The Biggest History Channel Controversies in Its 30-Year History

MTV is no longer “Music Television,” and TLC is hardly “The Learning Channel” anymore, but of all the examples of channel drift, History Channel’s evolution seems to be the most extreme. Once devoted to fact-based historical documentaries, the History Channel’s slate is now loaded with reality shows and pseudoscientific programming.

Such offerings are entertaining more than they are educational. For years now, the History Channel has been plagued by controversies, especially as on-air inaccuracies have piled up. Jeremy Stoddard, professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, wrote a 2010 article about what he called the History Channel Effect.

“Viewers who suffer from the History Channel Effect are unable to recognize the value-laden ideological perspectives in most documentary-style videos. They believe that all ‘documentary’ films are objective and neutral sources of historical information,” Stoddard wrote. “History Channel-produced programs in particular … can be extremely inaccurate as a result of low production budgets, use of out-of-context images and video, little or no historical oversight, and a desire to appeal to middle-aged male audiences by emphasizing warfare and patriotism.”

Surely that’s not what A&E Networks had in mind when the company launched History Channel on January 1, 1995. Abbe Raven, then senior vice president of programming for the History Channel, told the Los Angeles Times the following year that A&E Networks execs realized “you can examine any topic in history in a creative way and make it exciting and dramatic.”

But sometimes, as we know now, the History Channel’s creativity goes too far. Here at the 30th anniversary of the channel’s debut, we’re recapping our selections for its biggest controversies so far.

2004: Former U.S. presidents condemn The Men Who Killed Kennedy

A 2003 episode of the History Channel documentary series The Men Who Killed Kennedy implicated former U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson in the assassination of predecessor John F. Kennedy.

Lady Bird Johnson, Lyndon’s widow, and former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford wrote to the chief executives of A&E Networks’ parent companies to complain in 2004, as The New York Times reported at the time. Ford, for one, said the production lobbed “the most damaging accusations ever made against a former vice president and president in American history.”

2007: History Channel’s focus starts slipping with Ice Road Truckers

With 2007’s Ice Road Truckers, 2008’s Ax Men, 2009’s Pawn Stars, and 2010’s American Pickers, the History Channel has become focused on reality programming more concerned with the present day than with history.

U.S. Senator Charles Grassley went on a multi-tweet tirade about History’s case of channel drift in 2012, urging network bosses to change the channel’s name. The animated TV show Gravity Falls mocked the channel with a faux TV spot for “an entire 48-hour marathon of Ghost Harassers on the Used-to-Be-About-History Channel.” And Reddit users have bemoaned the transformation: “Can you recall the very last [History Channel] series you watched that was centered around history?” one person wrote.

2009–present: Ancient Aliens presents out-of-this-world pseudoscience

On the air since 2009 — and with more than 250 episodes to its name — Ancient Aliens has been rebuked for presenting as fact the farfetched theory that extraterrestrials not only visited Earth during prehistory but directed humans’ development of civilization, architecture, and technology.

“These ideas are not supported by scientific evidence, but they’ve become so prevalent that many people believe there must be something to them,” Matthew Peeples, associate professor and director of the Center for Archaeology and Society at Arizona State University’s School of Human Evolution and Social Change, explained to Phys.org.

Smithsonian Magazine science correspondent Riley Black called Ancient Aliens “a slimy and incomprehensible mixture of idle speculation and outright fabrications.”

And Kenneth Feder, emeritus professor of archaeology at Central Connecticut State University, said on a podcast that producers asked him to contribute to Ancient Aliens and that he told them their hypothesis was “execrable bulls***.”

2011: After criticism, History Channel cancels The Kennedys before its airing

Expectations were high for the multi-million-dollar project The Kennedys, which starred Greg Kinnear as John F. Kennedy and Katie Holmes as Jacqueline Kennedy and ranked as History Channel’s most expensive production to date and its first major foray into scripted programming. But early script drafts angered historians, including David Talbot, whose book Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years provided source material for the miniseries. “It’s soap opera as character assassination and an egregious distortion of the historical record,” Talbot said, per The New York Times.

Ultimately, A&E Networks opted not to air The Kennedys on History. (The miniseries eventually ran on Reelz, as did a 2017 sequel series.) “While the film is produced and acted with the highest quality, after viewing the final product in its totality, we have concluded this dramatic interpretation is not a fit for the History brand,” a channel rep told The Hollywood Reporter at the time.

