As Gallup officials respond to recent flooding, they say an AI news outlet is getting in the way

Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on Friday announced emergency orders directing $500,000 to help with statewide flooding disasters, including in Gallup, where historic monsoon rains in McKinley County flooded streets, damaged homes and tested the city’s aging drainage system. 

Leah March, a spokesperson for the governor’s office, told Source NM in an email that the funding will provide sandbags, communications assistance and other help from the New Mexico National Guard. State officials also  sent a team to Gallup on Friday to help with damage assessments, March said. 

“The state is working closely with local officials to get residents the help they need,” she said.

Local officials said in addition to grappling with natural disasters, they were also responding to a new AI news outlet named Prism McKinley County that they say has regularly published false and misleading information in a time of crisis. 

For instance, within the last week, Prism published a story about a woman drowning in floods, but the death occurred last year, according to Matt Robinson, Gallup’s tourism and marketing manager. The misleading story caused people to believe the recent floods caused her death, he said. The recent flooding has not caused any deaths or injuries, according to city officials. 

“They’re taking things that happened years ago that are negative, bringing them to light, scaring people, and sharing false information,” Robinson said. “It’s really not a good thing.”

Other misleading or false stories include one July 18 that reported that two women were robbed and beaten at a Walmart. The article goes on to say that the robbery actually occurred March 3, 2020, and Police Chief Erin Toadlena-Pablo told Source NM she does not know where the outlet got its information. 

Still, the article received roughly 250 shares and dozens of comments, most of which decried security concerns at the Walmart, which is one of the main grocery stores in town. 

The misleading posts prompted a Facebook post by the Gallup Police Department advising residents to use “verified sources and/or official government channels to obtain the most dependable information.”

Robinson told Source NM that city officials decided to warn the public about the news outlet during a meeting last week that was otherwise devoted to responding to the floods and a massive water main break.  

Six additional Prism sites operate in New Mexico, according to the outlet’s website, though only three appear to have social media accounts. Prism McKinley County, which launched in October, has the largest following of any of them with roughly 7,400 Facebook followers. 

NM news desert grows with closure of longtime Gallup newspaper

Prism Media, an Israeli-based startup, first publicized its operations in May in a press release decrying the disappearance of local news outlets. Dekel Valtzer, who lists himself as Prism Media’s co-founder and CEO on LinkedIn, did not respond to Source NM’s request for comment.

Alex Mahadevan, the director of the Poynter Institute’s digital media literacy project, told Source NM he has been monitoring Prism’s growth across the country and said that the McKinley County example stands out because Prism appears to be basing its articles largely on Facebook posts. 

In other areas where Prism has launched, its articles are unattributed, recycled and sometimes false, but are at least based on reporting from other news organizations or credible sources, Mahadevan told Source NM. 

“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 said of Prism McKinley County. “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.”

The Gallup Independent, the city’s longtime daily newspaper and main source for news, closed in February after more than a century of operation. The town currently has a weekly newspaper, the Gallup Sun, and a monthly community magazine, the Gallup Journey.