Onward State, an alternative student news website for Penn State University, has pulled an article about a student psychic for promoting “one of the most fraudulent, predatory practices around.”
The psychic has been given her own reality TV show on ABC Family (an oxymoron if ever there was one). The newspaper had reported the news of the show with, shall we say, something of a credulous eye. Per the item:
Penn State’s resident medium, Monica Ten-Kate, is set to take her abilities to TV. Ten-Kate will star in “Monica the Medium” on ABC Family, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
The unscripted reality series will follow Ten-Kate as she carries out her daily life as a communications major while juggling her side job as a spirit medium, someone who is able to communicate with those “who have crossed over.”
“The best part of being a medium is the gift I get to give people that I read,” Ten-Kate said in an interview with Onward State last fall. “Just being able to see their face change from sadness to tears of joy from hearing from their loved ones is probably one of the best feelings I could ever have.”
Much like “Long Island Medium” Theresa Caputo, Ten-Kate “uses her gifts to connect with your loved ones and deliver healing messages from them,” according to her website. Ten-Kate offers in-person readings as well as readings over Skype. However, in recent months, she has received so many reading requests that she has had to stop scheduling reading sessions entirely until further notice.
That was followed a day later by a pitch-perfect editorial from features editor Noel Purcell, which took a quick tour of charlatanism before inserting the knife:
As we reported yesterday, Monica Ten-Kate, the “Penn State Medium,” is indeed getting her own reality show on ABC Family — if nothing else, that much is true. Unfortunately, in trying to provide a relevant piece of news to the Penn State community, we inadvertently promoted one of the most fraudulent, predatory practices around: psychic readings. Our mission statement promises that Onward State will work to generate honest conversation in the hopes of enriching the Penn State community and experience. Yesterday’s article did not do that, and we hope to rectify that. We apologize for the oversight, and are issuing a full retraction of that piece.
After we published the article, Ten-Kate and her publicists requested that we “correct” several parts, claiming there were errors. She was absolutely right. There were significant mistakes in our piece. Instead of reporting critically, we presented her implausible assertions at face value, and implied that Ten-Kate can actually speak to the dead. In reality, she most certainly can’t talk to the dead, because that’s quite simply impossible. Anyone who claims to have that power is a liar. We apologize for any confusion or ire this may have caused amongst our readership, and we appreciate your comments.
Purcell went on to add that:
It may seem relatively innocuous without context, but those of us who understand the deception at its core, but choose to play along with these “psychics” because it seems like harmless fun, are in fact enabling con artists. We are allowing chicanery to substitute for real, tangible help for those struggling to cope with the death of someone close to them. We are, in a sense, willful accomplices to scam, and we are doing more damage than we could ever know.
Psychic mediums and their ilk are one of the most abhorrent cottage industries around. From the loathsome Long Island Medium, to Joel Osteen’s megachurch televangelism profiteering scheme, to John Edward’s cold readings, to Miss Cleo’s pay-per-call deception, the entire industry is built on the shameful idea of profiting off of those who most need solace. Taking advantage of the emotional state of another human being through explicitly deceitful means for your own personal betterment is a vile way to live, let alone make a living. And we’re hardly the first ones to point this out. …
… James Randi, the retired magician who has made it his life’s work to challenge those who claim paranormal powers, has a one million dollar reward waiting for “any person who demonstrates any psychic, supernatural, or paranormal ability under satisfactory observation.” It has remained unclaimed since 1964, despite numerous attempts by high-profile frauds. But really, it’s just common sense: Nobody can talk to the dead, regardless of what they claim.
However, I do have a sixth sense for bullshit, and right now it’s going off.
To which we say: Mr. Purcell — if you need a job after graduation, we might know some interested news organizations.
In addition to retracting the short article announcing Ten-Kate’s new show, Onward State has added an editor’s note to a previous profile of Ten-Kate that links to Purcell’s editorial, and alerts readers that the article contains “factual inaccuracies.”
Update 3:35 pm:
We heard from Purcell, who told us:
So the retraction was more or less tongue-in-cheek. The original piece ran because it was a local interest story about a student getting a TV show. We didn’t think about implications of promoting this morally bankrupt practice. After further discussion and reading some comments on the story that confirmed our thoughts, we thought it was best to clarify that we don’t actually believe in this garbage, and that it’s irresponsible to promote without scrutiny.
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I didn’t find anything unusual in the first article to warrant a retraction. Promoting mediums as real is the usual approach. And an editorial would be fine to dispute it. However, Purcell’s piece was inappropriate, accusing all psychics as being “liars” and “frauds”. That will get this writer in some hot water. He might want to learn libel laws before pursuing journalism. http://doubtfulnews.com/2015/04/kerfuffle-at-penn-state-over-psychic-tv-show/
Leaving aside the hed (which technically excludes Ten-Kate by use of the word “like”), the only thing you really seem to have to point to is this: “In reality, she most certainly can’t talk to the dead, because that’s quite simply impossible. Anyone who claims to have that power is a liar.”
How do you make this out not to be a statement of opinion based on a fully disclosed fact? How do you extract actual malice?
A law suit against Mr. Purcell would require proving in court that they are indeed not frauds and that could prove difficult for them.
Sounds like a lawsuit like that would be a real career-building for this young editor.
