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| - A newspaper clipping has been doing the rounds on social media featuring an alleged story about a groom in New Delhi dancing to the song ‘Choli Ke Peeche Kya Hai’ to entertain the wedding guests on January 18. According to the ‘report’, this angered the bride’s father and led to the marriage being called off. Placed next to this is an advertisement of Amazon MX Player, an OTT platform that provides free content, which states that everyone likes free entertainment.
Since the news story is related to the entertainment of the wedding guests and the promotion mentions free entertainment, the clipping is being widely circulated as the perfect example of ad placement.
probably the funniest ad placement i’ve seen till date 😂 pic.twitter.com/a189IFuRPP
— Xavier Uncle (@xavierunclelite) January 30, 2025
After the image had gone viral, a number of media outlets reported on the said ‘incident’. This included several major Hindi and English media outlets such as News18, Times of India, LiveMint, Deccan Chronicle, Economic Times, India TV News, DNA, Mathrubhumi, Indian Express, Republic, Deccan Herald, ABP News, News18 Hindi, One India, NDTV, Jansatta, as well as ABP News Hindi.
Fact Check
At first glance, the ‘story’ appears to be part of the advertising next to it as both the single -column piece and the ad next to it are in the same box and are separated from text above them by a solid line.
In newspaper layouts, one often finds news cluster or news packages, where similar items or related stories are put together. Their purpose is to provide context to several related news stories and enhance the reader’s understanding. When two or more news items are related in some way, for example, two different aspects of the same story, or news items that share a theme, presenting them together helps readers understand them in a more comprehensive way. Newspapers often make use of news clusters, keeping them separate and within a border so that the relationship is clearly visible.
In this case, the advertisement and the apparent news story were presented in a package or cluster.
Two more things are to be noted here:
Borders have special significance in newspaper layouts, as they are used to show separation or connection between two news items or advertisements. The presence of this news item and the advertisement within the same border or box raises suspicion of the placement being pre-planned and related.
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This alleged news item completely matches the theme of the advertisement. Apart from this, a full stop has been used in its headline, which is not usually used in newspaper headlines. Furthermore, this news story neither has a byline nor a placeline.
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Upon zooming in on the viral image, we saw two to three lines from another news story in small characters at the top. One line seen here states, “I will make them excellent. But if you ask me to engage in abuses”. When we performed an advanced search of this line on Google, we found a similar news article published on January 30 on a website called The Pioneer, which featured the headline, ‘Kejriwal calls Congress ‘vote cutter’.
Since this article was published on January 30, Alt News also examined the e-paper of the Delhi edition of The Pioneer from the same day. We found this advertisement and the alleged news story on the third page of the newspaper. Now, it is also worth noting that the alleged news story from January 18 about the marriage being called off due to the groom dancing to the song ‘Choli Ke Peeche Kya Hai’ was published in the newspaper on January 30, which is very odd.
We spoke to an official from ‘The Pioneer’ newspaper on this matter. He confirmed on the condition of anonymity that the news of the marriage being called off because of the groom dancing to ‘Choli Ke Peeche Kya Hai’ was not a factual news story, but an advertisement which an advertising agency had given him to publish.
Too Cheeky or Lack of Editorial Intervention?
Sometimes newspapers run advertisements that appear to be news stories, but they mention words like ‘advertorial’ or ‘consumer connect’ as a disclaimer somewhere on the page to indicate this to readers. This is part of basic editorial practice. For example, page 25 of the Mumbai edition of the Times of India newspaper published on February 5, 2025 was a full-page advertisement, and the word ‘ADVERTORIAL’ was mentioned in smaller text on the top right of the page.
Publishing advertisements that appear like real news stories without issuing a disclaimer shows a lack of editorial integrity and can be misleading to readers. Newspapers have a responsibility to maintain a clear distinction between news and advertisements. When they fail to do so, it affects readers’ trust in them and leads to the spread of misinformation. The recent case is an excellent example of this, where so many media outlets themselves fell for it and mistook the ad published by The Pioneer newspaper as a factual story, and created a cycle of misinformation.
Independent journalism that speaks truth to power and is free of corporate and political control is possible only when people start contributing towards the same. Please consider donating towards this endeavour to fight fake news and misinformation.
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