Letter to Channel 5 by the Society

Wendy Moorhen's Response to the Channel 5 programme on Richard III as part of their Kings and Queens Series can be found at www.richardiii.net under Richard in the media

--- In @y..., "Neil Trump" <neil.trump@b...>
wrote:
> Wendy Moorhen's Response to the Channel 5 programme on Richard III
as part of their Kings and Queens Series can be found at
www.richardiii.net under Richard in the media
>
>
The show was pretty inaccurate in general - Nigel Spivey is supposed
to be a professor of history at Cambridge and how he can make so many
mistakes is besides me. It wasn't just the episode on Richard that
was inaccurate.

Tracy-Anne

At 12:16 PM 8/1/02 -0000, Tracy-Anne wrote:

>The show was pretty inaccurate in general - Nigel Spivey is supposed
>to be a professor of history at Cambridge and how he can make so many
>mistakes is besides me. It wasn't just the episode on Richard that
>was inaccurate.
>

I serve on the board of the Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages
and as a result I have a number of medievalists in my social network, at
least eight of whom have been "talking heads" on these programs. Some of
them have shared their "horror stories" -- critical decisions about content
being made by "production assistants" who have absolutely no knowledge in
the subject area; bad editing of interviews that remove the nuance in favor
of the sensationalistic sound-bite; and above all a rather insouciant
disregard for anything other than bringing in a product that superficially
looks sound at the lowest possible budget.

However, and in defense of these programs, one professor commented that
he'd continue to participate, no matter how ghastly the program, because
these horrible travesties of the historical record nevertheless spark
interest in their subjects. And that, he opines, is A Good Thing.

--
Laura Blanchard
lblancha@... (University of Pennsylvania Library and
Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries
lblanchard@... (all other mail)
Home office: 215-985-1445 voice, -1446 fax
http://pobox.upenn.edu/~lblancha