I was just saying that it was a marvel of the modern capitalist system

[james_davis_nicoll]

that I automatically assume all statements from companies are misleading or outright lies unless I can prove otherwise. This covers a lot of educational programs: Phil Plait cheerfully pushed utter rot on people when he was on TV.

Wil Wheaton just discovered Discovery is owned by a profit-oriented entity.

(I am not making fun of him. I was very peeved over the crap physics on Plait's show)

Comments

[mishalak]

I am a little amazed by his statement, "Discovery Channel is more than just disposable entertainment on cable television." I like what I know of him, but I disagree with my usual mildness. This is, after all, the cable TV channel that is home of such educational masterpieces as Tattoo Wars, Monster Garage, and Auction Kings. And then there are the ones that allegedly provide actual education rather than blatantly provide entertainment like their oh so principled way of reediting BBC documentaries so as to avoid offending Americans.

This should, of course, be read with skepticism as I am one of those bookish, possibly communist, 'people' who do not watch television.

Mishalak
Unseelie Humanitarian
Sponsoring the 2013 Human Entertainment Survey
"Good heaven, and I thought our attention spans were short."

[egret]

I don't have cable TV anymore, but I seem to remember that Discovery had been showing a lot of those "Discovery of Noah's Ark" and "Sasquatch Sightings" shows, so I didn't see the fake!shark show as that much of a stretch. I was kind of surprised to see such outrage from Wheaton who I would have thought would have known a lot about how the TV sausage is made.

Some years back someone wrote an influential article about how animal documentaries are filmed and staged in general (spoiler: animal welfare not the main priority!) and I am wondering now if anyone has written about the filming of the shark specials.

[kithrup.livejournal.com]

My response to Wheaton's rant was: he just realized this now?

[thesaucernews.livejournal.com]

It's a trite thing to mention, but it's true. You're not the consumer of a product, you're the product being consumed.

[gareth-wilson.livejournal.com]

Just companies?

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

At least it continued the trend of their mocumentaries having questionable science and then quietly skipping over the "and then a miracle happens" part to continue on with the rest of the story.

"Dragons" had the four limbs to six miracle, "Mermaids" had the "legs gone, tail in" over commercial break, and this one had the "build the giant model whale in a few days".

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

"We tune into Discovery Channel programming with the reasonable expectation that whatever we’re going to watch will be informative and truthful. We can trust Discovery Channel to educate us and our children about the world around us! That’s why we watch it in the first place!"

So he never saw the ads CGI'ed into "Mythbusters" episodes, or the obvious ethics issues of "Deadliest Catch" or "Stormchasers," or the classism in their pot and moonshine shows? Wasn't some of that Bear Gryllis show faked? And Keith already brought up the Mermaids and Dragons "documentaries."

I can't believe Wheaton really thought an entire generation trusted the Discovery Channel for real, accurate science.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

The two positions, and Wheaton's late discovery, are not all mutually exclusive takes on reality. I am completely willing to believe that (a) Discovery has been "lying" to its audience for years, presenting faktertainment (made with 100% Real Fakts) to its audience to grab ratings, (b) Wheaton has only just had this epiphany, and (c) an entire generation of children has trusted Discovery, and continues to, as a source of "real, accurate science", where "entire generation" means "the overwhelming majority of its viewership". All at the same time.

In fact, it seems genuinely and depressingly plausible.

This doesn't make Wheaton's outrage too much less justified or compelling. Part of his charm vis-a-vis geekdom popularity is that he's believable as quite possibly "just a dude who backed into semi-stardom". That is, it's easy for geeks to imagine themselves as him and that he'd be their buddy if he lived around the corner.

Being "the common man" is so much easier when you demonstrate the fact that, hey, you're not the sharpest swizzle-stick in the jar. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that -- Wheaton still comes across as a decent, well-meaning, and genuinely companionable individual. The world needs more of these type of guys in celebritywood, anyway.

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

It doesn't make much sense for Wheaton to position himself as someone who can state an entire channel's output is/was scientific, and to comment with presumed authority over the channel's position in the U.S. culture as a whole, while at the same time clearly not knowing even the basics of Discovery's output.

I get that at some point after the Shark Week incident he must have realized Discovery operated in a different way than he had presumed; that is, he had that "epiphany." What I don't get is why he didn't then hop on ye olde internette to see if maybe Discovery had pulled shenanigans like this before. Instead, his post is specifically about how "last night" -- i.e. the night they aired the megalodon show -- Discovery changed from educational and scientific to making disgusting decisions and betraying everyone's trust. Like it was an overnight thing. Like it was a one-time situation where they could apologize and say they would never do it again and it would be all over.

I don't think Wheaton is not "decent" or "well-meaning" here. I think he was deploying hyperbole, both in exaggerating Discovery's place in scientific education, and in making this one incident seem like an enormous and singular betrayal of trust. He writes emotionally and this is more of an emotional plea, and on that level it's a fine blog post. But when he gets to the demand for an apology, it seems like he wants to achieve some lasting change in this little exercise in capitalism, and that's where he and I diverge: He thinks "single mistake, apologize and move on" while I think "entire system is broken, don't encourage people to trust corporations as long as they pretend to apologize."

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

Yes, exactly. The whole post has a general air of "This thing Discovery did is interfering with my ability to be an uncritical consumer of geek product, so they should stop that so I can go back to being credulous!" Why would they, and for that matter why would he?

