Supposedly professional and reliable broadcast information sources, such as NBC’s Today Show and Dr. Oz, have helped unscrupulous scamsters mislead and sometimes rob the ignorant, hopeful and gullible by treating psychics and fortune-tellers as if they were serious professionals. It is irresponsible and reckless, or perhaps testimony to the low level of education and reasoning ability of television news producers, that so many of these alleged journalists yield to the temptation of booking fake masters of the supernatural during airtime that is otherwise devoted to facts, or some version of them. While CBS’s “The Mentalist” performs a public service by presenting a hero who doesn’t hesitate to declare his former profession a fraud, it is hard-pressed to counter the corrupting effects of previous shows like “Medium,” which enhanced the dubious reputation of one psychic, and “Ghost Whisperer,” as well as cable’s TLC, which made the “Long Island Medium” a reality star.
Chicago’s WGN deserves an ethics razzing for falling into this trap, and providing a forum for a fake psychic to hawk her book in a live on-air segment on its morning show. Luckily, however, the news team persuaded the woman, Char Margolis, to attempt a cold reading of anchor Robin Baumgarten, and when she failed spectacularly, Baumgarten’s co-anchor Larry Potash delivered a deft coup de grace. Well done, WGN news team!
The fact that the segment turned into a wonderful YouTube lesson in how phony these predators are cannot retroactively excuse the unethical decision to have a fake psychic like Margolis on the news in the first place, but if there was ever a perfect example of how a poor ethics can have good results, this is it:
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Pointer: Soap Box Rantings
Source: WGN
Ethics Alarms 
Cheap shot to call him unkind. Was he supposed to just go along? Not only does he have to believe her he has to make it easier for other people to be taken in by her. I find it both surprising and disgusting that she expected to be unchallenged.
Why? If they were going to put her on the air, she could reasonably assume they would be supportive and help her plug her book. And what if she had nailed the cold read?
She didn’t. Why would it be unkind of one of the interviewers to point that out? She couldn’t have been given a promise that they would treat her kindly. (At least I hope not.)
Because its rare to see anchors turn on guests unless they are racists or Republicans. I don’t think it was unkind, but I’m sure she didn’t expect it. Such spots are usually soft-ball fests.
Kindness or honesty. Pick one, because you can’t have both.
I find that it is more or less always possible to be honest without being disrespectful (though forbearance has its place), but if “kindness” means “take what I say at face value” then I’m afraid she’s overstepping my hospitality by a wide margin, especially with the spirit-whisperer shtick.
I am worried that more than a handful of people would side with the psychic because she threw out the buzzword “closed-minded,” when the accurate term would be “skeptical.” “Skeptical” is not the opposite of “open-minded,” it’s the opposite of “gullible.” Ideally people should be both open-minded and skeptical. Regardless of how possible one thinks a “spirit world” is, it should be clear to anyone with a rudimentary level of critical-thinking that nothing the “psychic” did indicated a level of knowledge greater than “hunch,” as fattymoon points out. I am worried about the state of our society that people like this are given any significant credence, as it implies an abysmal dearth of critical thinking skills.
But the spirits tell me I’m preaching to the choir.
Similar (I think) question as wyogranny’s for you, Jack: How does what Larry Potash did fail to be consistent with what you honored Jake Tapper for?
It’s not. Why the question?
You can be confusing.
YOU can be confusing.
You CAN be confusing…
First the praising of Jake Tapper, then the title and early words of this post, then Potash’s on-air challenge, then the (implicit, at least) “you shouldn’t have, Potash”…
Are you posing a consequentialism riddle?
Over 40 years since I first took a law class, and I haven’t learned to think like a lawyer yet. So I still have my own reasons for being unclear. Heyyyy…I think I might be proud of myself…
This link probably is more fitting to share in the comments to the post about the know-nothing “ambassador,” but, as an expert sniper, I noted the author’s lack of mention of ethics expertise:
http://thefederalist.com/2014/01/17/the-death-of-expertise/
…which might have been his point. I don’t know. “Only an expert can deal with the problem.”
