by John Edward
Deborah thought that the right correspondent for the story was John Hockenberry, and she waited for him to be available. Meanwhile, I invited her out to Long Island to sit in on a day of private readings so she could get a feel for the work. Only one person of the five booked for that day didn’t want her in the room. The first reading was a struggle. It was for a woman who left unhappy, obviously disappointed that I didn’t get what she wanted. The others were just as difficult. One I couldn’t even read. Of course, the only good reading of the day was for the one person who didn’t want Deborah to sit in. Was this a big heads up—don’t do this? I don’t know. I tried to look at the bright side: At least Deborah wouldn’t think I brought in a bunch of setups to make me look good. Really looking on the bright side—and flattering myself—I told her that I was glad she got to see this because now she knew there’s a process here, and it’s not always bang, bang, bang, hit, hit, hit.
Deborah’s enthusiasm about John Hockenberry had me looking forward to meeting him. I imagined he was a pretty open-minded guy who wouldn’t figure to be waiting to ambush me. So imagine my disappointment when one of the first questions at our first interview was, “How much guesswork is involved with what you do?” That set the tone. His questions seemed designed to challenge me and challenge me again, and to get a reaction. I found I was answering most of the questions the same way: “Like I said, I see, hear, and feel my information. Some I get right, some I get wrong. But I get it.” He showed a clip from the One Last Time video, in which I got the name of a woman’s son who had passed. “You guessed the kid’s name,” Hockenberry said. I don’t know if he was trying to get me riled up. I wasn’t going to let him, but I had to politely challenge him: First of all, I didn’t guess. Second, do you know how insulting it is to that woman to suggest that because I got her son’s name right, she was going to validate the other details if they weren’t true?
I hoped the slant of the story would change after Deborah’s crew filmed me doing readings and Hockenberry got an up-close and personal view of how this worked. We arranged for a crew to come to the Holiday Inn on Long Island and shoot a group reading I already had scheduled. But before that, they wanted to get some footage showing my non-medium life, and stopped in at Sandra’s dance studio, where a cameraman named Tony taped us dancing.
A few people dropped out of the group reading because the camera crew was coming, but most agreed. When the Dateline producers arrived, I asked them to talk to every person and verify that I had not spoken to any of them beforehand. The night went well, as far as I was concerned. It was a typical group session—a lot of information connected, and some didn’t. Toward the end, I got a sequence of information that nobody acknowledged. Finally, the cameraman, Tony, said, “I think that’s for me.” At that instant, I had a weird push-pull feeling, like this could be a bad thing to do, or a good thing. I decided to go with the information, and Tony claimed it. It was his father coming through. He took the camera off his shoulder and became the focus of the moment. He was visibly upset as I relayed the information.
Deborah arranged a second interview with John Hockenberry a couple of weeks later. This time, he showed me a short clip from the Holiday Inn and asked me if I considered it a good reading. “Are you asking me if what you’re showing is a good reading, or if what actually happened was a good reading?”
“Well, I should say this has been edited for time,” Hockenberry said.
“No, you’ve edited for content. What you’re showing is not good. What actually happened, yeah, I think that was good.”
Then he showed me giving a woman a sequence of information, none of which she acknowledged. What he didn’t show was that all of it was meant for the person sitting next to her. “You’re not showing that,” I said.
And then, the climax of the interrogation. Hockenberry showed me the clip of me telling Tony the cameraman that his father was coming through.
“You’ve met Tony before, right?”
“Earlier that day, yeah.”
“You spoke to him.”
“Yes.”
“Were you aware that his dad had died?”
“I think earlier in the day he had said something.”
“That makes me feel like that’s fairly significant. I mean, you knew he had a dead relative, and you knew it was the dad. So that’s not some energy coming through. That’s something you knew going in. You knew his name is Tony, and you knew that his dad had died, and you knew he was in the room, right?”
“That’s an awful lot of thinking you got me doing,” I said.
It was true that Tony had mentioned in passing at the dance studio that if anyone came through for him he hoped it would be his father. I realize it’s futile to say this to a tough skeptic, but I really don’t remember things like that when I’m working. I just say what I get as soon as I get it, half the time not connecting it to something I’ve heard or said a minute before, let alone hours before. What happened at the Holiday Inn was that I got a bunch of information—more than Tony had told me at the dance studio—and he understood it and raised his hand to claim it. Did I know it was for him? No! I realized now why I was getting that push-pull feel when that information was coming through. My decision to pass it on was good for Tony. Not good for me. Maybe what I was feeling was a little tug-of-war between my guides and Tony’s dad. Say it. Don’t say it. The idea that there are no spectators to the process—if you’re in the room with a medium, you’re a participant—was, of course, nothing new. But this was months before Crossing Over, so doing a surprise reading of a cameraman wasn’t routine yet. So it didn’t occur to me to avoid talking to him earlier in the day. And when the information came through later, I definitely was not thinking about how this would seem and whether I should keep it to myself. I just get the information and pass it on. That’s what I do. In this case, what I did was give Dateline its “Aha!” moment.
