FARGO — A after a fabricated headline from their newsroom appeared in an ad for Kamala Harris, the Democrat’s 2024 U.S. presidential candidate.
“We feel insulted and violated by what was done here,” Steve Hallstrom, President and Managing Partner of Fieldstone Consulting Group and operators of WDAY Radio, wrote in a release on Wednesday night. WDAY Radio is owned by Forum Communications Co. and managed by Flag Family Media.
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“The problem is we didn’t write that headline or that story. They lied to every single person that saw that ad,” Hallstrom said. “It's misleading, it’s dishonest, and it hurts our news brand.”
The ad says that it is ‘Paid for by Harris for President’ and includes a WDAY Radio headline altered to make it more favorable to the Harris Campaign. Harris, the current vice president of the United States, recently selected Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate.
“A political campaign used our news brand and our URL to lie to people about the headline we wrote,” Hallstrom said. “We never wrote anything close to what is alleged here.”
In the ad, Harris Campaign mashed together two different story headlines that WDAY Radio published to read ‘Harris Picks Tim Walz – 215,000 MN Families Win.’
To Hallstrom, the final product leads people to think that “our news organization was cheering on the selection of a running mate (Walz).”
In actuality, the two WDAY Radio articles said and
As a media organization WDAY Radio strives to give the metro unbiased news, Hallstrom said, adding that the WDAY Radio newsroom would never express approval for any political party candidate.
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“The WDAY Radio call letters are more than 100 years old, and they mean something here,” Hallstrom said. “If your community believes that your news team is taking sides, you lose your credibility and your news brand.”
This Fargo-Moorhead radio station isn’t the only media organization impacted by this Google Ad campaign.
News outlets hit by this rash of fabricated headlines include national companies like the Guardian, Reuters, CBS News, the Associated Press and PBS,
However, it doesn’t appear that the Harris Campaign violated Google’s ad policy.
These ads are in line with Google’s advertising rules, because the Harris campaign is only framing the stories with a paid-for headline in a Google search and not changing the article itself.
While each ad provides the viewer with a link to the real article to see the actual headline, it does not make it clear to the viewer that the ad’s fabricated headlines were bought and paid for by the Harris Campaign.
The practice of mimicking news headlines is common in Google Ad campaigns, and allowable.
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“I’ve heard the excuses about how this meets Google ad criteria, and I don’t care. When you see that ad, you may understand it’s an ad, but any reasonable human being would believe the campaign is using a headline they found on our website,” Hallstrom said.
The advertising practice has media organizations like WDAY Radio outraged because these ads make it look like they are campaigning for Harris.
“We have reporters in that newsroom who have been in this community for decades, building their credibility,” Hallstrom said. “And this is a slap in the face to them, because it looks like we're taking sides in our reporting, and that strikes at the heart of our integrity.”
Across the country, news agencies struggle with perceptions of biased reporting and fear that
“We have reached out to the Harris campaign and demanded they terminate this ad immediately and we are considering all options here including legal action,” Hallstrom said. “This is not right, and they should not be allowed to get away with this and tarnish our reputation — whether it’s a family-owned North Dakota company like us or a major national news organization.”
This news comes shortly after that is set to run for the next three weeks.
The Trust Project
