¬Here is how our news was deemed to be Fake...
Today afternoon (11th May, 2020), Guwahati registered a new set of active COVID-19 cases. This being a fact, various newsrooms around the city started receiving inputs about Guwahati’s status being possibly changed from the current ‘Green’ to a ‘Red Zone’.
Regretably today, we find ourselves at the receiving end for spreading fake news. But we at G Plus would humbly request you to quickly revisit the chronology of events that led to this ‘misinformation.'
We first received information in the form of screenshots and telecast links that certain TV channels were telecasting news about Guwahati's zone status being changed to ‘Red.'
With the sincerity that we have towards creating awareness about spreading of fake news, G Plus reached out to a senior government official to verify the news. The senior government official responded to the effect (which was to our understanding) that Red Zone has been declared, but "containment areas will be identified by the state government,” (This documentation continues to be with us).
However, as follow up queries increased, we reached out to the Assam Health Minister, Himanta Biswa Sarma who said, “No order has been issued by the Government of India and an announcement is possibly expected later today evening.”
Based on these developments, we further released a new story about the confusion on Guwahati’s COVID status: (https://www.guwahatiplus.com/daily-news/guwahati-s-confusion-over-red-zone-continues) which clearly mentioned the statements made by the source and state minister and how we continued to strive to be transparent about the matter.
We believe in our reportage to an extent that we are open to investigation about the source and the evidence of the communication thereafter.
Later in the afternoon, the first source called G Plus and for inexplicable reasons expressed uncertainty and vagueness on the matter.
Dear followers, we at G Plus have always given an extra thrust on the importance of fact-checking and verification of every piece of information that we publish. It is unfortunate that the ‘red zone' news turned out the way it did.
But we assure you all that we had no mala fide intentions but only truthfulness in our hearts and we believe our readers are also well aware of the same.
It is the Press Information Bureau in Assam fact-check that shed complete clarity on the matter and the news was deemed ‘fake’.
As part of our reporting policy, we have always used the Press Information Bureau disseminations as a source of validation. We have always been adhering to the GOI guidelines and we believe our track record in giving you validated news has always been clean and unquestionable.
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To ensure our commitment to our principles and beliefs we are deleting/ unpublishing the purportedly "fake" news to stop its further spread. We reiterate that we are open to investigation about our claims of having validated the news from our source.
However, there is no escaping that an error was made due to human miscommunication. Today, we assure you that we will be even more diligent in our reportage in the future.
We apologize with all sincerity for the hurt we might have caused.