For reasons I never knew, the story didn’t air for a year, until November of 2000, by which time Crossing Over was hitting its stride and giving me a much higher profile than I had when I was taping the story. I never saw the show. I don’t read or watch much of what’s reported about me because I find it impossible to judge it objectively. I’d rather hear what people around me say about the stories and use that as a gauge or the response. The story was a lot longer than I expected, about two-thirds of the hour-long broadcast, and according to most of my friends—who are admittedly protective of me and probably not much more objective than I am—it wasn’t pretty. But they didn’t think it was terrible either. They showed both sides as promised.
I was shocked—shocked!—that I hadn’t done anything to move John Hockenberry. He thought the session at the Holiday Inn was “an often tedious four hours with many, many misses.” He summed up: “What if we could have a snapshot of all the people John Edward said were clamoring to send a message to the living? What kind of people would we find that they are? Well, they’re not angry folks. They’re not bitter at being taken too soon. We heard no stories of pain and suffering, no calls for revenge or settling scores. These dead people are nice. And maybe a little boring. But as we saw here, even a nice, boring word from the dead beats a whole sermon from anybody in this world.”
Hockenberry came down on the side of the professional skeptic they used as my foil. He was identified as Joe Nickell, a member of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, which likes to simplify things and call itself CSICOP. He did the usual sound bites: that modern mediums are fast-talkers on fishing expeditions making money on people’s grief—“the same old dogs with new tricks,” in Hockenberry’s words.
Some people thought that except for the snideness of some of Hockenberry’s comments and his big Gotcha! moment, the show was right on balance; that Deborah Trueman kept to her word to show both sides. They thought it was the man from CSICOP who was the same old dog, and he didn’t even have any new tricks. The show must not have been all bad. Studios USA was
using it to help sell Crossing Over into syndication. And it wasn’t until after Dateline aired that the paperback version of One Last Time made it onto the New York Times bestseller list.
THE DATELINE PIECE and some stories that appeared in respected publications left me with the feeling that there’s a lot of inaccuracy in the media. Hey, stop the presses! But beyond regular old bad reporting, there’s the added problem that few who write about this phenomenon seem able to do so without catering to somebody’s belief system—either their own, or the people they work for. It seems that the bigger and more prestigious the news outlet, the less chance there is that it will take what is evidently a big risk and present spirit communication honestly and openly, without the inevitable elitist, mocking tone. Maybe that’s why Star magazine’s story on me was more accurate than the one on NBC. There are exceptions, of course, the story by Bill Falk in Newsday in 1997 being the most notable. But some reporters see this as a free ride. Write whatever you want—hey, he’s just some goofy TV psychic. It’s libel-proof.
And now we have the Internet. I hate the Internet. Sure, I’d be lost without e-mail, and it’s amazing the kind of stuff you can find online. But that’s also the problem . . . it’s amazing the kind of stuff you can find online.
“Why is Crossing Over all that bad?” somebody named Viki Reed wrote in November 2000. “For the same reason that when a child is abducted in a small town, no one can sleep with their doors unlocked again. When you poison the already depleted well of human trust, you taint it for all. . . . How much love is caused by someone who takes grief and turns it into zeroes on a contract? . . . I have some questions for John Edward and company: Have The Dead given you an approximate date as to when you’ll be exposed, and what foreign country it feels like they’re suggesting you should fly to?” There are endless discussions filled with erroneous statements on the skeptic websites. Somebody claimed my mother isn’t even dead.
I’m not looking for one of those free rides. I’d be more than satisfied with simple, unbiased accuracy. If Deborah Trueman had reported that she sat through a day of one-on-one readings and that I had struggled so much that one of the people had practically left in a huff, that would have been accurate. That happened. I have no insecurity about people knowing that—as long as they also know the whole story. Even on Crossing Over, I want whatever happens to be reported accurately.
In the context of a half-hour TV show that’s boiled down from hours of tape, that means the kind of careful editing that doesn’t leave false impressions. From Day One, I was very concerned that we not edit the show so that all the unvalidated information and slower moments disappeared, essentially leaving a highlight reel of one jaw-dropping read after another. I knew going into this that this was the TV instinct—I couldn’t expect our producers and post-production staff to instantly unlearn everything they knew. But I did expect them to adapt what they knew to what I did.
Editing an entertainment show to make it flashy is fine. Editing Crossing Over in a way that distorts what actually happened—that’s not fine. Besides being dishonest, it goes against the grain of what I want to accomplish. Making myself look good is just not something I care about or need to do. I want people to know the truth about this. The last thing I want to do is raise expectations so high that people come to the gallery expecting their socks to be knocked off every five seconds. I can’t deliver that. So the law in our editing room is this: Edit for time, not for content.
