Has the History Channel Forsaken its Right to its Name?

Dear History Channel, To be or not to be the specialized network serving the niche of people with an interest in history that you purport to be, that’s the question you’ve apparently answered in the negative. Whether it’s nobler to remain true to the name of your channel and steadfastly continue producing and providing quality history-oriented programming, or justifiable to depart from your commitment to your former target market of history buffs and go more mass market with a slew of shows that have virtually nothing to do with history? I suppose this is really a no-brainer of a dilemma for bottom line oriented corporate bosses. But please be aware and mindful of the fact that you’ve grievously disappointed your original, once loyal viewership of history aficionados. Your channel has gone from being a solid favorite that many of us tuned into on a habitual basis to one that we surf by without even stopping on for a moment to see what’s airing. You can use the slogan “History made every day” to try to rationalize what your programming execs are doing and uphold the name “History Channel” but it’s pretty feeble and only insults our intelligence. You’ve almost entirely ceased to be about delivering on your channel’s name and have banally become just another reality series mill churning out one uninteresting show after another. Alas, I guess the middlebrow market whose passion for history you used to appeal to just wasn’t sizeable enough to make your efforts sufficiently profitable. Or perhaps producing programs full of actors and extras reenacting historical events and battles was too expensive. Whatever economic motive induced you to toss aside being a bastion of (relatively) brainy television and descend to the ranks of reality show networks, you should fess up to the choice you’ve made by renaming your channel. What should you call a channel that features shows about truck drivers, lumberjacks, a dull as dishwater family of pawnshop proprietors, and rednecks living in Louisiana’s swamp country? I’ll leave that one to the inventive boys and girls in your advertising department. My wish however is that you will one day soon return to being the history channel in substance as well as in name. I think that if you applied yourself to producing a group of first-rate shows about a diverse variety of historical subjects you’d garner an audience that’s large enough to bring in a good bit of revenue. I realize that you’re a capitalist entity, i.e., a profit-motivated business, and ergo supplying educational programming is not really your mission, your only mission is making money. This is of course the great moral evil and fatal social flaw of capitalism, that its crass value system encourages people to only do the profitable not the principled thing. It would be naively unrealistic to expect you to be pure in your commitment to being “The History Channel”, but the least you could do is balance out the reality show garbage you currently favor with more genuinely history-oriented programs. If you do I promise that I and many others will return to being regular viewers, and perhaps you might even feel proud of doing something to help promote more intelligent television. (BTW, you're invited to visit my new website The Total Revolution Project.com Just copy and paste the following web address www.thetotalrevolutionproject.com )

This poll was created on 2010-10-07 18:44:18 by charleslb