By SUZANNE DOWNING
Sept. 28, 2026 — Ask an AI chatbot about a political candidate and it may answer with a citation to what appears to be a local news story. The answer may give no indication that the “news” site was created by a political organization trying to influence the election.
That is the warning in a Politico report published Friday. Citing an audit by NewsGuard, the report says leading chatbots drew on partisan sites nearly half the time when answering questions about candidates and issues those sites had covered. A chatbot is a program such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini that responds to questions written in ordinary language.
The article is actually authored by two employees of NewsGuard, which is a left-leaning organization that protects the mainstream media and goes after conservative sites.
Politico’s story uses The Alaska Navigator as one example. The website looks like independent Alaska news, but it is operated by One Nation, a nonprofit aligned with Senate Republicans. Its articles have praised US Sen. Dan Sullivan, including a story about his response to fentanyl trafficking. One Nation has also paid to promote the site’s articles on social media. The connection to One Nation is disclosed on the website.
But readers looking at Alaska’s election information landscape should also know about The Alaska Independent, which operates a website and sends newspaper-style editions to voters’ mailboxes. Politico does not tell readers about that site.
The Alaska Independent states on its website that it is a project of American Independent Media, a 501(c)(4) organization. The national operation as Democratic aligned and cited a Columbia Journalism Review description of it as a “pseudo-news” organization. Its Alaska website currently features favorable coverage of Mary Peltola and Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins alongside stories critical of Sullivan and Republican policies.
The Alaska Story examined one of its mailed editions in August. It placed a cover story critical of Sullivan and a favorable story about Peltola among Alaska scenery, recreation, a recipe and a crossword puzzle. The community-paper packaging gives the political coverage the familiar appearance of local news.
The Alaska Independent is ignored by Politico’s chatbot story, but it’s relevant because its articles are also online, where a chatbot can find and cite them. Its print edition gives the same operation a second route into Alaska households.
A third Alaska-branded outlet illustrates the scale of the problem: Alaska Business Daily. Media Bias/Fact Check identifies it as part of the Metric Media network and says the site relies heavily on algorithmically produced material. Of course, Media Bias/Fact Check, which rates Alaska Business Daily as right-leaning and low in credibility, is itself a privately owned ratings site. Founder and editor Dave M. Van Zandt says he is an unaffiliated voter and has disclosed a donation to Bernie Sanders in 2016. MBFC says it is funded by advertising, memberships and individual donations, while Van Zandt makes the final editorial decisions on its ratings.
Columbia Journalism Review has documented the broader network’s ties to Metric Media and Locality Labs, whose many sites adopt the look of local publications while producing large volumes of inexpensive, templated content. Alaska Business Daily is another reason a local-sounding name alone tells readers little about a site’s editorial independence.
The three outlets have different operators and methods. The Alaska Navigator promotes a Republican online only. The Alaska Independent carries Democrat-aligned coverage online and in print. Alaska Business Daily belongs to a much larger network of templated local sites. They should not be treated as one organization or presumed to have identical content. Their shared feature is that each can appear to a casual reader, or to a chatbot retrieving sources, to be an ordinary Alaska news publication.
That makes Politico’s selection worth scrutinizing. Leaving the Alaska Independent out of the Alaska picture risks giving readers a lopsided view of a tactic used across the political spectrum.
This is especially important because, according to a summary of NewsGuard’s findings, the chatbots tested were more likely to cite left-leaning sites than right-leaning ones.
Alaska’s governor’s race adds another reason to pay attention to AI and politics. The Alaska Story has reported that six employees of Anthropic, the company behind Claude, contributed a combined $372,000 to Democratic candidate Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, who has advocated AI regulation.
Politico, decidedly left-leaning, warns that a chatbot can turn a partisan article into an answer that sounds neutral. The warning is more useful when voters see the full Alaska picture. Who runs the site the chatbot is asking you to trust? It’s getting increasingly more difficult to determine, as AI takes over more and more news production.
Editor’s note: The Alaska Story is conservative-leaning news and commentary. One of our most important news beats is covering the legacy media and its leftist bias.
