What happened to the "REAL" hunting shows?

Its kinda like the Gun Digests now a days. When I was growing up, I eagerly looked for them at gunshows, yardsales, etc, and devoured the articles about guns. Now, its more 2/3 adds, a little write up here and there, and more adds for the newest firearm in the back. This is the reason why I keep looking for old issues.

American Sportsman. I fondly recall the episode where Fred Bear and Fred Savage hunted Iowa pheasants with bows and arrows.
I gave up TV over 20 years ago and I don't miss it.

Heck, I remember one show where they were bow hunting for boar on an island. Boar won and they had to carry the guy off the island on a makeshift litter.

Never see that again. But that was probably 50 years ago.

Most of the shows I have seen lately they are hunting on large hunting ranches. The so called wild life are grain fed and tank watered.
The big hunt begins as the hunters ride out on trucks/4 wheelers. Then the elusive game is shot at the feeding stations.
Kinda like going out on the farm and shooting the cow.

Sturgeons law, 90% of everything is crap.
I found 'Meateater' was a decent watch. Had one episode where Joe Rogan and another fellow came up to hunt and it was raining and miserable, they left early.

brasscollector said:

Sturgeons law, 90% of everything is crap.
I found 'Meateater' was a decent watch. Had one episode where Joe Rogan and another fellow came up to hunt and it was raining and miserable, they left early.

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Now that would be realistic...
(At least in my experience.)

The best one I ever saw was old man Eastman and a couple of his buddies hunting the Yukon Territory in the 50s.
Man that was a good show.

It is amazing how much hardware the younger generation needs to kill a lowly deer.

My own sons carry packs full of gear to hunt within a mile of home.

Not to mention the terrible music that seems to be blaring in the background at all times....

They have gone to youtube.

Seriously there are some very entertaining hinting and fishing shows, but they are not on television. They are on YouTube. It cost less to produce so you have people who really enjoy the sports and just want to take someone along with them.

And yea not every youtuber can produce quality stuff, but that 10% that can is genuine and in ky opinion worth the time. I laugh, I learn, and enjoy the adventure they had.

I second what Idaho Skies says about youtube. That is the only place I go to watch hunting shows and they are great. No commercials and you see exactly the program you want to see. I especially like to watch mule deer hunting, and if I want to watch mule deer hunting in Utah I just type in "Mule deer hunting Utah." If you haven't used youtube before just go into Google and click on the small square in the upper left corner that says Apps, and then click on YouTube. It doesn't cost anything and it's great.

I've worked a bit with different youtube channels and social media hunting/shooting personalities, with exposure to a few of the more popular folks, including guys on TV. They may be blowing smoke up our asses, but I've had a couple guys I would otherwise generally trust to be giving us good advice claim these shows, at least at first, have to pay for their air time, hence they're absolutely reliant upon sponsors to pay expenses PLUS air space. So the network pays its bills with the real commercial breaks, and the show pays its bills with the commercials embedded into the show itself.

Magazines are no different - they're jam packed with conventional ads, then many of the product review articles, or even the other conventional content articles are rife with product placements...

That's media marketing for you. If you're not selling, you're not making money. Less and less people subscribe to print media, and less and less people subscribe to satellite or cable, let alone regularly watch network TV - and even worse, less and less people are willing to partake in web-based subscription services, so we're stuck with monetized social media content as the fastest growing media market... Which has its own problems, since some of these do not allow monetized accounts for hunting/firearms based content. Take Playboy Magazine as an example - they started struggling years and years ago when their print sales and subscriptions dropped off, and they tried to cruise the wave of paid online content - and they did - but the wave is over, and consumer paid content of any kind, print and online both, just can't contend with free online content. So to be able to afford to keep the doors open, Playboy cut costs and went to the non-nude Maxim magazine model... If a guy can't make money in an ever more depraved world by selling pictures of beautiful, naked women, how do you think a guy is going to make money by selling videos, pictures, and articles of out of shape dudes wrapped in camo? Advertising - that's how.

Surprisingly, despite the increase in outlets for content, the competition to BE that content is still extremely deep - every Tom, Dick, & Harry seems to have a set of cameras and thinks they're going to become a millionaire by launching a youtube channel and "getting discovered."

I'm not saying anyone should feel sorry for the media industry, especially not for the print media industry - it's 2017, pa should have taken print media behind the shed with a rifle years ago already - but it IS silly for folks to stand up and complain about excessive advertising in media content, because that increase in advertising really is their own fault. If you're not paying enough for content, the revenue has to come from somewhere to keep the doors open.

Varminterror said:

If you're not paying enough for content, the revenue has to come from somewhere to keep the doors open.

