LAS VEGAS (AP) - The first online ads for U.S. Sen. Harry Reid's
campaign 2010 re-election effort have quietly been posted.

But the Senate majority leader's low-profile venture into new media advertising - placed on Google earlier this month ahead of what's expected to be a tough re-election fight for Reid - has still drawn the usual critical response.

And the criticism has arisen, in part, because the ads stake out relatively new territory for political campaigns, testing federal disclosure rules as campaigns find new ways to communicate with
voters.

Reid's ads appear as a series of sponsored links on the search engine. When a Nevada user searches for some selected key topics - Harry Reid, campaign or gun, for example - the ads appear on the right-hand side of the screen, a column designated for paid content.

But unlike most other sponsored links, Reid's ads link to a third-party, typically a newspaper that has posted a favorable story about the senator. And they carry no disclaimer or indication that they are paid for by the Reid campaign.

The approach is an effort to disseminate misleading information, Nevada GOP finance chair Robert Uithoven said.

"It shows me that right out of the gate the campaign is in a desperate position," he said. "I don't think it's a one-time thing. I think we'll see a lot of this throughout the campaign and this may be the first chapter."

No major Republican opponent has yet to enter the race against Reid, a Democrat. But the senator is a target for national Republicans who see him as vulnerable, and polls show Reid's disapproval rating in Nevada has risen along with his profile as a partisan leader.

His campaign contends the ads are both accurate and compliant with federal election rules.

"Reid encouraged Obama to run for president when others thought it was impossible," reads one of the ads, written like a headline, which was accompanied by a link to the Las Vegas Sun newspaper.

The link directs readers to an article on the paper's Web site. The story is about the epilogue to Reid's autobiography in which the senator claims to have urged then-Sen. Barack Obama to launch a bid for the White House.

"Somebody just casually browsing the Web could easily be misled by this," said Brooks Jackson, director of the nonpartisan Web site Factcheck.org. "It seems to say that the Las Vegas Sun reported that Reid was partly responsible for getting Obama, whose popularity is still very high, to run. And it's not at all clear that it's a paid ad from Reid."

Reid campaign manager Brandon Hall defended the approach, saying
the ads linked to objective news reporting.

"We're actually encouraging people to go read the articles as they were reported," he said.

But the fractured text in the ads can leave a different impression than the articles. Several ads give Reid credit for blocking the construction of a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest from Las Vegas.

One highlights the quote, "No way the dump will be built" and seems to attribute it to the Las Vegas Sun. The quote, however, was not written as fact by the newspaper but was said by Reid's own spokesman and reported in the newspaper.

The ads are revealing of how he hopes to boost his image with Nevadans. At least two note that Reid has won the support of a well-known Republican operative. Another notes his support for gun owner's rights, according to the campaign. A handful tout Reid's close relationship to President Obama.

Hall said the ads are intended to highlight Reid's key accomplishments and reach voters where they spend their time - on the Internet.

"They are 100 percent accurate and 100 percent compliant with
the law," he said.

The campaign believes the ads are exempt from Federal Election Commission rules requiring political ads to carry disclaimers identifying who paid for them.

They fall under an exemption initially intended to apply to small items, such as bumper stickers or pens, Hall said. He added that the FEC has ruled that the exemption also applies to text messages.

FEC spokesman Christian Hilland said the commission hasn't ruled on any cases that involved search engine advertising.

"Every advisory opinion is very specific," Hilland said, referring to the text message decision. "This case seems a little different."