A Channel 4 News report is dividing audiences online, after the reporter took a hard-line approach when questioning the owner of a novelty café.
The Cereal Killer Café has just opened in Tower Hamlets, just off London’s trendy Brick Lane, and is run by two twin brothers from Belfast, Alan and Gary Keery.
Tower Hamlets has a youth poverty rate of 49 percent, Channel 4 News reports, and reporter Symeon Brown asked Gary Keery whether the local community would be able to afford to eat the cereal in the café.
Replying that he thought the prices, which start at £2.50 (€3.20) for a small bowl, were in fact cheap, Mr Keery then asked the journalist to end the interview, because he did not like the line of questioning that was being followed. You can watch the Channel 4 report below:
Since the report aired, people online have been voicing their criticism of Channel 4 News for raising the issue:
I don't like the cereal killers cafe but are Channel 4 going to walk into the Pret around the corner and ask about pricing out the poor?
— Derek Boateng (@derekboateng) December 11, 2014
first they call out brand on his rent and now channel 4 missing the point yet again with their cereal cafe smear campaign.
— Richard Powell Smith (@dinosaur_world) December 11, 2014
That Channel 4 cereal cafe interview is disgusting and cheap. They blindsided him AND no one is forcing the locals to buy the cereal
— Adje (@Adje_O) December 11, 2014
Jesus, the Channel 4 interview trying to make the cereal cafe hipsters into evil villains is utterly stupid. http://t.co/v7pMgg4SXr
— Martin Robbins (@mjrobbins) December 11, 2014
Sad Channel 4's piece on the Cereal Cafe was so sneering. Given Starbucks et al's monopoly of high streets we should celebrate originality.
— Karen Y (@KarenYossman) December 11, 2014
Don't think it's up to 2 people opening a cereal cafe in E London to solve poverty in an area really. Oh, Channel 4.
— Brad Barrett (@artbaretta) December 10, 2014
The report prompted the Daily Mail to call Gary Keery an "out-of-touch hipster," and also received praise from many viewers who felt it was important the broadcaster raised the question about how London's poor are being marginalised:
Well done Channel 4 for skewering the stupid cereal cafe, charging loads in one of the poorest areas of London http://t.co/BXDYTK4gON
— Jacob Aron (@jjaron) December 11, 2014
Channel 4 finally asking that dumb cereal cafe the question I've wanted to ask but no media outlet bothered to
— Hootie Who (@hrhhootiewho) December 11, 2014
Shoreditch hipster interviewed by Channel 4 News about his cereal cafe. Shoredtich hipster doesn't like big bad man. http://t.co/lgSkoH2lQU
— Chris Nicholson (@EraseThisTweet) December 10, 2014
