Avoiding Controversy

I was just reading our first article in Public History for tomorrow and Mark Howell says "Too often public history is dumbed down to its lowest common denominator, the result being a pablum of information that overgeneralizes and avoids controversial topics."  I think that it is too true that to keep people interested and moving quickly information has to be dumbed down and simple so no one gets upset.  This line also reminded me of a program I watched on TV called The Falling Man.  It was a program about the picture of a falling man from the World Trade Center on 9/11.  I didn't get very far in the program, I didn't have time to finish it, but at the beginning it said that the pictures were never published because of what they showed and they had not been seen since.  People were afraid to confront the painful and controversial truth.  It makes me wonder what people will do if they get confronted with something that they can't avoid or be dumbed down by museums.