LA Times: “An unlikely Internet sensation has struck it big on YouTube: Los Angeles City Atty. Carmen Trutanich. Two polished videos promoting his run for district attorney last month show Trutanich driving the gritty streets of Los Angeles telling war stories from his days as a prosecutor: being shot at by a street gang and sending a killer to death row. Within days, the videos amassed 725,000 views on YouTube, with the most popular clip leaping past any campaign video from GOP presidential candidates Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum. A Trutanich news release trumpeted the videos’ popularity as showcasing ‘broad support behind Trutanich’s candidacy from a vast online and grass-roots audience.’ But the campaign statement left out a key detail: It paid for many of those YouTube views. After The Times questioned the video’s view count, Trutanich’s campaign acknowledged that it had hired an online marketing firm to drum up views by aggressively advertising the videos across the Internet. The Los Angeles firm said it was paid to generate 150,000 to 250,000 views but that a huge online audience then followed naturally.”