40 Dramatic Discovery Channel Scandals That Make You Wonder How Educational The Station Really Is
The Discovery Channel can be a fun watch, but are you actually going to learn anything from it? You’ve got a lot of people these days who insist that “Discovery” has been a misnomer for a long time, and the producers are more interested in reality TV than science. And to be fair, these Discovery Channel controversies and scandals aren’t the sort of thing you’d find in a scientific textbook.
Jeremy Wade’s River Monsters is one of the more educational Discovery shows, but experts have still raised objections to it. In 2013 a scientist named Kyle Hill wrote an open letter to the show’s producers via Scientific American magazine, complaining that the show turned “these typically harmless fish into actual monsters” and pleading with them “not to blur the line between real and fake for the sake of entertainment.” Wade actually wrote back to him saying he made “important points.”
Every so often things go wrong on Mythbusters, and it can have disastrous consequences. Back in 2011 the team were testing the trajectory of a cannonball at a bomb range, but it got away and smashed right through the walls of house. Luckily, there was a happy ending: not only did the occupants of the house escape without injury, but the cannonball didn’t even wake them up.
In 2017 news hit that Jake Harris of Deadliest Catch had made off with his girlfriend’s car, leading her to call the police. Unfortunately, things didn’t get any better from there. After a string of further crimes, including other car-related offenses, a judge gave Harris a jail term of 18 months in August 2019.
The Discovery channel keeps it very quiet, but the people who appear on Naked and Afraid actually will get paid for their trouble… if they finish the show and/or comply with whatever demands Discovery might place on them. And even then it’s not much money. It’s a mere $5k for being naked on TV.
