Louis Menand, an English professor at Harvard and another longtime critic of the Ph.D. production process, notes: “Lives are warped because of the length and uncertainty of the doctoral education process.” In his new book, “The Marketplace of Ideas,” he writes, “Put in less personal terms, there is a huge social inefficiency in taking people of high intelligence and devoting resources to training them in programs that half will never complete and for jobs that most will not get.”

Via NYT

A few months ago my judgment lapsed and I went to see a Haunting in Connecticut with Sean. I was humored by its claim to be “based on a true story”, so I skipped on to Wikipedia to examine this extravagant tale. Not too surprisingly, the house, the story of the haunting was the product of a horror writer who was told by his publishers to ignore the gaping holes in the family’s story and patch together something scary. After the book came out, the writer, Ray Garton, took a sledgehammer to the story’s authenticity. Go, go Ray Garton.

Now, I have no problem save a bit of eye-rolling for a horror movie that takes the lascivious imaginations of limelight-seekers and turns it into a good movie. Please don’t misconstrue that to mean A Haunting was a good movie: but I think that was the intent. I also don’t really care if someone’s implausible ghost tale is really, really implausible or just mildly implausible. I do have a few qualms with the Discovery Channel, ahem, “reporting” the Haunting as a truthy story, and sensationalizing a clearly false yarn.

The Discovery Channel! The Channel of exploring science, space, technology! The Textbook of Television! The Seminar of Cinema! The one you’re pretty much okay with plunking your 4-year-old in front of for several hours! Goodness, they’ve even got a show for myth-busting! The have a veritable anthology of horror stories, though, and while I am sure that wide-eyed horror hounds are gobbling it up and sending ratings through the ceiling like so many ghosts… it’s wrong. And lazy.

A writer in the NY Times this week upbraided the History Channel for a segment “Did Hitler Really Die?” wherein a codicil of whimsy was repackaged and stretched and contorted into a full-length historical show. The Times writer, Antony Beever, patiently explained the documentation of Hitler’s death, and that Stalin’s paranoia did historians a favor. He ends with a gentle reproach of the tactics of sensationalizing and preying upon our fears.

I’ll pick up where he leaves off: you are the History Channel. Not the Conspiracy Theory Channel. Yes, conspiracy theories are delightful distractions, and you may find your ratings ballooning delightfully. But the brand of the History Channel is that the stories are factual, and educational. There is even a classroom tools section that asks teachers to integrate the History Channel with their curriculum. It is going to get really difficult to convince teachers to use History Channel material when conspiracy is presented as a ‘mystery’, and easily falsifiable flights of fancy are given an air of legitimacy.

So please, guys: either admit you’ve gone off the deep end, or do the work you set out to do. There are real mysteries, and there are interesting theories, and there are true natural and technological phenomenons that make the world we live in, what we know about it, and how we understand ourselves and our surroundings just beautiful. Sensationalizing is taking the easy way out.