Although I could not relocate the article, I recall reading an item from northern New Mexico recently in which local police said that an online post had incorrectly identified a woman who had been killed during a crime. The local authorities urged citizens to avoid getting information from unknown sources and rely directly on the police.
But in this situation, there was no local daily newspaper to report the incident, so residents who read that incorrect post might not have ever seen the police warning and continued to believe that the wrong person had died. And many of them likely spread that false report to others.
Two weeks ago, officials in Gallup said an Artificial Intelligence powered news outlet had published false and misleading information about a local flooding crisis. That source, with no apparent in-person staffing, has apparently become a place to find local news after the closure of the western New Mexico city’s long trusted local newspaper, The Gallup Independent.
In earlier posts, I lamented the closure of that newspaper as well as the more than 100-year-old Roswell Daily Record. Both Gallup and Roswell are large enough communities that could support thriving and essential daily newspapers. Both were independently owned and had served their communities for years.
Their demise was not because of a corporate buyout, which has happened to many local news outlets (like ours in Las Cruces), but a decline in readership coupled with rising production costs. In my opinion, the decline in readership is the most hurtful reason of all. Many younger people simply don’t subscribe to local newspapers anymore and get their information from often sketchy online sources.
And yes, newspaper subscriptions just keep getting more expensive. But not having a reliable source of local news could become expensive as well if you’re not alerted about developments that could directly affect you and your family.
As I said, the Gallup misinformation came from a company which was described as an Israeli-based AI powered online “news service” startup. An article in the Albuquerque Journal (a publication which I trust and once worked for as a reporter/photographer) says that company claims to operate six sites in New Mexico. Three of those have their own social media sites, including Gallup which it claims has about 7,400 followers.
Here’s what the AI generated news source says about itself:
“Mainstream media left a gap. Local newsrooms shut down. Niche communities went uncovered. Entire industries lost their beat reporters.
… (we) fill that gap. We publish daily news for the people and places that big media forgot: county governments, hobby communities, frontline workplaces, and sports that don’t get prime-time coverage.”
And here’s what their website says about their publishing technique:
“…(we use) AI (artificial intelligence) to research, write, and publish at a scale no traditional newsroom could match.“
In the case of the Gallup miscommunication that alerted local officials, the supposed news source reported that a woman had died in the recent flooding. Upon further checking, that drowning occurred last year and there were no deaths recorded with the most recent flooding.
Matt Robinson, tourism and marketing manager for Gallup was quoted as saying:
“They’re taking things that happened years ago that are negative, bringing them to light, scaring people and sharing false information. It’s really not a good thing.”
The Albuquerque Journal reported that Alex Mahadevan of the Poynter Institute’s digital media project, says the AI news outlet “appears to be basing its articles largely on Facebook posts.”
“This is an interesting case where it does seem like it must be an actual news desert, and so they don’t have good reporting to go off of,” Mahadevan is quoted in the Journal article. “So they are stuck with siphoning news from Facebook, which any of us who’ve been on Facebook in the past 10 years knows is probably a bad idea.”
And no, I don’t personally have a Facebook account and I am inclined to be skeptical of anything posted there.
If you can’t bring yourself to subscribe to a local daily news source, there are still largely reliable sources. My go to source is the Associated Press (which some readers may think is controversial because they refused to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.) The Associated Press was a worthy competitor for me during my many years as a journalist, bureau manager and state editor for United Press International. We directly competed against eachother and both strived to produce accurate and timely information to our newspaper and electronic media customers. Accuracy was our paramount goal. Sadly, UPI has all but folded into a features-only news service owned by another foreign entity. Reuters news service is another good source.
My advice is to stay informed with a trusted media source. You can look up bias rankings online, but be aware some of those may be tainted. The ones I trust and have relied on consistently list the AP and Reuters as best sources for unbiased news. And don’t just read sources that are favorable to your point of view. I make it a point to occasionally listen to or read media sources that are clearly exposing their bias regularly. I read and see things that I may not initially agree with, but are important to learning why some people think so differently about the same subject.
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