Prism News has suspended its network of more than 200 AI-generated “local news” sites following investigations from multiple outlets that exposed plagiarism and falsehoods.
Over the last few weeks, I spoke with journalists at Interlochen Public Radio , Source New Mexico and Spin Class about Prism News, an Israel-based company that has alarmed public officials, scraped legitimate local news and violated basic journalism ethics.
Articles on the sites — which bore the tagline “(t)he stuff mainstream media skips, finally getting the coverage it deserves” — were published under fake, AI-generated bylines and regularly included information and quotes lifted from local reporting.
“We have currently completed our initial experiment,” said a statement on Prism’s website. “A big thank you to all who participated and gave their feedback. All activity is suspended for the foreseeable future.”
(Note that Prism News is not affiliated with Prism , the nonprofit independent newsroom led by journalists of color.)
There was plenty of reason for skepticism. Prism closely resembled pink slime — websites that masquerade as legitimate local news outlets — and described its vision like this: “This is bigger than better journalism. This is the complete reinvention of how humanity stays informed. What if Bloomberg, Vice, and CNN were born today, with zero humans, zero legacy, and infinite AI scale?”
And Prism was apparently able to find investors despite being a defective product (my words). Emily Horne reported in the Spin Class newsletter that the company received venture capital funding.
I reached out to one of Prism’s co-founders on LinkedIn — of course — but haven’t heard back.
Local news outlets face an unfair fight against sites like Prism News. Legal action is expensive. Scraping content and scaling such networks is cheap and easy. So kudos to Maxwell Howard, Patrick Lohmann, Horne and others who flagged the dubious outlet, although I can’t say for sure that their reporting led to the suspension.
By Alex Mahadevan, MediaWise director and Poynter faculty
WHCA president says the association is still working through Trump’s decoy flight
A catering truck is parked at Air Force One on the tarmac as the motorcade carrying President Donald Trump arrives to depart following the NATO summit at Ankara International Airport in Ankara, Turkey on July 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
A week after it was revealed that journalists unknowingly flew on a decoy Air Force One amid an Iranian assassination threat against President Donald Trump, the White House Correspondents’ Association is “still continuing to work through” the issue with the administration, association president Jacqui Heinrich said.
“We tend to get better results when we’re not fighting about it in the press and we’re actually going to them, explaining our position and asking for solutions and trying to figure out why something happened and how it happened that way and what we can do about it,” Heinrich told New York Magazine in an interview Monday.
Heinrich, a senior correspondent and anchor at Fox News, said “it was a shock to learn” about the plan, which The Washington Post first reported a week ago. During a trip from Turkey to the United Kingdom last month, Trump secretly took a separate military jet while reporters and some White House staff unknowingly took a decoy flight. Later, some reporters who had been on the flight expressed anger at having been misled and potentially endangered.
Heinrich told New York Magazine that she hopes the administration keeps the press pool with the president in the future, as “that is the purpose of the pool.” She noted that when past presidents have arranged secret trips — such as Joe Biden’s 2023 trip to Ukraine — the press was informed and sometimes allowed to accompany the president.
“In all of those scenarios, either the press or a portion of the pool or the full pool came with the president, or it became clear immediately after the fact what had happened. Neither of those things happened in this scenario,” Heinrich said. “And, concerningly, we were not able to correct the record in real time or immediately after the threat had passed. That is of paramount ongoing concern, especially when you’re dealing with the president who’s had so many attempts on his life.”
The plane switch is just the latest sign of the deteriorating relationship between the White House and the White House Correspondents’ Association, which has largely been defanged under Trump. The association, which is an independent nonprofit, used to organize the daily press pool that follows and reports on the president. But the White House took over that responsibility last February, giving the administration control over which outlets and reporters are allowed access to Trump.
Heinrich also defended the WHCA’s annual fundraising dinner, which has drawn criticism over the cozy spectacle of political reporters mingling with the people they cover. She said Trump will be invited next year despite his administration’s repeated actions against news organizations and journalists.
