Gawker more than a decade ago is how journalism gets evaluated at all. Markets reward attention. Awards recognise a tiny fraction of the work. For the individual reporter, between those two, nothing. Objection was one attempt at that question — the enforcement attempt. Primary is the second attempt at the same question, and I think it’s the right one. What moved it from an idea to something urgent was watching it happen to me. Rebecca Bellan at TechCrunch interviewed me this spring and published it in full. Within hours, AI systems had read it, compressed it, and were serving it onward. The reporter did the work. The machine took the value. That’s the economics of journalism in a single afternoon — and no arbitration process repairs it.”
D’Souza described The Primary’s business as “pre-revenue” — its revenue generation model “is a decision in front of us” — and pushed back on the notion that Objection simply couldn’t build a trustworthy system of adjudication it felt it could stand behind. (Or, at least, one which would satisfy its paying clients.) “The tribunal worked,” he wrote. “That’s not spin; it’s precisely why we moved. What we learned is that a verdict is an enforcement instrument, and enforcement only changes behaviour at the margin of getting caught. It arrives after the damage, in the small number of cases where someone has the resources and the appetite to file. It has nothing to say to the overwhelming majority of reporting, which nobody objects to. Every case we ran pointed at the same thing underneath, and it wasn’t bad journalists — it was that the discipline behind a story has never been measured at the level of the reporter who wrote it, and what isn’t measured doesn’t get paid for. You can’t litigate your way to a fix for that. You have to build the instrument that’s missing.”
So far, Jeff Bezos’ The Washington Post and David Ellison’s CBS News lead the rankings at The Primary from a small initial indexed pool, with the Daily Mail tabloid receiving by far the lowest aggregate score. A group of Reuters reporters hold the top spots among individuals — led by Rajesh Kumar Singh, its correspondent covering U.S. aviation. Among the prominent writers with the lowest scores are columnists Cindy Adams of the New York Post and Mark Halperin of the Daily Mail, as well as A.I. beat journalists Mike Isaacs and Cade Metz at The New York Times. (THR and its staff have yet to be ranked.)
D’Souza insisted to THR that The Primary’s scorecard will have a salutary effect on journalism. “A reporter who’s spent fifteen years doing the slower, harder, better-sourced work has never had a portable, public record proving it — something they can carry to an editor, a proprietor, or a competitor,” he wrote. “Now they do. That’s how incentives move: not by shaming anyone, but by making the alternative legible enough that someone can finally pay for it.”
The Primary isn’t the first to establish itself as a watchdog for the watchdogs. Two decades ago, there was the launch of the non-profit NewsTrust, which saw staffers rate stories. Then, in 2016, came automated browser extension The Factual, followed three years later by Credder, a self-styled attempt to be the Rotten Tomatoes of journalism. None remain in operation.
