I'm Getting a Little Sick Over Televsion Science Shows

[Bad Penny]

I've frequently complained about the accuracy of the information presented via science television programming.  Well, here I go again:

A while back, I saw a science program(me) on television that referred to the North American Great Lakes as "Inland Oceans".  As one born in the Great Lakes region, I was massively ticked by that statement.  An ocean is created by means of volcanic seafloor spreading.  Oceans surround and divide continents.  If you want to know what a true inland ocean is, look at the Mediterranean Sea, not at the Great Lakes.  The Great Lakes are, essentially, river valleys inundated in certain places that were squished into large basins by glaciation.  Look at a map: all of the Great Lakes except Lake Michigan constitute inundations along the course of the St. Laurence River, while Lake Michigan follows an old course of the Mississippi River (which I believe, but cannot yet prove, to have run northward, and to have been a tributary of the St. Laurence during the period of the supercontinent Pangea, fed by snowmelt from what was then an alpine mountain range which has since been whittled down into today's Ozark Mountains).  These lakes consist of fresh water, which flows in a single direction by means of a definite gravity-driven current, both of which properties are typical of rivers, as opposed to the known properties of oceans (ee. gg.: salt water, solar-heating-driven currents which create rivers within oceans, with slower-moving ocean water serving as their banks, whereas the Great Lakes clearly have dry land for banks).

By the way, the North Sea and the English Channel are also flooded river valleys (I'm currently looking for an oceanographic map which can show me the "hump" in the floor of the North Sea which once served as a continental divide, while realizing the fact that such a search may be futile, as, when I was a child growing up in Milwaukee, I lived within easy bicycle distance of the continental divide between the St. Laurence and Mississippi drainage basins, which was a barely noticeable elevated piece of land which I had a hard time finding even after I'd learned its approximately location).


Any other ideas?

***

EDIT:  Found it!  If you look at a hydrographic map of Europe, you'll see that the Gulf of Bothnia and the Gulf of Finland, back when they were river valleys (they are now filled with sea water, and are, therefor, no longer rivers) were tributaries of the Baltic Sea, which, in turn, flowed out through the Kattegat and Skagerrak, then northward along the Norwegian Deep and out into the Norwegian Sea (VERY powerful flow, as ocean-floor mountain ranges have a groove cut into them continuing the direction of flow from the Norwegian Deep.)  The Continental Divide is a slight rise generally paralleling the eastern coast of Great Britain.

[Tekoa]

First you have to clear your mind of all that you have been taught, everything was a lie. Now think the opposite of what you where told and start there and you will start to understand.