A dubious website named ‘EU Reporter’ has now become talk of the town in Dhaka, Bangladesh as one of the members of this website named Nick Powell, who is described as ‘Political Editor’ has recently visited Bangladesh pretending as an election observer at the invitation of another dubious entity named ‘Election Monitoring Forum’, which is run by an individual named Mawlana Mohammad Abed Ali. According to media reports, Abed Ali also runs another entity named ‘SAARC Human Rights Foundation’ which illegally uses the official emblem of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC).
According to Wikipedia, EU Reporter was described by The Politico as “blend of corporate press releases, original news and paid-for content”. Some of the website’s sponsored content is native advertising intended to look like a news article, without disclosing the sponsor. It is noted for paraphrasing Huawei press releases and publishing them as news articles EU Reporter rejected the accusation of undercover lobbying, characterizing the reporting as “an attack by Politico Europe on a smaller but successful rival publication”.
The Politico in its report said:
At first glance, EU Reporter looks like just another media outlet reporting from Brussels on the European Union.
The website publishes articles about the European Commission’s latest proposals. It offers analysis of global events, like last month’s United Nations report on climate change…
But what sets EU Reporter apart is that it presents its coverage as straight news — with rarely an indication that a company or government paid for, or was associated with, the articles. When the publication’s articles touch on one of its clients, that coverage is frequently positive. In addition to undisclosed paid-for content, the site posts EU and corporate press releases, opinion articles from European lawmakers and original material, making it impossible for readers to determine who is behind the coverage.
Surprisingly, despite such proven track record, EU Reporter shamelessly said, “We publish for money only press releases or articles marked “sponsored content”, or with the signature of the publisher”.
We have strong evidence where it is seen that this dubious website removed an investigative news item and later replaced it with propaganda content in exchange for cash.
On the website of EU Reporter, there are several names in its “Our Team” page although most of the names are published without any picture. Moreover, searching on the web, we could not find any journalistic work of any of the members of this obscure website. Nick Powell too has no web reference about his journalistic work anywhere else except for EU Reporter.
On ‘About EU Reporter’ page, it says, “EU Reporter rates at 8%, equal to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and ahead of the Guardian Online (6%) as the online news provider of choice among MEPs, EU Institutions staff and Brussels decision-makers and opinion-formers”.
Our IT experts have found the above statement as false. We already are working on another report on this issue.
Meanwhile, EU Reporter’s unverified ‘X’ (former Twitter) handle has 6,716 followers and Facebook page has just 5,200 followers.
This website publishes on an average 1-2 contents every day, most of which are press releases.
On its website, EU Reporter says, “The EU Reporter web site is currently getting over 1.8 million visits per month and building (Source Google analytics)”.
In reality, this information too is outrageously false.
On its website, EU Reporter claims to having “Partnership Agreement” with China’s leading daily newspaper the People’s Daily. But in reality, there is no such agreement.
It also claims to having syndication agreement with “5,000 news outlets”, while seeing the list any naïve even can understand this is just a blatant lie.
