Speaking to London Centric<\/a>, Lewis, who regularly tops polls about who the British public would like to see as prime minister, described how his name and opinions is routinely misused by online news sites even when he has said nothing on a topic.<\/p>\n\u201cI haven\u2019t spoken about air fryers in two years but I keep reading news reports about \u2018urgent warnings\u2019 I\u2019ve given about air fryers,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s ludicrous and it\u2019s a disservice to the public and it is a threat to journalism.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lewis singled out sites that republish old stories or invent new ones using out-of-context quotes from years ago. He gave the example of a headline that claimed: \u201cMartin Lewis warns pensioners not to turn heating on during a cold spell.\u201d The piece, he said, was \u201ca conflation of advice from two years ago,\u201d which had been reworded to sound like a current and dangerous claim.<\/p>\n
Much of the ire is directed at Reach plc, the UK\u2019s largest commercial news publisher, which owns the Mirror, Express, and a network of local titles such as MyLondon. Many of these now publish multiple daily stories about Lewis, some by reporters whose only apparent beat is writing about his advice.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019ve got journalists on \u2018local\u2019 news websites with their reporting specialism listed as \u2018Martin Lewis\u2019,\u201d he said. \u201cThese people are writing 12 stories a day, nicking the content, writing it inaccurately, being misleading about what I say \u2013\u00a0and taking the traffic away.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lewis described the model as \u201ccontent theft,\u201d driven by commercial incentives that favour clickbait headlines over accurate reporting. \u201cThe people doing it are not journalists, they are content writers and search engine optimisers,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is going to kill \u2013\u00a0and is already killing \u2013\u00a0journalism.\u201d<\/p>\n
He warned that the rise of AI-generated articles was accelerating the problem. Many of the rewritten stories, he said, appeared to be produced using artificial intelligence with minimal oversight. \u201cA lot of the content writers are using AI without checks,\u201d Lewis said. \u201cAI is a secondary source information provider. It takes information from elsewhere and regurgitates it in a new format. If everyone goes to secondary source sites … in the future who is AI going to scrape when it\u2019s killed all the primary source sites?\u201d<\/p>\n
He acknowledged the wider pressures on news organisations but was scathing about the way some publishers operate. Asked what he would say to the chief executive of Reach, Lewis replied: \u201cI think they know my view. I just think it\u2019s an absolute disgrace, the type of content and copy they write. They don\u2019t give a monkey\u2019s what I think. They only give a monkey\u2019s about utilising and pilfering my name for their content.\u201d<\/p>\n
While he expressed sympathy for individual journalists inside these organisations\u2014 \u201cyou talk to the proper journalists who work at Reach and they are in despair \u2014 he painted a bleak picture of the broader state of the industry. \u201cI haven\u2019t got an answer to the existential crisis facing journalism in this country,\u201d he said. \u201cI just know it\u2019s an existential crisis.\u201d<\/p>\n
In response, David Higgerson, chief digital publisher at Reach, said on LinkedIn: “Loyal audiences are growing across our titles, and public interest and civic journalism is being created in a way which ensures the people who need to see it, see it, there’s only one reason people are taking a sliver of stories they don’t like and trying to paint it as the dominant norm of what we do \u2013 we see it a lot.”<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Martin Lewis, the man behind the UK price comparison website MoneySavingExpert, has accused news publishers of misleading readers and undermining journalism by publishing clickbait articles that twist or fabricate his advice. Speaking to London Centric, Lewis, who regularly tops polls about who the British public would like to see as prime minister, described how his<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5175,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[118],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-5174","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-publishing-news"},"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sandbox.hbmadvisory.com\/amplify\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sandbox.hbmadvisory.com\/amplify\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sandbox.hbmadvisory.com\/amplify\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sandbox.hbmadvisory.com\/amplify\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sandbox.hbmadvisory.com\/amplify\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5174"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sandbox.hbmadvisory.com\/amplify\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5176,"href":"https:\/\/sandbox.hbmadvisory.com\/amplify\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5174\/revisions\/5176"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sandbox.hbmadvisory.com\/amplify\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sandbox.hbmadvisory.com\/amplify\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sandbox.hbmadvisory.com\/amplify\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sandbox.hbmadvisory.com\/amplify\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}