nobody calls themselves a scientist because they watched Mythbusters, but they might get interested in it through watching it. That’s the point.

Getting people excited about science, and then demonstrating a bad way to do science is counter productive.

While I understand the spirit of your argument, I think you’re being a bit too pedantic in a forum where the audience isn’t primarily academic or hard science oriented.

Think of shows like Mythbusters and Bill Nye as modern day equivalents to the big “scientific demonstrations” you’d see people like Edison doing for audiences at the turn-of-the-century. They are in no way there to demonstrate an authentic experience of the scientific method because the minutiae of actual scientific research would never make good television.

That being said, Mythbusters does explain the process of how they design their experiments pretty well. A viewer who works in experimental sciences can easily spot any flaws in their methodology, and a non-scientifically inclined person would never spot them anyways.