The History Channel is Bunk

By Jorge Abbondanza – El País

At this point, the idiocies that are so frequently seen and heard on cultural cable TV channels constitute a category that would be amusing - were it not so dreadfully terrifying. Drivel of this kind can be found on the History Channel program Decoding the Past – The Templar Code.

The program aims to examine the rise and fall of the Knights Templar, a religious-military organization founded in 1119 to protect the Holy Places. After the Crusades, the order became a group that with great financial power (bankers, moneylenders, seafarers, merchants and landowners from Western Europe in the XII and XIII centuries). In 1312, the pope dissolved the order, confiscating assets of the group and subjecting its members to the Inquisition. Many knights were tortured and burned at the stake after being charged with witchcraft, blasphemy and sodomy.

Throughout the program, mention is made of the king of France and of the King of Navarre, Philip IV (1268-1314), also known as "the Fair." While this monarch did play an important role in the massacre of the knights, the onscreen images show the face of another Philip IV (1606-1665), the king of Spain painted by Velázquez who lived three hundred years after the events in question.

The painting of Philip IV, in fact, is a famous portrait that belongs to the Kunthistosches Museum of Vienna. Not only do the TV program editors never catch the mistake, they repeat it; later in the program, in fact, another gross error is made when the narrator mentions Leopold of Habsburg, a somewhat minor duke from the XIV century, while the picture onscreen shows the Germanic emperor Leopold I (1640-1705) who ruled three centuries after his predecessor.

Such gross errors are common on a channel that wears its pompous name so unjustly. In other programs on the same channel, the Spanish translation of the English texts confuses 1,200 years before Christ with 12,000 years before Christ; army is translated "armada" (navy), while the word actually is translated "actualmente" (nowadays). Another grave translation blunder is the word casualties, which is translated as "casualidades" (coincidences), among many other distractions and accidents that reek of ignorance.

Any sensible observer knows that young people today no longer read history books: they get information from audiovisual media. As a result, viewers have the right to be outraged at the shallow knowledge that The History Channel increasingly spreads across the globe.

It is the end of the world as we know it: at least for Spanish language culture, which has been taken over by certain television networks.