I’d laugh if he was being told all the information by a radio operator, and say the radio operato played a litle april fools trick and made him say:
E: ‘Em, I’m getting a, em, a message It begins with yd’
E:does anyones name begin with d or a family members?
E:anyone?
E:Ok, now I’m getting the word ‘head’ anyones name or family member recognise this word?
The crowd: Yeah, you dickhead !
A bit off the subject, but has anybody else noticed that John Edward has an abnormally small mouth?
But to compensate for that he talks out of both ends at the same time.
This is from www.skeptic.com They have a good e-newsletter that covers topic such as this, as well as other topics relating to science and political agendas that are biased against science (Darwin in the classrooms etc).
COLD READING ON ABC
If you didn’t see the wonderful show on ABC television Halloween night here is a short summary of it from ABCNews.com. Ian Rowland did a show for us at Caltech as part of one of our conferences, and he has a brilliant book out about Cold Reading. You should contact him about getting a copy of it at ian@irowland.demon.co.uk
I’ll first say I don’t believe in psychics. Having said that, I think there has to be more to it than just cold reading. People have mentioned in the thread that John just gives initials but I’ve seen him use specific names from the start. I think the audience would have to be in on this or he had prior information.
On one episode I watched, he said he was to tease the audience member for not stopping for the deceased on the way to the hospital when she (the deceased) had to go to the bathroom. I don’t see how that came from a cold reading.
One other thing I’ve seen is that John will describe an audience member’s house, “When you enter your house you can go upstairs or downstairs, if you go downstairs, there is a poster on the wall just to the right on some floral wallpaper, he (the deceased) is drawing my attention to the poster.” I don’t get this either, unless the entire thing is a lie.
I guess for me, even if all of the above were real, I still don’t see what the point is in all of this. He doesn’t tell anyone anything worth while IMHO. I don’t see how knowing my dead dad likes a poster, or how my dead grandmother thinks it’s funny I didn’t wait for her to pee really means much.
Well, those little details make his act seem more convincing. After all, anybody could hazard a guess as to how somebody died, but to know about the poster or the peeing incident makes it seem as though he’s getting real info that nobody else would know.
You’re right that there’s more to it than cold reading. As others have said above, many of the things he says come from his staff listening to the people in line, or filling out a questionnare.
Still, remember that the trick to cold reading is to feed out small guesses and let the other person fill in the details. If it’s done well, it looks like the person is just confirming something the sickic had already said.
Another one from www.skeptic.com
Deconstructing The Dead: Cross Over One Last Time To Expose Medium John Edward By Michael Shermer
If there were a chance in hell that this dude had a connection to the afterlife, the Pentagon would have him sitting in a room waiting to see whether or not bin Laden had showed up yet.
He’s a scumsucking con artist. Period.
Oh yeah? When he contacted my dead grandmother, she said he was a fake! So there! 
A couple of weeks ago MAD TV did a parody of JE. Here’s an excerpt.
The whole thing is at JREF - Home
Umm, sj2, I wasn’t able to get beyond the title page in your link, because that site evidently wants the full article to be available only to subscribers. Not having $30US available to drop, I decided against subscribing, so I can’t tell for CERTAIN that your post above is the entire article. Still, that’s the way I’m betting, because otherwise I can’t tell where Michael Shermer’s writing ends and yours begins.
The point is that absent specific permission from the owners of the skepticdotcom site to reprint their content, the Chicago Reader (our host on this message board) does not want to bear an legal liability that would accrue due to having Skeptic Magazine’s copyrighted material reproduced here for the eyes of people who haven’t paid to see it.
Please understand me: I found it fascinating reading in and of itself, and it is valuable information for fighters of ignorance to have available, but…it’s not your intellectual property to distribute, so it’s going to have to go.
Welcome to the Straight Dope. Do yourself a favor, and go back and carefully read the conditions of use agreement you assented to when you joined, then come on back and help us stomp on some ignorance. 
Maybe this is a nitpick but his name is actually John Edward Magee Jr.
There is a link directly on the homepage with the title Deconstructing The Dead: Cross Over One Last Time To Expose Medium John Edward. When you click on “More” a new window pops up to give you the whole article.
Moderator’s Note: sj2, please don’t post entire articles from other sites on the SDMB. I’ve replaced the text of the articles you posted with links to the sites the articles originally came from.
ahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaa too funy…
Im sensing a Q…does anyone know anyone with the letter Q…(i shouldve finished that scam school…I want my money back)
[unwanted and possibly unwarranted hijack] Ryan, can you please slow down a little bit and give us the chance to get to know you? Right now you’re heading towards the record of “most new threads posted by a newbie immediately after joining”. This is not a good record to hold.
Believe me, we have noticed that you have joined the SDMB. I - for one - would like to give serious consideration to some of the issues you’ve raised in the threads you’ve started. They are topics worthy of discussion by newbies and “oldbies” alike.
But right now it’s starting to look like you’re posting new topics for the sake of doing so. That’s not how it works around here. While we’re a community of well over 20,000 people, most of us won’t just “jump in” with a response to your posts in the “factual” fora. We’ll generally let your post go unaddressed secure in the knowledge that one of our “resident experts” in the field will respond with the FACTS when they see you post rather than give you the “instant gratification” of multiple, uninformed opinions.[unwanted and possibly unwarranted hijack]
So kick back for a while. Realise that not every person who could give you a definitive answer lives in your time zone or has 24 free hours per day to respond to your question.
And a big, hearty “welcome to the boards” - please just understand that the “best” answer to your question may come from someone who only logs on once per week.
Apparently for each half hour show, they do 6 hours of taping; some of the shows are pretty crap for 6 hours of taping. Plus people who have been on have reported that they have heavily edited episodes so they’re not tomporally consistent anymore. (ie, they stick bits of the end of the show at the start for TV etc.)
I’ve hear he does hot readings aswell. How long is the waiting list to get on the show? They have the little session in between where they go over the hits John gets during the show. They have news paper clippings and stuff of the accidents that he is supposed to have learnt about from “the other side”. Information that you can get at any library… It’s pretty dodgy.
Okay, I confess: I jumped to a conclusion. Based on the fact that EVERY article I tried to open with the “More” arrow led to a “cannot find” error message, I concluded that this result was preset by the site owners to occur to anyone who tried to open the articles without being a paid-up subscriber.
However, this was only a minor point in my post, and I only included it to give myself an “out” in the event that I was mistaken about the entire article having been reproduced. As it transpired, my intuition was on target. The main thrust of my post was to give sj2 up about the policy he was violating, and I was trying to do it in such a way as to give him the benefit of the doubt as to his lack of awareness of that.
I’m posting from a different computer right now, so I think I’ll go back to skepticsdotcom and try to read some of those articles. Thank you for letting me know I’m likely to succeed.
“'T’ain’t funny, Magee . . .”
Ian Rowland, the SDMB’s very own ianzin, has already done a pretty thorough hachet job on Edwards.
I haven’t seen this specific guy, but I’ve seen other psychics and they’ve failed to impress me. I haven’t seen one who’s half as good as Derren Brown. And he doesn’t believe in psychic powers. The website there has some simple examples of what he does, but believe me, the TV programmes are much more impressive. If he claimed to have mystical powers, I’d probably believe him!
Hmm…now someone is going to tell me all his stuff is a setup! Better not be…