Why I'm hacked off at the History Channel.

[cab67]

And with those other channels that, when they first came out, produced lots of decent documentaries.

These documentaries did a good job of finding living eyewitnesses to the events they cover. The memories related by these eyewitnesses - and in many cases, survivors - were far more compelling than the reenactments or comments by scholars.

Then, they turned everything over to "reality" shows and pseudoscientific/pseudohistorical bullshit.

I'm thinking of this as we commemorate the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings. The number of veterans who lived through it dwindles every year.

Some of my favorite documentary series are the BBC World At War series from the early 1970's, Vietnam:A Television History on PBS in the 1980's, and the Ken Burns series on both wars. BBC also did a series on the First World War in the 1960's, and I once saw a documentary - I no longer remember where - on the Civil Rights movement of the 1950's and 1960's.

All of these documentaries did a fantastic job of recording living memory. The emotion that came through, in some cases many decades after the events, was (and remains) deeply moving.

Steven Spielberg and Yad Vishem have done an excellent job of recording the memories of Holocaust survivors and others who saw it (e.g. camp liberators). I wish other historical events were treated to this sort of attention.

I've had the privilege of meeting people who lived through historical events, but that's not true of everyone. I've met Apollo astronauts who walked on the moon, for example, and it meant a great deal, but those who won't have that opportunity can watch In the Shadow of the Moon, in which those who flew on these missions -many of whom have since passed away - can be heard for themselves.

Hearing about these events from those who lived through them is far, far more compelling than the sober assessment of a modern historian who might have access to documents and the perspective of time, but who can never show the kind of emotion through their eyes that someone who actually saw it - who was actually there - can do.

We need more of this - not less. It's an absolute tragedy that media outlets that once added to this archive of living experience have been given over to trash.