CotD: The Saga Continues

Above: If Wedel had used the words "laser" and "armor" at any time during his interview, CotD would have looked like this. Not that I'd complain.

Matt Wedel has posted his experiences trying to chase down what exactly went wrong with his infamous interview segment in the Discovery Channel and Dangerous, Ltd.'s special Clash of the Dinosaurs. You can read the letter where Dangerous, Ltd. admits that they quote-mined him like creationists and had him spouting nonsense discredited before he was born as if it were fact, here.

An excerpt of the good part:

"In your email, you said: ‘Someone in the editing room cut away the framing explanation and left me presenting a thoroughly discredited idea as if it was current science.’ In your interview you carefully set out a context in which you made your argument, a context that was perhaps not included in the show as carefully as it could have been. Whether this was in the interests of brevity or not, I entirely appreciate your position. We had no wish to suggest you were presenting an old, discredited argument, we were simply working on the show ever aware of the demands of our audience. This does not excuse a part of the program which was perhaps not edited with as much finesse as it could have been and consequently I will make your concerns clear to the production team in the hope that we may avoid such situations again."

Note that they don't apologize or say they'll fix this in future broadcasts of the show (and if it's like other Discovery shows, it will be running on a loop for months). The best part is that the lame excuse email makes clear Dangerous' motivations: They only wanted to accomodate the needs of their audience and hold everyone's attention. That means this was done ON PURPOSE, because the truth was TOO BORING.

Discovery Communications and their affiliate production companies don't care about science. Sorry if I sound like Kanye, but this is true and everybody needs to learn this fact. The only goal here is to keep eyeballs glued to the TV with whatever fake nonsense they can piece together from edited sound bites given by experts hired only to bring a veneer of credibility. They decide what they want to say and show, then hire experts and interview them until they've said enough vowels and consonants to piece together a convincing ransom-note narration.

Not that this wasn't already obvious, but there it is in print.