I wrote and deleted a longer diary on this topic. I got too didactic.
I am sure I am not alone in tv channel hopping and encountering the following mess.
( I've been laid low by the smoke of the Station Fire in L.A. and its affect on this COPD sufferer.. and hence, too much tv.)
Whether we excelled or leaned towards the sciences or the arts, the practical or the theoretical, I hope our educations led us to demand and expect some respect for the essential differences between fact and fiction, the proven and the unsubtantiated, the possible and preposterous.
So let's be brief.
What we see every day now in the health care debate is the utter disregard for the real and the unreal, the assertion and the fact, hysteria and reflection, the considered and the hyperbolic.
We may wonder what changes of developments in American thought or social behavior have given us "believers" to join the calculated chorus of deceivers. Perhaps the self-esteem pushers tried too hard to make every contribution to the debate feel a bit "valid"? Perhaps the loosening of academic disciplines to being more receptive to the unproven but deeply felt?
All I know is that the History Channel, and, for that matter, The National Geographic Channel dedicate the vast majority of their broadcast time to the most anti-rational, anti-scientific, superstitious, counter-factual, flying bat-people from hell, Nostradomus-right-this-time, ( OR IS HE??) breathless, misleading, spaced out for advertising, pile of crap know to the American market place.
Would we tolerate a NATIONAL MEDICAL CHANNEL that advocated bleeding as a cancer cure? Or could there be a PHYSICS CHANNEL that devoted most of its time to the hidden truth in Wily Coyote-Road Runner cartoons? ( You don't fall until you look down, look at the camera and gulp)...
It's time to demand, on behalf of every single university and college grad of a history program, or a geography program, that these networks find new names.
You cannot, I am sure, get a licence to name your porn channel VATICAN TV, or a channel devoted to sport fishing named CSPAN-4. Truth in advertising and truth in naming are worth something.
The criteria for evaluating assertions.. the rules of evidence.. the respect for knowledge are all victims of abuse in the political atmosphere of the early 21st Century in America.
Can we send a message to these networks that we love their "Nostradomus meets feral cats from Arkansas" programming but we do not appreciate the names they have appropriated from real disciplines of knowledge?
History and Geography have academic standards to meet. Your program producers have commerical ones that you have rendered inimical.
http://www.history.com/
http://www.history.com/...
http://channel.nationalgeographic.co...
http://channel.nationalgeographic.co...