We saw that the article carried ‘Pankaj Doval’s’ byline.
We looked for Pankaj Doval on social media platforms and found a verified Twitter account by the same name, that identified him as Times of India‘s national editor. Here, we came across a tweet that carried a photo of the same front page.
We saw that the story discussed the end of the 5G spectrum auctions on Monday, 1 August, which “fetched a record Rs 1.5 lakh crore for the exchequer,” as the government prepared to launch the telecom services from October later this year.
The morphed version of the screenshot appears to add extra space in the photo to accommodate the numerical figure, and it used a changed font of another headline next to the lead story.
While the original version of the paper carries a headline mentioned 5G to be the “dawn of a new era” in India’s telecommunications business, the altered version displays a headline on 5G offering “economic and social benefits.”
A notable discrepancy in the altered version of the news clipping is that the number in the headline contains 14 zeroes, which is 2,800 lakh crores, while the text mentions ‘2.8 lakh crores’.
Evidently, the viral clipping that the government suffered “record losses” of Rs 2.8 lakh crores during the 5G spectrum auction is an edited one.
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Source: https://www.thequint.com/news/webqoof/toi-clipping-of-record-5g-losses-is-fake-fact-check
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