27 January 2010

Science Channel refuses to "dumb down" any further


My post of the graphic of programming on The History Channel received a vigorous response, so I thought it appropriate to follow up with this news about the Science Channel:
SILVER SPRING, MD—Frustrated by continued demands from viewers for more awesome and extreme programming, Science Channel president Clark Bunting told reporters Tuesday that his cable network was "completely incapable" of watering down science any further than it already had...

"Look, we've tried, we really have, but it's simply not possible to set the bar any lower," said a visibly exhausted Bunting, adding that he "could not in good conscience" make science any more mindless or insultingly juvenile...

Debbie Myers, general manager of the Science Channel, said the cable station has maintained a balance of 5 percent science content and 95 percent mind-numbing drivel over the past few years, and that this was as far as they were willing to go....

...on-air demonstrations of such basic scientific principles as "inertia" and "momentum" are mostly relegated to pushing a blindfolded participant strapped to an office chair down a steep hill...

While they won't be dumbing down their already crude lineup of shows, Science Channel officials assured viewers that the network will continue to cater to the lowest common denominator and will keep airing embarrassingly base content completely stripped of all intellectual integrity...

"I don't like it when the science people talk about things no one can even understand," said Rich Parker, an Ohio resident. "It's like, just quit your yapping and dip the chain saw into the liquid nitrogen already."
Before you offer a comment, please note the source at the link.

8 comments:

  1. Very clever waiting to reveal the source until the very end. I totally fell for it!

    ReplyDelete
  2. The scary thing is, I always figure out an Onion article, but I often confuse the real news for an Onion article...
    Like this one:
    http://www.pe.com/localnews/inland/stories/PE_News_Local_W_sdictionary22.414bdf0.html
    for example.

    ReplyDelete
  3. MomoMonkey, the link is truncated--can you use TinyURL or something?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Swift, her link works fine for me. Perhaps your copy/paste left a space after "stories"?

    ReplyDelete
  5. The rest of the link does not show up on my screen, but if I copy, I can grab the hidden part:

    visible part:
    http://www.pe.com/localnews/inland/stories/PE_News_

    hidden part:
    Local_W_sdictionary22.414bdf0.html
    f

    ReplyDelete
  6. That's most curious, because the whole thing shows up on my screen; I wonder why some get it truncated. ?browser variance, computer-dependent. I'm using Firefox 3.5.7 on an iMac.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Sorry about that Swift, when I previewed and checked the link it was ok.
    It was about a school in the US banning the dictionary hence why I thought it was an Onion article.
    (I think the ban was later reversed.)

    ReplyDelete
  8. I'm running Chrome on a Windows Vista PC.

    Just to check, I looked at the page in Firefox, and IE 8.

    Firefox could see the whole link. IE could not. So, a minor incompatibility issue with the blogging software apparently.

    ReplyDelete

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...