Does zooming in on the newspaper pictured in a July 12, 2026, press release from Sen. Mitch McConnell's office show that the photo was AI-generated? No, that's not true: The fake close-up image of the newspaper text is the result of an AI hallucination. The newspaper in the real photo is not in crisp focus, but it does match the layout of The Washington Post sports section on July 12, 2026. Zooming in on the original photo does not reveal garbled AI-generated text in sharp focus -- it just results in larger blurry text.
The fake image appears in a post (archived here) by the X account @tonyposnanski on July 12, 2026. It is captioned:
There is the newspaper he is reading.
This is the fake newspaper image:
(Image source: post by @tonyposnanski on X.)
The @tonyposnanski post also included a repost (archived here) from Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News (embedded below). This post includes the picture of McConnell and his wife, Elaine Chao, the former U.S. transportation secretary. This photograph, which shows McConnell in a convalescent setting holding the newspaper, came with a statement from McConnell and his attending physician in a July 12, 2026, press release from the senator's office (archived here and here). A search of Google News shows the photo has been widely circulated in press reports (archived here).
MCCONNELL releases a photo - and statement.
-- Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) July 12, 2026
'To my fellow Kentuckians -
'When you elected me to a seventh term and made me our Commonwealth's longest serving Senator, you did so trusting that I'd keep showing up to fight for you every day. And over the past several weeks,... pic.twitter.com/YTzTXDhEgu
The image included in Jake Sherman's post, when expanded in a new window, is 713 by 660 pixels. This is not a high enough resolution to render the text of a newspaper occupying a small corner of the scene with crisp edges, as it appears in the @tonyposnanski post. Using Adobe Photoshop, Lead Stories cropped and enlarged the newspaper in the corner of the photo to mimic the cropping of the @tonyposnanski detail. The Lead Stories zoomed-in detail of the newspaper (pictured below) does not produce legible text, it is just larger, blurry and pixelated text.
These differences illustrate the pitfalls of "enhancing" a blurry image with AI technology. The garbled text in the @tonyposnanski image (pictured above) was not revealed through AI-image-enhancing technology -- it was created by it.
(Image source: post by @JakeSherman on X.)
The photo (archived here) of Texas A&M's Chris Hacopian appears in the alamy.com image library and was taken months ago, on March 13, 2026. In this photo Hacopian was wearing some gold chains that were bouncing as he ran. In the pixelated image, these chains are difficult to make out, but in the image as published in the July 12, 2026, Washington Post sports section (archived here), the chains are easy to see (image below will open in a new window). In the fake detailed image, this area was rendered like some sweaty grime on Hacopian's neck. Also, the Texas A&M team logo on Hacopian's helmet was rendered like a garbled New York Yankees logo.
(Image source: Washington Post.)
Lead Stories reached out to McConnell's office requesting a copy of the original photo at the resolution sent to press outlets. We will update this article if we receive a copy.
