VP Kamala Harris, Campaign Facing New Legal Action

[luyenchuong3000]

A family-owned news outlet in North Dakota is contemplating legal action against the Harris campaign and Google, alleging that deceptive tactics are being used to manipulate news coverage and portray the vice president in an overly positive light.

According to the Daily Caller, WDAY Radio in Fargo discovered that a recent headline about Vice President Kamala Harris had been altered in Google Search to make it seem as though the writers were endorsing her and her campaign plans. Axios reported that similar edits had been made to stories from national outlets appearing in Google search results about Harris.

The issue involves the Harris campaign’s use of sponsored ad results at the top of search engine pages, featuring misleading headlines such as “Harris Will Lower Health Care Costs” by NPR and “Inflation is Down” by Reuters. WDAY Radio’s owners are particularly upset that their headline was changed to read “Harris Picks Tim Walz – 215,000 MN Families Win.”

“We feel insulted and violated by what was done here,” Steve Hallstrom, the 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 our URL to effectively lie to people about the headline we wrote,” Hallstrom said. “They lied to every single person that saw that ad. It’s misleading, it’s dishonest, and it hurts us as the company, our news brand. So as of today, we’re starting to make some calls here. We are considering all of our options here, including legal action.”

Hallstrom provided the outlet with two original headlines that he believes the Harris campaign merged to create a misleading impression of bias. The separate headlines on WDAY’s website were “Walz Selected as Kamala Harris’ VP Pick for 2024 Election” and “Minnesota Child Tax Credit Benefits 215,000 Minnesota Families.” The campaign allegedly combined these into a single, biased headline.

“We never wrote anything close to what is alleged here,” Hallstrom said. “They took two different unrelated stories that we did have on our website, sort of mashed them together, and then from there, they rewrote a few words to make it look like our news organization was cheering on the selection of Walz.”

A Google spokesperson informed the Caller that the ad conflations do not violate its advertising policies. They mentioned that a “glitch” causing some ads to lack a necessary paid-for disclosure would be fixed. “I’ve heard the excuses about how this meets the approval of the Google Ad criteria people, and I don’t care,” Hallstrom said. “When you see that ad, you may understand that it’s an ad, that any reasonable human being would look at that and say, ‘Oh, the campaign, they found a story or headline on a website that’s good for them. Who would not use that? Who wouldn’t use that?’ But that’s not what happened here,” he continued.

Embedded Tweet

Other outlets agreed with Hallstrom and denounced the Harris campaign’s maneuver. “AP was neither aware of this practice nor would we allow these to run on our website,” an AP spokesperson replied when asked. Another for Reuters promised its own investigation. “We were unaware Reuters was being featured in these advertisements. We are looking into the matter. It is entirely wrong for anyone to put fake headlines under ‘The Independent’ brand. We object fiercely and believe it is undermining of what politics and journalism should be about. It is misleading to muddle fake headlines with any campaign trying to persuade people to vote in an election and must be widely condemned. We will be seeking their removal.”

Hallstrom questioned why the Harris campaign, despite recent success, felt it necessary to deceptively promote news coverage that wasn’t particularly critical. “There are things that are right and there are things that are wrong, and this clearly is wrong. This is clearly leading, it’s clearly deceptive, it’s dishonest, and it was done obviously recklessly without thinking about what’s really happening here. And I don’t know who on the Harris staff made the decision that this was a good strategy. But I can’t believe that on the whole that that organization, that campaign would, top to bottom, feel like this is a tactful and a principled approach to getting the word out about their candidate,” he said.