New York Times report lacks skepticism for antiscience

By Steven T. Corneliussen

Does a national newspaper confer credibility on pseudoscience by covering it, thereby publicizing it?

The recent New York Times news report "Don’t book that trip just yet. Mercury will be in retrograde" covers astrology-based travel advising as if it were legitimate. Four excerpts follow:

• “Linda Lauren ... uses a special deck of cards in conjunction with her clients’ itineraries.”
• “But what happens if a full moon coincides with a good date, as it might on Friday? That’s fine, Ms. Lauren explained. A full moon creates an abundance of energy.”
• “The topic of travel has become more prevalent among clairvoyants, according to Rosemary the Celtic Lady, the founder of the American Association of Psychics.”
• “Ms. Lauren, who charges $100 for a half-hour session ... advised him to put off that decision because of all the planetary activity ahead.”

Is the Times reporting this pseudoscience with tongue in cheek? Maybe, but I once heard a literature professor say that irony can’t work if there’s no clue, no hint, that it’s irony. And for what it’s worth, I myself can’t find a clue or hint in the article.

On the other hand, for nearly four centuries, Jonathan Swift’s satirical essay A Modest Proposal has never winked to readers. It doesn’t need to. With a straight face, it called for solving Irish poverty by selling Irish children as table fare for the rich. The outrageousness itself clues the reader to the satire.

So maybe in some sophisticated way, the Times isn’t really legitimizing superstition.

Maybe. But it must be noted that the Times’s search engine leads to "Psychics and Psychic Phenomena," a topic page offering a list of articles on the subjects. The list suggests either that the Times does confer credibility on pseudoscience, or that I’m just not sophisticated enough to spot the irony hints.

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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for "Science and the media." He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.