The entire shtick of the ITV anti-Reform piece is brazenly convoluted. The doom music, the grey filter, the slo-mo fluttering union flags on dilapidated buildings.
It is dystopian in its regime-esque demonisation of 'political opposition'
But ITV is not a political party. It is a part publicly funded broadcaster.
Someone else could have edited a year of footage with positive exchanges showing camradery, wins, hard work and hope and dressed it up in Hovid advert aesthetics for a completely different 'documentary'. That would be equally contrived.
Journalism should be about recording events as they really are. Not constructing a propagandising pastiche.
I started my journalism career with ITV and loved it. The newsrooms were discernibly freer and less snobby and groupthinky than the BBC ones I worked in. It makes me so incredibly sad to see ITV forsake its standards and its place as the real person's channel to become part of the Woke Mob's march through the institutions and self appointed morality police.
It's also increasingly agonising to see a profession I studied for and I have worked in for 20 years be ransacked by repeated examples of flagrant bias, become so distrusted and therefore displaced by people who are not real journalists. The sacred bond between newscasting and the public is a tragic joke today.
And that is one of many symptoms of a sick society in the process of breaking down.