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

"Dragons", I at least have some respect for: it was clear that it was fiction from the beginning, they didn't try to pass it off as reality by making it look like a documentary, and even the title, "A Fantasy Made Real", was honest.

Also: they need better CG artists. That "Hawaii whale" imagery had some really awful work, let alone the crap animation of the shark.

[akicif.livejournal.com]

In other news, the Martians didn't actually invade America in 1938....

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

You do realise that Wells said as much at the start of that show, right? At no time did he or Mercury ever attempt to pass their invasion off as real, unlike Disco.

-- Steve hates how they've drifted into mermaids, ancient astronauts, and sharknado territory the way A&E drifted into "reality" TV hell.

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

Meanwhile, the National Geographic channel has a show called "Doomsday Preppers," and I see that the History channel is debuting a new show called "The Legend of Shelby the Swamp Man" tonight. All of basic cable has been dead to shame for some time now. I kinda do think Wheaton's available for being made fun of, if he didn't notice that already.

ETA: edited for bad writing.

[david wilford (from livejournal.com)]

While I still have a soft spot in my cold scientific heart for Mythbusters, the rest of Discovery Channel's science programming fare is popsci-cles as far as I'm concerned.

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

Much of my fondness for Mythbusters is because of the way they never pretended to be scientific. They make it very clear that they are good at bodging stuff together, but have no scientific training of any note.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

And yet they are willing to accept one consequence of non-contrived science, which is accepting results that were unexpected rather than fixing them to suit the model.

[rpresser.livejournal.com]

Or so they state loudly, and so they have led you to believe.

It's all television. It's all pre-recorded, heavily edited, and interspersed with enough commercials that the number of people available to cause REALLY interesting results to get ditched is probably close to the number of people in the audience.

For all I know, they spend longer on Mythbuster storyboards then they do on Simpsons shows. The bulls running around the styrofoam china shop could have been pure CGI. Maybe the stars are CGI too. I have no way of knowing, and no dependable reason to trust them.

I'm exaggerating of course. The likelihood that pure CGI is used is very low, because of the expense it would mean. But there is NO place where I can set my trust level and be confident it's in the right spot.

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

I'm confident Mythbusters chooses myths after deciding they would make for entertaining television AND consulting with experts so they know what the outcome will be well before they even start. But none of the stars are very good actors, so it's the moments of (probably) genuine excitement, anger, and surprise that I watch for. Also, I'm not gonna lie, I like watching things explode.

Also, I notice that the hosts are in the same set of clothes both for an original failed experiment AND the retry that's allegedly some time later. They just filmed the failures and successes all on the same day and didn't try too hard to make it look otherwise.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

There was this whole segment of cable TV in the early days that was basically trying to expand on PBS's core competencies: several channels purporting to provide quality kids' programming, A&E and Bravo for highbrow imported dramas and such, TLC and Discovery doing educational and pop-science programming. With the possible exception of some of the kid stuff, most of them have long since sunk into the same morass as the channels that had no such pretensions. The channels focusing on documentary programming are all into some combination of freakshow reality TV and bullshit paranormal/pandering stuff.

[maruad.livejournal.com]

If there was a like button or a recommend button I would have hit it on this comment. I am more than willing to cancel most of our cable stations but I have run into resistance from my family.

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

I'm reminded of this regularly while trying to remember where I saw this or that lesser-known movie; most of the time, I saw them on A&E. Films like Gance's Napoleon, which had just been restored at the time, were on A&E, not even edited. Nowadays even movie channels can't promise that. Only Fox Movie Channel in the mornings and TCM have uninterrupted, unedited films now, though TCM has lately been licensing the cheaper pan & scan prints of a LOT of films, things you can get in their proper aspect ratio on DVD, so I rarely bother recording off TCM anymore and just rent the movie.

I guess the internet is the provider of the good shows to watch now, just like cable was 20 years ago.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The great shining exceptions seem to be animation (both for kids and for adults: there are several shows out there on Disney, Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, etc. that are surprisingly good), and original drama series (HBO, AMC).

But everyone who is trying to do things on the cheap just slides into the same crap.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

Phil Plait cheerfully pushed utter rot on people when he was on TV.

But it was educational to learn that the reason interstellar travel is difficult is because people can't withstand the acceleration.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Interplanetary, surely?

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

No, I think it was interstellar, although as an explanation for interplanetary travel being difficult it's just as ludicrous.

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

Hmm, is Plait the guy I saw many, many years ago on a TV show (on PBS, maybe?) saying that we couldn't travel significant distances because once a ship accelerated the crew would be "chunky salsa" against the back wall? I remember even seeing "chunky salsa" written on a whiteboard.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

Did the episode feature the host zooming around in the passenger seat of a jet trainer? If so, that was him.

Here is the transcript to the episode of "Bad Universe" I was talking about

http://livedash.ark.com/transcript/bad_universe-%28alien_attack!%29/6222/DSCP/Wednesday_October_06_2010/468930/

The whole argument he gives there is utter codswallop, of course. Assuming you could have sustained acceleration of 1 gee (huge if), you could reach relativistic speeds in about a year.

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

I saw some of Bad Universe, probably at the time -- it's not the show I was thinking about, but both were unintentionally hilarious.

[dexitroboper (from livejournal.com)]

The show that killed the 'documentary' channels for me was 'America's Hardest Prisons' on National Geographic. Prisons as entertainment was just too far into Roman Empire excess for me.