The fake story that tricked Alabama
Damn the Torpedos | Column by Rob Holbert | Co-Publisher, Lagniappe (Mobile)
HERE is a link to Rob's column OR read below.
The messages started coming in hot and heavy late Sunday night from people I know and respect.
They carried a link to a story from some site called The Editorial entitled “The Ghost Paper That Ate Alabama: How a Media Startup Killed 47 Weekly Newspapers and No One Noticed.”
I clicked and read the jaw-dropping tale of how current GOP nominee for lieutenant governor, John Wahl, via the auspices of the right-wing website 1819 News and a shadowy Delaware-based incorporation called Alabama Community News LLC had managed to buy up 47 local weekly newspapers for $3.2 million, and turn them into AI shells of their former selves before ultimately letting them die.
Even as I read the story, some things jumped out at me that seemed odd, but there was a tremendous amount of information, and theeditorial.news itself contained loads of long-form, investigative stories that looked credible. Given my own research into 1819 News’ shadowy beginnings and opaque ownership and funding, the story seemed plausible at first glance. I’ll admit to spending a few minutes dumbfounded that this had somehow all happened right under my nose.
In just a matter of minutes, several more smart, media-savvy people had sent me the story, so it was definitely making the rounds.
But there were some issues with the story that bothered me, and I’d never heard of theeditorial.news, so I decided to try to contact the reporter, Elena Marchetti. I could find no email or contact information. A larger search found no publication history for her. Hmmm?
Then I went looking for contact info for the publication itself. No publisher or editor was listed anywhere, and there was very slight contact info that was hard to find. I went to bed thinking, this is probably AI, but confused as to why this bizarre story would be concocted about newspapers in Alabama, 1819 News and John Wahl, when the rest of the stories on theeditorial.news were about things from all over the world? And why now?
In the morning light, I decided to ask ChatGPT what it could find out about the story, and it quickly threw cold water on the whole thing. AI ratting out AI, who would imagine?
My brother, a Ph.D. in computer science, has pro-level AI knowledge, and we were vacationing together, so I asked him to give it a look. His Jedi-like AI radar not only poo-pooed the whole thing as being totally made up, but dug much deeper.
“There is no evidence that any of the central events occurred. The piece attaches a handful of real names — 1819 News, Alabama GOP Chairman John Wahl, gubernatorial candidate Tim James and several genuine newspapers — to an entirely invented company, a non-existent acquisition and a bankruptcy that never happened. It originates from an anonymous AI content-farm website, is credited to an unverifiable author, and is contradicted by readily checkable public facts,” the analysis said.
It pointed out some of those issues, such as the fact that most of the newspapers mentioned in the article as having been put out of business are still actually publishing. When you sit down for a second and consider the concept of 47 newspapers in a state with 67 counties going out of business and nobody noticing it, it’s hard not to feel dumb for having even given this a moment’s consideration. This deeper analysis also showed how most of the facts and people mentioned in the article could only be found in the article and nowhere else.
So why did this happen? The AI analysis suggested that theeditorial.news had used the June 2025 closure of The Demopolis Times and 1819 News’ 2023 scandal surrounding the suicide of Smiths Station Mayor and Pastor F.L. “Bubba” Copeland after the paper outed him as a cross-dresser as the basis for this lengthy and realistic-looking hallucination.
But it seems to me there’s something even more insidious here. It’s as if the AI that created this false story was able to take into account the suspicions many have about 1819 News and its own secrecy to write a narrative that played into what many might find quite believable.
The story of 1819’s rise as part of the state’s media scene is shadowy at best. Its CEO, Bryan Dawson, is a convicted felon with no journalism background who came out of nowhere. The company officially parted ways with API a few years ago, but 1819 News LLC is actually operated by Alabama Media Foundation, which lists Mark Peeples and Josh Rhodes as directors and Dawson as a registered agent.
Did API just give 1819 News to these guys? Was it purchased? IRS 990s show more than $2 million a year flowing into the organization from grants and donations, but it doesn’t list who they are.
And while 1819 News does produce some journalism, most of what it appears to promote is dressed-up advocacy and conservative propaganda. Who’s paying for that remains a mystery.
I emailed Rhodes and Peeples Monday morning to ask their thoughts on the strange AI story and also to hopefully answer some of the questions about ownership and funding, but they didn’t immediately get back to me. Dawson oddly doesn’t have a personal email listed on 1819 News, so hopefully he got my questions.
Monday morning, I also wrote to three generic emails for theeditorial.news to ask about who they are and to see if they could put me in touch with their fake reporter. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one. By early afternoon, the story had been taken down. I guess it was a victim of its own success.
The article was archived and can still be read here.
The Editorial’s fake story appears to have not only caught a lot of people off guard, but done so by playing on 1819 News’ own credibility problems. I even saw one post from a blogger, former journalist and professor who admitted to having reposted links to the story before realizing it was fake simply because it played to his own research into conservative media outlets in Alabama. I can get that.
I’m not sure exactly what’s to be learned here, other than the fact that AI continues moving ahead at breakneck speed and now even appears to be able to tap into our conscious and subconscious thoughts and biases to get us on the hook. We all already knew to be careful, but this should be a reminder that even the most skeptical among us can be tricked.
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