Yeah, this ground has been covered before... gets a lot of people's blood pressure up, including mine, and other folks like George Gassaway immediately springs to mind...
Those guys are total idiots and "media attention-wh0res"... They're willing to make all of rocketry look like a bunch of idiot careless bombtossers for their 15 minutes of fame... Lowest of the low if you ask me. Of course, these idiots couldn't get their 15 minutes of fame if there weren't gobs of low-talent Hollywood types looking for ANYTHING to splash on TV capable of being spun at an angle stupid enough or weird enough to draw some attention (like a car crash, basically) just to grab some ratings and make some quick dough on advertising... scum begets scum IMHO... they're co-dependent. They don't care how badly they represent the rocketry hobby, so long as they can splash some "sensational garbage" on the telly and make a few quick bucks before people tire of it and move on, by which point they're looking for the next 'angle' to exploit... These bottom feeders seek out the most idiotic or desperate-for-attention types and feed their ego with 15 minutes of fame, in order to film a lot of stupidity for a quick buck. We have some of my wife's family up in southern Indiana who live on "Porter Ridge Road" where the flash-in-the-pan series "Porter Ridge" was filmed... they rounded up the village idiots and attention-wh00res and put them in front of the camera to do various @$$-grabbery and @$$-clown stunts... Once they 'pump the well dry' they move on. I guess they just weren't "redneck" enough for them, because "Porter Ridge" is gone, and now I see some new crapola series coming out with a couple yahoos turning an outhouse into a rowboat or something equally stupid... Geez... there's no end to it...
In the same way, the Discovery Channel coverage of LDRS wasn't "exciting" enough on its own, so after the first few times, they started "spicing it up" with a lot of stupid stuff... What's most aggravating of all is when people IN CHARGE, *WHO SHOULD KNOW BETTER*, go along with whatever @$$-grabbery they suggest next, instead of pulling the plug on it. That's how you go from flying outhouses to basically any kind of oddroc that can possibly pinwheel to destruction being acceptable, culminating in some idiots thinking somehow flying a snowmobile is okay... Geez...
In the same way, as soon as ANY of these @$$clowns get ANY measure of attention or "success" (ratings), someone pops up to clone it and "capitalize on the popularity" of it... hence we get "Master Blasters" and other such stuff, with each idiotic Hollywood type finding some @$$clown willing to "go further" than the last ones, culminating in pure garbage like "Rocket City Rednecks"...
Oh well... least common denominator... seems like that's all this country is capable of anymore... Too bad...
Later! OL JR