The Smug Baldy Speaks

One of Sylvia Brown’s biggest on-screen blunders, mistakenly telling Shawn Hornbeck’s parents - on camera - that he had been murdered, has now caused a bit of a stir in syndication across the pond. The Ofcom regulatory agency found that ITV’s rebroadcast of the Montel Williams episode in which Sylvia Browne needlessly devastates Hornbeck’s parents to “be in breach of its broadcasting code”:

The regulator ruled that an episode of The Montel Williams Show on ITV2 on 11 February breached rules on offensive material and potentially harming viewers by suggesting psychics could give life-changing advice.

I would suspect that Sylvia’s bad advice was both life-changing for the Hornbeck family, as well as harmful. Imagine if some quack told you that your son had been murdered. If you were to believe that “prediction” and then your son were to be found, what would you do to minimize your cognitive dissonance? Would you deny the living, breathing fact that you child was still alive, or would you perhaps question the validity of your favorite psychic’s claims that he or she had super powers?

In Britain, apparently, you can’t go around and make silly claims like that. At least, not without having a regulator call you on it. See, we could learn something from our British cousins!