Several news portals synchronously publish fake news and propaganda, always in favor of the government and the ruling SDSM. It seems that new sites have sprouted like mushrooms this time around, and it is evident on social media that they have a huge marketing budget, writes Ekonomski Lider.

Ekonomski Lider is launching research in four installments about who is behind these news portals and how are they funded? Finally, let’s put together a complete picture of the government’s media propaganda.

It is widely rumored among media outlets that the head of the government’s press service, together with the head of a non-governmental organization and a former head of public relations at the Ministry of Culture, have set up a hotbed for propaganda and fake news near the SDSM headquarters.

In an apartment, they gathered and prepared government propaganda on a daily basis, and a plethora of bots shared the same material on their news sites and social networks.

Their news sites are divided into several “wings”, in several companies, and there are those behind which are individuals.

Economski Lider begins its research by mapping two websites that are registered in Kriva Palanka and are linked to the name of the secretary general of the ruling SDSM, Ljupco Nikolovski and his family. These are the news portals gragjanskizbor.mk and iportal.mk.

These two portals are registered under the Kriva Palanka-based Ultimate Innovation company, where the owner and manager is a certain Jordanco Minevski. The same person is listed as the editor-in-chief of both news portals, and at the same time the editorial teams consists of certain Hristina Stojanovska and Stefan Dimitrovski.

The name Jordanco Minevski is not known to the Macedonian media public at all, but if you open his Facebook account, you will see that he does not hide that he is part of SDSM and that he calls for voting for this party.

The question is, how is it possible for a person who calls for voting in elections to be an independent and objective journalist, and at the same time, as an independent and objective journalist to be funded by the state?

Namely, his company has received an advertisement from the State Video Lottery and a banner has been published on the news portal iportal.mk. The question is, by what criteria did the State Video Lottery choose this website run by an SDSM activist for advertising? But the state-owned company is not providing any answer.

In addition to the state-funded ad, this news portal also features an ad from the Equilibrium restaurant.

The same restaurant, where you can often come across the government’s secretary general Ljupco Nikolovski (who, like the owner, is from Kriva Palanka), is advertised on the second news site of Jordanco Minevski (gragjanskizbor.mk), where besides him, you can also notice the Larikon Invest company.

It is strange when a transport and shipping company “is advertised in the media, if it is known that the those services are not used by the entire population and from a marketing point of view, advertising those services is certainly not the main motive for this ad.

The insight in the central register shows that the company of Jordanco Minevski (SDSM activist who owns a news portal that receives state money), in 2018 had a total income of 211,000 denars.

If we know that half of this price is needed only to pay for a server for the pages annually, the question arises as to how with 100,000 denars three people took a salary all year and whether they may be given money under the table? If it is known that the news portal work still requires a lot of work.

At the same time, it is symptomatic that these two news sites often appear as “Sponsored” on the social network Facebook, which means that a lot of money is invested in them and only 211,000 denars are shown on paper.

Moreover, the owner of these two portals also knows to present himself as a non-governmental activist of the FinanceThink organization. On Facebook, a SDSM man, sometimes a “professional journalist” and, if necessary, a non-governmental activist.

In one of the following installments, Lider will try to provide a comment from the owner of these two news sites, but also from the management of the state-owned company that finances them.

Until then, the question remains, how can party activists can be independent journalists?