@popobawa4u wrote:
No, "the truth" is a philosophical problem. Documentaries should instead strive to be accurate.
I dealt with this problem a lot when my child was around 7-8 years old, trying to explain that this stuff is cool and interesting precisely because it is real. Which gets easily undermined by those making the shows resorting to mumbly faux-dramatic narration, weasel words, irrelevant graphics, and outright deceptive framing. I pointed out how if one disregarded all of that stuff to sift for actual factual bits, your 30-60 minute documentary might yield only a couple paragraphs of sketchily-written information. For the investment of time, this seems quite an inefficient way to convey knowledge compared to, say, reading articles.
Also, the whole enterprise of encouraging fake and fake-ish documentaries ties directly into the problems of debate and having an informed public. Trying to cultivate "ratings" through bogosity tells people that scientific evidence is a kind of populist contest, based upon pandering to what they like. To what extent this can be said to encourage science, it encourages bad (i.e. biased) science. I can't relate to the idea that the actual universe we live in is supposed to be less exciting and interesting than obfuscation, superficiality, and cheap drama.