The screenshot of an article purportedly published by BBC is being shared on social media claiming that the ‘Gallop International’ survey has ranked Congress leader Rahul Gandhi as the third most trustworthy political leader in the world. Also, the post claims that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was ranked 65th in this opinion poll. Let’s verify the claim made in the post.
Claim: BBC article reporting Rahul Gandhi as the third most trustworthy leader in the world.
Fact: The BBC article screenshot shared in the post is a morphed one. The Switzerland-based ‘Gallop International’ had never conducted an opinion poll on the world’s most trustworthy politician and ranked Rahul Gandhi. If such an international survey features Rahul Gandhi as claimed in the post, several news websites would have published articles reporting the same. But, we could not find any news article reporting this survey. Hence, the claim made in the post is FALSE.
When we searched to check whether the BBC had published any such article on their website, we could not find such an article on the ‘BBC News’ website. But the articles featured beside the top story section in the viral image were found published on the ‘BBC News’ website. They can be seen here, here, here, and here. The same reports were also be found on ‘The Newsroom’ programme by BBC telecast on 03 June 2016. While all these articles were published by the BBC in the first week of June 2016, the screenshot of Rahul Gandhi article is marked as that published on 11 Jan 2016, prior to all these articles. One can only find these posts on social media only from 03 June 2016, and not prior to this. This clearly indicates that the image of the BBC article shared in the post is morphed. Also, the published date in BBC articles is actually mentioned as ‘11 January 2016‘, not ’11 Jan 2016’ as seen in the viral image.
When we searched on Google with the relevant keywords ‘Gallop International survey ranked Rahul Gandhi as the third most trustworthy politician in the world’, we could not find any news reports confirming this claim made in the post. If such an international survey features Rahul Gandhi as the third most trustworthy politician in the world, several news websites would have published articles reporting the same. But, we could not find any news article reporting this information on the internet.
The Switzerland-based ‘Gallop International’ survey organization had never conducted an opinion poll or survey on the world’s most trustworthy political leaders. The ‘World’s Trustworthy Leaders’ survey was never mentioned in the survey categories listed on their website. The Gallop International survey website used to release ‘Global Leaders’ rankings every year. Rahul Gandhi has been never listed in the ‘Global Leaders’ list released by the Gallop International survey website. However, PM Narendra Modi was ranked third in the ‘Global Leaders 2017’ list. Further in 2018, Narendra Modi was ranked fourth in the ‘Global Leaders 2018’ list. Every year, the ‘Gallop International’ survey releases the report of ‘Rating World Leaders’. Rahul Gandhi was never listed in any one of these surveys conducted by ‘Gallop International’.
Earlier, when similar fake survey messages were attributed to PM Narendra Modi and former PM Manmohan Singh, FACTLY published fact-check articles. They can be read here and here.
To sum it up, the image of ‘BBC News’ article reporting Rahul Gandhi as the third most trustworthy politician in the world is a morphed one.
