History Channel
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The History Channel is a US based cable television channel. While it airs a few serious shows that might teach you something (the UK version History strips out most of the gun-nut yee-haw type "documentaries" and replaces them with quaint David Starkey type stuff in between the MOAR HITLER), it also airs some really strange shows that are notorious promoters of woo, sometimes branching out into thinly veiled pseudohistory.
It is sometimes called the Pseudohistory Channel by people who are disappointed with its scholarly standards, the Hysteria Channel by people who are pissed off by the scaremongering end-of-the-world shows, and the Hitler Channel by people who were fed up with its (formerly) extensive programming covering the Second World War.
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[edit] All Hitler, all the time
The channel had earned the unfortunate nickname of "The Hitler Channel," due to its need to fill the schedule with content related to World War II.[1] Military programming has since moved to its sister channel, the Military History Channel, leaving the channel to fill their programming gaps with shows about old stuff like Pawn Stars and American Pickers, utterly non-historical content such as Ice Road Truckers, Ax Men, Life After People, and the topic of the next section...
[edit] Pseudohistory and sensationalism
[edit] Ancient Aliens
One of their classic intellectual achievements is their incredibly embarrassing series, Ancient Aliens.[2] Sadly, it namechecks huge numbers of our articles, so rapidly as to be difficult to keep up with, such as:
- 2012 apocalypse
- Ancient astronauts
- Baghdad battery
- Bermuda Triangle
- Crop circles
- Crystal skull
- Dendera lamp
- Erich Von Däniken
- Fermi paradox
- Jungle hypothesis
- Native American woo
- Noah's Ark
- Pangea
- Pyramids
- Spinning plasma vortex!
- Zoo hypothesis
To quote a typical talking head featured on the show, discussing of all things, the coming 2012 apocalypse, "you would think that had to come from extraterrestrials" (sure, but only for very small values of "think").
Every segment has the announcer saying "could it be that ... this is evidence of ancient aliens ... maybe!" Near the end of one show, at least, Michael Shermer (founder of The Skeptics Society, and Editor in Chief of its magazine Skeptic) gets a few moments to call it all rubbish. Otherwise, it is so much non-stop woo, it sounds like a train whistle! So much bullshit, even the farmers are complaining!
At least Ghostfinders is on the Sci Fi channel, where it belongs.
[edit] Parallel universes
An episode of the channel's show "The Universe", called "Parallel Universes" went so far as to promote parallel universes as being solid scientific fact.
People like Michio Kaku started theorizing the reality of parallel universes and classify their work in this regard as physics instead of metaphysics. Michio Kaku reveals this theory in his books, Parallel Worlds and Hyperspace. When physicists start to speculate about parallel universes as based in reality, they have drifted away from science a bit too far.
[edit] Worth watching?
Perhaps at one time yes, the "History" Channel might have had some intellectual merit. However these days its quite clearly fallen into a New Age nonsense trap, its shows having been long replaced with the above nonsense and just generally boring, non-history related content. This seems to be a general theme among its sister channels (TLC, The Discovery Channel, etc) these days. At least Animal Planet continues to have a shred of dignity... especially for furries.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ All Hitler, all the time A viewer of History could be led to believe that nothing of note happened in recorded history outside of World War II and ancient Egypt.
- ↑ Yes, this is really on the "history" channel The show's website. Warning: you will laugh hysterically.