Man, I used to love those kid shows-- Seasame Street, Square One, 3-2-1 Contact, and Channel One in the afternoons at school. I still watch them, too, although Glenn was right about Elmo's World: stoopid. But if you're home from work in the mid-morning, Seasame Street and Dora the Explorer are still better quality TV than any 6-hour long morning news show with 20 minutes of real information that just gets recycled and drawn out with fancy graphics and 'teasers.'
Last night I camped out in front of the History Channel all night watching shows about the battle of Thermopylae, pirate history and technology, and historial sexual practices from around the world. And then I watched TAPS, the SciFi ghost hunter show I mentioned before (although not educational in the least, I do love that show).
I have to agree that the History Channel is sometimes way too much of the WWII Airplane Channel. But when it's not that, it's usually really interesting. I pretty much only watch the Discovery Channel when they have one of those medical freak shows on, but I can get that same fascination with less of the freak show guilt by watching House. Watching these channels, though, I do run into the Dragon Problem-- I've been told I'll believe anything with a footnote (I think I was searching for irrefutable truth to support my deep suspicion of aspartame at the time), and I have to stop myself from getting too wrapped up in the conspiracy or future predicting shows. Like the one I saw the other night on the History Channel that said several completely unrelated ancient cultures, all renown for their learning and intelligence, have independently predicted that the world as we know it will end on December 21, 2012. Try sleeping after that.
I don't consider news shows educational in the least. Everytime I happen to pause on one, I last about 15 minutes before they're either repeating stories or sensationalizing the ones they have to an unrecognizable degree. Garbage, garbage, garbage. We don't need multiple 24-hour news stations. We don't need fancy graphics and politically polar pundits. We need the news, we need to know what's going on in the world, and we need to be reminded to how we got to this point. Tell us about events present and past, not theories about the future laced with 'angles' and 'spin.' Please, leave the future predicting to the History Channel.
Showing posts with label Discovery Channel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Discovery Channel. Show all posts
Friday, May 25, 2007
Monday, May 21, 2007
Just what is it that we're discovering here?
I grew up watching pretty much only PBS and the NBC nightly news, and as such I have a fondness for educational/factual television. Yes, I love to watch plenty of mindless entertainment, but I’m also perfectly willing to kick back and watch something informative. Before moving to Korea last August, I’d never had the opportunity to watch the Discovery Channel. I was excited, thinking I’d be watching it more than anything else. (Little did I know OCN would distract me by showing CSI nearly all the time… And yes, I can sense Caitlin’s disapproval from across the Pacific.) CSI notwithstanding, I do actually watch the Discovery Channel Asia a good bit, although over the past ten months I’ve begun to wonder just how accurate it all is.
My distrust of the Discovery Channel stems from several things. Two of those “things” are actually two episodes that I really enjoy watching: A Haunting and Psychic Detectives. They’re really entertaining, although I don’t take any of it seriously. The thing is, these shows present everything as fact without present any alternate explanations for what’s happened.
For example, in one episode I saw of A Haunting, a woman starts to have incredibly strong, irrational, unexplainable feelings of sadness and despair shortly after moving into a newly purchased old house with her boyfriend. The show explains her feelings by bringing in psychics who sense the negative energy of a malevolent spirit, blah, blah, blah. To me it seemed obvious that the woman was suffering from the classic symptoms of clinical depression; she needed Lexapro and not an exorcism. Additionally, it seems that almost all of the A Haunting episodes involve some sort of Catholic exorcism/cleansing. Do only Catholics see ghosts? The show also presents as fact that if you use a ouija board or dabble in the occult, you will soon be possessed and/or tormented by Demons from Hell. As someone who has done both of those things, I would just like to point out that I haven’t summoned any demons.
I took a class in college called Pseudopsychology. We looked at all sorts of paranormal phenomena, but we looked at them from the point of view of the believer as well as the scientist. Everything we discussed in class was debunked via scientific experimentation. As an educational television station, shouldn’t they add some education of this sort to their shows about ghosts and psychics? Or do they skip over that simply because it’s not as entertaining?
