When the Seer is Blind
by Jeremy Foster

Quackery has always been a risky commodity. Just ask Sylvia Browne. When she appeared for her usual guest spot on the Montel Williams show in 2003, she told the parents of missing Shawn Hornbeck that their son was dead. The supposed clairvoyance both shattered their hopes and stifled the then ongoing police investigation of their son's disappearance. But all was not dismal. Sylvia had visions of where their son might be and described his captor as a Hispanic man with dreadlocks. A month later, according to the once closure-hungry parents, she allegedly called them with an offer to continue the discussion at her usual exorbitant rate of $700 per hour. The parents couldn't afford it.

When 15-year-old Shawn Hornbeck was found alive two weeks ago and his captor turned out to not fit Browne's description, the fallibility of her powers once again reared its ugly head. No doubt Browne's PR department has mastered the art of mitigating the inevitable blunders that come with their ever-precarious line of work. But given the high-profile, emotionally-charged nature of the story, one wonders if — and hopes — damage-control here is no longer possible. In the past, Browne has missed the mark with her predictions but has always gotten away with it by tactfully disappearing from the public eye until the confusion and embarrassment caused by her psychic misnomers subsided. She is pulling the same parlor trick now. When CNN's Anderson Cooper recently reported on Browne's Hornbeck misreading, she rebuffed the invitation to defend herself on the show — a tacit admission that she has no defense — and merely released her usual statement about not being "God," a surprising defense given the smug confidence she exudes during her readings.

Imagine if she did have the omniscience of God. Not only was Bill Clinton never impeached, because it turned out he was falsely accused of having an affair with Monica Lewinsky, but he was never President from 1993 to 1997 after being soundly defeated by George H.W. Bush in the 1992 presidential election. Breast cancer was cured in 1999, Michael Jackson is now sitting in jail after being convicted of molestation charges in 2005, and the world no longer seethed in suspense when Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt finally announced they were having a child.

But Browne is not popular for her prediction of world events. Those are somehow mostly forgotten. She is popular as a sooth-saying oracle who gives vague readings to people hoping to connect to deceased loved ones. After all, she has neither the formal credentials or the clean rap-sheet to break into the rosy psychiatry of a Dr. Phil. So she took the other route straight into the lucrative market of psychics.

A September Baylor University study found that 13 percent of Americans believe in the power of psychics. Given that the population of the United States is at 300 million people, that means there are millions of potential customers. And with the times relatively anxious — Sept. 11, the Iraq war, the rising gap between the rich and poor, the divorce rate, Katrina, etc. — what believers wouldn't fork over some money to see the future, especially when their friends did it and came back with some rosy forecasts?

What's more unsettling than the viability of her line of work is the great extent to which Browne have been propped up by a ratings-hungry media, even as her credibility has whittled over the years. Who cares that she appeared on Larry King Live just days before Sept. 11 and failed to forecast two jetliners crashing into the World Trade Center. Or that during the minute-by-minute news updates on the 2006 Sago Mine Disaster, Sylvia was on a radio show smugly telling the host after it was mistakenly reported 12 of the 13 miners had been found alive that she "knew they were going to be found," quipping moments later that she hated "people who say something after the fact." By "people" she clearly excluded herself, because when it became apparent that the contrary was true, that 12 of the 13 miners had died, Sylvia danced around her previous statement with, "Yeah, but see I never... I didn't believe that they were alive." Like many times where the elephant was in the living room, the host was either too naive or too embarrassed to press her on the contradiction.

Some might argue that it is incredibly naive to expect talk show hosts such as Montel Williams and Larry King to act responsibly and demand that Browne's supposed powers be tested (she refused to take up a challenge by professional skeptic James Randi, citing his godlessness) before giving her a forum to increase her book sales and inflate her consultation rates, given that she's a big ratings booster. The Hornbeck case shows why that argument is no longer feasible. When supposed psychic powers purports to give hope by shredding it, when it jeopardizes an investigation, when the faces of a couple sink in grief after being told a shameful lie, the argument for ratings becomes downright immoral.

E-mail Jeremy Foster at jcarlosfoster at gmail dot com.