Claim: A screenshot appears to show that Dawn published a news story on its website titled, “Flood in Pakistan is not due to Climate Change, but because people are not reading Quran.”
Fact: The screenshot in question is doctored. Dawn did not publish any such news story.
On 28 August 2022, Twitter user @Sidha_memer tweeted what appears to be a screenshot of a news article from the website of Pakistan’s English-language daily newspaper, Dawn, with the headline, “Flood in Pakistan is not due to Climate Change, but because people are not reading Quran.”
Fact or Fiction?
Soch Fact Check used reverse image search tools to identify the source of the screenshot. We only found posts containing the screenshot in question. However, when we input the search term, “Flood in Pakistan is not due to Climate Change, but because people are not reading Quran,” no relevant results turned up.
We found no such story on Dawn’s website either. We narrowed our Google search by using the names of the authors mentioned in the screenshot, Saleem Shahid, Manzoor Ali, and Iftikhar A. Khan that turned up a report titled, “Army called in as KP faces flood threat,” archived here. It appears that a screenshot of this article was edited to replace the original headline with the one claiming that flooding in Pakistan was because people are not the Quran.
Moreover, Dawn uses a specific font for its headlines, which does not match the one used in the screenshot in question. The screenshot, as well as the authentic news story, have the same thumbnails.
Update from 31 August 2022: Dawn Senior Staff Reporter Shazia Hasan and Dawn Print & Broadcast Reporter Naeem Sahoutara both said the viral screenshot has an altered headline.
Virality
Soch Fact Check conducted a CrowdTangle analysis for the three-day period from 27 August 2022 to 30 August, using the search term, “Flood Pakistan Climate Change people reading Quran”
We found seven posts on Facebook that garnered close to 1,900 interactions; the posts are available here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. On Twitter, the image in question was shared here, here, and here, with more than 1,000 likes, 10 likes, and 1,500 likes, respectively. Another post is available here.
Conclusion: The screenshot in question is doctored as Dawn did not publish any news story titled, “Flood in Pakistan is not due to Climate Change, but because people are not reading Quran.” The actual headline reads, “Army called in as KP faces flood threat.”