I don’t mean to be alarmist, but there’s been an increasing number of stories in the media about viewers being defrauded by our largest television stations. Whether it’s phone voting scandals, television quizzes where the production assistants phone in and win or faking programmes by bending reality to fit an editorial angle.

We’ve had the Queen made to look like a stroppy diva by the BBC (off with their heads!) and now ITV has admitted to falsifying an Alzheimer patient’s death when the man died several days earlier.

There used to be a saying that ‘you can’t believe everything you read in the papers’. That’s increasingly the case with British television.

When you consider that people generally trust their broadcasters and that these same broadcasters can influence popular opinion, this is a seriously bad thing. People get passionate about issues they see on TV, whether it’s X Factor, documentaries or bridge-collapsing tragedies.

But what if we’re being duped? What if television programmes are exaggerating issues to gain market share? Tabloid sensationalism comes to your TV screen.

It brings to mind those knee-jerking citizens of Springfield in The Simpsons – where half-assed news reports by the nasal Kent Brockman frequently send the town into disarray, only to find out later that they didn’t have the whole story.

Or, do you remember the classic Drop The Dead Donkey, where the jaded hacks in the newsroom regularly made up footage because the real news was so boring?

That’s just two examples of how mainstream media is becoming like those caricatures. What’s worse is that the tabloid press are sensationalizing their downfall and we don’t know who to believe.

[tags]Television, Entertainment, Trust, ITV, BBC, TV[/tags]