Opinion

BROADCAST BIAS: Networks embrace their latest form of panic – the AI apocalypse

NBC, ABC and CBS all led evening broadcasts with dire AI warnings after OpenAI incident

By Tim Graham Fox News

Published September 19, 2026 8:00am EDT

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Broadcast news often has a problem telling us what happened yesterday, or earlier in the day. These shows want to scare viewers about some dark and desperate future. Forecasts, not facts. The newest eruption of doom came over artificial intelligence, and how it could end up causing the destruction of all humanity within a decade. So much for soft-pedaling it.

Coming out of the weekend, on the Sept. 14 "Today," NBC co-host Savannah Guthrie sounded the alarm in the first seconds of the program: "Doomsday warning! The country’s leading developers of AI coming forward to call for a slowdown in the technology, saying humanity itself is at risk."

Guthrie interviewed Josh Tyrangiel of The Atlantic magazine, asking: "How worried should we be?" He said, "Extremely worried," and laid out OpenAI’s "Hugging Face incident" from July, when AI bots independently engaged in a cyberattack on the AI startup called Hugging Face. That led Guthrie to play up the possibility of "apocalyptic outcomes."

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