Ads in the news. Literally.

I don’t want to say that I’m cyncial about advertising creeping into places it does not belong (particularly thanks to the supposedly empowering wonders of technology), but let’s just say it’s hard to surprise me. This did:

Last month, FoxNews.com ran an article about Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s postelection prospects. In the story, the words “house,” “speaker” and “leadership” were underlined twice.

The underlines weren’t for emphasis — they were clues that those words were doubling as advertisements. When readers moved their cursors over the underlined words, a pop-up advertisement would appear, obscuring some of the text of the article. The ad above the word “speaker,” for instance, was for the search engine Ask.com. “Search Ask.com for Speakers,” it said, and linked readers to the site.

This doesn’t need to be said, there may be no point in saying it, but let me just say: That’s so, so wrong.

Here’s the WSJ story.