Back in 2015, a young Aussie tricked Channel Ten’s primetime weather reporter to run a photo they thought he took but actually found on Google. Mates, I am cackling like thunder at this.
Six years ago, when Tim Bailey ran community photos of the weather on the nightly Ten News, a then Year 12 student named Jack James sent in a stunning photo of an orange-kissed lake in Moss Vale, a town in Southern New South Wales.
But, as it turned out, it wasn’t a photo of a lake in Moss Vale nor a picture he took. It was a random Norweigan lake he found on Google.
“I watched Tim Bailey do the weather every day since I was about five years old and I always wanted to meet him, or least have him know I exist,” James told PEDESTRIAN.TV.
“He’d been doing the Daily Bailey weather wall for a while, so I decided to give it a go but then realised quickly that I didn’t know how to take a nice photo.
“I quickly googled ‘royalty-free nature desktop backgrounds’, found one that wasn’t too nice that they’d question it, and emailed it in.”
6 years ago today I googled “pretty photo of lake” sent the photo to channel 10 and fraudulently appeared on national television pic.twitter.com/k0bfoAvYdj
— jack james (@cockroachemoji) July 9, 2021
“The thought of having potentially millions of people admiring this photo of my hometown was pretty funny considering it was some lake in Norway.”
Norway? More like, no way. Editor’s note: I’ll see myself out.
Funnily enough, James said he had completely forgotten that he had sent the photo in until it played on TV and his Mum called out: “Jack, you’re on TV!”
“I ran in and she asked me, ‘when did you take that photo, it’s beautiful,’ and I said, ‘I didn’t.’
“She proceeded to lecture me about the legal system and how I’d go to jail if I ever did it again.”
Look, to play devil’s advocate here, I don’t blame Ten for this goof. News is a fast and ever-changing beast and, generally speaking, you don’t expect someone to send in a fake photo. But that isn’t stopping me from downright screaming at this story.
Earlier this week, Ten News First used the traditional names for our main cities in a weather report and we love to see it.
