A set of two screenshots with logos of Telugu news organisations, NTV and Way2News are going viral on the internet where they are attributing a communal quote to the new Chief Minister of Telangana, Revanth Reddy.
These claims state that Reddy allegedly made a remark about the Congress party helping Muslims by letting them auction the land which belong to the Hindu temples.
When were these shared?: These claims were first shared in November, at the time when the parties were campaigning for the elections in Telangana.
An archive of the post can be found here.
(Source: X/Screenshot)
This post recorded 21.6K views at the time of writing this story.
(Archives of similar claims can be found here, here and here.)
What is the truth?: The claim is false as the screenshots are fabricated.
NTV and Way2News did not publish this communally-charged statement on their websites or social media handles and have published denials of ever reporting something along these lines.
Further, we could not find any speech made by CM Revanth Reddy to prove the viral claim.
How did we find out?:
WAY2NEWS: The Quint reached out to the publication over email who confirmed the statement had not been published by them.
They added that “miscreants are spreading misinformation using our logo.”
We also found a post from Way2News's fact-check unit on X (formerly Twitter), confirming that the screenshot is fabricated.
NTV: We ran a Google image search on the screenshot and came across a post by Chilukari Srinivas Rao, digital manager of NTV Telugu Live, who posted that the screenshot was fake.
Upon translating the caption from Telugu to English, it read, "This news has nothing to do with NTV; it is fake news, legal action will be taken against those who create such fake news in the name of NTV."
The Quint has reached out to the publication for more details and the story will be updated when the response comes.
Telangana Congress: We came across a news report by The Hindu dated 15 November which is also the time when the claims first started circulating on social media.
The report stated that the Congress party leaders had approached the Cyber Crime police and asked the authorities to take actions against the leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and unidentified individuals who shared a fabricated TV screenshot allegedly claiming that the Telangana Pradesh Congress Committee (TPCC) chief Revanth Reddy making communal statements.
It added after enquiry, the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS), BJP and "others" were behind this spread of misinformation.
We have reached out to the Telangana’s Chief Minister Office for further inputs and the story will be updated when the response is received.
Conclusion: This claim is false as the screenshot is fabricated. No such statements have been made by CM Revanth Reddy.
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