Wil Wheaton has a nicely outraged post on the Discovery Channel and its dereliction of duty.
So last night, I tuned in to watch the first entry in this year’s sharkstravaganza: a documentary about one of the coolest megasharks ever, the prehistoric Megalodon. This thing was freaking huge, with teeth the size of an adult human’s hand, and it is very, very extinct. Discovery’s special started out with what appeared to be “found footage” of some people on a fishing boat that gets hit and sunk by something huge … and I immediately knew something was amiss. The “found footage” was shot the way a professional photographer shoots things, not the way a vacationer holds their video camera. There was no logical way the camera could survive the salt water for the footage to be found. The footage was alleged to have been found in April … but then it got so much worse: Discovery Channel started Shark Week with a completely fake, completely made-up, completely bullshit “documentary” and they lied to their audience about it. They presented it as real.
Well he’s right to be outraged – that’s disgusting.
I realized why I was (and am) so angry: I care about education. I care about science. I care about inspiring people to learn about the world and universe around us. Sharks are fascinating, and megalodon was an absolutely incredible creature! Discovery had a chance to get its audience thinking about what the oceans were like when megalodon roamed and hunted in them. It had a chance to even show what could possibly happen if there were something that large and predatory in the ocean today … but Discovery Channel did not do that. In a cynical ploy for ratings, the network deliberately lied to its audience and presented fiction as fact. Discovery Channel betrayed its audience.
An entire generation has grown up watching Discovery Channel, learning about science and biology and physics, and that generation trusts Discovery Channel. 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!
Sing it.
Wil seems like a nice dude and all, but Discovery Channel’s commitment to veracity has been in doubt for like a decade or more now.
Like, next he’ll be telling us that you can’t actually scan for ghosts with electronic doohickeys or that Andrew Weil’s vitamins don’t make anyone immortal.
I disagree — with the “in doubt” part. This is the same company that brought us mermaid “documentaries” two years in a row. Along with loads of other crap.
I believe Mr. Wheaton may be a friend of Adam Savage. Perhaps that’s misled him about the true intentions of Discovery Communications. Adam and Jamie should be ashamed to work for them.
I hear a lot of people say that Discovery doesn’t do real shows anymore and because more than half their shows are reality crap we should not expect any better from the,, this is bullshit. Yeah most of the programming sucks, but if you watch American Chopper or one of the other idiotic shows you know what it is from the start.
Discovery still puts on quite a few good nature documentaries and they are documentaries with real scientists and real science and they traded on this in promoting Megaladon as a real documentary. I suppose you can argue that its no different than the fake setup drama they put on in the “reality” shows, but its different, its more of a direct lie.
Obligatory Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus.
Fictional and for your amusement.
We have been watching the decline of Discovery for a while, It’s pretty sad really to watch it go the way of the History Channel. I’m wondering now when Dr. Oz is going to get his own “Complimentary medicine” show on the science channel.
One of their recent efforts at outright pseudoscience, Mermaids: The Body Found, was a big success. Why wouldn’t they do it again?
It’s called the Discovery Channel because they discovered that you can catch more flies with shit than with sugar.