Fact Check: Telangana Scribe newspaper does not exist; its news about KTR, Kancha Gachibowli is fake

Hyderabad: Fake newspaper clippings containing sensational and controversial information about political leaders are increasingly circulating on social media. Formatted to look like a credible newspaper clipping, these viral posts are spreading false narratives.

One such fake news organisation is Telangana Scribe, whose newspaper clippings get hundreds of shares. NewsMeter has fact-checked many fake e-paper clippings from this non-existent news outlet.

The latest Telangana Scribe news to go viral is about former chief minister and Bharat Rashtra Samithi president K Chandrashekar Rao, former minister and BRS working president KT Rama Rao and other leaders from the party regarding the row over the Kancha Gachibowli land issue.

These clippings make statements accusing KTR and the BRS party of obstructing the chief minister A Revanth Reddy-led Congress government in Telangana. In the backdrop of the Kancha Gachibowli land row, the reports question the BRS’s opposition to the government’s actions. They also allege that BRS is spreading misinformation on social media while overlooking its own past governance decisions.

These posts can be seen here, here, here and here. Let us check whether this news organisation exists. (Archive 1, Archive 2, Archive 3, Archive 4)

These newspaper clippings do not substantiate the claims with sources, and the statements are credited to vague sources.

How authentic is Telangana Scribe?

As with any other e-paper clipping, Telangana Scribe clippings have a headline, key points and image; the report and a banner consist of a logo, a date and a link.

The banners of these newspaper clippings do not provide any direct link to the report or the news website. However, a link to an X profile is given in the banner.

This link directed us to an X profile by the name ‘im dharani’. The profile picture of this account is of a woman, unlike the X accounts of other news organisations that use their logos in the profile picture. The X profile has been inactive since February 2023 and does not have any posts relating to Telangana Scribe.

Lack of search results

We also conducted keyword searches on Google and Bing. If a news website by the name Telangana Scribe existed, the search engines Google and Bing would index results from the website. However, the search queries did not return any results, and we found that the Telangana Scribe e-paper or its website does not exist anywhere.

Using Whois, we also found that the domains ‘telanganascribe’ and ‘telanganascribedigital’ have not been registered yet. Whois is a public database that stores information about domain name registrants

The banner on the newspaper clippings contains the logos of social media platforms like X, Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram with a username ‘Telanganascribe’. We did not find any WhatsApp channels with the username.

Instagram does not have any accounts with the exact username ‘Telanganascribe’. However, there are other variations of the username, such as telanganascribe_, telangana_scribe_, scribetelangana, telangana_scribe. We examined these accounts and found no posts indicating that it is a news organisation’s social media account.

We have searched on Facebook and X for the social media profiles of Telangana Scribe and found one with that name. However, we did not find any posts on these profiles referring to the viral post. The logo used on the profile pictures of these profiles is also different from the one in the news clipping. A comparison of both logos can be seen below.

Telangana Scribe is not a registered news organisation

As we did not find any information about the existence of Telangana Scribe online, to find out if the news organisation is a periodical, we searched for the registration of ‘Telangana Scribe’ and ‘Telangana Scribe Digital’ on the website of the office of the Registrar of Newspapers for India (RNI). The RNI website can be used to verify the title registration of periodicals in India. We found that the titles were not registered.

NewsMeter has debunked several such fake claims made using news clippings of another media outlet called Telangana News Today Daily, which also does not exist. You can read the report here.

Therefore, NewsMeter concludes that ‘Telangana Scribe’ does not exist and the newspaper clippings circulating in its name are fake.