The Harris campaign is destroying the boundary between political narrative and political reality, as the media hurtle headlong into their own professional graves.
Every day this month I have promised myself, “Okay, that’s it — I’m done warping my brain by writing about the vibes election for a while. I’m just gonna keep whupping on commies.” And then almost immediately the Harris campaign will present us with some grander, escalatory insanity. The ratchet aspect is in some ways at the core of this whole circus: How much more insane can it get?
Donald Trump’s campaign has all the alertness, agility, and quick-response reflexes of a stunned yak. Kamala Harris’s campaign, meanwhile, is successfully destroying the boundary between political narrative and political reality — with the assistance of the mainstream media, who are hurtling, happy and headlong, into their own professional graves, whether they realize it or not.
One wonders if the Harris campaign’s newest move might give her acquiescent media collaborators a moment’s pause: Axios reveals this morning that, no longer content merely to rewrite her own past, Kamala Harris’s alarmingly arrogant campaign has now taken to rewriting the mainstream media’s past headlines about her as well.
The Harris campaign has been editing news headlines and descriptions within Google search ads that make it appear as if the Guardian, Reuters, CBS News and other major publishers are on her side, Axios has found. . . . It’s a common practice in the commercial advertising world that doesn’t violate Google’s policies, but the ads mimic real news results from Search closely enough that they have news outlets caught off guard. According to Google’s ad transparency center, the Trump campaign isn’t running these types of ads, but this technique has been used by campaigns before. The ads say that they are sponsored, but it’s not immediately clear that the text that accompanies real news links is written by the campaigns and not by the media publication itself.
Just to make it clear what the con is here: The Harris campaign is paying for “sponsored” ads on Google en masse — these are the promoted ones everyone sees at the top of a list of search returns nowadays, the ones that hit even those of us who now venture online only with multiple prophylactic layers of overlapping adblockers strapped to their browser like a man descending into the Number 4 reactor at Chernobyl. There are many people out there savvier than I about the ways of the internet — while others in my youth were learning to code, I was learning how to beat Contra without the “Konami Code” — but the play is obvious to anyone with even a few months’ worth of experience sludging through the radioactive pile that is modern internet search. These sorts of ads are usually meant to look authentic, until you click and find yourself in some commercial marketplace or reading ad content.
In particular, here is where the increasing unhelpfulness of Google search — while still retaining a dominant market share overall — becomes acutely relevant in an internet era tailor-made for a fantasy campaign that literally does not exist outside of rallies. Everyone has noticed the sharp collapse in the value and organization of Google’s search results in recent years as they have monetized their product. Rows and rows of “sponsored content” dressed up to look like legitimate results must often now be skipped before you can find something useful. (I am willing to accept that Google can no longer effectively improve their algorithm, and I am even willing to accept that they do not care to. I think it scandalous that they have actively and intentionally participated in its degradation.)
But the Harris campaign is applying a new, devilishly cynical twist to the old “Google ad” swindle. They’re not trying to hide that these “hits” you receive in response to a search are anything other than (clearly marked) “Sponsored by Harris for President.” That’s not where the deceit lies this time. The sleight of hand is in what they expect you never to click through to see: The ad will list a media outlet first, and then a “headline” that is not, in fact, the headline of the piece at all when you do click through. (An example: “NPR.org – Harris Will Lower Health Costs; Kamala Harris will lower the cost of high-quality affordable health care,” written to impersonate a traditional two-tiered headline, is actually a piece titled “What Are Harris’s Plans for the Economy?”) Obviously the shading in these rewrites is done to favor Harris, in ways usually not intended by the pieces’ authors or editors (who, in any event, certainly were not consulted). The idea is precisely that you won’t click — you’ll see it and mutter, “Ugh, another stupid ad, where’s the Wikipedia link?” but still subliminally retain a positive impression of Harris by seeing her name associated with a “mainstream media” headline that imbues her with credibility.
And that’s why Facebook long ago banned advertisers’ ability to edit headlines of links to outside content, in the wake of the post-Trump spasm of “digital disinformation” guilt in Silicon Valley. Google, though, has no problem with this arrangement whatsoever, and defends the practice, saying the Harris ads were “easily distinguishable from search results.” This is true — except for the multiple times when those Harris ads above, with their bright “Sponsored by Harris for President” chyrons, ran without that warning label. But don’t worry, the cause of those many, many accidental omissions — which Google doesn’t dispute occurred — are “being investigated.” (I expect them to get to the bottom of it just as thoroughly and publicly as the Secret Service did with all that blow found in the White House last summer.)
The fallback excuse I expect the Harris campaign to mount — these are good-faith summaries, and the links are there, just click and go read it yourself — is obviously beneath contempt. Who wrote the headline? To their benefit? After first invoking a media’s brand as the presumptive authority speaking in their own voice? Sure, anyone who clicks through could discover, provided they got deep enough into the linked article, that it doesn’t actually say what the Harris campaign said it did — but then of course the campaign clearly never intended for anyone to get that far. It is the sort of excuse that isn’t meant to persuade, merely exist as a formality.
For there is no real intellectual defense for advertising that dishonestly uses mainstream media as ventriloquist dummies — though the metaphor is a brutally revealing one, I suppose. If you’re one of the affected parties in the mainstream media, the only ethical response should be incandescent outrage. It is a direct insult to the press’s claims to intellectual and journalistic independence, and yet a further blow to their reputation as anything other than toadies for the Democratic Party or its activist base — an insult contemptuously delivered by Harris herself, no less, so little does she think of them. So it will be fascinating to see whether the media have any principles left they wish to assert. I am extremely skeptical that this will jar them from their stuporous complacency, for they are overtly willing participants in this hedonistic campaign.
But we shall see. If the media, in this final rapture of the 2024 campaign, choose not to protest the Harris campaign’s direct insult to their autonomy, then they will earn what awaits them once America wakes up from its reverie in January 2025 and finds itself with a world aflame, a cipher in the Oval Office, and a media dug so far down into a hole from selling a disastrous presidency that the only thing remaining for those watching from above is to start shoveling the dirt back in.