Where, in the name of God, is any sentence that suggests he shouldn’t have? I’ve read the post over and over, and you are seeing things. What does “Luckily, however, the news team persuaded the woman, Char Margolis, to attempt a cold reading of anchor Robin Baumgarten, and when she failed spectacularly, Baumgarten’s co-anchor Larry Potash delivered a deft coup de grace. Well done, WGN news team!” mean other than “they screwed up by putting her on, but properly nailed her on the air”? There are two members of the news team, and I praised both, and unequivocally. What does “Well done” mean on your planet? As far as I can see, you are the only one seeing some coded message that I didn’t think Potash was an ethics hero for pouncing like mongoose on a python. I did, and while I can be confusing, the confusion in this case appears to be self-generated. Please explain what language you are using to make my post read as the opposite of what I wrote and intended. I’m fascinated.
I guess I am “seeing things,” all right. This reminds me of the classic Daffy Duck cartoon, “Pronoun Trouble.” (Or maybe, more darkly of the definition-of-is days. Or less darkly, of Who’s On First.) Except here, it’s Sarcasm Trouble.
Okay, I retract from the point where I misunderstood you; that point was when you said, “Well done, WGN news team!” At that point, I was sure you were being sarcastic.
Why? Because you had already said the team was doing the wrong thing by having the psychic on the set in the first place. So the way I read the tone of what followed, from “Luckily, however,…” was a more subtle sarcasm, as if to say, “That screw-up wasn’t enough; the team had to keep going by humiliating their guest on the air.” By the time you said Potash delivered a coup de grace and said “Well done…!” I was convinced that you had gone into flaming sarcasm.
Still, if you were _not_ being sarcastic beginning with “Luckily, however,…” then I detect a bit of consequentialism. The news team did the wrong thing, but redeemed itself in the end, making lemonade out of lemons, by debunking the psychic. You don’t see how I could possibly see that as consequentialism? Is my misunderstanding of consequentialism so far off-the-mark?
Oops, forgot:
jeeez, did you read the frickin’ thing? I also specifically wrote…
“The fact that the segment turned into a wonderful YouTube lesson in how phony these predators are cannot retroactively excuse the unethical decision to have a fake psychic like Margolis on the news in the first place, but if there was ever a perfect example of how a poor ethics can have good results, this is it…”
A consequentialist, as in, wrong and rationalized, interpretation would be that the good results—she was exposed—-meant that the decision to have her on was an ethical one, because good resulted. That’s crap, and I wrote that it was crap. The fact that a bad decision worked out well is moral luck, and that’s all. How could you read a direct statement that the results did not redeem the original act as consequentialism, when that fallacy would argue the exact opposite? Are you reading sarcasm into everything? I’m really not sarcastic in posts (as opposed to replies to comments) very frequently at all.
“jeeez, did you read the frickin’ thing?”
Yes, I read it. Okay, so it’s moral luck, and not consequentialism. I told you, I misread from “Luckily,…”
“How could you read a direct statement that the results did not redeem the original act as consequentialism, when that fallacy would argue the exact opposite?”
Because I did not think I was reading a direct statement.
“Are you reading sarcasm into everything?”
No.
“I’m really not sarcastic in posts (as opposed to replies to comments) very frequently at all.”
I’ll try to remember that.
I kinda miss Criswell of “Criswell Predicts!” and one of my favorite movies “Plan 9 from Outer Space”.
And he never blinked…
A deft blow of fat?
Yup, that’s what I said.
Kindness and rudeness are opposites. The others weren’t rude or cruel, they didn’t agree she demonstrated her talent. She probably should not have volunteered if she wasn’t absolutely sure she could deliver on air.
I am more appalled at the fact that Robin Baumgarten knows neither what her six year old daughter does or who her friends are.
Yeah, that was a little disturbing subtext there. Modern parenthood! Wendy Davis would approve.
After watching again I think she might have been pretending not to know because she was not going to give Margolis a chance to be right. But that is even more disturbing and gives Margolis’ remark about being unkind a little more weight.
Well that would have been cheating indeed. And hardly a service to her viewers, if the psychic was really scoring….if she was real or fake, the viewers had a right to genuine evidence to judge. I didn’t get that impression—I think, like too many parents, the news anchor really has little idea what her daughter does all day or associates with.
The psychic should have been talking to the nanny.
“Most people are respectful and really nice about it- except for Larry!”
Translation: Most people make excused for me like the other talking head did, and pretend I’m not blatantly lying! But if they don’t I call them mean and close-minded!
Oh well, at least Sylvia Browne finally kicked it.
