It has become a common joke that cable channels meant for a particular niche are slipping. MTV used to show music videos, for example. SyFy used to be Sci-Fi… before they started showing wrestling and morons chasing ghosts. And the History Channel used to be about History… and now they show Ancient Aliens (as South Park recently lampooned). So at least theoretically, I shouldn’t be too surprised to see non-discovery-type-stuff on the Discovery Channel. But even so, I got a bit of a shock a few minutes ago.
There I was, minding my own business, working on an article describing a 1960’s hypersonic test vehicle project, with the TV on as background noise. I turned on the guide to see if anything might be on worth watching… and about crapped myself when I saw this listing:
Yeah, it’s a photo of the TV screen. Not a screenshot or a link to a website. So sue me. But the thing to notice… what the hell is showing on the Discovery Channel after “Mythbusters?”
Peter Popoff. Peter friggen’ Popoff. With this intellectual nightmare of a show:
In case you are not familiar with Peter Popoff, he’s a televangelist who claims psychic powers. Psychic powers that, it turns out, come via radio transmitters, as James Randi showed years ago. This sort of rubbish is the precise antithesis of what the Discovery Channel is *supposed* to show.
Now, it looks pretty clear to me that what’s actually happening here is that at 1AM the Discovery Channel runs out of programming, and the channel is given over to paid infomercials. But whoever is selling this space on the Discovery Channel really needs to do a bit more due diligence. Some salesman hawking worthless consumer items is one thing. Some proven charlatan hawking anti-science should be kept as far from the Discovery Channel as possible.
More on Popoff:
[youtube SNl52deOZro]
[youtube bgW5gTp4bnM]
GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR………..
