CBC Strives for Supermarket Tabloid Status

As a source of credible journalism, CBC used to be one of the standards by which other media measured themselves. It was reliable, honest, and responsible. Oh, how far CBC has fallen from that perch. Decades of (mostly CONservative-implemented) cuts to reporting and editing staff, egregious layoffs too often in parallel with high executive bonuses ($14.9 million paid to roughly 1,100 people in 2023), coupled with an executive management which has clearly lost focus and has been flailing about aimlessly have taken their inevitable toll on the once-great Canadian institution.

This week, CBC scraped a new low in the barrel of flaccid, tabloid journalism, with an article titled, “Can a pet psychic read your pet’s mind? More animal owners looking for connection while skeptics cast doubt.” This headline was soon watered down in a second post to read “Why are pet psychics on the rise? More Canadians spending to have psychics read pets’ minds.” Regardless of the belated attempt to seem less like the National Enquirer, the whole article is below even the standards of a supermarket tabloid.

If CBC had a competent editor, the word psychic would be enclosed in quotations because it’s not a real thing. But this isn’t the first time CBC has pandered to the tabloid audience with stories about so-called psychics: search popped up many other stories, several feeding off this one with headlines like “Psychic pet reading offers comfort” and “Meg Vickell explains how she communicates with animals,” and “Psychic Pet Detective.” Clearly, the corporation’s standards in journalism and editorial oversight have fallen far from what I expect for such pieces of claptrap to be published.

And those “skeptics” in the original headline? Just one guy: an American named Kenny Biddle, described only as a “paranormal investigator at the Centre for Inquiry in Amherst, N.Y.” Nothing in the article about his educational background, academic qualifications, experience, or even what the Centre itself does, not even a link to the Center’s website for people to explore the qualifications, their mission, and decide for themselves if they’re credible.*

This is such lame journalism you’d almost think it came from our flaccid local media, not from the nationwide public broadcaster.

Biddle is quoted saying, “There is no communication happening. They are just taking your money.” And at $500 for a house call, that’s a lot of money for what is basically bullshit.

Yes: bullshit. Spoiler alert: there is no such thing as a psychic, pet or otherwise. No one can read minds, no one can speak to the dead, there is no magical aura, no telepathic energy floating around. Period.

It’s a self-applied label used by con artists to relieve the gullible, the vulnerable, and the hard-of-thinking of their money. It’s not a paranormal ability: it’s a grift. And reading the minds of pets? Believing that piffle is up there with believing Donald Trump won the 2020 election or that Pierre PoiLIEvre wants to help Canadians. It’s a pretty special kind of stupid to fall for any of it.**

“This is like selling snake oil. It’s a story as old as time. Psychics aren’t new and they also aren’t real,” Kenny Biddle, a paranormal investigator at the Centre for Inquiry in Amherst, N.Y., said.

But yet, according to the story, a lot of hard-of-thinking folks with too much disposable income on their hands happily shell out $500 for a home visit from a pooch quack. A Toronto Star story from 2023 featured a pet “psychic” who charges $550 to “read the minds of cats, dogs, even bearded dragons.” There are hundreds of sites online from people offering pet “psychic” services, all for a cost of course. Most appear no better than a telephone or email scam, but why aren’t the media like CBC or The Star exposing and debunking it? Why aren’t these self-described psychics held up to measurable standards? Asked to provide verifiable proof, not just anecdotes and unsubstantiated claims?

As Richard Dawkins wrote back in 1996:

…scientists are required to back up their claims not with private feelings but with publicly checkable evidence. Their experiments must have rigorous controls to eliminate spurious effects… Paranormal phenomena have a habit of going away whenever they are tested under rigorous conditions… Why don’t the television editors insist on some equivalently rigorous test? Could it be that they believe the alleged paranormal powers would evaporate and bang go the ratings?
Consider this. If a paranormalist could really give an unequivocal demonstration of telepathy (precognition, psychokinesis, reincarnation, whatever it is), he would be the discoverer of a totally new principle unknown to physical science. The discoverer of the new energy field that links mind to mind in telepathy, or of the new fundamental force that moves objects around a table top, deserves a Nobel prize and would probably get one. If you are in possession of this revolutionary secret of science, why not prove it and be hailed as the new Newton? Of course, we know the answer. You can’t do it. You are a fake… The universe is a strange and wondrous place. The truth is quite odd enough to need no help from pseudo-scientific charlatans. The public appetite for wonder can be fed, through the powerful medium of television, without compromising the principles of honesty and reason.

