My short answer is yes. I wish I was in control of sponsor funding so I could help curate the public image.
@sb and others: I think you're missing part of the danger here. These channels get bundled into some packages that have nothing to do with hunting or outdoor channels. The antis see these and their opinions are further confirmed. If this disgusts even hunters, just think what it does for the majority of people (70-80% of the population) that neither hunt nor are anti hunting? Hunting is allowed to exist because this majority hasn't been turned against it.
Think about it - if you were someone who hadn't really been exposed hunting (maybe you know that there is one dude at work that hunts deer or something on his grandfather's 60 acres) and you were flipping through the channels and came across the Outdoor or Sportsman channels. You see a show at random, some dude is wearing camo, carrying a gun, and talking to the camera. You are a little curious about hunting, so you keep it tuned in. (It's gotta be better than spending your next half hour flipping through the 500+ channels of TV you pay for, right?) You keep watching and you see how these show personalities portray hunting. The guy takes a shot from a quarter of a mile away, and breaks the deer's back leg. It limps around a bit while the host loads another round. After running 50 yards further away, it finally stops and the host shoots again. It looks like a hit this time (you couldn't tell from the footage that it was a gut shot) but it runs off a bit further and the hosts get all excited and start congratulating each other. You watch a few more minutes and see advertisements for a variety of different things: camo clothing; gun ammo being sold by a very muscular dude and/or a very attractive blonde woman; artificial deer pee that you are presumably supposed to shower in; and finally the next show up where the host was apparently raised by pigs. After commercials the hosts go looking for their animal and spend the remaining 5 minutes of their episode doing trophy photos and talking about how their super powered rifle/scope combo from x company could have taken down this creature from twice that distance, but they didn't need to thanks to their fake deer pee and camo from y company.
I don't think this experience is likely to make this person interested in hunting, or even learning more about hunting.
It is my opinion that we are our own worst enemies when it comes to anti-hunter recruitment. We've got an entire generation that, despite not growing up in rural areas, is interested in hunting for a variety of reasons, and yet 95% of the media that we show the world is doing just about everything right to drive them away forever.
