In the aftermath of the shooting death of Alex Pretti following a confrontation with Border Patrol officers in Minneapolis on Saturday, social media was flooded with photos and videos of the altercation. Many turned out to be AI-generated or manipulated, and Megyn cautioned on Monday’s show to be more careful than ever about verifying what you see online.
Well, it looks like some major news organizations didn’t get the memo. MS NOW is getting called out after running what appeared to be a doctored image of Pretti during at least one of its programs on Monday.
On Tuesday’s show, Megyn was joined by the hosts of Ruthless – Josh Holmes, Comfortably Smug, Michael Duncan, and John Ashbrook – to discuss the negligent reporting and the larger pattern of media manipulation.
The Fake Photo
On Monday’s Deadline White House on MS NOW, host Nicolle Wallace reported on the growing “outrage” in Minneapolis over Pretti’s killing. In the clip, Wallace called Pretti “an ICU nurse who cared for veterans” and claimed “Donald Trump, his cabinet, [and] his administration are demanding, once again, that you not believe your eyes and ears.”
Apparently MS NOW also didn’t want its viewers to believe their eyes because the image of Pretti that was displayed while Wallace spoke was an enhanced version of his staff picture from the Department of Veteran Affairs.
As you can see in the side-by-side below, Pretti appears bronzed and buff with a more sculpted nose and jawline in the doctored photo on the right. “Apparently, they did not think that their hero was hot enough, and so they – or someone from whom they got the picture – clearly manipulated the photo that is out there of Alex Pretti in his nurse’s scrubs to make him look better,” Megyn theorized. “Again, I don’t know who did it, but [MS NOW] used it.”
Megyn described the “multiple manipulations” she observed in the original photo (left) vs. the altered image (right). “They darkened his hair. They filled in his hair a little to make him look slightly less bald. They tanned him up, they whitened his teeth, and they may have straightened one tooth over there on the top left,” she explained. “His nose, which, I’m sorry but you take a man’s rather prominent nose and start manipulating it to make it look, what, less long and out there? Now, you are really messing with things. That is just so beyond… a filter that makes the guy look tanner. Maybe that could happen accidentally, but the shortening of a nose does not happen accidentally.”
Comfortably Smug noticed one more thing. “They, like, juiced him. Look at his right bicep,” he noted. “Isn’t that insane?”
Master Manipulation
MS NOW has since put an “editor’s note” on the YouTube video that contained the photo, admitting it was fake. “MS NOW swapped out the original thumbnail image for this video,” the note reads. “The previous thumbnail used was an AI-enhanced image of Alex Pretti.”
But the internet lives forever, and Megyn suggested the faux glow-up – regardless of where it originated from – is part of a larger and more sinister pattern of manipulation. “What kind of a cynical mofo was like, ‘He’s not hot enough. We have to make him look hotter if we really want him to be our poster boy.’ I mean, like, that is effed up,” she said. “It just shows you how this is all acting… It’s performative.”
She pointed to a new report by Fox News’ Asra Q. Nomani about how a “complex network of far-left organizations with a wide range of causes” funds agitators like Pretti and also drives up the outrage.
The report specifically names American-born billionaire Neville Roy Singham, a self-declared Marxist-Leninist living in Shanghai, as a primary funder of the protests that emerged after Pretti’s death through offshoots of his nonprofit, the People’s Forum Inc. “It is a nonprofit that supports these entities like BreakThrough News, which is a left-wing propaganda output that has been heavily creating content centered on Minneapolis,” Megyn explained. “They’re doing things like sharing videos, publishing graphics, demanding things like abolishing ICE, and on it goes.”
“We are being actively manipulated from MSNBC down to these shadowy groups that are openly communist. It’s some guy sitting in Shanghai,” Megyn added. “These shadowy figures want to control the American dialogue from… God knows where.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Ruthless by tuning in to episode 1,239 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s The Megyn Kelly Channel (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.