The comment that ‘half of Bangladeshi voters support the Awami League’ is not from Reuters
Recently, the information that “nearly half of Bangladeshi voters support Sheikh Hasina’s party” has been circulated on social media, claiming it to be a comment made by the international news agency, Reuters.
See the Facebook posts making this claim here, here, here, here, and here.
See posts making the same claim on other platforms: Instagram, Threads.
Fact Check
Rumor Scanner Team’s investigation reveals that the comment “nearly half of Bangladeshi voters support Sheikh Hasina’s party” is not made by Reuters. In fact, Krishna N. Das, Reuters’ representative in India, made the comment during a podcast, citing Sheikh Hasina and Sajeeb Wazed, which is now being promoted as a comment made by Reuters.
In the investigation, it was found that a Facebook post by Reuters is being cited as the source in the posts making this claim. In the caption of this post, published on the night of November 18, the part of the claim is clearly visible written in quotation marks (”). The post provides a link to a related podcast.
The Reuters World News podcast, titled ‘Trump’s Gaza plan, Epstein vote, Comey and Bangladesh,’ is available on Spotify and YouTube and was also published yesterday (November 18). The transcript of the podcast is available on the Reuters website. In one part of this transcript, a comment is found from Krishna N. Das, the Editor for Politics & General News at Reuters’ India bureau. Krishna N. Das states: “So Hassina’s son told us that they have been, Hasina and the son himself, Sajeeb Wazed. Both of them are abroad, but they’re in touch with their activists in Bangladesh, and they said there will be violence ahead of the elections if the ban on the party is not lifted. They say that nearly half of Bangladeshi voters support Hassina’s party, the Awami League, and if they cannot participate in the election, you are simply robbing the chance of a lot of people to vote in the election because they do not have their own first choice party contesting.”
This means the comment is not made by Reuters or any journalist from the news agency, but rather by Sheikh Hasina and her son, Joy (Sajeeb Wazed). Moreover, Reuters also did not claim it as their own comment; instead, they published the comment in quotation marks.
So, a remark claiming that “about half of Bangladeshi voters support Sheikh Hasina’s party” has been circulated as a Reuters statement; which is misleading.