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True. Personally I don't mind paying for subscriptions for a variety of online publications, from Chuck Hawks to digital versions of a number of traditional magazines, but when I do, the quality of the content matters. Same thing with TV and commercials: if the show is good, let the commercials roll in with the fuzzy and warm feeling that they pay for the content. Sometimes that has even directed my purchases toward the brands that have advertised on said channels or even sponsored some of my favorite shows. They scratch my back, I scratch theirs.

On the other hand, the majority of hunting shows on TV is crap these days. I keep paying my subscription to the Outdoor Channel hoping that something interesting will air every now and then but that's getting rare. To put it bluntly, there's little entertainment value in watching a bunch of bellowing d*ldos showing off the latest, select brand-name gear and hunt in what effectively is a glorified petting zoo.

Varminterror said:

If a guy can't make money in an ever more depraved world by selling pictures of beautiful, naked women, how do you think a guy is going to make money by selling videos, pictures, and articles of out of shape dudes wrapped in camo? Advertising - that's how.

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There is so much on target within your post, but nothing, NOTHING spells it out like quite as clearly as this snippet. While I'll be shopping for a new keyboard soon enough, I can assure you that all media industries are feeling the pinch.

Likewise, any car guys around my age can remember when there were two (2) car shows on a year. That was the Indy 500 and the Daytona 500 on ABC sports. We'd postpone Armageddon to be able to watch the entire "show". And ya know what, they had advertisements also....

Now, you can turn on the TV and find at least ONE car-specific TV show on a channel somewhere, at any point of the day. And we, as over-fed consumers, bicker about the content, the ads, and flippantly jump to a new, different tasting, more favorite program. We exercise our superfluous choices as our right, at the cost of commitment. To some, this is progress.

Hunting shops have changed the same way hunting itself has. Used to be about hunting, outdoorsmanship and the hunt itself. Now it's mostly all about shooting, and many times is a domesticated or semi-domesticated animal, (one that has been protected by limited hunter access and allowed to grow old enough to be considered a "shooter").

I loved "ABC's American Sportsman with Kurt Gowdy. He had a couple of episodes hunting with Phil Harris (Jack Benny's band leader if you're as old as me) in Eagle Lake, Texas for snow geese over rags. I would DREAM of the day I might be rich enough to do that. Well, I book a couple of hunts a year, now, and live 20 miles west of Eagle Lake. When I was a kid, I was crazy over duck and goose hunting, had places to hunt 'em growing up on the Gulf coast as I did. Being raised in a lower middle class working household, I wasn't blessed with lots of land or money and would go beg the ranchers to hunt on their land, which back then they would usually agree to for a kid. The Eagle Lake thing was just a dream then.

I don't think there's been a decent outdoor show since American Sportsman. In fact, in the late 60s, American Sportsman started going down hill with kayaking shows, mountain climbing, anything, BUT hunting. It was a sign of the liberal times, the birth of PETA, that sort of thing.

I will still watch shows on the only outdoor network we have on cable, Pursuit channel, that involve waterfowl. You've seen one whitetail shot from a tree stand, you've seen 'em all. I get as bored with whitetail on TV as I am with bass fishing on TV. I particularly like the Ducks Unlimited show which actually reminds me a bit of the original American Sportsman as they stress the ethics and the "giving back" of hunting. Occasionally they'll have something on I'll watch that isn't deer hunting, like shows about hogs and pig sticking with dogs, or there's a trapping show which is informative as I don't have a huge lot of experience trapping fur, though I've done some with raccoons and I trap hogs.

But, generally, quality programing died when American Sportsman started going all PC. Besides, hunting is a participation sport.

JMHO

There was a local hunting show on TV when I was a kid. A couple of gentleman from Terre Haute, Indiana. They wore suits in the studio and showed clips of their hunting and fishing adventures. They owned a sporting goods store in Terre Haute. It was sponsored by local businesses.
They don't make em like that anymore.

Oh, by the way, they always showed great respect and reverence to any animal they took. Unlike the fists pumps and high fives and self celebration of today's tv personality.

I don't know what is new so much. About 40 years ago two sports writers that most of the older members on here would recognize were in a hunting camp in Alabama with us. Some of the local guys went out and spot lighted a deer. The next morning one of the writers put on his buck skins, had a picture taken with his muzzle loader on the deer, and proceeded to write an article for a major periodical about the tracking, stalking, blah, blah .

Well, remember Jimmy Houston's debacle?

http://newsok.com/article/2931320

I've had to stop watching one with a fat guy with a beard that's on later at night. He likes to go to foreign countries and gut shoot animals on private ranches. It makes me so mad that I have a hard time sleeping after watching it. Yeah, he gets his trophy antlers/horns, and the guide or owner gets advertising, but that doesn't excuse gut shooting animals or chuckling about "Texas heart shots". JMHO.

Ya, I cut out all the "outdoor channel" from my cable package, and I haven't missed them at all. Some of them are as credible as Bush People or Flipping Las Vegas. The real outdoor experience, is the one you put together for yourself. My 2 cents.