I swear to Christ if I ever bump into Cameron Harris I’m gonna shave off one of his eyebrows.
Harris is the Davidson College grad outed by the New York Times last week as the auteur of a body of fake news that ran on his site christiantimesnewspaper.com. One of the stories he cooked, about “tens of thousands” of Hillary Clinton votes found in an Ohio warehouse in the days before the primary, was shared 6 million times.
And if I ever see him out, I’m gonna throw a glass of water on the crotch of his pants.
Because I was feeling pretty good about my profession in general before I read this story, and this newspaper in particular. We had just published Jordan Green’s investigative manifesto, nine months in the making, that not only named and quantified the biggest landlords in High Point but also laid out the historical groundwork, showing us all how things got to be this way. North Carolina Public Radio even invited him to be on “The State of Things” to discuss it Tuesday.
It was a masterpiece, and did very well on our website, garnering thousands of pageviews on the first day alone, which through programmatic advertising on the site passively earned us about $10, which I thought was not too shabby.
Then I found out that Harris’ site took in more than $22,000 in the two months leading up to the election, largely on the strength of the Clinton story, which I want to remind you he completely cooked up; he said he wrote it in 15 minutes. He also told the Times that he tried crafting fake news geared towards Hillary supporters, but, they reported, “as other seekers of clicks discovered, Mr. Trump’s supporters were far more fervent than Mrs. Clinton’s.”
This is actual fake news, not the kind that our president accuses CNN of peddling but actual lies, written with malice and forethought — until the story came to light, Harris was employed as a staffer for Maryland’s Republican state Sen. David E. Vogt III (and also living in the lawmaker’s basement, which is weird), though he has since been fired.
And all of you dopes out there shared it 6 million times, lending so much weight to the lie that Snopes had to get involved, debunking it within a week. The Snopes correction was shared about 24,000 times, proving that a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can put its boots on, and also that people love BS and hate the truth.
And that’s why, if I ever bump into Harris, I’m gonna have to give him a wedgie or something. Because in his disgusting $22,000 lie, he gave me a glimpse of the truth.
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Your SFW threats against Cam Harris are far too gentle. As an alum of Davidson, I want to take his sheepskin, roll it into a tube and use it to pour bile down his throat, in a literal act that mirrors his ‘journalistic’ acts on gullible readers. Our esteemed president, Carol Quillen, in response to this episode, made a powerful statement upholding Davidson’s cherished reputation for honesty and honor, but she failed in my opinion to heap enough scorn on the head of that unrepentant charlatan. Vile as he is, I expect he will land on his webbed feet in the service of a Trump booster.