New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, from the city government's website [3]

The mayor and city council of Newark, New Jersey "hired a fledging newspaper called Newark Weekly News to publish 'positive news' about the city - and will pay $100,000 over the next year for it." The no-bid contract specifies that the paper will "generate stories based on leads" from the mayor's spokesperson and city communications staff. A senior scholar at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies said, "If you are publishing government propaganda [4] in the guise of neutral, detached reporting, that's about as unethical as you can get." Rutgers University journalism department chair John Pavlik told the New York Times [5] that the arrangement was "fake news [6]." In New York, as Mayor Michael Bloomberg "picked up the endorsement of an influential black minister at a Harlem restaurant last month," some of the diners who "were quoted in news stories" as "regular people" were actually campaign volunteers [7]. At least three people whose glowing quotes about Bloomberg were printed didn't identify themselves "as being affiliated with the campaign," reported the Boston Globe [8].