Martin Lewis condemns publishers for misusing his advice

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 name and opinions is routinely misused by online news sites even when he has said nothing on a topic.

“I haven’t spoken about air fryers in two years but I keep reading news reports about ‘urgent warnings’ I’ve given about air fryers,” he said. “It’s ludicrous and it’s a disservice to the public and it is a threat to journalism.”

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: “Martin Lewis warns pensioners not to turn heating on during a cold spell.” The piece, he said, was “a conflation of advice from two years ago,” which had been reworded to sound like a current and dangerous claim.

Much of the ire is directed at Reach plc, the UK’s 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.

“You’ve got journalists on ‘local’ news websites with their reporting specialism listed as ‘Martin Lewis’,” he said. “These people are writing 12 stories a day, nicking the content, writing it inaccurately, being misleading about what I say – and taking the traffic away.”

Lewis described the model as “content theft,” driven by commercial incentives that favour clickbait headlines over accurate reporting. “The people doing it are not journalists, they are content writers and search engine optimisers,” he said. “This is going to kill – and is already killing – journalism.”

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. “A lot of the content writers are using AI without checks,” Lewis said. “AI 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’s killed all the primary source sites?”

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: “I think they know my view. I just think it’s an absolute disgrace, the type of content and copy they write. They don’t give a monkey’s what I think. They only give a monkey’s about utilising and pilfering my name for their content.”

While he expressed sympathy for individual journalists inside these organisations— “you talk to the proper journalists who work at Reach and they are in despair — he painted a bleak picture of the broader state of the industry. “I haven’t got an answer to the existential crisis facing journalism in this country,” he said. “I just know it’s an existential crisis.”

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 – we see it a lot.”