If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.

So goes the age-old journalistic adage that once governed a newsroom’s desire to get the story right. These days, though, our Fourth Estate is about as trustworthy as Joe Isuzu — and even less so now that Team Kamala is passing off fake news as the real deal.

Here’s how the scam works: First, the Harris campaign focuses on an issue of importance to voters, such as healthcare or inflation or abortion or immigration — or even an issue on which the campaign is playing defense, such as the Mitty-esque military record of its valor-stealing VP nominee, Tim AWalz.

Then it finds a particular news story that it likes, typically something from a reliably left-leaning outlet, like NPR, or the UK’s Guardian, or Reuters, or CBS News. Then, it harvests the story for use in its Google Ads campaign, but not before editing the headline and the description to make it even more Kamala-friendly. Take this one, for example, which purports to show an NPR headline that reads, “Harris Will Lower Health Costs,” and a descriptive subhead that reads, “Kamala Harris will lower the cost of high-quality affordable health care.”

But that’s not the actual NPR headline or the actual NPR subhead. That’s a doctored headline and subhead created by Kamala Harris’s propagandists. And yet nowhere on the ad does it say this. And if you think these are isolated incidents, think again. And see for yourself how the Harris team is flooding the zone with fakery.

Here’s another, courtesy of an ad that ran next to an article in The Guardian. The Harris-ized headline reads, “VP Harris Fights Abortion Bans — Harris Defends Repro Freedom,” and it’s followed by an equally obsequious subhead that reads, “VP Harris is a champion for reproductive freedom and will stop Trump’s abortion bans.” Uh-huh.

Why does it matter? It matters because it’s fake news, and because it leaves Democrats and low-information voters (but we repeat ourselves) vulnerable to the deception that all these news outlets are enamored of Kamala Harris and her policies. (They are, of course, but they’re smart enough not to say it in such a blatant way.)

To its credit, Democrat-friendly Axios broke the story yesterday, but it still went all mealy-mouthed on the damning facts. “It’s a common practice in the commercial advertising world that doesn’t violate Google’s policies,” they write, “but the ads mimic real news results from Search closely enough that they have news outlets caught off guard.”

Alas, it seems that our mainstream media has been off guard an awful lot lately, as it’s now been 24 days since Harris began holding “our democracy” hostage by refusing to sit for so much as a single interview with even a pseudo-journalistic fellow-traveler.

As for the news outlets whose journalistic valor is being stolen by Team Harris, they report to being blissfully unaware. As Axios adds, “Spokespeople for brands such as CNN, USA Today and NPR, whose links appeared in Harris for President ads, said they were unaware their brand was being featured this way.”

They’re shocked — SHOCKED — to learn that their reputation for truthiness is being undermined by their fellow Democrats.

Summing up: If a Google ad tells you that CNN or USA Today or NPR or CBS loves Kamala Harris and supports her policies, you needn’t bother to check it out.

You can be sure it’s a lie, even if it’s the truth.