Randi appeared on Anderson Cooper with Sylvia Brown’s business manager last night. You can watch it here: JREF - Home
Cooper was clearly on Randi’s side. It was almost like Randi was unaccustomed to being interviewed so sympathetically. You could see him correcting himself when he said something like, “what you’ve done here . . . or what is often done here, I should say, is to selectively pick and choose her hits.” He starts off instinctively with the accusation before he realizes, “oh, wait, this guy’s on my side” :).
This clip of Sylvia Browne on Montel is just classic (and owuld be funny if it weren’t so heartbreaking-- she tries to make a 9/11 widow look bad. Nice.)
He’s pretty much always like that. The difficulty that he (and all skeptics, for that matter) face in this sort of debate is that he knows damn well his targets almost certainly can’t do anything paranormal and that a large proportion of his targets are not even deluded, they are knowing frauds. However, if he ever makes a positive statement of that sort, he will get asked to justify it and it is very difficult to prove a negative or to prove someone’s knowledge.
Consequently, Randi always tries to stick to pointing out that there is no evidence that these people can do what they say, and that what they do is explicable in terms of trickery, but he always tries to stop short of ever saying they can’t do what they say and are performing trickery. However, positive accusations on his part (understandably) bubble just below the surface, and he does slip up semi-regularly.