The various cable channels under the umbrella of the Arts & Entertainment network umbrella win the dubious distinction of having the most egregiously bad closed captions on television. Not only do they have bad captioning, they have no captioning on recent DVD releases of programs they broadcast. These DVDs are priced far above feature film discs, yet have no captioning or subtitling. In the great scheme of things, closed captions for a documentary program seem more important than those for a soap opera or situation comedy. This does not reflect the value of these programs, but the way the programs are used. A program about World War II on the History Channel may be the only source on its topic that many viewers will ever get. Thus, the History Channel's 'default' style of captioning, which omits all proper names, cities, ships, generals, etc., is apalling. Since many names and places in History/Discovery/ Biography programming might be foreign and/or hard to understand, even someone who is not hearing-impaired might turn on the captions to get the spellings of these words. In any event, there is no excuse for captioning this bad. A&E is the sponsor in most cases, and no captioning company is listed at the end. A&E obviously did it on the cheap and has thus rendered their programming both inaccessible and incorrect. TULUSLA TREK The worst captioning I see is invariably on the History Channel and History International Channel (which becomes the Military History Channel on weekends). In a program on Paris landmarks, 19th century artist Toulouse Lautrec's name was spelled Tulusla Trek! I understand that captioning is done phonetically on a stenotype machine, but simple proofreading and/or adding a few words to the captioner's dictonary based on the subject matter of the program would prevent such horrendous mistakes. In a program on, I believe, the five different intelligence services that the French government has had since the 17th century, all were named by the narrator. None were named in the captions, not even the most famous, the Deuxieme Bureau. They were all called 'the bureau,' making it seem like there was only one. Another program about Heinrick Schliemann, the archeologist who discovered ancient Troy and a famous hoard of gold, misspelled every name at least once. King Priam became 'King Preon,' and even once, 'King Peron' (an ancient ancestor of Argentine president Juan Perón, perhaps??). Schlieman's first name is spelled three different ways in the program, and--as with all History Channel shows--all supers are obscured by the captions, so even if the correct spelling is there, you can't see it. These opinions are mine. No attempt is made to 'study' captioning or take a sampling of a wide variety of shows. I just review what I happen to watch.