“This dinner precedes President Trump. It will continue after President Trump. And we will invite the president no matter who the president is every year,” Heinrich said.
Read the full interview, which includes Heinrich’s thoughts on White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s decision to step down, here .
By Angela Fu, media business reporter
BBC seeks subpoenas for Trump family members in $10 billion defamation suit
The BBC wants members of President Donald Trump’s family to talk, and it’s hoping to enlist the help of a Florida court to subpoena them.
According to CBS News , the broadcaster made the request as part of its defense against Trump’s $10 billion defamation lawsuit.
In a court filing released Friday, the BBC asked the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida to subpoena Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner for testimony and documentation related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The BBC argued that Trump’s two adult children and Kushner would have “personal knowledge and likely have possession, custody, or control of records relevant to multiple elements of Plaintiff’s claims against the BBC.”
The BBC previously tried to subpoena Trump’s children and Kushner without the court’s assistance but was unsuccessful.
Trump’s lawyers have until Friday to respond. His attorney Alejandro Brito did not immediately respond to CBS News’ request for comment on Monday. A spokesman for Trump’s legal team accused the BBC of “seeking to harass him (President Trump), his family, and supporters by abusing the deposition process.”
Trump’s lawsuit stems from a 2024 BBC “Panorama” documentary that edited together two parts of a speech Trump delivered before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Trump’s legal team argues that the BBC “intentionally, maliciously, and deceptively” doctored the speech. The BBC has apologized for the editing error.
The BBC case is one of several lawsuits Trump has pursued against news organizations and publishers. He has pressed cases against the BBC, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and CNN.
The lawsuits are part of a much broader campaign against the press. My colleague Angela Fu recently analyzed more than 100 federal actions affecting journalists and news organizations during the first 18 months of Trump’s second term. Read her analysis here .
By Amaris Castillo, staff writer
404 Media tracked a shipment of rare books. It led to an Amazon warehouse where books are destroyed.
404 Media wanted to know who was buying huge quantities of rare books and whether they were being used to train artificial intelligence. So the news outlet tracked a shipment across the country.
- The shipment’s landing spot, according to
- 404’s investigation
- an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas.
“That final destination was an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, Nevada. Amazon employees who work at this location say all they do is receive massive shipments of printed books which they then cut the bindings off in order to scan the books more quickly,” wrote Emanuel Maiberg, co-founder of 404 Media. “The printed book is destroyed in the process.”
Amazon, he reported, is “buying massive quantities of books, scanning them for AI training data, and destroying them in the process.”
The investigation showed how the shipment of books was first flown from an airport in California to the area around Mitchell International Airport near Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The books then landed in a warehouse belonging to a specialized shipping and distribution company in Kenosha. 404 Media saw the shipment on a truck in Colorado Springs before it eventually ended up in Vegas.
But in this case, what happens in Vegas does not stay in Vegas.
Last month, Maiberg reported on booksellers who had seen a spike in sales over the past year and suspected it was due to AI companies acquiring books to use as training data. He spoke with one bookseller who received a large order of roughly 1,000 books placed through Biblio.
The seller, who was granted anonymity by 404 Media, agreed to put an Apple AirTag provided by the news outlet in one of the books.
404 Media identified the Amazon warehouse as LAS8 and found that part of the facility houses another Amazon operation known as VGT3. Maiberg found online posts from people identifying themselves as Amazon workers there, including one who wrote: “I work at VGT3 here in Vegas, and all we do is scan books.”
By Amaris Castillo, staff writer
The Knowing wants to put a glossy magazine in your inbox
Former entertainment media executive and reality TV star Geneva S. Thomas is launching The Knowing, a newsletter-first media outlet that promises “premium, independent journalism on issues, culture, and beauty for young Black audiences,” Adweek’s Rebecca Stewart reported .
