Medium on Sci-Fi

S

Silas

asimovbot
Registered Senior Member
Anybody watching this? Let's leave aside the TV show aspect - Patricia Arquette is very attractive, and it's agreeably put together, and it's always great seeing dead people.

But the person the show is based on is a "real" medium, who claims to do what the TV woman does, ie work for her local police force on a regular basis. And what makes it worse is that this real Allison DuBois actually appears in little teasers herself to promote the show. Ironically, of course, Patricia Arquette, while very attractive, looks like a normal human being, whereas Allison DuBois looks like a top end TV star, with her perfectly groomed looks and two-tone hair colour.

My thing is, did it not occur to anybody at the TV studio that making a show about a real medium - any real medium - is just a timebomb waiting to go off? Every medium is a fraud, and sooner or later they all get exposed.

So anybody else taking much notice of this show?
 
All TV shows to a greater or lesser extent are dumbing-down exercises... My university tutor told of one year's students endlessly quoting X Files as a source "because it says at the start of the show that each episode is based on real FBI cases, so it MUST be true", CSI, etc etc.
Bread and circuses... At least The Simpsons never pretends to be anything other than entertainment.
 
Some people don't believe that all mediums are not frauds. Most people who claim to be psychic are not really, but that doesn't mean an individual who says they are psychic and say things that convince people they are is a fraud. I think people at the T.V studio know this and believe there are real psychics.
 
Just read your own comments in the thread about Star Trek, Star Wars and Star Gate:-
At times they can be sleek and fool people, but people should get smarter.
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Look at http://skeptically.org/spiritualism/id10.html
Ontario Provincial Police Commissioner (41 years with the Ontario Police) as saying, "A psychic never to my knowledge has solved a case"
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"I always talk to psychics, though. They generally seem sincere to me, though none has ever helped me on a case"
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Twelve psychics participated in the double-blind ex*periment. Two solved crimes and two unsolved crimes were selected by an investigator not involved in the research. The results: little, if any, information was gained from the psychics that would help in the investigation of the crimes.
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Each psychic was allowed to establish what he or she considered to be fair conditions. Later, the same cases were given to students and they made guesses. Each group scored according to chance. Says Lucas: "We may as well have opened fortune cookies to derive solutions to our criminal cases"
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And most tellingly -
The police departments of the 50 largest U.S. cities were surveyed about their use of ‘psychics.’ Nearly two-thirds have never used psychics. None said psychics provided information more useful than that from other sources. Some comments were quite negative.
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(My italics).
Yep, people should think more - a depressingly large number of them don't think at all.
 
There are many psychics working for the FBI, they had to work really hard to prove that they are for real. Today they get paid to help out on a case.
And I didn't get the idea that psychics are real from just T.V and Hollywood. i look around and research in other palces as well and form my own opinion.
 
I'm so so tired of hearing this same kind of response. Someone provides actual evidence that there's nothing to it, and all you get is "there are many psychics working for the FBI they had to work really hard to prove they are for real." There clearly aren't any psychics working for the FBI, primarily because in properly conducted experiments like the one described, no usable results were obtained. If on the other hand the FBI are using so-called "psychics", the experiments described by Oli are a sure indication that they are simply wasting their money.

But as a matter of fact, I simply think that Sgal made it up out of whole cloth. He believes that psychics are being used in law enforcement, and therefore writes a completely unbacked statement to the effect that there are "many" such people, and that they work for the FBI. This actually betrays a lack of knowledge of what the FBI are and how they work. In America sadly it is really not unlikely that a local police force in one rural county might make use of a professed psychic, but it is the height of impossibility for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the national government police, to do so.
 
Sqal:
There are many psychics working for the FBI,
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Google result 1:
http://members.aol.com/garypos/Renier_chap_pt2.html
"Merrell wanted to know whether the FBI used psychics in our investigative process. And I told him that was absolutely something I wouldn't discuss, but, in reality, we don't."
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Google result 2:
http://www.courttv.com/news/hiddentraces/sidebars/psychicside.html
While some law enforcement agencies say they do not employ the use of psychics — the FBI forbids it — others across the country seek out their help when investigations stall.
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My italics in borh quotes.
Wow I wonder who I believe...
 
