‘Fake news’ billboard targets TV stations in NC town, paid for by ex-city councilman
A new roadside digital billboard in a rural North Carolina town has drawn ire after a reporter shared it on social media Monday.
“Fake News,” the billboard reads in all-caps, followed by the call signs of three local TV stations.
“The journalists I know here in Eastern North Carolina work their a---s off every single day to keep the communities they cover and care about informed and safe,” WITN sports anchor Tyler Feldman wrote on Twitter. “Shame on the people who decided to pay to put this on a billboard.”
His tweet had more than 800 likes and 129 retweets by Tuesday afternoon.
“Imagine paying actual money to say something so dumb,” one person said in a reply.
Feldman said the billboard is in Winterville, a town of about 9,900 residents just south of Greenville, according to U.S. Census records.
It sits at a fork in the road between Winterville Parkway and Mill Street, just down the street from Pitt Community College.
The billboard was installed by Riley Outdoor, an advertising business with locations in Eastern North Carolina. The company is owned by Robert Moore, a former member of the East Carolina University Board of Trustees.
Moore resigned in February 2020 after his involvement in a student government election scandal at the Greenville campus, the News & Observer previously reported. Moore and another former trustee, Phil Lewis, were accused of offering to help finance an ECU student body president campaign in exchange for that student’s loyalty on voting matters once she was elected.
Moore said his company sells ad space just like a newspaper and “you might not like some of the ads you sell.”
The company runs ads for Democrats and Republicans, he said, and they try to give everybody a fair opportunity to purchase space on their billboards.
Ray Craft of Pitt County purchased the ad space.
Reached by phone Tuesday, Craft said he bought the ad to be displayed for 30 days starting over the weekend.
Craft said the billboard was not intended to criticize local journalists. But he said he’s frustrated with how national news is presented on local stations and this is his way of “expressing his displeasure” with the media and its “liberal bias.”
“If local journalists feel like they’re being attacked, I’m sorry,” Craft said.
He said it wasn’t just the 2020 presidential election, but that pushed him to buy the ad and the plans were in place before the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol last week. Though initially he said he was reluctant to use the term “fake news,” Craft said the billboard has limited space and he was looking for something that would catch people’s attention.
Craft purchased a second ad on the billboard that says “unborn lives matter,” which also runs for eight seconds at a time in a carousel of other ads. He wouldn’t say how much he spent on the ads.
Craft said he’ll decide whether to keep them up or buy new ones related to the media after the 30 days ends.
Craft, a former Greenville city councilman, was sentenced to prison and paid nearly $200,000 in restitution after pleading guilty to tax fraud in 2009, WRAL reported.
This story was originally published January 12, 2021 at 5:27 PM.
