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Date Posted: 06:41:13 04/23/04 Fri
Author: Detroit Free Press
Subject: TV's truth is Always About Entertainment

TV's truth is always about entertainment
BY TERRY LAWSON
Detroit Free Press


If Rolling Stone magazine had a hint, the new issue might have had Jesus on the cover, with the tagline "He's hot, He's sexy ... and He's resurrected!"

Forget Justin and Janet. The current, most controversial superstar is Jesus Christ, or Jesus the Christ, as Mel Gibson's movie would have it. I saw the light the week before Easter, when documentaries about the life of Jesus multiplied like loaves and fishes on the cable schedule.

Gibson and other Christians looking to spread the Word found the perfect partner in secular TV - specifically the History Channel, A&E, the Discovery Channel, the Learning Channel and other alternatives to derivative sitcoms and bad movies - which increasingly looks to piggyback on big media moments with tie-in documentaries. I fully expected Court TV to put the Jewish people, or at least Judas, through one of its mock trials. But perhaps they were too busy preparing for Robert Blake.

Yet anyone looking for actual, factual history on the tube should remember that A&E stands for Arts and Entertainment. Every one of the Jesus documentaries I sampled made at least a token effort at impartiality, with various historians pointing out inconsistencies in the Gospels and theologians attempting to explain that it was possible to believe in the divinity of Jesus while accepting that the authors of the New Testament had a specific agenda. But none devoted any serious time to more radical schools of thought, such as those arguing that there is no substantive proof that the Jesus of the New Testament ever existed.

As an unapologetic history geek and documentary lover, I've become increasingly wary of what is sold as "the true story behind the sinking of the Titanic" or anything else. The talking head academics and authors on a recent History Channel doc "The Alamo" pretty much agreed that Davy Crockett didn't go down swinging his rifle butt and that Jim Bowie probably didn't put up much resistance to Santa Anna's army from his sickbed. But that doesn't necessarily prove the show's contention that Crockett and others were summarily executed. That idea is based on an alleged Mexican soldier's diary whose authenticity has long been disputed.

This month, the History Channel was forced to do something it had not done before. Under fire from historians and former associates of Lyndon Johnson, it aired an investigation into its original investigation of a tired conspiracy theory, trotted out yet again in a recent, error-riddled book, that Johnson was involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The revisitation took the form of a refutation by more trustworthy sources, but was essentially an apology.

Freedom of speech protects me in making stupid, ridiculous claims to get attention, but the History Channel devoting an hour to such crackpot speculation was not just misguided, it was irresponsible. It's even worse than Oliver Stone's entertaining but ultimately contemptible "JFK," which at least had actors making its absurd claims: Even to pinheads and partisans, that should be a tip-off.

Jack Nicholson could have been right: Maybe we can't handle the truth. Or maybe we just don't want to hear it, because it often goes against what we want to believe. The History Channel, PBS and the others capitalizing on our current and generally admirable interest in real events that shape our lives should acknowledge that truth is always under reconsideration, that history is forever being rewritten and that believing in something doesn't make it so.

Maybe they should ask themselves the question believers do: What would Jesus do?

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