One weekend I stumbled upon a documentary on the Discovery Channel about a British scientist who had discovered the fossilized remains of dragons in Eastern Europe – irrefutable proof that dragons were not mythical beasts after all. It was an incredibly well done documentary, with interviews and footage from the excavations and extensive delving into historical records… except that as I was pretty damn sure none of it was real, I checked online. According to the Discovery Channel’s website, it was a mockumentary showing what would happen *if* someone discovered proof that dragons had existed. Um, ok. Someone please tell me what’s the point here? Confusing small children who might watch and then believe in dragons? Yes, it was entertaining, and yes, I watched the whole thing… but that was hardly educational!
Obviously, not all shows on the Discovery Channel are of that nature. I watched an excellent documentary of the terrorist siege at the school in Beslan, Russia quite recently. I felt that the documentary was quite well done (especially considering that they were able to get Russians willing to go on television and criticize the way the government handled the situation; that kind of open criticism is hard to find over there), and I felt that I learned a lot. Except that afterwards, I found myself wondering if everything I had just watched was presented as accurate. I mean, this was the channel that told me ghosts and dragons were factual!
So what are your feelings on educational television? (And not just the Discovery Channel – you can take on PBS or the History Channel or any other educational station.) How factual should educational television be? Is it acceptable to include shows about dragons and psychics and ghosts without any sort of scientific counter argument? Or should educational TV be like the channels here in Korea: a teacher lecturing at a blackboard, guaranteed to send your children to sleep immediately?
My distrust of the Discovery Channel stems from several things. Two of those “things” are actually two episodes that I really enjoy watching: A Haunting and Psychic Detectives. They’re really entertaining, although I don’t take any of it seriously. The thing is, these shows present everything as fact without present any alternate explanations for what’s happened.
For example, in one episode I saw of A Haunting, a woman starts to have incredibly strong, irrational, unexplainable feelings of sadness and despair shortly after moving into a newly purchased old house with her boyfriend. The show explains her feelings by bringing in psychics who sense the negative energy of a malevolent spirit, blah, blah, blah. To me it seemed obvious that the woman was suffering from the classic symptoms of clinical depression; she needed Lexapro and not an exorcism. Additionally, it seems that almost all of the A Haunting episodes involve some sort of Catholic exorcism/cleansing. Do only Catholics see ghosts? The show also presents as fact that if you use a ouija board or dabble in the occult, you will soon be possessed and/or tormented by Demons from Hell. As someone who has done both of those things, I would just like to point out that I haven’t summoned any demons.
I took a class in college called Pseudopsychology. We looked at all sorts of paranormal phenomena, but we looked at them from the point of view of the believer as well as the scientist. Everything we discussed in class was debunked via scientific experimentation. As an educational television station, shouldn’t they add some education of this sort to their shows about ghosts and psychics? Or do they skip over that simply because it’s not as entertaining?
One weekend I stumbled upon a documentary on the Discovery Channel about a British scientist who had discovered the fossilized remains of dragons in Eastern Europe – irrefutable proof that dragons were not mythical beasts after all. It was an incredibly well done documentary, with interviews and footage from the excavations and extensive delving into historical records… except that as I was pretty damn sure none of it was real, I checked online. According to the Discovery Channel’s website, it was a mockumentary showing what would happen *if* someone discovered proof that dragons had existed. Um, ok. Someone please tell me what’s the point here? Confusing small children who might watch and then believe in dragons? Yes, it was entertaining, and yes, I watched the whole thing… but that was hardly educational!
Obviously, not all shows on the Discovery Channel are of that nature. I watched an excellent documentary of the terrorist siege at the school in Beslan, Russia quite recently. I felt that the documentary was quite well done (especially considering that they were able to get Russians willing to go on television and criticize the way the government handled the situation; that kind of open criticism is hard to find over there), and I felt that I learned a lot. Except that afterwards, I found myself wondering if everything I had just watched was presented as accurate. I mean, this was the channel that told me ghosts and dragons were factual!
So what are your feelings on educational television? (And not just the Discovery Channel – you can take on PBS or the History Channel or any other educational station.) How factual should educational television be? Is it acceptable to include shows about dragons and psychics and ghosts without any sort of scientific counter argument? Or should educational TV be like the channels here in Korea: a teacher lecturing at a blackboard, guaranteed to send your children to sleep immediately?
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