The History Channel
Feb. 18th, 2007 08:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumIs starting to piss me off.
I understand that people will make mistakes, but the number of them which I am seeing is making me question the folks they have doing their fact-checking.
Take, for example, the armament of the Huey helicopters in Viet-nam. They say the arrived in theater with 2 x 30mm machine guns. Not.
The only aircraft we have with a 30mm is the A-10 Warthog, and the recoil from a single 25 rd burst slows it, a lot.
That was bad enough, but they then said, it was quickly upgraded to a pair of 60mm machine guns. They then showed them, and mentioned them by name... the M-60, a .30 caliber machine gun.
Which replaced the M-1 Browning, a different .30 caliber machine gun. The biggest change? The M-60 uses a shorter cartridge.
In the grand scheme of things this is meaningless. Most people don't care enough about things ancient (or modern, for that matter) to know that the context they are being given about whatever bit of infotainment the History Channel is peddling, but on the flip side, if they are this clumsy in the little things, what sorts of mistakes are they making in the bigger things? I know they are victim to the problem of a small number of people giving them "expert" commentary. The American who teaches at Sandhurst has been used to explain everything from the close combat tactics of the Greeks, to the logistical/tactical problems which caused the US Army to not be interested in helicopters.
It seems that his being at Sandhurst is enough "gravitas" to make him an expert on anything which involves an army.
This problem isn't limited to the realm of television history though, we are prone to allow pundits to weigh in, as if they had expertise on things which they aren't expert on, and we do it, often enough, even after they've been shown to be clueless to the point of actually being dangerous.
I understand that people will make mistakes, but the number of them which I am seeing is making me question the folks they have doing their fact-checking.
Take, for example, the armament of the Huey helicopters in Viet-nam. They say the arrived in theater with 2 x 30mm machine guns. Not.
The only aircraft we have with a 30mm is the A-10 Warthog, and the recoil from a single 25 rd burst slows it, a lot.
That was bad enough, but they then said, it was quickly upgraded to a pair of 60mm machine guns. They then showed them, and mentioned them by name... the M-60, a .30 caliber machine gun.
Which replaced the M-1 Browning, a different .30 caliber machine gun. The biggest change? The M-60 uses a shorter cartridge.
In the grand scheme of things this is meaningless. Most people don't care enough about things ancient (or modern, for that matter) to know that the context they are being given about whatever bit of infotainment the History Channel is peddling, but on the flip side, if they are this clumsy in the little things, what sorts of mistakes are they making in the bigger things? I know they are victim to the problem of a small number of people giving them "expert" commentary. The American who teaches at Sandhurst has been used to explain everything from the close combat tactics of the Greeks, to the logistical/tactical problems which caused the US Army to not be interested in helicopters.
It seems that his being at Sandhurst is enough "gravitas" to make him an expert on anything which involves an army.
This problem isn't limited to the realm of television history though, we are prone to allow pundits to weigh in, as if they had expertise on things which they aren't expert on, and we do it, often enough, even after they've been shown to be clueless to the point of actually being dangerous.
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no subject
Date: 2007-02-18 07:25 pm (UTC)But how much of it is The History Channel and how much is it individual production companies? Some of the military history stuff I catch has well-known names involved, people with some history in the study of the subject. But you can avoid the dumb mistakes and still get critical details wrong.
After all, there is a difference between .30 and 7.62mm NATO, not that it's significant in this context.