See picture: https://imgur.com/a/d6Mbk7i
How is this not considered false advertising? According to a quick google search in the US the federal Lanham Act allows civil lawsuits for false advertising that “misrepresents the nature, characteristics, qualities, or geographic origin” of goods or services. 15 U.S.C. § 1125(a).
This is a vaguely interesting thing to think about, but the extreme internet lawyer framing of the post takes away from the weirdness of the thing you found.
Regarding the "lawyer framing", try reading again the start of that sentence.
Possibly the Washington Post has an agreement with CNN.
Even if the Washington Post were deliberately trying to infringe on CNN’s trademark (unlikely), it would be a civil matter. CNN would have to file a lawsuit to stop them, it’s not illegal in the sense that the cops are going to be looking for it and proactively arresting people who infringe on trademarks.
WaPo might claim - “we’re not pretending to be CNN, we are accurately stating that we provide breaking news about CNN.” And with CNN often in the news these days, there is some validity to this position.
In general, you can’t even use ‘Coke’ in your ad if you’re Pepsi, as in ‘Tastes better than Coke - buy Pepsi.’
Another reason is that laws are difficult to interpret. There are lots of laws, prior rulings, unintuitive concepts, etc. Presumably some lawyers at Washington Post and/or Google have at least signed off on rules that allow this kind of thing. That means there's probably some not obviously insane way to construe this as legal.
Regardless of legality, it's certainly terrible performance from Google.
Google doesn't seem to care much about false ads unless it causes them unusual trouble. If you pay, you can literally pretend to be whoever you want in a search ad.
By the way, same thing happens in iOS appstore as well when you search in some popular category.