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Maryland Legislative Staffer Loses Job After Real News Reveals He Owns Fake News Site

A 23-year-old a legislative aide in Annapolis has been fired after The New York Times revealed he was the owner and operator of an infamous fake political news.

By Phil Davis

A 23-year-old a legislative aide in Annapolis has been fired after The New York Times revealed he was the owner and operator of an infamous fake political news.

Cameron Harris, an aide to Republican Del. David E. Vogt III of Frederick County, was fired by Vogt this week, according to The Frederick New Post, after the Times identified him as the operator of the ChristianTimesNewspaper.com.

The website became notorious during the 2016 election cycle when an article he wrote, lying about a nonexistent effort to skew election results in Ohio in Hillary Clinton's favor, went viral on social media. The article was so widely circulated that Jon Husted, Ohio's secretary of state, issued a statement to deny the story's falsities.

The Times wrote that Harris said the website paid him about $1,000 an hour in web advertising revenue and was once appraised to be worth between $115,000 and $125,000 before Google announced it would stop placing ads on sites that promoted clearly fabricated stories.

The Frederick News Post reported Thursday that Vogt fired Harris around 4 p.m. Wednesday. Vogt said Harris had been livingin his basement in Brunswick.

Harris posted a long response to the Times article on Twitter Wednesday afternoon, saying that even though "the initial motivation behind launching a fake news site was financially-based," he'd learned a larger lesson about American politics in the process.

"There are large-scale changes occurring in America, from where we live and where we work to the people with whom we interact and the lens through which we see the world," Harris wrote. "America has responded to these changes poorly. Instead of engaging one another we have withdrawn into the ideological and cultural circles that support the belief systems to which we subscribe."

He went on to say that he apologizes "to those disappointed by my actions" and hopes to "be allowed to contribute my informed experience to a larger dialogue about how Americans approach the media, tough issues, and the manner in which we, collectively, will inform our decisions going forward."

Harris could not be reached for direct comment.

(c)2017 The Capital (Annapolis, Md.)

Caroline Cournoyer is GOVERNING's senior web editor.
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