Faking News

» see fakingnews.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

A joke about an IRCTC booking queue or a prime-time studio panel only lands if you already know exactly what those sound like. Faking News was written for people who had Indian television news on every evening, and I was not one of them. You can read the archive from outside and see the shape of each piece perfectly well without the reflex that made it funny.

It began on 15 September 2008 as a blog by Rahul Roushan, a Delhi management consultant who signed his work Pagal Patrakar, Hindi for mad journalist. There was very little of this in India then. The Onion had been running in the United States for two decades and the form had not crossed over, so for several years Faking News was close to the only site inventing Indian political news in English and daring readers to notice.

Politics was only part of the target. A large share of the archive aims at Indian television news itself, at the studio panels and the breaking-news banners, and every so often the site would drop the act and publish a straight piece about TV journalism with no joke in it at all. Firstpost, the news portal of the Network 18 group, bought it on 31 May 2013 for an undisclosed sum. Roushan stayed on as editor until September 2016 and then left for the magazine Swarajya, and the site went on publishing under corporate ownership for another four years without the person who had built its voice.

It stopped on 11 July 2020, with no farewell post and no explanation from the company. The date Wikipedia carries traces to a message from the site's own account that morning. Everything said since has been secondhand: a figure of 370,000 visitors gets quoted, along with AdSense revenue that never covered what a joke site costs to staff.

~ the dossier ~

~ the ones that got believed ~

On 21 October 2009 an Indian portal called Indiainfo republished two Faking News pieces as genuine reporting. One of them was about a man suing Axe because the deodorant had not got him a girlfriend, and that story would not die. The Times of India printed it as fact on 27 May 2011, then printed it again on 25 September 2011, by which point it had been picked up outside India and turned into a proper urban legend. A few weeks after the Indiainfo incident, on 10 November 2009, another portal ran the site's story about a young man killing himself because he could not work out how to use Google Wave.

It kept happening to bigger outlets. On 22 December 2013 India Today published Faking News on a committee blaming fog for a slow IRCTC website, as news. On 28 May 2014 the legal team of the BJP politician Nitin Gadkari quoted a Faking News article in court while arguing a defamation case, having taken it for a real report.

~ who was writing it ~

Roushan's best trick was not on his own site. On 2 September 2012 the Hindustan Times, one of India's largest English dailies, ran a full page called Parody Times that he had written as a spoof of that same newspaper's front page, printed inside the paper. He left for Swarajya in September 2016 as chief strategy officer, and he is now chief executive of OpIndia, a Hindu nationalist news site that Wikipedia describes as far-right and that fact checkers have repeatedly caught running false stories as real ones.

~ the closing word ~

The archive record does not quite match the official date. fakingnews.com was still serving a normal 27 kilobyte homepage on 6 June 2020; the next day it redirected, and on 11 June it answered 403. After that the Internet Archive got nothing at all from the domain for eighteen months. Whatever happened to the servers happened in early June, and the account posted the closing word on 11 July, a month behind the site it was closing.

The domain is now parked on Cloudflare nameservers with no address published. Eleven years of invented Indian news went off the internet without a goodbye page.

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