Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass caught in fabricated polling scandal

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass was involved in a misinformation scandal after a fabricated poll was used to claim her campaign was gaining momentum in a reelection battle against Nithya Raman. The poll, which falsely showed Bass leading by twelve percentage points, was released by an obscure entity known as Median Strategies.

Median Strategies admitted to the Los Angeles Times that the data was entirely bogus. Before shutting down its website, the organization claimed the fabrication was a “short-term social experiment” intended to test how unverified polling information spreads through the political ecosystem. The group had also reportedly released fake data in Wisconsin and Nevada.