Every weekday morning, as the clock strikes 7am, myself and Katie wake and start getting ready for the day of work ahead. The usual ritual is to snooze for fifteen minutes, Katie then rises and gets into the shower and I power up the laptop and read some early morning feeds. As Katie comes out the shower, she requests that I put the TV on, nine times out of ten it’s straight to channel three, GM-TV.
GM-TV as it goes isn’t too bad, it is a little more varied than your straight up BBC News and it helps get the news, weather and odd reports in before you leave for work.
The one thing that really gets to me is the sensationalist reporting. Two days ago it centred on a piece of council-estate scum who had “been given a criminal record” for overfilling his outside bin. I could imagine, as they said this, millions of viewers were shocked at council bureaucracy gone mad.
What we weren’t shown was that the council had merely fined the man for overfilling his bin, something that he would no doubt have received correspondence through the post when the action came into place. He proceeded to ignore the letter, letting the courts issue a court order against him and charging him for the whole thing. In my house, if there is not enough room for something, you have a council recycling plant probably two or three miles from any house that you can deposit your rubbish in. This man was just lazy. GM-TV made the viewer think that the man was unfairly punished for something I think he could have stopped dead in it’s tracks.
Yesterday was even better. They told viewers a million times that an American woman had come home and heard noises in her kitchen, only to find an 8 foot crocodile! (zOMG!). They proceeded to interview the woman, asking silly questions like “Will you leave your back door open now?!” and stating things like “You must have been very scared!”.
Granted it’s background TV, some of the crap that TV stations are allowed to get away with now is just plan wrong. At least GM-TV arent hurting anyone.
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