So, thanks to the miracle of TiVo, my husband and I are watching this week’s episode of Mythbusters right now – the one where they test whether a bullet can get lodged backwards in an opponent’s gun.
I love this show, but I’m curious about the way they presented the original myth – they said it was from a shooting in Seattle, and they showed “The Seattle Tribune,” with the story and picture of the gun on the front page. You could see the web address (www.theseattletribune.com), the date, price, etc. Thing is, there isn’t a Seattle Tribune. I found the story in the online archives of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and it’s the exact story, word for word, that they showed on the program.
So, why did they make a fake paper, and make it look real? I could understand it if they couldn’t get or afford the rights to use the P-Is image, but then why didn’t they do something that was obviously fake - like, the “Mythbusters Tribune” or something, instead of presenting it as a real paper? Or tell us that they couldn’t get the rights, and just go on with it? It kind of ticks me off, because it damages their credibility, IMO. I mean, how do we know what else they might be faking? And do they think they have no viewers in Seattle, who know that there isn’t a Seattle Tribune?
(They also got the shooting backwards; they said that it was the bad guy’s bullet that got lodged in the cop’s gun, but it was the other way around. That doesn’t bug me as much, because it’s just a mistake, as opposed to willful fakery.)
I wondered about that paper being fake, too. For one thing, the place where the date would be only said “Wednesday.” And it looked pretty perfect–very white paper. I was looking for the date, specifically, because that gun looked old-fashioned to me (don’t go off on a tangent about this, please – I know nothing about guns). I was trying to determine which decade the original story was from.
My guess is that they just mocked it up, and probably changed the name deliberately for trademark reasons. They’d already said it was in Seattle, so they may have deliberately made up a plausible but incorrect “Seattle Paper.”
Don’t know if this is related or not, but I’ve noticed that Mythbusters has a nearly pathological tendency to blur out trademarks and corporate logos. Everything from labels on soda cans to t-shirts, even the labels on a model train set. Are they really that afraid of getting sued, or do they just want to deny free advertising to these people?
It sounds like they are liars. I always had a feeling the people associated with this show were dishonest. Thanks for the information. Now, I will never watch again.
Come again? Liars in what sense, aside from this potentially isolated example, which from what I can tell, does not affect the actual “mythbusting” itself in any way.
Yes, but you stated <I>“I always had a feeling the people associated with this show were dishonest ,”</I> which suggests that they lied prior to this newspaper incident, and I’m curious as to what that might be.
The story is from April of this year – you can read it here.
I don’t think they’re liars – I love the show, and I understand that, as they do experiments, there is going to be information that is either too involved or too uninteresting to make it on the air. I know they cannot, in a one-hour show, show us every single step, trial, or whatever, and that that may lead us, the viewers, to say, “Hey, they never tried it this other way! So how can they say it’s busted/plausible/confirmed?”
I just wonder why they went to the work of creating a real-looking fake paper, instead of either showing the real paper, or an obvious fake. For me, this doesn’t undermine their authority or honesty in the long run – it just makes me roll my eyes at them and hope they don’t do it again!
I know of one myth that they “busted” that was absolutely true. My husband worked on the original project, seeing it with his own eyes. The project information, while not classified, was not intended for public release. (PR nightmare)
Mythbusters used completely different materials in their version. They even admitted afterward, they’d not used the proper material, but busted the myth anyway.
It does not matter. It is entertainment. It is fun and interesting. You can always nitpick something into oblivion if that is your aim. It does fun science and deals with explosions. What could be more fun than that unless the women on the show wore manditory bikinis. Then it would be prime time.