Campaigns can make their own headlines — and cite them, too

Campaigns have long used newspaper headlines and television news clips to validate claims in paid advertising, betting that voters are more likely to trust a familiar news organization than a politician asking for their vote.

But a fragmented media landscape has made it easier for campaigns to create the validation they need  — and sometimes to effectively write the headline themselves.

The technique is a political version of the familiar “four out of five dentists” endorsement: an appeal to outside authority intended to establish credibility.  News logos, bold headlines, cropped text and rapid editing can make a campaign assertion appear to carry an independent seal of approval.

The issue could surface in New Jersey’s 7th district, one of the nation’s most competitive and expensive House races.

A campaign could write a press release, secure its publication on an outside platform and then place the resulting headline — accompanied by the platform’s logo — in a television or digital advertisement.   A letter to the editor or opinion column can receive the same visual treatment as an independently reported news story.

It is no longer just the state’s legacy newspapers; platforms like Substack and Medium allow almost anyone to publish without an editor, while some online outlets post press releases with little or no independent review.  Patch allows users to create accounts and publish their own content.

Generative artificial intelligence has made it faster and cheaper to fabricate convincing headlines, news pages and video clips. But campaigns do not need AI to manufacture credibility. In today’s media landscape, they may need only an account, a platform and the headline they want.

The distinction may be lost on voters, particularly when a headline flashes across the screen too quickly for them to examine the attribution or determine whether the underlying content was news, opinion or campaign-generated material.

“For most of us, the line between fact-based news reporting and opinion writing can get pretty blurry,” said Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University. “I think what’s most important is that campaigns aren’t trying to pass off one as the other to legitimize their partisan claims.”

“The lone single standard we may have on that score is what Justice Potter Stewart said about obscenity: ‘I know it when I see it,’” Rasmussen said.

Carly Jones, a spokeswoman for Democratic challenger Rebecca Bennett, would not say whether the campaign would use material from Substack or other opinion platforms without traditional editorial oversight to substantiate claims in television or digital advertising.

“The campaign hasn’t made plans for paid media at this time, but we will be ready to prosecute the case against Tom Kean Jr.’s failed record,” Jones said.

Harrison Neely, a top strategist for two-term Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-Westfield), promised the Kean campaign would not rely on self-published material.

“Unlike Rebecca Bennett, we don’t need to run a dishonest campaign,” Neely said. “We have complete confidence in the facts and Congressman Kean’s record. That’s why we won’t try to pass off Substack posts and self-written headlines as legitimate news.  When the facts are on your side, you don’t have to make them up.”

National party committees and campaigns have turned to ideologically friendly outlets to produce stories or headlines that later appear in advertisements. Some ads excerpt a sentence from a longer article without the context that qualified or complicated the claim.

Neely would not rule out citing conservative publications such as the Washington Free Beacon or Washington Examiner, arguing that while they have an ideological perspective, they employ reporters and editors and do not simply cut and paste campaign material.

Both campaigns were asked the same question, but their answers landed differently: Jones would not commit either way, while Neely offered a pointed denial coupled with an attack on Bennett.

Political speech receives broad First Amendment protection, and campaigns generally are not required to cite their claims.  Even false statements are not automatically stripped of constitutional protection, although laws governing disclosures, defamation and fraud still apply.

For voters, the safeguard may be less formal: a moment before the ad cuts away to ask who actually wrote the headline on the screen.