In the age of AI, it can be difficult to believe anything on the internet.
And with editors like Colby Hall on the job, it’s even harder to know what’s real.
Hall had been in charge of Mediate’s subscription-based newsletter One Sheet, which somehow managed to get people to actually pay for Mediate content.
Come to find out, Hall had been fabricating quotes right and left. And best case scenario, he claimed it was all because he trusted AI too much.
But there’s good reason to doubt his story, as Breitbart reported:
“Like many editors, I use AI in a limited way as part of my editorial workflow — primarily as a copy and organizational aid,” Hall said. “Unfortunately, we’ve made mistakes that are easy to jump on.”
But when announcing Hall’s suspension on Tuesday, Mediaite editor-in-chief Joe DePaolo appeared to go out of his way to debunk the AI excuse.
“We presented the findings to Colby Hall, who insists the errors were purely a result of sloppiness in how he aggregated and categorized information, not from the use of AI,” DePaolo wrote. “Regardless, it is completely unacceptable and Colby has been suspended from Mediaite pending further investigation.”
On Monday, the far-left media outlet Status told Semafor that One Sheet “appeared to outright fabricate a quote and attribute it to our very own Jon Passantino, putting us on heavy blast on its website and newsletter for something we never did.”
Semafor further reports that since its launch, One Sheet has serially misattributed quotes to the wrong people and outlets, including CNN, Fox News, Status, and Politico. In other words, those dumb enough to pay for One Sheet were misinformed about who said what. Hell, I can’t imagine anyone dumb enough to read Mediaite for free.
Social media posts exposing the controversy drew some additional attention:
.@NewsNation @NewsNationComms @newsnationam @connellmcshane @BlakeBurman
your #ColbyHall has an interesting way of practicing “journalism” 🙃
Woof. pic.twitter.com/SrRFSoS3TC
— Pat Lammer (@PLamRecruiting) April 15, 2026
I said every one of his trump columns were ai months ago
— E kirk (@emkirk50007) April 15, 2026
last time i asked them about this it was attributed to a case of the mondays
— Laura Hazard Owen (@laurahazardowen) April 14, 2026
Semafor provided additional context:
On Monday, media company Status said One Sheet “appeared to outright fabricate a quote and attribute it to our very own Jon Passantino, putting us on heavy blast on its website and newsletter for something we never did.” In response, Mediaite added a correction, citing “mistaken attribution.”
This was the second time Mediaite had misquoted Status: In February, Status said Mediaite falsely attributed quotes to the newsletter, claiming founder Oliver Darcy had written a column on US President Donald Trump posting a photo of the Obamas as apes (Mediaite apologized at the time and appended a correction to its piece).
Hall told Semafor that the reason Monday’s newsletter misattributed a quote was that he “entered my own misinterpretation into my sourcing notes as if it reflected what Status had actually published. I guess you could call that confirmation bias, but I ended up constructing a drama that wasn’t there.”
CNN has also experienced frustrating attribution issues. In Monday’s edition of One Sheet, Mediaite mixed up CNN media writer Brian Stelter’s commentary on Athletic reporter Dianna Russini with recent reporting about California Rep. Eric Swalwell.
“Stelter frames the Russini story as a case study in the difference between “‘internet whispers and investigative reports,’” One Sheet wrote.
Whether AI hallucination, human error, or something more nefarious, media outlets have dealt with cases of quote fabrication before.
Here’s a flashback to an incident involving USA Today a few years ago:
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