Summary: How reliable is the reporting of science journalists who are also part of the "Skeptical community"? Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for a review of his work investigating psychic detectives: Alex Tsakiris: A couple of years ago, I did a fairly lengthy investigation of psychic detective case with Ben Radford. It’s taken two years, but next week I’m going to have a chance to do an interview with Ben Radford again, and hopefully close the loop on some of that work that we did. Background on this case: 78. Psychic Detective, Noreen Renier and Skepticality Response 69: Psychic Detective Smackdown, Ben Radford 58. Psychic Detectives and Police 57. The Psychic Detective Challenge Play It: Download MP3 (15:00 min.) Read It: Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and on today’s episode we’re going to look at a topic that I haven’t touched on in quite some time, and that is psychic detective work. The idea, of course, of psychics and law enforcement working together to solve crimes. In particular, we’re going to focus on how that work is reported in the media. Hey, by the way, what do you think of the title of this episode? The title again is “Science Journalist Ben Radford Believes Psychic Detective.” Let me tell you how I put that together. See, I took the first part, which is true—Ben Radford is a science journalist, so I took that, Ben Radford, science journalist. And then I took the part that I wished was true, “Believes Psychic Detective,” and I added that onto the end and I got a good title. A title that I wanted. Now, of course, some of you would object to a title like this because if you’ve ever heard Ben Radford or read much of what he’s written in various science sites, then you know that he’s a hard-core skeptic. He’s a guy that goes out of his way to debunk these psychic detectives. Hey, but then again it’s been shown that 87% of what these skeptical science journalists generate is just plain wrong. Okay. I don’t know if that’s really true. I just kind of made that figure up. I mean, it sure feels true to me, but I don’t know if it’s really true. And for those of you who have listened to this show for a long time, you might have figured out by now what I’m really getting at here. See, a couple of years ago, I did a fairly lengthy investigation of psychic detective work with Ben Radford. It’s taken a while. It’s taken two years, but you know, next week I’m going to have a chance to do an interview with Ben Radford again, and hopefully close the loop on some of that work that we did. In advance of doing that, I wanted to kind of reintroduce you to the work that we did back then because I think it really paints a broader picture of some of the problems that we’ve talked about on this show. Really, it points back to the big picture change that we’ve made on this show in terms of saying, “Hey, you know what? It’s not about the data. It’s about all the other stuff other than the data.” I know that’s a little abstract, so let me bring it down to a concrete example here, with this case that I did with Ben Radford. After spending a good month and hours and hours of interviews with police detectives, who you’ll hear in a minute, and the psychic herself, who you’ll hear in a minute, and presenting this information to Ben in the most concrete, straightforward way, we were then faced with Ben turning around and completely misrepresenting—directly misrepresenting—what was said by the detectives in another broadcast. I think what that really calls into question is this broader issue of who can we trust? Can we trust the gatekeepers of science, the self-appointed gatekeepers of science, who are the skeptical science journalists like Ben Radford? So with that as a bit of an introduction, let me replay for you one of the points that was raised during this long, drawn-out,
