Several posts (here, here, and here) featuring an alleged image of ‘The New York Times newspaper’ mocking Indian Prime Minister Modi are widely circulated across social media platforms. The claim accompanying these posts is that The New York Times, published this article. The image depicts a person sitting on a throne without clothes, with an objectionable comment in English about PM Narendra Modi next to it, referencing Electoral Bonds, the Supreme Court, and SBI. In this article, let’s fact-check the image shared in the posts.
Claim: Image of the ‘The New York Times’ article mocking Prime Minister Narendra Modi after the Supreme Court judgment on Electoral Bonds.
Fact: ‘The New York Times’ did not recently publish any article mocking PM Modi. This is an edited image of ‘The New York Times’ newspaper clip created by a X(Twitter) user @EducatedBilla using MS Paintbrush to satirically suggest that the international media is mocking PM Modi following the disclosure of Electoral bonds data by SBI. Hence, the claim made in the post is FALSE.
After examining the newspaper clip shared in the viral posts, we discovered that the words ‘Satire Edition’ are written at the top, above the name of the newspaper, and ‘Reported By- @EducatedBilla’ is written at the bottom. Additionally, in some of the posts, there is a Hindi article accompanying this image supposedly mocking PM Modi. Further, there is no proper format and proportion of fonts and images. It became evident from this analysis that this newspaper clip is fake.
We then discovered that ‘@EducatedBilla’ had shared this fake newspaper clip on 15 March 2024 on X(Twitter) (Archived link). In response to a comment on this post, he stated that it is satire and that he created it himself using MS Paintbrush.
Furthermore, we visited ‘The New York Times’ website and located the front page of the 15 March 2024 edition. We discovered that this original article is entirely different from the viral newspaper clip. There was no such picture or report mocking PM Modi. From all this information, it is evident that ‘The New York Times’ did not publish any article mocking PM Modi. Below, you can see the comparison between the viral and genuine newspaper clips.
To sum it up, ‘The New York Times’ did not recently publish any article mocking PM Modi. This viral newspaper clip is fake.
