A video (here, here, and here) showing TV anchor Anjana Om Kashyap apologising for supporting the government and failing the public is doing the rounds on social media. In the clip, Kashyap is heard saying that journalism is now “sitting in the lap of power” and that she, instead of being the voice of the public, started speaking the voice of the government. Further in the video, she can be seen saying that she has changed and will now question the government. We will fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: Video shows journalist Anjana Om Kashyap apologising for failing to speak up against the government and saying that she would be questioning the government from now onwards.
Fact: The viral video has been manipulated using AI. The original footage features Kashyap praising her home state, Bihar. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
To verify the claim, we performed a keyword search online and did not find any reports or videos about Anjana Om Kashyap making the comments seen in the viral video. While watching the video, we closely examined the lip-sync in the video and found clear mismatches between Kashyap’s lip movements and the audio, suggesting AI manipulation. To verify the same, we ran the video through Cantilux, an AI content detection tool, which analysed the video and reported that there is a high confidence in being an AI-generated video.
Then, to learn more details about the video, we performed a reverse image search on the video’s keyframes, leading us to an Instagram post from 4 October 2024 by the account ‘bihar_vibes’. It featured the same visuals and outfit worn by Kashyap, captioned “My Journey from Bihar to Achieving My Dreams.”
In the video, we can see her narrating the story of her journey from Bihar to Delhi. During her speech, Kashyap says that she took a train from Bihar to Delhi, studied Botany Honours, and did social work in 1993.
Additionally, we found that Anjana Om Kashyap has posted a longer version of this video on Instagram on 16 October 2023. The caption of the video in Hindi translates to, ‘Today, a Bihari is standing in front of you.’ It contains a hashtag that says ‘#BiharMeetInDubai.’
In this video, too, she shares her experiences of being a Bihari. Further, we found the unedited, uncropped version of this speech on an unverified YouTube channel named ‘Anjana Om Kashyap’, uploaded on 17 October 2023.
It also carried the same title and hashtag as the Instagram video, which is ‘Today, a Bihari is standing in front of you.’ The video shows her speaking about her personal journey and expressing pride in Bihar, not making any apology or political statement.
To sum up, an old video of journalist Anjana Om Kashyap praising Bihar has been edited using AI to falsely depict her as apologising to the public.
