In another thread, Bosda Di’Chi of Tricor posted a link to this story by someone who used to work for her, so to speak.
Cool! I always wondered how these psychic rip-off places work.
On a local talk show, they got on the subject of TV psychics and were happily tearing them apart, when a girl called in who used to write the scripts for Miss Cleo to use and commented that the whole thing was a big scam.
Imagine the cash these companies make if they can pay their callers $12 an hour, plus additional funds for ‘supervisors’, and the cost of making and showing those TV ads, as well as whatever Miss. Cleo herself makes.
I still find it so astonishing that TV stations will allow this sort of crap to advertise along with all that other crap like ‘positive ion bombarded healing bracelets for just $49.95, like most of the great athletes wear’ (and they cannot actually name any) but find advertising condoms as immoral and degrading.
So, it’s cool to rip people off, working on their frailties, insecurities and stupidity, but not cool to advertise ways that encourage them to wear a simple device to prevent babies and disease.
The entertainment network moralities are strange.
Are you really surprised by that? After all Television is the same industry that thinks nudity and sexuality is immoral but random acts of violence to solve disputes and real videos of people suffering is acceptable entertainment
If you’d like more insight into how these psychic hotlines work, This American Life (an NPR show) ran a disturbing yet hilarious piece a few years ago with a writer who had worked for one. Go here and fast forward to the 39th minute:
http://www.thislife.org/ra/86.ram
(actually this whole show, entitled “Taking others people’s money” is worth listening to.)
I don’t know, but she sure is annoying.
I once asked my sister, while watching one of Miss Cleo’s commercials, whether or not she learned English from Jar Jar Binks…
I for one believe wholeheartedly that Ms. Cleo’s Jamaican accent is every bit as authentic as Tina Turner’s.
No particular insight on Miss Cleo. However…
In another lifetime, I was a radio talk show host for about 10 years (I’m now ashamed to admit this, but for scientific purposes, I’ll carry on).
For several of those years, I somehow – I honestly don’t remember how – got hooked up with a psychic who made monthly appearances on my show.
Some random observations on that experience:
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I have no belief in psychic abilities whatsoever, of course.
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I think the main reason I countenenced the whole enterprise was the personal charm of the psychic herself. She was a 40-ish, full-figured woman who favored exotically colored caftans. Despite an attempt at a certain mysticism, she was basically down-to-earth, and conversed in quite a normal way that wouldn’t have raised any alarms if you didn’t know what her gig was. My wife (at the time) and I actually went out to dinner with her a couple of times, and enjoyed her company.
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On the flip side, she undercut her “normalcy” a bit by intimating that she regularly consulted with certain Hollywood celebrities, and had on a couple of occasions been to the White House for personal consultations with the President (Reagan at the time). Yeah, I know Nancy was into astrology…but still, I tended to disbelieve this.
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I think she sincerely believed in what she was doing, as opposed to being someone who was just perpetrating a huge scam and laughing all the way to the bank.
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Laughing or not, that where she headed. She advertised personal consultations on my show, and would periodically come to town and set up in a hotel room, where the price was 50 bucks for a half hour.
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Someone earlier said psychics “just tell people positive stuff they want to hear.” Not this one – I blanched on several occasions when she flat-out told callers “Your husband is running around on you.” She also tended to lose patience with callers who were excessively whiny, giving several of them fairly good tongue-lashings when they moaned that they could do nothing to change their circumstances.
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She did turn over a big deck of standard playing cards while talking to people on the air, but said she did this mainly as sort of a “distraction.” Only rarely did she tell a caller “Well, this card just came up, so it means this…”
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There were certainly occasions when she would tell a caller something about a circumstance in his or her life and would be met by “My God, that’s exactly right! How did you know that?” But I suppose anyone might do this from time-to-time just by chance. While I don’t think she was psychic, I do believe she was acutely sensitive to people’s voices and how they spoke. I suspect that gave her a lot of clues.
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Whatever I may personally have thought, there is no question that her monthly appearances were far and away the most popular shows I did. The phones lit up and never stopped, starting from the moment the show that preceded mine ended. Needless to say, the burning issues of the day rarely generated that kind of fervent participation.
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A final thought…for all of her psychic abilities, she incorrectly predicted the sex of my only child before he was born. She also gave no indication of knowing just how troubled my marriage was in the last couple of years – though I suppose she could have sensed it and just not said anything out of discretion.
So did she really help people? Probably…at least some of them. As the linked story in the Nashville newspaper indicates, psychics are a form of a low-rent psychiatry for those who couldn’t afford someone with credentials. It’s probably better that they talk to someone than no one.
Did she do more harm than good for others? God, I hope not.