Liberal media outlets often warn their audiences that conservatives are fouling our democracy by recklessly posting misinformation on the internet. But in the first seconds of Monday’s drama-queen episode of Nicolle Wallace’s Deadline: White House, they posted an AI-doctored photo of the late anti-ICE agitator Alex Pretti.
Later, MS NOW admitted they aired a fake image on their video of Wallace's Monday sermon on YouTube:
EDITOR’S NOTE: MS NOW swapped out the original thumbnail image for this video. The previous thumbnail used was an AI-enhanced image of Alex Pretti.
But the funniest part is how Wallace preaches as she displays this fake image that Donald Trump's team demands you not believe your eyes and ears on this case! The fake image is displayed for 35 seconds. She began her speech over the screen graphic "Breaking News" (more like "Breaking Fake"):
WALLACE: When the history of this time, of this moment, is studied, an epicenter of this moment will undoubtedly be the city and the people of Minneapolis, Minnesota. The people there were pushed to the brink over the weekend, again, in the wake of another killing of a nonviolent bystander by ICE agents in Minneapolis. This time, [fake image appears] it was 37-year-old Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse who cared for veterans. Donald Trump and his cabinet, his administration are demanding once again that you not believe your eyes and ears.
Fortunately, for the sake of our country and our democracy, Americans in large numbers today are choosing to reject Donald Trump's lies and his administration's lies and reject a smear campaign by Donald Trump and his administration that is intended to somehow justify the unjustifiable -- a state-sanctioned act of brutality on the streets of an American city. First, the facts [fake image dropped] as we understand them, as we can see them with our own eyes.
It's somehow a perfect pratfall! At the top of her Monday MS NOW show, Nicolle Wallace aired an AI-enhanced image of "nonviolent bystander" Alex Pretti as she alleged Trump demands "you not believe your eyes and ears" on this. She says we can see the facts "with our own eyes." pic.twitter.com/Dd5aX0J7SN
— Tim Graham (@TimJGraham) January 29, 2026
Sean James at Mediaite noted that on her podcast, Megyn Kelly underlined the particulars of the “Pretti-fied” version aired on national TV:
KELLY: 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 — there was like a snaggle, and it appears to have been gone in the AI version on the right.
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 like, long and out there? — and now you are really messing with things. That is just so beyond by a journalist.
A filter that makes the guy look tanner, alright maybe that can happen accidentally. The shortening of a nose? That does not happen accidentally. And his jaw may have been shortened in the picture on the right.
“Apparently, they did not think that their hero was hot enough,” Kelly said.