2011: History Channel gets a “Pants on Fire” rating from PolitiFact

After the History Channel program Christmas Unwrapped: The History of Christmas claimed that Congress “sat in session and continued to stay open on Christmas Day for most of the next 67 years” — and after Jon Stewart cited that claim on The Daily Show — the fact-checking site PolitiFact dinged History Channel with a “Pants on Fire” rating. In fact, the site added, the House of Representatives and the Senate met on Christmas Day just once each during Congress’ first 68 years.

An embarrassed Stewart later addressed the Pants on Fire rating on air. “Apparently the clip we showed was off by around 66 years!” he said. “Of course, it’s my fault for trusting something called the History Channel! You know, with facts about things that happened in the past. The next thing you know, we’ll all find out the Nazis did not employ alien technology in their quest for world domination. You know what, History Channel? You have f***** me for the last time!”

2012: The Men Who Built America glorifies industrialists and ignores everyone else

With dramatic reenactments and commentary from modern-day businessmen like Donald Trump and Russell Simmons, History Channel’s The Men Who Built America told the story of how Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, and Henry Ford led their business empires.

And as critics pointed out, the four-part docudrama seemed all too ready to celebrate the success of rich white men of the 19th and 20th centuries. “The most curious things about History’s new miniseries The Men Who Built America are right there in the title: the notions that men alone built America, that America was primarily crafted by its industrialists, and that infrastructure is ‘built’ by the businessmen rather than the workers,” wrote NPR’s Linda Holmes.

Added The Conversation’s Anjali Vats, “The show’s use of the Great Man theory of inventorship and entrepreneurship leaves out the many women and people of color, including Thomas Jennings, Elijah McCoy, Miriam E. Benjamin and Sarah E. Goode who … not only invented and patented during the same period but … used their work to lobby for suffrage rights for women and people of color.”

2013: The Bible viewers think the miniseries’ Satan character looks like President Barack Obama

When History Channel aired The Bible in 2013, viewers — including Fox News vet Glenn Beck and CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer — thought that the miniseries’ Satan character, played by Mohamen Mehdi Ouazanni, bore a striking resemblance to then-President Barack Obama. The hashtag #ObamaIsNotSatan even trended worldwide on Twitter, per The Washington Post.

In a statement, History Channel said it had “the highest respect for President Obama” and that it was “unfortunate that anyone made this false connection.” Even so, History Channel wiped photos Ouazzani in character from its website, and when producers turned The Bible into a feature film called Son of God, they left the Satan character on the cutting room floor, per The Guardian.

2015: TV special Breaking History: Bigfoot Captured special fools viewers

As Snopes reports, the 2015 History Channel special Breaking History: Bigfoot Captured was positioned as a documentary that, according to its synopsis, “takes an unexpected turn when a Sasquatch capture is caught on camera.” However, a brief on-air disclaimer mentioned the special would feature “some dramatization,” the credits listed actors as Bigfoot hunters, and, as it turned out, Idaho State University engineers created a Bigfoot skeleton for the show.

“The fact that you have networks such as History Channel, Discovery, and Animal Planet willfully and consciously planting falsehoods into the minds of their audience is absolutely shameful,” Paste’s Jim Vorel wrote the night after Bigfoot Captured’s airing. “There’s no other word for it. The people involved should be ashamed of themselves because they are causing very real, literal harm. They’re actively performing the polemic opposite of their network’s stated function.”

2017: History Channel’s Amelia Earhart documentary is discredited almost immediately, then pulled

The History Channel documentary Amelia Earhart: The Lost Evidence claimed that Earhart had survived a crash landing and been captured by the Japanese military, and for proof, the show banked on a photo purportedly showing famed aviator Amelia Earhart after her 1937 disappearance.

Two days after the airing, however, a Japanese military history blogger noted that the photo had a publication date of 1935 in Japan’s National Diet Library, as NPR reported at the time.

In the wake of that finding, History Channel vowed to investigate the photograph and decided to cancel re-airings of the special and remove the show from on-demand and streaming platforms, Variety reported.

As researcher Ben Radford put it, “The photograph’s provenance was established — and thus the key premise of the show discredited — in about half an hour of Google searching.”