Re:Is Facebook a Structural Threat to Free Society?
by dragonwriter on Tuesday March 14, 2017 @05:09PM
(#13871507)
> Today's Discovery Channel (and History Channel, and TLC, etc) - are vastly different than what they were when they started. All have definitely "dumbed down" to the LCD.
While with "educational" channels it.comes off as dumbing down, there's a broader effect of appealing to narrow groups that drive popularity and then moving on to appeal to the masses. Outside of TLC/Discovery/History you can see this in Food Network (where the cooking slowly migrated to the Cooking Channel -- typically on more expensive cable tiers) while Food Network was taken over by food tourism shows, advertorial series, and reality/competition shows; MTV, where the music keot migrating to subordinate channels while the main channel was taken over by non-music reality/competition programming, and lots of other outlets.
Today's Discovery Channel (and History Channel, and TLC, etc) - are vastly different than what they were when they started. All have definitely "dumbed down" to the LCD.
I understand that this is normal change for a business, especially one centered around TV entertainment. I also know that even in their prime, these channels were never as educational as, say, PBS and the like. But compared to today's programming, their earlier incarnation was vastly superior.
But that is just my (probably biased) opinion...