The Central Basin Municipal Water District of California paid $200,000 taxpayer dollars to a consulting firm to write pro-CBMWD propaganda “in the image of real news,” Sam Allen reports in the LA Times. The scheme is laid out in documents obtained by the Times and posted online. CBMWD contracted with unnamed journalists to write favorable stories about the agency’s water recycling initiative and other programs.

These stories were published on a site called News Hawks Review, which Google categorizes as a news site. A reader who searched for the right keywords on Google News would see these stories and assume that they were reading independent news coverage.

Celebrities often resort to similar tactics to burnish their online images, but according to Allen, this is the first time a public agency has gotten caught trying to launder press releases through the Google News system.

[Photo credit: Elada 1, Creative Commons.]