Part of the general dumbing down of the world — and the reason so many people fall for conspiracies, scams, grifts, flat-earthers, anti-GMO diets, homeopaths, anti-vaxxers, climate-changed-is-a-hoax, and Trump’s lies — is because media is not rigorously debunking such claims or providing sources for evidence-based counterpoint. Many people don’t know what to believe in the clamour of competing voices, all given equal attention and credibility on social media.

In this article, you have to read well past the claims from the alleged psychics, more than halfway through the article before you even reach the comments by the single skeptic. And while the “psychics” are given wide rage to tout their “successes” and ramble on about “telepathic energy,” none are required to provide verifiable evidence or submit to any scientific testing to prove their claims. CBC just allows them to advertise their scams via the story.

Here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter what you believe. What matters is whether it is factual. It doesn’t matter how it makes you feel. What matters is whether the claims are backed by solid evidence. And anecdote is not evidence. As Thomas Huxley wrote in 1886, it is important that we “give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions for things beyond the possibilities of knowledge.”

Notes:

* They are credible, even if they do not provide what I would consider essential for public assessment: bios of their investigators. Their mission statement says they are “dedicated to defending science and critical thinking in examining religion. CFI’s vision is a world in which evidence, science, and compassion—rather than superstition, pseudoscience, or prejudice—guide public policy.” It also “strives to foster a society free of the dogmatic influence of religion and pseudoscience; a society inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment, the wonders of science, and the limitless potential of human intelligence and creativity; a society in which beliefs are not granted the same rights as people, where the freedom of expression is enjoyed by all, and all ideas are open to the scrutiny of reason.”

Biddle is listed on their website as “Chief Investigator, Committee for Skeptical Inquiry” without explaining anywhere what that is, who else is involved, where they publish any results, what the criteria for investigation are.

** There are legitimate animal behaviourists who study how animals communicate. Some work specifically with dogs and they have an association of professionals called the International Association of Animal Behavior Consultants. They offer “internationally recognized credentials in Dog, Cat, Equine, Parrot and Shelter behavior.” On their website they offer an interactive map to find a certified consultant in your area. The American Kennel Club has a page on hiring a proper animal behaviourist, warning:

The only people officially titled “animal behaviorists” are those certified by the Animal Behavior Society (ABS). The ABS offers two levels of certification. Associate Certified Applied Animal Behaviorists have a Master’s Degree in a biological or behavioral science and at least two years of professional experience in the field. Certified Applied Animal Behaviorists have a doctorate in biological or behavioral science with five years of professional experience in the field.

Wikipedia adds,

Skeptical investigator Benjamin Radford wrote about this topic in 2012 and said: “Even though thousands of people claim to be able to communicate with animals, there hasn’t been a single scientific test proving their abilities. Professional pet psychics often sell books and teach seminars about their power, but don’t prove that they can actually do what they claim.” Radford also outlined a simple 3-step test that would provide proof of this claimed ability, but predicted that pet psychics would always fail such a test.

And from a Psychology Today about debunking “psychics”:

People may also be taken in by other kinds of thinking errors well known to psychologists, such as clustering illusion, bandwagon effects, and confirmation bias. So the acceptance of psychics’ claims by vulnerable people is better explained by thinking errors than by the truth of the psychics’ claims… People have looked for good scientific evidence for paranormal phenomena since at least the 19th century, but apparent successes can be explained by incompetence or fraud or error rather than by the actual occurrence of paranormal phenomena.

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