The inability of India’s mainstream media industry to verify basic facts about an incident and its incessant propaganda against Pakistan has once again been exposed.
For the past couple of days, leading Indian media outlets that included NDTV, The Times of India, Zee News, and notorious Indian news agency Asian News International (ANI) just to name a few, ran the news that parents in Pakistan are ‘locking up’ graves of their daughters due to rising cases of necrophilia.
The ‘Fake News’ was covered widely by Indian media.
The news was not carried by one or two Indian media outlets, a simple Google search reveals that hundreds of Indian news websites ran the news with an equally large number of India-based Youtube channels following the same script.
Leading Indian fact-checker and journalist Mohammed Zubair, who was ironically arrested on charges of hurting religious sentiments for a tweet he posted in 2018, was the first to question whether the news has any credible ‘source’.
Zubair didn’t stop at just questing the veracity of the news, Alt News, a fact-checking website co-founded by him, dug out the details of the story. Alt News found out that the grave in question is actually in Hyderabad, India.
A Hyderabad-based social worker was also sent to the spot in question by Alt News, who shared photographic evidence that the grave being linked to Pakistan is actually in India.
A Hyderabad-based social worker was also sent to the spot in question by Alt News, who shared photographic evidence that the grave being linked to Pakistan is actually in India.
The local Imam told Alt News that the grave is approximately 1.5 to 2 years old. The Imam further said that since the grave is at the entrance of the cemetery, the grille was constructed with a view to preventing people from stamping on the grave.
Recently, following up on two previous investigations published in 2019 and 2020, the EU DisinfoLab revealed how Indian news agency ANI quoted sources that do not exist. The investigations have also revealed that ANI regularly quoted the defunct ‘EP Today’ and ‘EU Chronicles’, two fake media outlets supposedly specializing in EU affairs that were, in fact, created to push anti-Pakistan/China narratives in India.
Source: Pro Pakistani