‘Crooked and Dishonest’: Fargo AM Battles Harris Campaign Ad

The Harris/Walz campaign has been discovered to use a Google ad strategy that presents modified news headlines to imply endorsements from news outlets. While these ads are marked as “sponsored,” the distinction isn’t immediately obvious, raising concerns among media outlets about the unauthorized use of their trusted brands.

The Harris campaign insists it complies with Google’s regulations, despite occasional glitches in Google’s Ad Library displaying ads without proper disclosures.

Among major outlets like CBS News, USA Today, and PBS, was Flag Family Broadcasting’s WDAY – a 10,000-watt AM signal covering Fargo, ND – raising serious concerns about the misuse of local radio and local news on a national scale.

Radio Ink talked with Flag Family Broadcasting President and Managing Partner Steve Hallstrom about the exploitation of WDAY’s brand.

Radio Ink: How did you discover that WDAY’s articles were being used in this way?

Steve Hallstrom: We didn’t know about it until someone from outside our organization let us know about the story in Axios. Then it was a matter of just finding out what the heck happened. I think our news people are pretty good but everybody has a bad day. And I thought, “God, did we really write that headline on one of our stories? Please tell me that we didn’t do that.” So I started digging into it to find out what in the world happened.

Our people did two very innocent stories about factual things happening in the world and somebody took ideas from both of those, mashed them together, edited a little bit, added a few words, and came up with something that we wrote nothing near what is being purported that we did there.

It was a shock to us at first. Once we really had the story straight, my business partner and I got pretty upset about it. We said let’s fight a little bit, and we decided that we were going to be very public about it. We’re just trying to get the word out about this because we don’t want this to ever happen again to any news organization. It’s horrendously unfair, crooked, and dishonest. They lied to anybody who saw that ad about a headline that we wrote.

I know they’re saying it doesn’t violate the rules of Google ads, and a conscientious consumer of news knows that when it’s a sponsored ad you have to think critically. But the average, reasonable human being looks at the formatting of the ads and thinks, “Wow, that’s some kind of headline for that news organization to put out,” and not, “I wonder if the Harris campaign completely fabricated that headline and used that news organization’s URL for their own personal gain?”

And if you happen not to like Kamala Harris or Tim Walz, then you’ll put us on a blacklist and say, “Well, not only can I not trust those guys, I don’t like them either.” Of course, I’m much more worried about the first one than the second one. There’s a whole lot of damage that can be done in times like this. I don’t think this is something that we’ll never be able to recover from, but it shouldn’t happen and it’s just plain wrong.

Radio Ink: The Harris ads also falsely cited CNN, Reuters, and The Guardian, but it’s extremely disconcerting that they targeted local radio. How has this affected your newsroom?

Steve Hallstrom: The first thing and the last thing I’ll say about that is the people that I’m fighting the hardest for are the people in our newsroom. We’ve got a reporter in our newsroom who’s been doing this for decades. I still don’t know how she votes and I don’t want to, because a good news reporter will handle their work in such a way that you never know what their political beliefs are.

We’re a 100-plus-year brand in news, weather, and sports. The call letters WDAY mean a lot in our part of the world. We seem to be the only kind of locally owned family broadcasting company. It’s us and a bunch of behemoths. I don’t know why they chose us.

These people, who work very hard to keep their opinions out of their work, are most damaged by things like this. Somebody is looking at Google, they see WDAY radio’s URL and they see that headline, they’re going, “Man, journalism is dead if those idiots in Fargo are putting out stories like that.”

For a political campaign – and it doesn’t matter who or what party; I’d feel the same if it was the Trump campaign that had hijacked one of our news headlines – to rewrite and completely distort the truth about what we said for their gain is mind-numbingly bad.

Radio Ink: Have you heard from any listeners about this that have seen it?

Steve Hallstrom: Oh, yeah. A lot. I think most didn’t see the ad, but we’re talking about this a lot on our shows right now that we do here in our building and listeners are calling to express support. They’re glad that we’re taking a stand.

And this has struck a chord with people outside of our signal. I got an email from a gentleman in Idaho who I’ve never met and who never listens to our stations. He heard about this somehow and emailed me to say, “I just want you to know, I am very thankful you’re standing up for what’s happening here. This is wrong. I hope you pursue this. I hope you take legal action.”

We are considering that. We’re getting information about what that looks like. Obviously, I don’t have the budget to hire the kind of legal team it would take to take on Google and the Harris campaign. But if it turns into me in a courtroom in Los Angeles, I’ll stand up for the little guy.

Radio Ink: In what ways do you think that regulations or industry standards should evolve to protect radio stations and news organizations in the future?

Steve Hallstrom: We are all playing this game of trying to be present on multiple platforms at multiple times. In the end, you can have all the rules, guidelines, or policies you want, but it comes down to what they talk about in the legal world: does a reasonable person see what’s happened here and draw the wrong conclusion? I feel like any reasonable person would see that headline and believe that we wrote it. And that’s just plain wrong.

So there has to be standards to these things. Maybe Google would never catch an ad the first time around. Maybe the ad gets placed and there’s no way to know. I don’t know their business well enough to say, but there’s got to be a way for them to be monitoring what is going out over their platform and it should be done right away when someone places an order. But maybe it’s not realistic to know that and to see every ad that’s going to pop up, but there does need to be some responsibility on the platform.

You couldn’t put pornography up, or a video of somebody beating somebody else. That would violate decency. Well, this is decency of another kind. It’s always going to come down to what’s right, what’s fair, and what is meant to deceive. We’re all wrestling with the new world and the new things, but some of these things aren’t all that new anymore.