Kamala Harris' campaign has been responding to a push of literal fake news in an attempt to make an already liberal media's coverage look more favorable to her.
According to a story broken for the first time axesthe Harris campaign has been manipulating the headlines and descriptions that appear in Google search results to try to appear even more supported by the “mainstream” media.
Their strategy is for the campaign to pay for ads on Google, but the ads are made to look like titles of articles that support it from various publications. So instead of an ad that reads something like “vote for Kamala Harris,” they make their ad look like an article supporting Harris from an actual publication that didn't write anything. In other words, someone will scroll through Google search results and see what appears to be an article from The Associated Press purporting to claim that a Harris presidency will lower costs and raise wages, but no such article exists.
Media outlets caught doing this include NPR, PBS, The Guardian, Reuters, The Independent and CBS News, among which the campaign is said to have taken creative liberties.
Some examples of The Axois report can be seen below:
Anyone who types any of these article titles into Google won't find any actual articles in posts with those titles, because they don't exist. Unfortunately, Harris' campaign strategy is brilliant in an age when hardly anyone reads beyond the headline. The ads linked to real articles, but the headlines were fake.
At least one of them is now threatening to sue, according to the Daily calls:
WDAY Radio, a local news outlet in Fargo, North Dakota, is considering legal action after the Kamala Harris campaign deceptively edited WDAY headlines to appear to support her in an ad campaign, its president told the Daily street WDAY was the only family-owned outlet listed in the report.
“We feel insulted and violated by what was done here,” Steve Hallstrom, president and managing partner of Flag Family Media, which owns WDAY Radio, told the Daily Caller.
“You have a political campaign that used our news brand and URL to effectively lie to people about the headline we wrote,” Hallstrom said. “They lied to every single person who saw this ad. It's misleading, it's dishonest, and it hurts us as a company, our brand of news. So starting today, we're starting to make some calls here. We're considering all our options here, including legal action.”
The Harris campaign ran three variations of an ad with false headlines linking to WDAY's website.
These hacks are the main media that the Axios reporter who broke this story, Sara Fischer, kept trying to explain how the Harris campaign did nothing wrong after the story began to gain traction.
Yesterday, Axios' Sara Fischer blasted CNN for “misinformation” and Elon Musk allowing Trump to “say whatever he wants.”
Today with the hand of the Kamala Harris campaign editing press headlines into ads to spread misinformation.
incredible pic.twitter.com/u69o0RP8dh
— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) August 13, 2024
Admittedly, I'm not entirely sure what the point is when all the publications her campaign is creating fake stories for are already generating endless content about her.
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