LONDON: Several Arab media sites have failed to remove or amend a news story regarding actor Leonardo Di Caprio donating $10 million to Ukraine because his maternal grandmother was born there despite it coming out as false.
While Di Caprio did donate, the amount stated was found to be inaccurate and no confirmations about his grandmother’s birthplace have been verified. Reputable Arabic news sites including Al Araby, however, kept the original fake news story.
Other outlets such as Sawt Beirut, Roayah News and ElBalad also kept the story up.
These Arab news entities are not the only ones to have published the false news story, with global outlets like The Independent, The Daily Mail and Euronews, among others, at fault.
However, unlike the Arab outlets, the story on each of these websites was amended or deleted.
This is not the first time Arab outlets have poorly sourced or verified a story, let alone amended a fake news article.
Last year, major news sites in the Arab world published fake news regarding the role of the late Saudi Petroleum Minister Ahmed Zaki Yamani following his death.
Arab outlets, including the Kingdom’s main business daily Al-Eqtisadiah, the English-language daily Saudi Gazette, the highly quoted Okaz newspaper, news portal Akhbaar 24 and even the Saudi Broadcasting Authority’s official state newscaster, Al-Ekhbariya, referred to Yamani as the first-ever secretary-general of OPEC — when he, in fact, was not.
An editorial review of the published Arabic-language articles containing this factual error found that the source of the mistake was Yamani’s Arabic-language Wikipedia page, which lists him as the “first secretary-general of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC.”
