Harris' Deceptive Ad Scandal

If this isn’t “misinformation” I don’t know what is: Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign has been running Google ads, just like many others. The only problem: Her campaign is deliberately making it look like news outlets like The Guardian, NPR, Reuters, the Associated Press, USA Today, and Time magazine are on her side by running ads designed to look like flattering headlines.

Axios first reported this and noted that former President Donald Trump’s campaign has not done the same. (If it had, I suspect that you would be hearing far more about this story, with this practice repeatedly condemned as one that spreads misinformation.)

Though the practice does not technically violate Google’s policies, with a spokesperson saying sponsored content is “easily distinguishable from Search results,” it looks… shockingly deceptive. Judge for yourself.

Though “the ads include links to real articles from the news outlets…the headlines and supporting text have been altered to read as though the articles support the Harris campaign’s objectives,” notes Axios. An ad that links to the Associated Press contains the headline “VP Harris’s Economic Vision—Lower Costs and Higher Waves” with a subhead reading “A future where every person has the opportunity not just to get by but to get ahead. We won’t go back to the failed trickle-down policies that hurt working families.” An ad with a link to NPR uses the headline “Harris Will Lower Health Costs,” along with a subhead reading “Kamala Harris will lower the cost of high-quality affordable health care.”

“Spokespeople for brands such as CNN, USA Today and NPR, whose links appeared in Harris for President ads, said they were unaware their brand was being featured this way,” reports Axios. And, an unconvincing response from the culprits themselves: “A source familiar with the Harris campaign’s ads team said the campaign buys search ads with news links to give voters searching for information about Vice President Harris more context.”

I honestly fail to see the reason for editing these ads to make it look like these news outlets are on Harris’ side—the original headlines are flattering enough.

CPI comes in: In July, consumer prices rose 0.2 percent, up from 2.9 percent a year prior. Core prices, which strip out food and fuel, were up 3.2 percent compared to a year ago. There were no massive surprises; this was all roughly aligned with what analysts expected, though it is notable that “this is the first time that overall inflation, measured on a year-over-year basis, has come in below 3 percent since March of 2021,” per The New York Times‘ Ben Casselman.

There were upticks in both food and shelter indices (the food index, notably, had fallen in June), per a Bloomberg analysis of the report.

This report may be “among the last inflation readings that will matter hugely to the Fed and Wall Street,” noted the Times‘ Jeanna Smialek prior to the release. “We’re already starting to focus a lot more on the job market, and if this reconfirms that inflation is on a cooling trend, heading back to the central bank’s 2 percent goal, I think the focus is going to shift even more.”

The Federal Reserve had already telegraphed intentions to cut interest rates this September, and the fact that this consumer price index report is roughly aligned with people’s expectations makes that move even more likely.

Scenes from New York: “Mr. Ademolu spends his days like this, pacing Manhattan subway platforms and stations, searching for people who appear severely mentally ill. He is a member of a Subway Co-Response Outreach, or SCOUT, team, a new project between the city and the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority,” writes The Manhattan Institute’s Nicole Gelinas in The New York Times. “His work represents the newer of two strategies that New York’s city and state governments are using to dispel the atmosphere of disorder and danger that permeates the subways. The other is more old-fashioned policing and prosecution. Success for both depends on New York creating a functional mental health system and recreating a functional criminal justice system. If this strategy works, it could become a model for other American cities struggling with crime and mental illness.”

The piece is really good, contrasting policing approaches of the past with those of the present, and positioning arrests within the context of a criminal justice system that declines to prosecute things like fare beating at a much higher rate than in the past. (“This year, as Hannah Meyers at the Manhattan Institute has found, of 6,041 transit-system arrests, prosecutors declined 33.6 percent of cases and dismissed 22.5 percent. This collective 56.1 percent rate is higher than the 36.7 percent in 2018, when District Attorney [Cyrus] Vance stopped prosecuting most fare-beating; the rate was 15.6 percent in 2017.”)

• Antitrust regulators set their sights on the stupidest possible target: Breaking up Google.
• “Millennials are now wealthier than previous generations were at their age,” reports The Wall Street Journal. “The biggest driver of that increase was real estate. Millennials’ housing wealth grew $2.5 trillion, after accounting for the additional mortgage debt they took on. A colossal jump in home prices benefited owners, whether they scraped together a down payment in the early 2010s or squeaked in just before the recent leap in prices and rates.” But real estate isn’t the only factor.
• What it’s like to swim in the cleaned-up Seine.
• Solid takes on the policy idea of exempting tips from taxes, which we first saw trotted out by Trump and which Kamala Harris is now copying:

There is no good reason for exempting tips. A worker at McDonald’s making $15/hour in wages vs a worker at a sit-down restaurant making $15/hour (wages + tips) should be treated exactly the same for tax purposes https://t.co/P1qCcfLVc0

— Jeremy ‘adjusted for inflation’ Horpedahl ???? (@jmhorp) August 12, 2024

• Please stop with the yas kween headlines:

I don’t know if I can do three more months of this. pic.twitter.com/rF9ZMy6Zn0

— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) August 13, 2024

• The laugh line that poor Stephen Colbert didn’t realize was a laugh line!

NEW: Audience starts cracking up after a serious Stephen Colbert tells CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that CNN “just reports the news as it is.”

Remarkable.

Colbert: “I know you guys are objective over [at CNN], you just report the news as it is.”

Audience: *Laughs hysterically*… pic.twitter.com/9R8iv2UXeN

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) August 13, 2024

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