In an Instagram post , Thomas said the idea for the publication came to her in spring 2023 and that she’s been developing the concept ever since. The newsletter will feature the design of a glossy magazine.
The Knowing will cater to “young, prestige readers,” according to Adweek, although Thomas hasn’t publicly defined what she means by “prestige reader.”
The Knowing also goes by TK, an homage to journalism’s “to come” mark used during the editing process. It will feature “reporting and distilled analysis on urgent global issues, interviews, profiles and cultural criticism, alongside expert insights on best-in-class beauty and wellness,” according to its website .
Thomas will serve as founder and editor. TK currently has three board members: Amy DuBois Barnett, former senior vice president and general manager of BET Digital and former editor-in-chief of Ebony, Teen People and Honey; Joan Morgan, director of New York University’s Center of Black Visual Culture; and Kimberly Paige, former chief marketing officer of BET Media Group and a former senior executive at brands including P&G and Coca-Cola.
Adweek reports that the newsletter will cost $10 per month or $85 per year. The company projects $650,000 in revenue by August 2027, with a five-year plan to grow that figure to $8.3 million.
The first issue will publish Aug. 29 and feature a cover story written by Thomas titled “Take Me to the Water: Black women and American corporate labor. Pushed out to take flight.”
By Nicole Slaughter Graham, staff writer
Media tidbits and links
- About an hour and a half from Disneyland, in the small California town of Adelanto, journalist Carlitos Ricardo Parias has spent 300 days in ICE detention. ICE officers shot him and took him into custody in October. On Monday, his detention became the longest known time a journalist has spent in U.S. custody. “His horrifying conditions aren’t unique among immigrant detainees, but Parias’s case is extraordinary,” writes The Intercept’s Adam Rose. “Perhaps no journalist has endured such a sustained sequence of violence, prosecution, and imprisonment at the hands of the U.S. government.” Rose reports that, even in detention, Parias has remained a journalist in: “ICE Shot a Journalist and Threw Him in Detention. He’s Approaching 300 Days Behind Bars With a Festering Wound.”
- Monday added yet another chapter to the ongoing Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery megadeal. After agreeing to postpone the $111 billion acquisition over a lawsuit filed by a group of Democratic state attorneys general — a delay that could cost the company millions of dollars — Paramount now wants the plaintiffs to post a bond covering potential losses. “The Hollywood studio is seeking a $1.88 billion bond from 12 states, led by California, along with the Writers Guild of America, which have sued to stop the company’s deal to acquire Warner Bros., citing antitrust concerns. Paramount proposes that it would collect the proceeds from the bond if the states lost their case,” The New York Times’ Lauren Hirsch and Benjamin Mullin report .
- Bob Herman, Stat’s business of healthcare reporter, got an accidental email from UnitedHealth, a company he covers. It said: “We’ve received an inquiry from our least-favorite reporter from STAT.” Herman was a good sport, writing on X , “Hello, from UnitedHealth’s ‘least-favorite reporter.’”
- The Washington Post is launching a new newsletter to make sense of the preponderance of polling. The Pollwatcher , from polling director Scott Clement, will “go beyond the headlines to explore what polls reveal about the big issues shaping people’s lives.”
- CJR’s Jem Bartholomew writes about the outgoing White House press secretary in “What Karoline Leavitt Leaves Behind.”
- WWL Louisiana chief investigative reporter David Hammer writes “A Louisiana Supreme Court justice sued a newspaper. A secrecy dispute now hangs over the trial.”
- The Guardian’s Ramon Antonio Vargas with “ ‘Outrageous’ handcuffing of New Orleans journalist sends ‘chilling message,’ says media group.”
- The Washington Post’s Todd C. Frankel writes “They were told to park outside. Then their cars burst into flames.”
- For The Atlantic, it’s Julia Curlee with “The Wrong Kind of American.” In 2017, Curlee wrote “Coming Out as Transgender Made Me a More Effective CIA Officer” for The Atlantic under a pseudonym.
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