{"id":881,"date":"2008-08-07T10:28:36","date_gmt":"2008-08-07T10:28:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/?p=881"},"modified":"2008-08-07T10:28:36","modified_gmt":"2008-08-07T10:28:36","slug":"sensing-moider","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/?p=881","title":{"rendered":"Sensing Moider"},"content":{"rendered":"

Media7, the neat mediawatching TV show led by Kiwi blog legend Russell Brown, trained its eye on NZ’s crime-‘n-psychics hit, Sensing Murder.
\nSensing Murder is one of the (relatively few) things that divides our happy household. The lovely stronger light<\/a> is fond of the show, while I can’t stand it. I have been enthusiastic about other spooky psychic shows, such as Most Haunted<\/a>. Heck, I even participated in table tipping with the Most Haunted crew on one occasion<\/a>. The difference between Sensing Murder and Most Haunted, as Stronger has identified, is the element of exploitation. Sensing Murder revisits recent unsolved violent crimes, talks to all the friends and family of the victims, and films lurid re-enactments of the psychic’s visions of this final demise. It all leaves a very bad taste in my mouth.
\nAnd I don’t for a moment think the psychics are convincing. The basic method is that a psychic turns up and is followed around by a film crew as they “feel” their way through the case. The show proudly announces at the beginning, “Only true statements from the psychics are affirmed!”, oblivious to the fact that this process is a cold reader’s dream setup – they throw out guesses, get the right ones confirmed, and discard the wrong ones. (At least, I hope the show is oblivious to this, because otherwise they’re being outright deceptive, and that’s just not on.) I suspect that the psychics are all genuine people who believe in their abilities, and even if they engage in a bit of cheating they’d just rationalise this as “helping things along”.
\nAnyway, the episode features the show’s producer taking on NZ media satirist Jeremy Wells, who outright calls the psychics “charlatans” who are deluding people for cash. I was interested to hear that the format is an import, but this is the first country where the show became popular – in other markets it has vanished from the airwaves. It’s a good watch if you’re interested in this sort of thing, and can be found on TVNZ OnDemand<\/a> and YouTube<\/a>. See also the Media7 blog<\/a> and Russell’s Hard News blog<\/a>.
\nFurther reading: Stephen Judd explains why he is offended by the show<\/a> and the infamous “skeptic becomes believer” episode deconstructed<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Media7, the neat mediawatching TV show led by Kiwi blog legend Russell Brown, trained its eye on NZ’s crime-‘n-psychics hit, Sensing Murder. Sensing Murder is one of the (relatively few) things that divides our happy household. The lovely stronger light is fond of the show, while I can’t stand it. I have been enthusiastic about … Continue reading Sensing Moider<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-881","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mediawatch"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8D9ZE-ed","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/881","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=881"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/881\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}