FAKE ALERT: Viral National Geographic cover on farmers' protest is fake

CLAIM

An image of a turban-welding Sikh man on a magazine cover is being circulated on social media with a claim that it is the official cover of the 'Winter 2020' edition of the

National Geographic

magazine.

This magazine cover is being used to claim that National Geographic’s cover story features the ongoing

farmers

’ protests in North India.

The cover bears headlines like 'Farmers feed the poor at Delhi borders', 'Experts say Punjab will be a desert in 15-20 years', 'When injustice becomes law resistance becomes duty', etc. It is being shared with a tagline that reads 'The largest protest in history is happening now and it is not being televised'.


Many Twitter users are sharing the magazine cover thanking the editorial team of National Geographic for covering the farmers protests. Some are using the cover to attack BJP and its supporters.



TRUTH
The magazine cover is fake and digitally manufactured. National Geographic hasn’t yet featured farmers’ agitation in Delhi as its cover story, nor has it reported any story headlined on the fake cover.

VERIFICATION AND METHODOLOGYWe looked up National Geographic's website to check the magazine’s recent covers, but none of those matched the one that is being shared above. Nor did they publish any other cover or story highlighting farmers protests in India.

Hers is the November cover, December cover and January cover of the magazine.

Cropping the relevant portion of the image and running a reverse-image search on it led us to a photo story published by The Quint on December 19, 2020. Titled ‘In Pics: India This Week’, one of the images published in this post was that of the same turban-tying Sikh man featured on the doctored National Geographic cover.

The image is captioned as ’A farmer at Singhu border during their ‘Delhi Chalo’ protest against the new farm laws, on Saturday, 12 December’ and credited to news agency PTI and photographer Ravi Choudhary.

On observing the viral magazine cover closely, we noticed that it bore a watermark which read @anoopreet.

Looking up for this ID across social media platforms, we found that this to be a user ID of an Instagram profile.

The same profile posted the doctored magazine cover on January 3, 2020.


Tagging the PTI photographer Choudhary, it explicitly stated that this was an imagined cover for artistic expression only.

Choudhary posted the image of the Sikh man on December 27, 2020 with the caption ‘The Green revolutionaries of 2020!’

VERDICT
Times Fact Check has found that an imagined National Geographic magazine cover on farmers protests in India is doing the rounds with the false claim that the esteemed magazine did a cover story on farmers agitation in India.