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When Max D. Lederer Jr., the longtime publisher of Stars and Stripes, announced his retirement on Tuesday, amid rumors that the Pentagon might fire him, it was the culmination of months of uncertainty. In January, Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesperson, vowed on social media to turn coverage “away from woke distractions that syphon morale,” posing a public challenge to the autonomy of the paper, which is funded partly by the Pentagon but whose editorial independence is mandated by Congress. When Jacqueline Smith, the publication’s ombudsman, spoke out against the administration’s efforts to restrict and remake Stripes, Parnell fired her. Just after she was dismissed, she published a column, writing, “The House and Senate Armed Services committees have long had an interest in ensuring that unfiltered news went to the troops who are fighting for our country and deserved to read the truth, not propaganda.”
Last week, Stars and Stripes showed the value of its independence, breaking a story about a mounting mental health crisis aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft carrier. The Lincoln has been deployed in the Middle East for nine months to support United States operations against Iran, including roughly two hundred and fifty consecutive days without a port call.
Alison Bath spoke to active-duty sailors and family members of the roughly five thousand sailors and Marines aboard the Lincoln, who raised urgent concerns about the crew’s mental health, including reports of suicidal ideation. Sailors described an incident in which a crew member had to be stopped from jumping overboard. A parent told Bath that their son said that “he and his shipmates constantly think about jumping off the ship just for relief.”
Bath’s reporting, which was soon followed by news outlets across the country, also detailed difficult conditions that have compounded the strain—food and water shortages, disrupted mail service, and limited time off. The consequences can extend beyond the sailors themselves. As some reporting has since noted, exhaustion and mental health problems can impair service members’ ability to perform their duties and increase the risk of dangerous mistakes.
Pete Hegseth, the so-called secretary of war, has responded to the reporting with his usual equanimity, calling it “fake, America-hating news.” When Donald Trump was asked about it, he claimed family members are “not actually worried” and said the ship had not been out “nearly long enough.” (Yesterday, the carrier was finally relieved and is now heading home to San Diego.)
Back in January, responding to Parnell’s tweet, Erik Slavin, the editor in chief, sent a memo to his team. “The people who risk their lives in defense of the Constitution have earned the right to the press freedoms of the First Amendment,” he wrote. “We will not compromise on serving them with accurate and balanced coverage, holding military officials to account when called for.” With its report last week, Stars and Stripes proved it is still delivering on that promise.
It has not been a good month for political polling. In the Michigan Democratic Senate primary, polls predicted that Abdul El-Sayed would blow away his opponent Haley Stevens. Instead, he won by just one point. In Wisconsin, polls showed Francesca Hong up by around twenty points going into election night in the Democratic gubernatorial primary. Instead, she lost—by just short of a percentage point. This week, the Los Angeles Times reported that a “poll” posted on X by Karen Bass, the city’s mayor, showing her leading Nithya Raman by a wide margin in her bid for reelection, was completely made up.
The fake poll was released by Median Strategies, a mysterious company that shut down once Noah Goldberg, a reporter at the Los Angeles Times, asked questions about its methodology. After Goldberg’s inquiries, Median posted a statement on its website saying that its polls “should not be cited or treated as genuine polling data” and that it was “created as a short-term social experiment.” When speculation arose that the purpose of the phony polls was to influence prediction markets, Median added a note clarifying that “the project was not undertaken for financial gain or to influence the value of any financial or prediction-market position.”
I emailed the address listed on Median’s website and got no answer. The Guardian had better luck, identifying Median yesterday as the work of a twenty-one-year-old recent college graduate named Rahil Prakash. “I wanted to see if fake polls could really penetrate the ecosystem that easily,” Prakash said. “And as it turned out, it could.” Before being withdrawn, the firm’s “findings” were published by the California Post and a local TV station. They were also amplified by several popular polling aggregators on social media. (Strangely, once the LA Times revealed the truth, the Post, instead of issuing a correction, simply replaced its story with new copy at the same URL saying that Median had shut down. The original story is preserved here. The Post did not respond to a request for comment.)
As news budgets shrink, there are fewer reliable sources of polling information, particularly in local primaries. Outlets increasingly rely on campaigns for polling data, giving candidates plenty of opportunity to spin favorable numbers or hire friendly firms to conduct their own polls. That isn’t new, but the introduction of completely fabricated polling can stir real chaos.
Leonie Huddy, a professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook who has studied political psychology and polling, told me that polls can create “some kind of conformity.” That is: “I see that Candidate X is twenty points in front. Who doesn’t like a winner? Maybe I should vote for that person.” More concerning, Huddy said, is that false polls could influence who receives campaign funding. “If suddenly a candidate looks more viable than anyone imagined, then more money will pour into that race for that candidate, and people tend to pull money if the candidate doesn’t look very viable,” Huddy said. “I think one of the biggest effects is on donors, and that can have ripple effects.”
Last month, Emanuel Maiberg reported on an unusual development in the book business. He had received a tip from a bookseller seeing a sharp increase in sales over the past year, which the seller suspected came from AI companies buying books for training data. The text in printed books is often not easily accessible online, so physical copies are particularly valuable for training large language models.
On Monday, Maiberg, a journalist and cofounder of 404 Media, confirmed the bookseller’s suspicions in a new piece that reveals “Amazon is buying massive quantities of books, scanning them for AI training data, and destroying them in the process.” What makes the reporting especially interesting is how Maiberg tested the theory.
To figure out where the books were going, he enlisted the help of an anonymous source to hide a tracking device inside a rare book they suspected would be purchased by an AI company for training data. He was then able to trace the book’s path across the country, following along until it eventually arrived at an Amazon facility in Las Vegas. Maiberg told me that he was inspired to use trackers by a Reuters exposé from 2023 that used similar devices hidden in the soles of eleven pairs of donated shoes to investigate Dow Inc.’s recycling practices.
Once the tracker arrived at the Amazon warehouse, Maiberg was able to confirm what was happening by looking at online forums for Amazon employees, who discussed scanning books. Some employees posted photos of a logo at the facility’s entrance: a dinosaur baring its teeth, apparently about to devour a book in its hands. “It was a little on the nose,” Maiberg said.
It’s not clear whether the Amazon book-buying operation constitutes copyright infringement. There are a number of lawsuits testing the legality of AI companies’ use of copyrighted material as training data. But whatever the courts decide, Maiberg told me, “the thing that is ethically concerning is that we are mulching a bunch of books because of this. We know that for a fact, and we don’t know what we’re losing.”
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