Bugs
SO ABOUT THOSE FREE RIDES. I used to pretty much assume that the top institutions of American journalism had minimum standards that they rarely slipped from. They made mistakes, everyone does, but they were honest ones and usually not monumental. They had systems of checks and balances—editors, I think they call them—to make sure they adhered to basic accuracy and fairness. So a reporter from, say, Time magazine, couldn’t just make stuff up or write whatever he wanted without checking it out just because it happened to fit with some personal bias or belief he had. Could he?
In mid-February of 2001, a call came to my office from a reporter from Time named Leon Jaroff. Carol, my assistant, took the call, and Jaroff told her that he had written a story about Crossing Over that he imagined we would want to comment on. Carol was confused. First, how could he have written a story? This was the first she had heard of him. He hadn’t been to the show or interviewed me or anyone else. And she knew that someone else from Time was supposedly doing a story. It was a woman, and the last Carol had heard was that she was making arrangements with Jean Guerin, the publicist for the show. Carol asked Leon Jaroff if he was working with this other reporter. He said he wasn’t. He was already finished with the story and, as he was saying, he wanted to get a comment. He said he was on vacation in Florida, in case she was interested.
She still didn’t understand how he could have written a story. “Where did you get your information?” she asked. Jaroff said he had watched the show, looked at my website, and interviewed someone who had been read on the show. “So you haven’t spoken to John and you haven’t been to the show?” Carol asked, demonstrating a greater appreciation of the journalistic technique and a higher level of professional curiosity than Mr. Jaroff. And, really, how surprising was that? As we later found out, Jaroff was a science writer with decades of experience reporting on things like human genetics. So you wouldn’t expect him to be very big on finding things out. One of the high points of his career was a story claiming to expose spoon bender Uri Geller twenty or thirty years ago. So there wasn’t much he didn’t know.
Jaroff repeated that there were some things in the story that we would be concerned about. Carol asked him to fax the article, but Jaroff said he couldn’t do that. “Then how can we comment?” she asked. He said he wanted to read it to her over the phone. At this point, Carol decided this was getting strange. This guy says he’s from Time magazine and he’s got this story we would be “concerned” about, and he still hasn’t asked to speak to me, or even asked Carol who she is or whether she is the person he should read his thousand-word story to and get a comment from. Carol asked him to hold on, and came back to my office. Definitely something for Jean to handle, I told her. Give the guy her number.
Jaroff did call Jean Guerin—but not immediately. When Jaroff said we would have concerns, he wasn’t kidding. He told Jean that someone who had been read on our show had told him that staff members gathered information about people in the gallery and then passed it on to me during a supposed “technical difficulty” delay. This person also was saying that we had microphones around the studio that picked up conversations among the people in the gallery before I came out. Jean was flabbergasted. These things were ridiculous, she said—who was this person? She told Jaroff that as a rule, I don’t respond to criticism—an interpretation of my “I have nothing to defend” policy. But she tried to set him straight and invited him to the show to see for himself—we have a wide-open-door policy—and interview me. He said that wouldn’t be possible. He was on vacation in Florida, and the story was going to print the next morning. The next morning? Well, Jean said, at least correct those false allegations.
The headline was the first clue that he didn’t: Talking to the Dead. To reach those who have ‘crossed over,’ John Edward may have crossed one line too many. The first paragraph described me as “a fast-talking former ballroom-dancing instructor who is cleaning up” on his supposed abilities to connect with the dead. It went downhill from there. Jaroff went on to list my various sources of income and proclaim that I was “one of the few growth industries in an otherwise lackluster economy,” thanks largely to my heavy reliance on “posing a series of questions and suggestions, each shaped by the subject’s previous response.” Cold readings, in other words.
If Jaroff’s story had been limited to one more clueless description of my work or a predictable overstatement of my net worth by someone whose mind was narrower than the ties that were fashionable the year I was born, you wouldn’t be reading about i
t here. But what the people who toiled over Crossing Over found when they opened Time that Monday in March was a different kind of surprise-attack reading. After producing this groundbreaking and delicate TV concept with the highest order of integrity for nearly a year, they found themselves accused of being the worst scoundrels in television since the quiz show scandals of the fifties. As for me, I just want to make one thing clear: I am not a former ballroom-dancing instructor. And if you don’t believe me, just show up on the set any day after we tape.
Here’s what seems to have happened: A man named Michael O’Neill had come to the show with relatives who had an extra ticket and were hoping to connect with Michael’s grandfather. An older male figure did come through and pulled me toward the area in the gallery where O’Neill was sitting. He validated enough of the information to indicate that we had connected with his grandfather, and he apparently went home reasonably impressed. But when O’Neill saw the show on TV weeks later, according to Jaroff, he “began to suspect chicanery.” He believed that the reading was edited so that he appeared to be nodding yes to information that he remembered saying was wrong, and that most of the other “misses” in his reading and those of others were edited out.