[allo37]

I don't really have any evidence to make a counterargument, so you might be right.

I could present an alternative viewpoint though: Cable access has steadily been losing marketshare to streaming services for a while now, so they're aiming for as much mass appeal as possible. It might not be that there is a lower proportion of people looking for educational entertainment than there was before, but that declining viewership has made it unprofitable to produce content for that niche. I see a lot of documentaries on Netflix, for example, and then there's CuriosityStream which is a service just for that, right?

Also a lot of "edutainment" is and always has been sensationalism...I remember watching a documentary about how solar storms were gonna wipe out humanity any day now, and "top 100 things removed from the human body" on old-school TLC (spoiler: #1 was a petrified fetal twin!)