AI in journalism: Live tracker of scandals and mistakes
Press Gazette: “Round-up of the main cases where AI use in journalism has gone wrong. AI is being widely used in journalism and can lead to reputation-killing scandals and mistakes if not monitored closely. Here Press Gazette rounds up some of the main examples of where AI has gone wrong. Most recently, The New York Times published a quote attributed to Canadian opposition leader Pierre Poilievre that was an AI-generated summary of his views, using words he had not said. The Mississippi Free Press admitted to being the latest news outlet caught out by publishing an AI column written by a fake author.
The non-profit outlet said the journalist did not seem suspicious until they submitted an invoice that did not match their name. This was the same way that purported freelance journalist Margaux Blanchard was caught out by Wired last year. There have been numerous similar cases of AI work mistakenly published by major news outlets in the past year as the technology grows more sophisticated. Sometimes the ‘journalists’ are caught out by commissioning editors pre-publication.
There have also been examples of real writers getting caught out using AI in unsanctioned ways. Australian news website Crikey took down a series of articles because a writer had used ChatGPT in the editing process against its strict AI policy. In this new page, Press Gazette will keep track of such incidents to help publishers to learn from these mistakes. Last updated: May 2026. Skip to:
How Russell Vought Became the Shadow President
One of the biggest assholes in the Trump regime is Russell Vought — and that’s really saying something; it’s a fierce competition. He’s the guy who said in 2023 that he wanted to put federal workers “in trauma”. ProPublica produced a video in Oct 2025 about how Vought is acting as a shadow president in his drive to dismantle the US federal government.
Russell Vought is one of the most powerful people in the Trump administration. For almost three decades, he worked in Congress and held prominent roles at conservative think tanks. But he was little known outside of political circles. He’s now the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget and the chief architect of President Donald Trump’s campaign to radically reduce the size of the federal bureaucracy.
In this video, ProPublica reporter Andy Kroll tells the story of Vought’s rise from a young staffer for Texas Sen. Phil Gramm to his role as the driving force behind Trump’s plan to dismantle the so-called “administrative state.” Vought declined to be interviewed. Kroll’s account is drawn from dozens of interviews, thousands of pages of documents and hours of videos and recordings of Vought’s briefings to supporters, including one where Vought says he wanted to put federal workers “in trauma.”
ProPublica and the New Yorker co-published a lengthy companion article as well.
During the Biden years, Vought labored to translate the lessons of Trump’s tumultuous first term into a more effective second presidency. He chaired the transition portion of Project 2025, a joint effort by a coalition of conservative groups to develop a road map for the next Republican administration, helping to draft some 350 executive orders, regulations and other plans to more fully empower the president. “Despite his best thinking and the aggressive things they tried in Trump One, nothing really stuck,” a former OMB branch chief who served under Vought during the first Trump administration told me. “Most administrations don’t get a four-year pause or have the chance to think about ‘Why isn’t this working?’” The former branch chief added, “Now he gets to come back and steamroll everyone.”
Being Fed Content
From an interview (gift link) with Don Hertzfeldt, creator of World of Tomorrow:
Not to sound like a curmudgeon, but when I was a teenager, I took the train to go to the record store to find rare stuff. Spotify is way more convenient, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to get out and to feel like you’re hunting, to feel like you’re living your life. I’m going to the movies, I’m going to this show. What streaming has done—it’s very convenient, but it’s taken the feeling of going hunting and turned it into we’re all just being fed. We’re all farm animals that are just being fed, and we’re being fed content. You can just stay home. Just stay home. We’ll just feed it to you. No wonder everyone’s depressed.
I feel like Xochitl Gonzalez’s piece on robotaxis, People Who Don’t Like People Are Making All of Our Decisions, rhymes with Hertzfeldt’s comments:
For two decades, I have watched us blindly fall for one sales pitch after another. Every app and advancement comes shrouded in promises of “progress” and “connectivity” and “convenience.” And in many early cases — such as the invention of ride-sharing apps — Silicon Valley truly did deliver a better mousetrap. But we’re getting diminishing returns. We are living in Silicon Valley’s future now, and we are lonelier, more anxious, and more polarized than ever before.
The Night Witches were an all-female Soviet bomber regiment that attacked Nazi forces during World War II.
An attack technique of the night bombers involved idling the engine near the target and gliding to the bomb-release point with only wind noise left to reveal their presence. German soldiers likened the sound to broomsticks and hence named the pilots “Night Witches”.
Some of the aviators were Jewish, like Polina Gelman
