Sandra Sully on mistrust, AI and the coming election

Sandra Sully encountered her first major test in discerning ‘fake news’ on September 11, 2001. She was already more than a decade into her news career when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the world changed.

“It was about accepting what was happening was real,” Sully recalls. “I mean, this was long before AI, obviously, but it was so surreal we were quite concerned about the fact that could it have been some bizarre hoax.”

Sully and the Channel 10 team “quickly established that it was, in fact, real, and the world’s media had frozen in fear and shock – and we just kind of went with it.”