Authors
Vasudha noticed the growing problem of mis/disinformation online after studying New Media at ACJ in Chennai and became interested in separating facts from fiction. She is interested in learning how global issues affect individuals on a micro level. Before joining Newschecker’s English team, she was working with Latestly.
Claim
Pakistani news major Dawn attributes massive flooding in the country to “people not reading Quran,” dismisses the role of climate change.
Link to the post can be found here.
Fact
Newschecker began by looking up for keywords “Flood in Pakistan”, “ Climate Change,” and “people are not reading Quran,” on the official website of Dawn, however did not find any article carrying the headline seen in the viral image. Further, on carefully analysing the image we spotted some discrepancies between the alleged screenshot of The Dawn report and the usual style sheet of the news outlet. Notably, a full stop can be seen at the end of the headline. Additionally, the first alphabet of the phrase “Climate Change”, which appears in the middle of the title, can be seen written in uppercase.
Further, we conducted a Google reverse image search on the collage of four pictures seen in the alleged screenshot of Dawn report, which led us to an article published in the Pakistani’s news website on August 27, 2022, titled ‘Army called in as KP faces flood threat.’ We compared the mobile screen version of the article with the viral image and found, except for the headline, all other elements – the byline, date line and subheads at the top of the website- to be the same.
A report by Dawn, dated August 30, 2022, further clarified that the viral image was fake. Featuring the viral screenshot with a “Fake” stamp attested on it, the report elaborated, “A doctored screenshot of a Dawn story on the catastrophic floods in Pakistan has been making rounds on social media. The original Dawn report with the headline ‘Army called in as KP faces flood threat’ was published in the newspaper on August 27 and appeared on Dawn.com the same day.”
We could thus conclude that the headline of a report by Dawn has been digitally altered to mislead people into believing that the Pakistani outlet blamed “people not reading Quran” for massive flooding in the country.
Result: Altered Photo
Sources
Report By Dawn, Dated August 30, 2022
Self Analysis
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Authors
Vasudha noticed the growing problem of mis/disinformation online after studying New Media at ACJ in Chennai and became interested in separating facts from fiction. She is interested in learning how global issues affect individuals on a micro level. Before joining Newschecker’s English team, she was working with Latestly.
