Family-Owned News Outlet Plans To SUE Kamala Harris, Google: ‘We Feel Insulted’

A family-owned news outlet in North Dakota is considering legal action against the Harris campaign and Google over deceptive tactics it claims are abusing news coverage to paint the vice president in a more favorable light.

According to the Daily Caller, WDAY Radio, a news station in Fargo, noticed that a recent headline about Vice President Kamala Harris was edited on Goole Search to make it appear as though the writers were endorsing Harris and parts of her campaign plans. Others quickly noted that similar edits had taken place in the stories of national outlets whose reports appeared in Google search results about Harris, Axios reported. Specifically, it is the campaign’s practice of paying for sponsored ad results that appear at the top of the search engine’s page – with false headlines such as “Harris Will Lower Health Care Costs” by NPR and “Inflation is Down” by Reuters. In the case of WDAY Radio, the owners are incensed that their coverage was rearranged to declare “Harris Picks Tim Walz – 215,000 MN Families Win.”

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“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 shared with the outlet two separate headlines that he believes the Harris campaign melded together, giving his station’s coverage a biased slant that isn’t there. “Walz selected as Kamala Harris’ VP pick for 2024 Election” and “Minnesota Child Tax Credit benefits 215,000 Minnesota families” were two separate pieces on WDAY’s website before team Harris combined them into one.

“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 spokesperson for Google told the Caller that the ad conflations don’t violate its advertising policies and that a “glitch” leaving some of the ads without a necessary paid-for disclosure would be corrected. “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.

Harris campaign has been editing news headlines & descriptions in search ads that make it appear as if major outlets support her
—Google believes its sponsored disclosures are enough to keep voters from being misled, but media outlets may feel differentlyhttps://t.co/dU0KFhbeuy

— Sara Fischer (@sarafischer) August 13, 2024

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 by the Harris campaign, if it is doing so well recently, felt the need to be deceptive in promoting news coverage that wasn’t even very critical to begin with. “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.

Reporters continue to harangue the vice president and Democratic nominee over ducking sit-down interviews and unscripted press conferences. Earlier this week, a spokesman for Harris promised she would sit for a single interview by the end of the month. The election is 81 days away.

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