Sylvia saw it coming though…
Astonishingly not- she predicted she’d die at at 77 instead of 66. Well, it was a double number, and only God is right all the time…
If there’s justice in this world and the next she was greeted by the shades of the dead children she lied about, hungry for a few millenia of vengeance.
Penn and Teller did a very entertaining expose on ‘mediums’ and ‘clairvoyants’.
There may be a cruel bone in me, I really enjoyed watching her squirm and dodge on TV. Especially when her next challenge to Larry was “I can do a reading with you if you’re honest. Oh and not on TV!”
Translation “I can do a reading with you, if you play along, and the mistakes and awkwardness don’t get captured on film”
Is there some misunderstanding of what a “cold reading” is and entails?
“Cold reading is a series of techniques used by mentalists, psychics, fortune-tellers, mediums and illusionists to determine or express details about another person, often in order to convince them that the reader knows much more about a subject than they actually do.[1] Without prior knowledge of a person, a practiced cold reader can still quickly obtain a great deal of information about the subject by analyzing the person’s body language, age, clothing or fashion, hairstyle, gender, sexual orientation, religion, race or ethnicity, level of education, manner of speech, place of origin, etc. Cold readers commonly employ high probability guesses about the subject, quickly picking up on signals from their subjects as to whether their guesses are in the right direction or not, and then emphasizing and reinforcing any chance connections the subjects acknowledge while quickly moving on from missed guesses.” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_reading
Jack, and probably most of you here, are confirmed skeptics of, I would think, any and all practices related to psychic endeavors. So, allow me to offer you one such endeavor which has been proved time and agin throughout the ages. It’s called “dowsing.” The proof is in the digging. I recently finished The Divining Hand by Christopher Bird, wherein he documents the amazing success rate of what used to be called “water witching.” http://www.amazon.com/The-Divining-Hand-year-old-Mystery/dp/0924608161
What’s even stranger is “map dowsing” wherein a dowser uses a map to pinpoint the location of water. This too is extensively documented. One well known dowser was Abbe Mermet – scroll to bottom of this link… http://yourwatermatters.com/uncategorized/radiesthesia-resonance/
I recently have been experimenting with dowsing using a pendulum. It’s possible I have some natural ability because my father introduced me to the work of Michel Eugène Chevreul who attempted to explain how dowsing and related “magical” activities worked. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Eug%C3%A8ne_Chevreul
Although he has a point that involuntary and imperceptible muscle movement are involved in these activities, that does not satisfactorily explain the successes achieved with dowsing. Not that there have never been failures – there’s been lots of them. http://www.sdanet.org/atissue/books/dowsing/d01.htm
Recently I joined The America Society of Dowsers, Inc. to further whet my curiosity and increase my knowledge – http://dowsers.org/
On a personal note, I have had some success with my pendulum dowsing experiments. There’s practically no limit to the experiments you can undertake. You don’t have to buy a pendulum, you can make one yourself. http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xyqk1e_how-to-make-a-pendulum-for-dowsing_lifestyle
A pendulum is nothing but a weight at the end of a thread, string, chain, etc. I made one using an old railroad spike attached to fishing line. Or, you can visit a new Age store (or search online) and buy some really pretty ones.
Perhaps we could somehow set up an experiment here since I’m into this sort of thing.
Dowsing is fascinating, and it is also problematical, since there are fraudulent dowsers who do not believe in the practice, and those who are honest and sincere. I have always regarded the phenomenon as similar to that of a Ouija Board. That is either unfair and ignorant, or not.
?
Water is practically EVERYWHERE under the surface of the Earth. The dowser’s aren’t miraculously finding pinpoint sources of water.
Yup, it’s the ideomotor effect, same as an Ouija board. (“a” Ouija board? They both look wrong to me somehow). An honest and sincere person can still be fooled by the fascinating responses of the body, but the James Randi million dollar challenge has tested many and found no success.
Surely the success of dowsers has nothing to do with the fact that water is practically EVERYWHERE. Huge aquifers underlie most of the Earth’s surface. It’s not like dowser’s are shooting at a fly in the dark… more like tossing a rock at the broadside of a barn from point blank range.
It’d be just as miraculous if I claimed to have a system that detected air every time my finger twitched or something. My finger twitched! There must be air around here.
Sure, it’s the underground streams, you know 😀