The Lorraine programme on ITV did a recent segment on “before and after” photos of the Himalayas, as seen from Jalandhar in northern India.

The idea was to demonstrate how lockdown in India had diminished pollution to such an extent that you can now see the mountains clearly from a distance—whereas they had previously been shrouded in thick pre-Covid smog.

Except both images appear to have been taken at the same time.

As one eagle-eyed ITV viewer pointed out, in both photos you can see the same two men, who are wearing the exact same clothes and standing in the exact same positions.

The “after” picture is genuine; it was taken by a photographer named Anshul Chopra in India, who claimed ownership of it on Twitter.

That means the “before” picture has been edited to make the sky and mountains appear much fainter.

Despite this, there is some anecdotal and statistical evidence that lockdowns in India have led to significant improvements in air quality and visibility.

A map in the print version of the Daily Express last Friday gave a very misleading impression of the current state of the pandemic in the UK.

It claimed to show the number of new Covid cases in each nation and region of the UK, with several apparently showing zero cases.

In fact, all these numbers were wrong.

None of these nations or regions actually reported zero cases of Covid on 29 April, or on any other recent day. Nor were any of the other case totals accurate.

It’s possible that the numbers were meant to refer to something else, but we’ve not been able to work out what. 

We’ve asked the Daily Express what the map was meant to show, but we had not received an answer at the time of publication.

A headline in the Daily Telegraph last week claimed that the “doubling of teenage depression rates” is linked to social media use.

But this is a misleading representation of the story.

The main study cited in the article does not discuss any link between depression and social media, and social media usage was not investigated in the study. 

An academic quoted in the Telegraph article said that, while social media may be related more generally to changes in mental health, a causal link hasn’t been established, and other factors would need to be considered. 

We asked the journalist who wrote the article for evidence for the alleged link between teenage depression and social media use. 

In reply, we were sent a blog post from a marketing agency which looked at Gen Z and Millennial social media use. But the blog didn’t actually mention depression.

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