An interesting story. Nice to get some non-science hard-core cases at RW once in a while. I think three things:
a) I like Mr. Purcell’s fervor, but his sharp tongue will get him into trouble, no doubt. In general, institutions don’t like the hot-headed commentator. That does not mean that you don’t have value. With some training, Mr. Pucell’s passion could be channelled into some very positive energy and results.
b) I have my own concerns and doubts about psychics, although I admit I have never met one in person. So, the veracity can be tested easily, by removing the carrot, money. If they can show their psychic powers without the financial incentivation, then they are most likely the real deal. When they have proved themselves, then remunerate them for their skills. Currently, the exploratory “market” tells the general audience to believe that the basal presumption that the psychic is true, and aks that same audience to cough up money to see the show and to get proof of that power. So, the system has to change. Very similar to “predatory” publishing.
c) Doubtful news. You state: “Purcell’s piece was inappropriate, accusing all psychics as being “liars” and “frauds”. That will get this writer in some hot water. He might want to learn libel laws before pursuing journalism.” Would you care to comment on Jeffrey Beall’s story, and terminology used:
Fraud Alert: Bogus Article Acceptance Letters
http://scholarlyoa.com/2013/01/24/fraud-alert-bogus-article-acceptance-letters/
The default response to psychics is that they are “liars” and “frauds” unless and until they present hard factual evidence to the contrary.
The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry aka CSICOP for years, has a long, long history of evaluating psychics, with the same outcome as Randi, one of their Fellows.
Good for Purcell, although there are probably some psychics who actually believe they can do it. Among Randi’s books I have is Flim-Flam! (1986).
If you can find a copy, pp.308-325 has an amusing description of dowsing test, with a well-designed test setup of pipes under a field with different routes for water, and dowsers got a chance to peg what they thought.
The 3 Italian dowsers generally gave 99-100% expectations of success.
They got together for dinner, trying to rationalize differences in their results, which were different.
Randi presented the concealed plan of pipes.
The dowsers were stunned, at first … but then rallied with explanations: sunspots, geomagnetic variables…. Randi thought they’d all end up rejecting the results, becaise they *really* believed they could do it.
So, to be safe from defamation losses, one might say “liars, frauds or self-deluded”/
http://www.skeptics.com.au/publications/articles/australian-skeptics-divining-test/
“Looking at the tests on specific substances, the water tests showed 50 tests total with 11 correct or 22%.”
Whereas with 10 pipes chance would have give closer to 5 correct out of 50.
Here is a binomial calculator:
http://vassarstats.net/binomialX.html
which gives that getting 11 or more out of 50 correct has a probability of less than 1% with confidence (p) of less than 0.01.
But the test was not about whether they could do better than chance, it was about how well they could predict what they could do.
That’s not what the p means.
Oh, belay that, I take it that you meant P. The problem is that you don’t get to combine the results from the eight different water dowswers.
Yes thanks, this is not a correlation situation where a confidence figure is also needed, I should not have said confidence.
This is just giving the probablity that such an outcome or better could occur.
I put 50 (tests), 11 (successes) and 0.1 (chance of getting each test correct since only one of the ten pipes has water in it.)
Then Vassarstats gives the probability for “hypothesis testing” in the two-tailed situation (involving both sides of a bell curve):
Method 1. exact binomial calculation 0.018709203174
Method 2. approximation via normal 0.009597.
So if the “exact” figure is used this 11 or greater result would very likely show up once if you did the 50 tests again each day for another 53 days.
So it is not conclusive but strongly suggestive of better than chance.
Contrary to what you say, I think that that is the results from the different water diviners combined. Randi has not given the individual figures so we cannot say if some individual(s) may have had better success in the water test.
Randi also gives the result for gold, water and brass combined, and I calculate about 28% chance of that happening. But I note that none of the water diviners tried the gold, and I am also wondering why people who said they could dowse for gold did not try the water. They were allowed to try more than one and some tried water and brass. Dowsing for large gold ingots must be something which is not very commonly practised so anyone making a claim they could would not have had much experience to go on. It would be hard to exclude the possibility that some entrants were in as a sort of game of chance.
I think John Mashey’s description of these people is a bit too harsh. The water diviners over all said they thought they might be 86% successful, but they were only 22% successful, but chance would have been 10%. The fact that the gold people said they expected to be 99% successful makes me rather suspicious, I say again, given previous practice they could have had at dowsing for a large gold ingot.
I have to say that Randi’s write up could not pass a review process since conclusion of whether dowsing is better than chance cannot be drawn from how well people say they would be at it, and testing that against how good they are at it.
P (just to stick with the Vassar output) is the likelihood of obtaining the same or a more extreme result if (the distribution implied by) the null hypothesis were true in the sample.
It is thoroughly unclear to me what vassarstats means by a “two-tailed” value for P(k≥11); they’re simply reporting twice the (correct) value for the one-tailed test. The two-tailed 95% CI for k = 11 — which is appropriate if the null hypothesis is “dowsing is different from chance,” which isn’t really the case here — is, from R’s binom.test, [5.76, 17.98], P = 0.01451. That’s less than 0.05, so one rejects the null at “95% confidence,” so long as one ignores the small issue that if the data were actually poolable (i.e., 50 dowsers vs. 50 controls), the experiment would be inadequately powered to detect a difference at this level (150–162 in each arm; in fact, 50 dowsers would always be inadequate). This is a problem.)
(It would not, however, be a 3 σ detection, for which the CI is [3.96, 21.57], same P. A Bayesian might idly note that this isn’t astronomy.)
It’s not immediately clear to me how you arrived at that specific estimate, but no. P-values have no predictive value at all. Neither does the 95% CI.
Wait, that is what I said, which is why the exercise is kind of silly.
Oh, anyone can
call spirits from the vasty deeptalk to the dead, as long as you don’t expect an answer.Ms. Ten-Kate should apply a cold compress to that burn.