Fact Check: Republic TV plays clip of Hurricane Ian while dramatic anchor pretends it's Biparjoy

Hyderabad: A hilarious yet questionable video of Republic News anchor Shweta Tripathi has gone viral on many platforms.

Days before Cyclone Biparjoy hit landfall in Gujarat, Republic TV played a bulletin reporting on the weather conditions in Gujarat, anchored by Shweta Tripathi. In the forecast, you can see the anchor rambling and jumbling all over the set with an umbrella in hand pretending she was standing in the middle of an actual cyclone.

Since then, Shweta Tripathi is being mercilessly trolled on social media.

Leaving aside the morals and ethics of journalism, let’s focus on the video that she was referring to as the actual scene from a Gujarat cyclone.

Does the video show Biparjoy cyclone in the clip behind her?

Fact Check

NewsMeter found that the video is not from a cyclone that Gujarat had experienced. We performed a simple reverse image search and found that the visual playing behind Shweta Tripathi, while reporting the plight of Dwarka before the cyclone arrived, was a visual of Hurricane Ian that hit Florida in September 2022.

According to a report in The Hindu, “A revived Hurricane Ian, estimated to be one of the costliest hurricanes ever to hit the US, has terrorized people for much of the week — pummeling western Cuba and raking across Florida before gathering strength in the warm waters of the Atlantic Ocean to curve back and strike South Carolina.”

Moreover, we also found the same video on YouTube uploaded on the official channel of ABC News at the time stamp of 3:07 mins.

We also spotted a tweet by World Times debunking the same.

Hence, we can say that Republic News not only unnecessarily dramatized the effects of the cyclone in the safety of a studio but also used an inaccurate video.