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Sunrise error shows archival footage of cyclone

Updated: Seven's use of archival footage is called out on two accounts.

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Sunrise has removed archival footage of a 2021 cyclone which screened this morning as Cyclone Ilsa was making landfall.

News.com.au reports during a live cross between host Matt Shirvington, Dean Narramore from BOM and Port Hedland mayor Peter Carter, the program ran overlay footage showing the trail of destruction from Cyclone Seroja which devastated the Midwest WA towns of Kalbarri and Northampton in 2021 – over 1300kms away from where Ilsa made landfall.

On social media some viewers questioned the use of archival footage, which also showed daylight destruction when Perth was still in darkness.

“Why did you show damage to Kalbarri from the cyclone that went through there a couple of years ago. Very misleading and dangerous to show this while Port Hedland was still under red alert,” one viewer asked.

A Sunrise spokesperson told TV Tonight, “A question was in the segment about the dangers of such a high wind speed and what it could do. A production error ran the clip at the wrong time. It has been removed from online.”

Updated: The error follows Media Watch also calling out the use of old vision without proper clarification of dates.

8 Responses

  1. I noticed this too, nothing unusual I thought. Wasn’t expecting a whole article on it here though. Those sorts of programs always tend to use false and misleading footage in their stories. Journalism seems to be going further and further downhill these days. Just yesterday there was a story on the news about a garbo strike that they were leading us to believe was going to impact the kerbside collections in my council area when they didn’t explain fully that it was a different kind of service it would be impacting. They just don’t seem to mention every important detail in stories like that and that really lets the whole thing down

    1. TV news bulletins have at least three big problems that contribute to the decline in journalism that you’re noticing.

      1. They need to appeal to viewers across a broad region (example: all of New South Wales). Therefore, they can’t spend too much time on any one part of a region without annoying viewers in another part of the region.

      2. They need to hold viewers’ interest. In an era where attention spans seem to be getting shorter, this means cutting down on story length, and, as a result, having to omit details, no matter how important, that would eat up more time.

      3. They need to include advertisements to make money. The ABC doesn’t have this problem, but 7, 9, 10, and SBS do. Advertisements can eat up to 1/3rd of the 6pm news “hour”, leaving less time for stories.

      One way to resolve this problem is to cover fewer stories in each bulletin, but spend more time on the stories that do get covered. ITV does this exceptionally well over in the UK its news bulletins.

      1. They should display on the screen it’s “archival footage” and they need to drop the handle of being “Exclusive” interview “Extraordinary” footage because it is really not. Secondly stop promoting themselves as “the best news source” because they are not. They could cut back promoting their own shows on nearly every add break, because it is enough to turn you off watching. And worst of all is showing stories they consider news like a zebra running amuck on the street in South Korea because it escaped from a zoo. Newsreaders voicing their opinions of stories as in the case of the newsreader on Seven last night saying “ignorance is bliss” about the story of a woman helping research isolation where she spent 500 days in a cave own her own. Big difference helping research to being ignorant. No need for newsreaders narrating the news like they’re reading an audiobook or a kids book to the viewer either. 30 minute bulletins are plenty, News is there 24/7 from multiple sources.

  3. Production errors happen regularly. The teams that produce these programs are human, and, like all humans, are capable of making mistakes. This was a very significant error, but Seven has owned up to the mistake and pulled the clip from the web. They’ve responded as best they can. We can hope that the production teams do better in the future.

  4. These people have no concept what it is like to go through one of these things. They seem to believe it is just a bit of wind and rain. Trust me, I’ve been through three of ’em including Joan in Port Hedland in ’75 which was bigger in power than Tracy (Darwin), but not as big is Ilsa if I read the figures correctly.

    And it is not the size of the cyclone that matters. It is the difference in the pressure from the eye to the edge. The greateer that is, the more destructive it is.

    And don;t get me started on those idiots that decide to go surfing ….

    1. To be fair Sunrise and others have regularly had reporters at locations as cyclones approaching (but I can’t verify if that includes actual landfall). Sunrise was live in WA but looks like Today was delayed.

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