On Monday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said the media should make an extra effort to maintain its credibility.
The prime minister also said that today every citizen analyses and attempts to verify news through multiple sources.
While the PM’s advice is crucial for the mainstream media to regain trust it is equally relevant to the prime minister’s peer group i.e. politicians who share fake news with alarming consistency.
In no particular order, here’s a list of instances when politicians and party functionaries were brazen and did not delete their fake tweets.
Note that this is not an exhaustive list of politicians who have shared fake news but only the ones who have failed to delete their tweets despite being called out by BOOM and other fact checkers.
1. In the weeks after demonetisation, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal retweeted a horrific picture of a man who committed suicide by hanging himself from a ceiling fan in a nationalised bank in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh. Kejriwal linked the photo to demonetisation and sarcastically asked the prime minister to have pity on the poor. However, the context of the photo was fake. Several news websites reported that the man who hung himself tried to rob the bank and took the extreme step when local police surrounded the premises. Surrounded by police, robber ends life in bank