doctorvee

I am sure that, for most people, the most surprising thing about the story about a scene in The F Word being faked is the fact that it is a surprise to some people.

I mean, making it look as though Gordon Ramsay caught a fish when he actually didn’t is a bit lame compared to most of the media’s crimes. There surely can’t be a single thinking person in the country who does not believe that this kind of behaviour is actually standard MSM practice.

Surely whenever they switch on the radio or read the newspaper, most people bear in mind that somewhere along the line a journalist will have used artistic license to sex up a story. I am sure this happens all the time in actual news reporting. So lying about catching a fish seems relatively innocuous to me.

I first heard the story on the Up All Night paper review. I couldn’t really believe that I was supposed to be shocked by the story. The editor of The Sunday Times was going on and about how important this story is, particularly given the recent Channel 4 scandals that everyone now likes to pull out of their bums whenever it suits them: the shocking realisation that Jade Goody is thick and that quiz scams are indeed scams.

It was like the bloke from The Sunday Times was blowing a big balloon. Comparing Gordon Ramsay not catching a fish to Jade Goody being a diabolical racist and Richard & Judy producers scamming thousands of viewers out of money kind of undermined his case enough. But Up All Night presenter Dotun Adebayo smartly put a pin to the balloon by saying, “Of course, you’d never see that kind of thing happening in the newspapers.” Stony silence from the bloke from The Sunday Times.

I imagine it’s going to be the cool new thing for all of the papers to do now, just because last week the Queen happened to be the victim of the common media trick of making boring footage seem interesting using clever editing. This kind of thing must have happened to thousands and thousands of people in the past. But as soon as it happens to the Queen people are shocked, just shocked!

Whenever outlets like The Sunday Times question competitors over the honesty of their editing, they will have hypocrisy pouring out of every orifice. It is like the bandwagon against premium rate phone quizzes that started earlier this year. The papers bleated on and on about it — quite rightly, because they are scams. But rather conveniently, they failed to turn their guns on similar premium rate phone lines used by the very newspapers who were criticising broadcasters.