But Can She Find The News & Record’s Brain?

Greensboro is a pretty big city, as far as North Carolina goes.  But its newspaper, the News & Record, still reflects those good old -fashioned values of yesteryear.  No newfangled sciency stuff will be found, no siree.

For instance, there is no religion section – because the religion section is found in the front section.  This last Saturday, religion was placed before national and world news, which is telling. 

Of four letters to the editor, two were written by conservatives, and one by a real fringe guy (claiming that President Obama had “openly joined with those who want to destroy our way of life” and was “providing aid and comfort to our enemies”), which tells you something about the News & Record’s reader base.

So, yes, I think the Greensboro News & Record caters to the irrational beliefs of the public, including those who believe in psychic powers.  One article in particular caught my eye, because it’s about a psychic who lives in my town.  Her name is Deborah Heinecker, and her story not only appeared in what passes for a major newspaper in these parts, but was put on the front page.

The author of the article, Jonnelle Davis, writes about Heinecker as if psychic powers actually exist, even though there has never been any scientifically valid evidence of telepathy or channeling, let alone the existence of spirits in the first place.

Put yourself in the place of the reporter.  Pretend you’re suppose to actually be finding out the truth of things.  Then make a list of what you might have done differently from what you read below:

(H)einecker read a newspaper article about a missing police dog and feared the dog would die of dehydration in the heat.
No picture accompanied the article she read. But she got a vision of a reddish-brown dog in a wooded area.

“God just kept saying, 'You need to go find that dog,’” Heinecker said.

Police readily accepted Heinecker’s offer of help when she called them. She sat in the back of the cruiser where the dog rode and directed officers to a wooded area near a state park. The animal was exactly where she told officers it would be.

“The dog ran right up to me and licked me like he knew that I was the one that led them to him,” Heinecker said.

Heinecker took no money for that case, but told Montgomery County authorities she wanted to remain anonymous.

So… we are supposed to accept the following:

• Psychic powers exist and people can use them to discover things.
• God – the all-knowing, all-powerful ruler of the ENTIRE FLIPPING COSMOS – speaks directly to a woman in an obscure North Carolina town to encourage her to find a lost dog.
• The police accepted the offer of a psychic.  (This may be true, but even so, doesn’t that call into question the judgment of the police, and beg for further investigation?)
• The “psychic” unerringly provided the location of the lost dog (do we have corroborating testimony?  Eyewitnesses?  Documentation?  Photographs?  Hell, polygraphs?)
• The dog knew that Heinecker had rescued him.

If you were the reporter, what might have you done to follow up?   Would you have spoken to the police and gotten written statements as to the veracity of Heinecker’s claim?  Or would you have reported, without a hint of skepticism, the following:

To learn more about what happened in a case, Heinecker visits the crime scene and carries something with her that belonged to the victim. She enters into the situation cold, not even knowing the victim’s name sometimes.

Then, as if meditating, she tunes in and listens. The answers don’t always come to her in the same form, she said. “Sometimes I will get an exact command of what to do, but it’s not some roaring voice.”

Other times the events of what happened play out like a movie in her head, and often lead to very intimate connections with victims. It’s not uncommon for her to feel pain in her body where someone suffered a gunshot wound. In a case in which the person had been beaten to death, Heinecker got a pain in her head that resembled a headache.

Come on.  Alarm bells should be ringing all over the place.  Ms. Heinecker may be a very nice, maybe even well-meaning, woman.  But I would bet my house that she could not demonstrate one single paranormal ability to a qualified investigator (and such qualified professionals do exist).  That the News & Record would uncritically report on her with a puff piece of pap, rather than properly investigate this woman’s claims using reason and the tools of modern science, tells me that the newspaper is more concerned with providing the public with heartwarming fairy tales rather than with news from and about the real world.  What a shame.