The local police force were the ones suspicious of psychics at first because they are a smaller unit then other bigger crime agencies and psychics were really not taken seriously until recently by the majority of the people. The FBI are the ones looking into it more and more.
 
The FBI are the ones looking into it more and more.
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Re-read the quote above in my post. THE FBI FORBIDS IT.
More quotes
"Zero. They go on TV and I see how things go and what they claim but no, zero," says FBI agent Chris Whitcomb. "They may be remarkable in other ways, but the FBI does not use them"
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from http://skepdic.com/psychdet.html
"These guys don't solve cases, and the media consistently gets it wrong," says Michael Corn, an investigative producer for Inside Edition who produced a story last May debunking psychic detectives. Moreover, the FBI and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children maintain that to their knowledge, psychic detectives have never helped solve a single missing-person case.
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from http://skepdic.com/refuge/bunk15.html
The FBI responded by explaining that "Although the Bureau has never contracted psychics as consultants, it is possible that individual Special Agents may have encountered people who have volunteered information based on their psychic impressions [which] would be handled in the same manner as leads obtained from other sources. The FBI does not endorse or recommend the use of psychics in law enforcement
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from http://www.csicop.org/klassfiles/fbi_klass.html
Note that last phrasing. "Psychics" may have given individual agents "information", but it's treated exactly the same way any other lead is treated.
Edited for spelling
 
Silas said:
My thing is, did it not occur to anybody at the TV studio that making a show about a real medium - any real medium - is just a timebomb waiting to go off? Every medium is a fraud, and sooner or later they all get exposed.
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There are tons of those out now, how can you have missed?
Of course, one have a sneaky suspicion that those shows are staged. But who knows? They've made it a living anyway, as good as any. Tv-meduim, sound like a good job to me.
These shows will maybe encuorage real mediums to contact the police more often, instead of Hollywood.

But I love the Medium series, it has a very pleasant feeling to it, with the family life and all, the cute little Bridget.
Did anybody see her at Jay Leno? Very bizarre child, gave the impression of an adult..maybe she's a midget?
:D
 
It's pretty simple, people watch television for entertainment and thats exactly what that show is. If people treat it any different than entertainment then they really need to do a "reality check".

A simple method if you aren't too sure if a television studio is truly backing any of these outrageous claims is to send them a letter asking them if it's real or just pure entertainment, admittedly they probably wont reply but they might on the offchance just tell you. "It's not real, it's just televised entertainment"... Or they might tell you to stop wasting their time and read the credits for legal disclaimers.
 
I have to admit I was extremely tempted with one, however during another show where they were pretty much pointing out the guilibility of viewers, one of the people from the "Most Haunted" series pretty much stated it was a farce. However alot of people believed it to be real.
 
Yes, Most haunted is so fake, anyone can see that. The nightvision cameras and all...the extremely crazy and twitchy meduim, with glowing eyes..of course.
 
The question if psychics are real or not is debatable because there are as many people who believe then those who are skeptic. The question is always being argued. Yes the the T.V studio put this series on air for entertainment and I will say just like everything else. But it was also put on to show the believers side of the arguement and because it is always being argued.
 
It's just good marketing to buy into an already structure genre. Just look at the "Market Share", how many other programs on television depict mediums in some form of Parapsychological use??? Simple answer, none other I can think of. Therefore it has 100% of the "Market Share".

The suits that sit inside the offices that decide television planning don't think "I know lets tell that side of a story", what they really thing is "Is there an audience for that? and if so how big of one?" If the audience is too small then the likelihood of such things becoming more than an arguement for the Believers is moot.
 
The reason it has alot of Market share is because this is one of the few times that psychics are being depicted in a good light. And also a show like this has not been done very often. So people are happy that more attention is being called to the topic. Another example would be The Dead Zone.
 
they started showing this program here in belgium a few weeks ago.....
its like csi: miami....but with the chick from "nightmare on elm street 3" in it.

oh yeah, and vague unrealistic psychic powers as well. cant forget that.
 
The way psychics see things is new to people. That's because this is one of the few times its being shown. They just want to show one of the ways a psychic can see things. Whether or not the particular gift the medium has in the show is real or not. It could be similar to the real thing.
 
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