@gadgetgirl02 wrote:
I watched a lot of documentaries as a kid (one of the few TV show types my entire family could agree on). We watched more factual documentaries, but we also watched docs on cryptozoology and UFOs. Leonard Nimoy's "In Search Of" series was a family favourite.
But you know... I don't remember Nimoy or any of the other presenters actually coming out and saying misleading stuff. They would ask a bunch of leading questions, sure -- if I remember right, my parents used them as an example to teach us what a leading question was. But even with the strictly fact-based shows, there was a context of "until we learn more/better" to the material presented.
I once met someone who had done a film about local ghost stories for Discovery, and was disappointed to learn that they had altered and/or made up some of the stories they presented in the film. When I said so, the response was, "So what? There's no such things as ghosts!". Of course there's no such thing as ghosts, but the point of ghost documentaries is to look at the local history which led to the ghost story, get into the psychology of guilt and fear which leads to the ghost sightings, look at the odd weather patterns/physical science which led to the appearance of supernatural phenomena, and so on, and so forth. If you're just making up stuff, all that is lost.
So my line isn't so much at The Truth/Not the Truth, but that facts vs. conjecture are clearly delineated. If it's a case like the mermaid film, the filmmakers aren't even trying to conjecture, so it fails. But a film that looks at the violent history of an old house and discusses various ghost stories surrounding said history... that's fine.