India Today has started an initiative called the AFWA (Anti Fake News War Room) where they try their hand at ‘fact-checking’. However, fact-checking is serious business and not everybody, least of all mainstream media generally has the tenacity to fact-check news that truly matters. Now, India Today’s ‘War Room’ has turned itself into a joke by fact-checking a meme that was watermarked by a photoshop artist.

The so-called ‘fact-check’ was shared on Twitter by Rahul Kanwal, who is the Director of India Today and Aaj Tak and in his bio, calls himself a ‘fake news slayer’.

On one side, as can be seen, India Today calls an image where former President of the United States of America can be seen watching Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s oath-taking ceremony as ‘fake news’. India Today then ‘fact-checks’ that image in an adjacent image and says that the photo is morphed since the original image is from 2014 where Obama was watching a FIFA World Cup match between Germany and US.

However, there is a catch.

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The image that India Today has supposedly ‘fact-checked’ already bears the watermark of a well-known photoshop artist, Atheist_Krishna.

if one sees at the bottom corner of the image, the watermark of Atheist_Krishna has been encircled in red.

Atheist_Krishna had made a bunch of such memes during the swearing-in ceremony of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. One of them was Obama watching the ceremony, that India Today fact-checked.

In fact, Atheist_Krishna had also made a meme where the current President of the United States of America, Donald Trump, was shown watching PM Modi’s swearing-in ceremony.

Atheist_Krishna is the very photoshop artist whose work was shown by actor Akshay Kumar to Prime Minister Narendra Modi during an informal interview that the former conducted of the Prime Minister in the run-up to 2019 Lok Sabha Elections.

Read Also: Meet the Photoshop artist whose work Akshay Kumar showed to Prime Minister Modi