Editor’s note: Attention, founding members! We have a fabulous guest lined up for our second edition of the Splainer AMA: Madhavi Menon, who is Director, Centre for Studies in Gender & Sexuality, at Ashoka University. She has written and spoken extensively (and brilliantly) about the history of sexuality in India—and is often nicknamed the ‘historian of desire’. So bring your questions about Bollywood, bhabhis, Mahabharata, the Kamasutra and all other sexy/sexual things under the Indian sun. Read: a review of her book here, and a wide-ranging interview here. Time/Date: 6 pm on Saturday, May 15, via Zoom. Sign up: for one of the limited slots here ASAP! Any remaining slots will be opened to the rest of our subscribers!
A flurry of fake-ish news
The TLDR: In recent days, two articles have been making the rounds on social media and WhatsApp—each published in dubious sounding publications. Wtf is going on? Here’s a brief investigation based on the available information. Note: Thank you to all our subscribers who messaged or emailed us about the Australia Today op-ed—often with excellent leads. You make splainer better!
Article #1: On Monday, we pointed to an op-ed on ‘vulture journalists’ covering India as a provocative but potentially unpopular read. It was published in ‘The Australia Today’—a fact we didn’t pay much attention to (our bad!). If we had, we would have noticed:
- This allegedly Australian outlet is run almost entirely by Indians—and was launched only five months ago. And the ABC News correspondent in Delhi tweeted, “This is NOT a real Australian news publication.”
- It claims to be “dedicated to narrative journalism,” and that it “offers the biggest names and best writing in news, culture, and analysis, with a particular focus on Australia and Indian subcontinent.” Of course, there are no ‘big names’ in evidence on the site.
- As subscriber Animesh Kumar wrote in to point out, the website is registered under the name of Jitarth Jai Bharadwaj—who is also its editor-in-chief.
- He calls himself (oddly enough) an “Australia-India Collaborations & Partnerships Adviser” on his LinkedIn profile. And on political issues, his tweets uniformly toe the BJP line.
- And the publisher is a company called Ethnic Link Labs which doesn’t seem to be doing any real business—as per its public corporate filings.
- Most interestingly, the op-ed was republished from another publication called Trunicle.com—which describes itself as so: “Truncile.com derived from True Chronicles, is a pro nationalist opinion and news portal, launched in July 2020” by “a group of engineering graduates & entrepreneurs who incessantly work for India, and strive hard to tell her story to millions of NRIs across the globe.”
Article #2: Yesterday, numerous union ministers and BJP leaders shared a single story on Twitter—almost all at the same time.
Written by Sudesh Verma, it is titled ‘PM Modi Has Been Working Hard; Don’t Get Trapped In The Opposition’s Barbs’—and published in The Daily Guardian. Here’s what we know about it:
- It is owned by ITV Network—a media company that also owns The Sunday Guardian and TV channels like NewsX (interestingly Bharadwaj lists a stint at NewsX on his LinkedIn resume).
- This outlet too was launched recently—circulating as a print publication in Delhi starting in February under the name The Sunday Guardian Daily Edition. A senior BJP party member sent a congratulatory message on its launch.
- The author, Sudesh Verma, is the convenor of the Media Relations Department of the BJP. He also represents the party as a spokesperson in TV debates.
- And a senior ITV executive—agitated by those calling the story ‘fake news’—tweeted: “Lots of hue and cry made on #TDG… The Guardian is printed from UK, The Daily Guardian is printed from India. We are proud of our News Paper and its articles. We bring the truth out.”
So this is fake news, right?
Is it? Let’s examine the facts.
One: Both are op-eds which get a lot of leeway even in reputed publications when it comes to fact-checking (see any op-ed penned by party leaders or ideologues in newspapers). What is notable is the fact that the Daily Guardian does not disclose the fact that many of its pieces are written by BJP members—and that is definitely misleading.
Two: Both are clearly poor quality rags churning out misinformation. But you could say that for many tabloids that engage in yellow journalism—including fake stories about aliens and celebrities.
Three: Neither the publications nor its editors appear to be concealing their blatantly pro-BJP bias. So this could be just grossly biased journalism—which is as old as the hills (and Fox News).
Four: There is no sign of multiple outlets being orchestrated by a single entity. Back in December, a Brussels-based non-profit organisation called EU Disinfo Lab uncovered a global network of 750 fake news websites and fake NGOs operating across the world—all of them owned by a single Indian company (explained at length here). However, there is no sign that ITV has a hand in The Australia Today. So until we find some kind of common agent either financing or controlling outlets like these, we can’t put them in the same category as outright fake sites.
Point to note: But here’s what is similar to the fake sites uncovered by EU Disinfo: both names spoof real media outlets. The fake sites have names like Times of Los Angeles, Times of Portugal, New Delhi Times, New York Journal American, and Times of North Korea etc. So it is interesting that the two publications have names close to The Australian and The Guardian.
The bottomline: We may be entering the era of ‘fake-ish news’: bad journalism being churned out by disreputable news organisations—which may have been launched with the sole aim of circulating a certain kind of information that helps a specific party. And the new target is not a foreign entity like the European Parliament but Indians at home.
Reading list
Alt News and The Telegraph have the best breakdown on The Daily Guardian story. We also highly recommend reading our explainer on the fake global news sites run by the Srivastava Group.