AP Photo/Lauren Victoria Burke; Photo provided by Sen. Mitch McConnell’s office.
The Washington Post got one of its interns to fact-check a photo of Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) holding the paper’s sports section amid continuing “online speculation” about his health.
The 84-year-old senior senator from Kentucky is retiring, having announced in February 2025 that he would not be running for re-election. He has served in the Senate since 1985 and is currently in his seventh term, making him Kentucky’s longest-serving Senator. McConnell spent years as both Senate Majority and Minority Leader as the Republicans’ electoral fortunes waxed and waned. In 2024, he stepped down from his party leadership role and was replaced by Sen. John Thune (R-SD).
McConnell has been hospitalized for several weeks. Several Republicans have said they have spoken to him on the phone, but rumors and conspiracy theories have flourished online as he has remained out of the public eye. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear (D) has repeatedly called for McConnell to provide a full update on his health to “end the crazy speculation.”
In the meantime, the senator’s office has released several statements and then on Sunday, a photo of him in the hospital with his wife, former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, by his side. In the photo, McConnell is smiling, wearing a button-down shirt and jeans, and holding a newspaper on his lap.
According to the statement released from his office, McConnell said he was “briefly unconscious” and then taken to the hospital, where he has been recovering and “deal[ing] with a mild case of pneumonia,” but he did not break any bones, have a concussion, heart attack, or stroke.
The newspaper in McConnell’s lap was quickly identified as Sunday’s sports section from the Post, but the “proof of life” photo did little to quell the chatter.
The Jeff Bezos-owned paper weighed in Monday with a report by Ben Bindlay, who is identified at the end of the article as “an intern on The Washington Post’s politics team, covering campaigns and democracy.”
Bindlay confirmed that the newspaper seen in McConnell’s photo was “The Post’s July 12 Sports section, featuring Chris Hacopian, the Washington Nationals’ selection with the No. 11 pick in this year’s MLB draft,” and included
Screenshot via The Washington Post.
The Post reached out to McConnell’s office to request a copy of the original photo, Bindlay wrote, and reviewed it Monday evening, finding that “its metadata appears to show it was taken Sunday.”
“An independent digital forensics expert also said there appeared to be no evidence that the image is fake,” Bindlay added, citing an analysis conducted by Hany Farid, a digital forensics professor at the University of California at Berkeley.
Farid “examined the photo and said there is no evidence that the image is fake or AI generated,” wrote Bindlay, and “said that neither McConnell’s nor Chao’s face looks suspicious, according to an analytical model he used to examine the image.” The professor also found that “the picture’s lighting is plausible and consistent,” and matched the image in the photo with the Post’s Sports section from Sunday.
Some of the social media posts that are fueling the speculation have included AI-generated changes, Farid told the Post, including alterations to the text that differed from the print copy, but the resolution was too low to read the text legibly in the original photo.
Far-right influencer and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer declared in a tweet Sunday evening that the photo was “bullsh*t” and looked “AI generated,” accusing McConnell’s staff of being “liars.” When Bindlay reached Loomer by phone on Monday, he noted that she was standing by her accusations even though “she did not provide substantiating evidence.”
Bindlay addressed another conspiracy theory circulating online: that the photo of McConnell is legitimate, but is several years old.
“One viral post, with more than 4 million views, claimed without evidence that Sunday’s photo of McConnell is nearly identical to a photo of him from 2023,” he wrote, but “The Post could not find any such picture.”
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